There are different expectations on women and men, from what personality traits one should have (so-called masculine ones for men, feminine for women), to what one's goals in life should be, all the way down to what compensation one should expect from one's work. To some extent, most people take up some or all parts of their role.

Two questions. First, are gender roles fundamentally a good thing, or a bad thing? And second, to what extent are these roles created by culture, versus inherent to our physiology?

I know this train of thought can lead into some unstable territory, so try your hardest to remain civil. If what someone writes offends you, try to assume first that any but the grossest sexism is accidental, or simply based on ignorance. As a preemptive measure: I'm not asking which sex is "better".

By the way, there is a slightly different, but related thread in RPG Design.

Uhh, I think the male sex is ten times better, and that we should go back to the way things used to be (jokes).

In reality, I believe that there is some cultural traits to the whole male and female thing. From an anthropological standpoint, men were the hunters while women the gatherers. This can be seen in today's life too. Women (stereo)typically like to go shopping, which is a trait they picked up from their earliest of ancestors. Men still typically like the idea of hunting.
Now there are other things to consider too. Being a male dancer, I've learnt a few things. It is easier for a man to do a pirouette because women are more top heavy, making their center of gravity less fit than a male's which is closer to the ground. That allows men to be better at balance than women. So there are things that the opposite genders will just have an easier time at doing, and that may dictate their actions.
I also have a personal belief that there is a question of who us as humans wish to mate with. Some of our typical actions may be just a matter of courtship. I'm not positive about this and it's only really my own little theory.

I'm not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm not here to make judgement on the way someone wishes to live out their lives. I just came here to give you some facts and theories.

Eh, gender roles are a good thing when they create a bit of balance, but in the long run they just make things worse.

Oppress one group, and they'll just rise up and oppress the other.

Mr_Doomed wrote:I also have a personal belief that there is a question of who us as humans wish to mate with. Some of our typical actions may be just a matter of courtship. I'm not positive about this and it's only really my own little theory.

I'm sure that, even without any significant differences in brain wiring, being born with a womb completely alters a large part of your self-image, and hence your typical actions.

I'm wrapping up my class "Women in American History."

Pretty much the only way to curb the social expectations of men and women are to create amendments, edit the working world to promote equality, and in some States there are ERA (Equal Rights Amendments.) But to this day, there isn't a federal ERA. You have to change the law, to change expectations.

Women still aren't allowed to serve in all but one or two special forces areas, because combat roles are not open to women. Which also predicts where women fall in the military's rank system--most of the highest achievements are taken up by males with combat/special forces history.

I think the problem of gender roles is what outlawed abortion until what... the 60s/70s? Sexual harassment didn't exist before the 70s. Birth control, in the early years of distribution, would only be given to married women. Because single women, how dare you want to have sex before marriage! We didn't get to vote until 1920. After the Vietnam war, women wanting to join the armed forces saved the US military's population. But once again, it wasn't until the 70s/80s they began opening up more jobs to women and letting them claim their husbands as dependents. A woman had to bring a lawsuit against the Air Force for that to occur.

Pro-ERA website

Stop ERA website

Check it out, let me know your opinions. =)

Opossum wrote:Pro-ERA website

Stop ERA website

Check it out, let me know your opinions. =)

Two competing propaganda campaigns. The Stop ERA campaign seems to be narrowly focused on keeping as many benefits as possible for women who choose to follow her traditional roles. It doesn't recognize the needs of women who have different life goals. As well, Stop-ERA seems paranoid about the "gay agenda".

However, I'm not automatically pro-ERA. I'm not sure if "equality" is something all women want. I just had a discussion with a friend who wants systemic change, instead. The whole system is corrupt, and leaves everyone at a disadvantage.

Related. <-- since I'm too tired to write up a new post summing up my feelings.

I personally believe that conventional gender roles are outdated in many modern technological societies.

Delving back into history, especially with regards to paleolithic hunter-gatherers, men were largely responsible for activities that required physical finesse such as hunting and resolving inter-specific conflicts. This is generally attributed to the fact that women were required to give birth to and take care of their offspring - an activity that, in part, constitutes a full-time job.

Another interesting point to consider is how our species sexually reproduces. The strategy for the male was/is spread his sperm into as many females as possible to increase the chance of producing an offspring, whereas the strategy for females was/is to pick and choose males according to how strong, confident, and successful they were with the idea that they would stick around and help raise healthy children.

While I'm no psychologist, nor an anthropologist, this has all seemed to translate into the dominant ideology that men are providers and protectors while females are nurturing, compassionate, and empathetic.

Now we have to look at where we are today. Superior strength is not necessary because the physical qualifier of most occupations is to, at most, push and file papers. Women are giving birth much later in their lives, usually after establishing respectable careers, and can afford to take the time off to rear a child (especially with benefits like maternity leave) and/or put them in daycare.

