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Gender is a social construct. It assumes that, by definition, females are feminine and males are masculine. These gender constructs completely disregard hermaphrodites, the transgendered, and others who do not fit neatly in the "man" or "woman" box. There are male hairstylists, nurses, teachers, fashion models, and stay-at-home dads. There are female engineers, construction workers, CEOs, athletes, and politicians. These people defy their assigned gender roles and the fact that this defiance is rare does not mean that femininity in females and masculinity in males is biologically fixed at birth. Separating people into categories this way is convenient for statistical and discriminatory purposes, but individual people just aren't that black and white.
Femininity and masculinity do have some biological basis. Females tend to outperform males in emotion-related tests, even as infants. This Scientific American article focused on a new study linking sociability - typically perceived as a feminine trait - with the size of the straight gyrus (SG) in the frontal lobe. Basically, large SG size correlates with sociability in adults and small SG size correlates with sociability in children. Participants took a test on their social cognition, on their masculinity vs. femininity, and had an MRI done. While most adult women had larger SGs and higher social cognition scores than the men, "masculine" women were less social and had smaller SGs. "Feminine" men were more social and had larger SGs. So while there is a connection between differences in the brain and gender-associated traits like sociability, it is not directly tied to a person's biological sex.
People who assume that men are from Mars and women are from Venus also fail to consider that brains change over time. For instance, the gap between men and women's performances on emotional tests grows with age. While the infant girls' performances on these tests indicates that interpersonal skills are somewhat influenced by nature, the increased gap between adult men and women indicates that nurture plays a very strong role as well. In general, girls are groomed to be social and nurturing. Boys are groomed to be aggressive and action-oriented. These experiences change peoples' brains. Thus, the gap in adults' SG sizes (and other brain differences) may be because the women in the study had been encouraged to be empathetic and caring for 30 years or so, and being empathetic stimulated their SGs, making them grow more than their male peers' SGs. Males, after all, are generally discouraged from being empathetic. They're often told that crying makes them girls and talking about their feelings make them "sissies" or "gay."
Since our brains and personalities aren't fixed and rigidly tied to our biological sex like some would have us believe, it doesn't make sense to raise children with the "boys will be boys" attitude. We need to stop categorizing personality traits as "masculine" and "feminine." Empathy should be encouraged in all children. Aggression should probably be discouraged. Girls shouldn't be discouraged from excelling in math and science. Boys shouldn't be discouraged from taking on caretaker roles. Everyone deserves the chance to be educated and to do what they want to do with their life.
The small inborn brain differences that men and women tend to have probably evolved in prehistoric times. Back then, gender roles were necessary. Humans lived in small, isolated groups where death by wild animal was significantly more common. The men, like now, were generally physically larger and stronger. It made sense for them to go out and hunt because they would have an easier time taking down a mammoth. Somebody needed to stay home and care for the children. They had to be close to the infants to breast feed and the infants needed to be kept out of harm's way so the population could grow. It made sense for the women to stay home and care for the kids. Thus, aggressive tendencies evolved in males and nurturing tendencies evolved in females.
That black and white world of rigid gender roles is nonsensical in our modern world. The world is overpopulated and farming is largely mechanized now - we don't need women to stay at home and care for a dozen kids that the family needed to run the farm. We certainly don't need aggressive males to go hunt for food with spears and bows. We need to stabilize or even reduce the population. We need widespread use of birth control (so that every child is a wanted child that can be cared for) and talented, educated women in the workforce. We need women to take on leadership roles, too, to ensure that laws and other policies are fair for all people. No more sacrificing women's access to reproductive care to get healthcare reform passed. No more rape culture. No more victim-blaming. No more domestic violence. No more double standards. No more stereotypes. It may have been good enough for cavemen, but things have changed and we know better. It shouldn't be good enough for us.
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GREAT POST! Bravo! I am a bio major so I loved how you brought a feminist interpretation to this "objective" (ha!) study. Thank you so much for your openmindedness about gender and thank you for reaching out and posting this here.
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vanessaaishacoleman
| 12/4/09 08:26 PM
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vanessaaishacoleman
| 12/4/09 08:26 PM
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by Anatic09