For as long as humans have been around, we have taken it for granted that men and women differ in their behaviour. So old stereotypes never die – they just return endlessly as bestsellers. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps are among the biggest worldwide hits.
There is a long list of male and female differences that have captured the popular imagination. Women are better at reading facial expressions, more fluent with words, more sensitive to sounds and smells, more concerned about and empathic towards their friends, and they talk more to their intimates. Men are more likely to take stupid risks, pursue status over intimacy – and they can mentally rotate maps better.
Some of these characteristics are well grounded in research, some are mere prejudice, and others are not nearly as simple as they look. Take the old one about men being better at navigating: they may solve mazes faster but women are better at remembering landmarks (see Â鶹´«Ă˝â€™s special issue on Gender, 12 May 2001).
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Why bother about sex differences at all? There are no psychological characteristics in which all men are different from all women, or vice versa, so judgements about individuals should always be based on the individual and not his or her sex. Modern societies accept that view, even if they have yet to provide the equality of opportunity it implies.
In that sense, sex is not important. But sex differences are critical in the study of human nature. If we have a “human nature”, if we are not simply blank slates on which experience writes afresh each generation, then we would expect men and women to be subtly different. Those differences would be expected to reflect our evolutionary past, and the different strategies the two sexes would need to leave their genes behind. And we would expect the differences not to be solely based on experience.
These themes run through the contributions that follow. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen believes that there are significant differences in the way men and women think, which he calls “systematising” and “empathising” (“Sugar and spice”). Anthropologist Helen Fisher argues that men “step think” and women “web think” and – more controversially – that the emerging information-based society plays to women’s strengths (“A century for women”). Psychologist Anne Campbell records how behavioural differences emerge almost immediately after birth – and how some male/female differences can be turned upside down (“I had to smack him one…”).
Perhaps the biggest challenge comes from primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who argues that too much research has been unbalanced and dominated by a male perspective (“New rules for an old game”). When the new science of evolutionary psychology focuses on sex differences, it can certainly look as if it was invented by a Victorian male. The standard view is that our mental make-up has not had time to change since we settled down to agriculture, civilisation and office life.
Our bodies are still run by a Palaeolithic mind, shaped by our long life as hunter-gatherers, with mental modules designed to help us survive and reproduce in our past. Many postulated adaptations – fear of snakes, spiders, heights, darkness and strangers – apply to both sexes. But differences are expected to emerge from a fundamental reproductive asymmetry: a woman has no choice but to make a massive investment in producing a few offspring, while a man can potentially father a huge number.
This implies that to benefit reproductively women should seek out mates who have ample resources to share, and that men should pursue many women at the peak of their fertility. Cross-cultural studies confirm this: women value healthy, wealthy, stable, older men with high social status; men are attracted to young women whose beauty signifies fertility.
But be warned: there is more to life than this. Blaffer Hrdy provides a richer picture from her wide knowledge of different primate societies and existing hunger-gatherer societies. Males and females may, for example, be locked into a complex set of strategies, with females setting up networks of alliances and even spreading paternity among multiple fathers. We are at the very beginning of disentangling differences between the sexes and why they arise: without a time machine to visit the ancestral environment in which Homo sapiens evolved, firm conclusions will come slowly.