As for the typified gender characteristics derived from the notion of our reproductive strategies, I believe they still stand to an extent. However, we're seeing a gradual shift from this paradigm with a cultural awareness that "success" in today's society is an extremely subjective concept, and that a "living" can usually be obtained with a bit of hard work and passion for whatever it is that one chooses to do, regardless of gender.

While I understand that this argument does not address modern day gender roles in its entirety, it certainly speaks against a patri- or matriarchal familial organization as well as the fact that many men still need to (forgive my bluntness) compete with others to demonstrate how big their "jewels" supposedly are. Newsflash: the playing field is increasingly being leveled.

Gender Roles or any "role" that seeks to differentiate one sub group from another is unfortunately needed. Matriarchal or Patriarchal doesn't matter as long as one tries to subjugate the other. Humans need conflict to survive and grow. Mankind is not satisfied unless there is turmoil; never has there been a time in history where we, as a collective race have been content. Frankly humans love to discriminate - which turns to hate, regardless of the source. Gender roles, class and religion will always be problematic. Ethnic bigotry is quickly growing passe so there is your silver lining to the storm cloud of discontent.

Personally, I think women deserve just as much as men. They can have the same jobs, be paid the same wages but if they want equality it has to be across the board and without double standards. Women fail to realise they have the advantage; females have the ability to weaponise sexuality like Constantine weaponised Christ, they are constantly thought inferior by ignorant men who still believe anthropological books written in the 1800's regarding the "fairer sex". Never has an opponent been so under-classed since the Athenians went to war with Sparta and yet people assume females are the weaker sex? Nonsense.

I know it's commonplace to imagine a utopia where we are all grey and formless ambivalent masses but that's a fantasy. I might as well say I want to be a caterpillar as absurd is the idea of "equality"; It will never happen in our lifetimes but it's a nice dream.

The most important difference between men and women in the context of modern life is that the male emotional brain comes with an off switch, the female emotional brain does not. This difference can be found in the very structure of the brain itself where the female brain (even those of transgender females) have a larger corpus callosum which is the route of communication between the left and right hemispheres. The male ability to turn off emotions can be quite useful in a variety of circumstances: debating a purely logical thesis, jumping into a raging river to save someone, or hunting big game. Sometimes emotions can truly be detrimental distractions. Unfortunately, there are other times when the ability to turn off ones emotions paves a highway straight to hell. Have you ever noticed that whenever a person makes some disgusting remark similar to, "we should just nuke <insert bad country>", its almost always a male. This is because a women can not turn off the part of her brain which shows her pictures of children having their skin burnt off and makes her contemplate how that would feel. Men intuitively know this and it is why they censor such statements when in female company. My knowledge of this dichotomy is somewhat more conscious and so informs, among other things, my voting. I do not generally vote for male politicians because I do not like the idea of those with the power to declare war possessing the ability to turn off their emotions and reduce casualties on both sides to numbers.

Scumbag_Brain wrote:The most important difference between men and women in the context of modern life is that the male emotional brain comes with an off switch, the female emotional brain does not.This difference can be found in the very structure of the brain itself where the female brain (even those of transgender females) have a larger corpus callosum which is the route of communication between the left and right hemispheres.

You're making a number of assumptions here:
1. Left and right hemispheres have defined and separate functions (which, outside of certain aspects of speech/language, as far as we know they don't- it's one of the great myths of neuroscience, we just don't understand much about them at all).
2. A larger corpus callosum is associated with more efficient communication between the hemispheres. Size =/= neuron density. Just as neuron density =/= more efficient communication, in fact.
3. Communication between hemispheres is associated with 'emotionality' (whatever the hell that is). In a purely theoretical context, it could be argued that 'emotionality' might presumed to be associated with less communication between different areas, thus not allowing logic to influence decision making.
4. The brain actually has defined 'areas' dedicated to higher cognitive areas such as 'logic' and 'emotion'. It doesn't. It's a lot more complicated than that...

However, the biggest problem with what you're saying is... Women don't actually have larger corpus callosums. The earlier studies were based on extremely small sample groups and more recent imaging studies using high resolution MRI actually shows no difference! The jury is still out on physiological imaging (that is, measurements aimed at detecting the metabolic or signalling activity of neurons), I'll give you that. But how much of this is due to truly in-built genetic differences and how much is due to development within a certain context is anyone's guess.


As for the rest of your post... I'd remember that it's extremely difficult to separate the 'social' from the 'biological' (I'm not even going to get into how the two interact during development). It may be that it's the social context of a woman's environment that makes her more 'emotional' or more likely to fulfil subscribed gender roles and generating good quality experiments that completely separate the two is extremely difficult.

