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Similarities in the Genders
Hi All ,
I came across an article on a study on gender differences which seems to conclude there are more similarities than differences between male and female :Seems to be right in the middle of the debate
Happy Reading
Suzz -
2 Replies
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An excellent article that would fit in well with the discussion on genetics.
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Hmmmm… looks like a case of get some data, plot a few graphs and prove just whatever you want.
Putting cynicism to one side, I would suggest that the research isn’t about similarities in the genders (as this thread is headed). I’m not willing to pay to read the full pdf of the study but the abstract gives the non-sensationally worded conclusion as
Quote:Average differences between men and women are not under dispute, but the dimensionality of gender indicates that these differences are inappropriate for diagnosing gender-typical psychological variables on the basis of sex.What they conclude (well this is my interpretation of all the academic stuff) is that sex is not a reliable indicator of gender typical characteristics.
Rocket science? Hardly. If everyone had to have the same gender characteristics as their physical sex there wouldn’t be any gender diverse people and this web site would have closed down years ago!
So what did they discover? They plotted gender characteristics for people who were physically male and for those who were physically female and the graphs were a mess – with males having feminine characteristics and visa versa. Luckily they didn’t throw any intersex people into the equation….or perhaps they should have??
The abstract does say that one of the characteristics they measured was masculinity and femininity – but without paying $$$ we can’t tell how they did this. But what would have been interesting is if they redrew the graphs showing how the characteristics vary with masculinity and femininity not with sex. But they didn’t … or they didn’t release those graphs to the world.
I’m guessing they measured gender using a multifactoral approach – as they mention Spence’s (1993) gender identity theory in the abstract. So there could be some valuable information here for our community – provided that they changed the “horizontal axis” from sex to gender.
I’ll start another thread to discuss multifactoral gender identity theory perhaps – I wasn’t previously aware of work in this field, and it could greatly add to our understanding of gender.