Did you know, for example, that simply putting a tick box for male/female at the beginning of a mathematics exam at university level makes women perform less well and men perform better compared to not having one at all (where women will actually perform better than men on average)?

Being fairly androgynous myself, I sort of find it difficult to conform to either female or male gender role's. I feel comfortable in the middle, and not worrying about what society expects of me. In this day and age, it's ancient history to worry about something like that, I think.

@NorthernSoul Actually it's the myth that's the myth. The hemispheres have to do with how we process information. You can do a study where you hold up a picture of a forest. Ask someone to focus on a single tree and you will get more left brain activity, but ask someone to focus on the whole thing and you get more right brain. I do not think the classic experiment used a forest but the gist was the same. By asking these sorts of question you can make the left or the right brain light up respectively, this implies lateralization of function. I'm not saying we completely understand it or that its simple but it is not all hot air either. It's very popular to say its a myth these days and I get this response everytime I mention left/right, always spoken as if the wise person is welcoming me into the modern age. Here's a bio on the neuroscientist who first documented the split using patients with damaged corpus collosums (collosi...? lol)

http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/m ... round.html

As far as the callosum is concerned it's dimorphic size is still debated hotly, though my instincts tell me the modern studies (like the 2006 one you referenced) share a modern bias to make the genders equal. However there is no doubt that it is dimorphic in shape and so an important gender psychological difference is implied if you assume neural structure relates to psychology. Furthermore the fact that transgendered females have a callosum matching biological females and transgendered men have a collosum matching biological men pretty much proves beyond a doubt that the shape and composition of the structure has a strong role in gender psychology.

You may be right about communication through the callosum and your point about neural density is a good one. However, the fact that observable gender behaviors so closely match what I would expect in this case sways me to thinking that shape (if not size) does matter.

I'm not saying one gender is better than the other or that any generality should be applied to individuals with one exception and that is whoever is in the position to have their finger over a button that reads <NUKE'M>. In this one situation I intend to continue playing the odds and (when given the chance) voting for the sex who I have never heard say, "to heck with <insert country> we should just nuke'm."

[quote=northernsoul]Did you know, for example, that simply putting a tick box for male/female at the beginning of a mathematics exam at university level makes women perform less well and men perform better compared to not having one at all (where women will actually perform better than men on average)?[quote]
That's really interesting, I didn't know that. I wonder why an exam would even need a tick box for gender? Surely they have gender, date of birth, etc., in your record under the candidate number?

Being a trans man (ie., assigned female at birth) I really dislike social gender roles. I grew up with, "You're so BOYISH, why can you be more girly?" from my peers, family, etc., which is ridiculous in the first place because I tended to play with kids of both genders or do more neutral things like read books or draw. And then when I came out, and now everyone knows me as male I tend to hear, "you're so girly!" from my peers (normally because I'm short and quiet or because I like to read). It's a really weird thing to say to someone, when you think about it. Not to mention that when I began to transition, people picked up on the 'girlier' things which they'd not mentioned earlier. Fortunately, I don't get it that much anymore because I hang around with nicer people (;

I think that people should have equality regardless of gender, and that people should also have a right to choose. This means that if a woman wants to be a housewife, fine. It's also means it's fine if a man wants to be a househusband, or if a woman wants to be a builder or some other traditionally male job.

It's a bit of a non-answer, sorry about that, but there's some ideas here anyway.

I think that, gender specific roles are caused my culture. I mean, you can raise a boy to act like a girl, and they think that it will be right. Sex is biological, Gender is cultural. You have to raise the child in the way that you want. I am not really talking just about children. Gender comes into play a lot with jobs and rights. Women can't sign up for the draft, or be in the front line in the military. But if, culturally, women were treated like men, there would be no difference between the two.

@Nightblaze This has been tried, doesn't work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ ... Study.html

Women lack testosterone at anywhere near male levels. Unless one is naive enough to believe the presence of testosterone in high concentrations has absolutely no effect on personality, then that alone is enough to kill the argument. If you still persist in thinking testosterone is irrelevant than look into the concentration of XYY males incarcerated (one of the major side-effects of XYY is increased testosterone levels).

Transexuality is the ultimate proof, however. Do you think that transexual males simply decide, "fudge it I wanna be a dude." No, something about their neurology is inherently male and this is why they see themselves as such. The studies back up this assertion with transexual brains matching the brains of their actual (not culturally assigned) gender. If gender did not have a biological component than transexuality would not exist especially considering the indescribable psychological and sociological torment these folks undergo to be who they are.

I suppose that raised how I was, by all females. By three, I am more femenistic then normal male's with male figures in their life. I suppose, I don't have any. Well, I suppose MALE are suppose to be the dominant ones. Females, recessive and submissive. But, I don't believe that women are suppose to be dominated. I don't care for emotion, physically, and mental abuse towards women.