Joe Heschmeyer tackles wide ranging errors about the differences between men and women, revealing the authentic, Catholic view of male/female difference.
Transcription:
Speaker 1:
Despite the fact that well-formed common sense tells us that men and women are different and that this is good. Our world is boiling over with polarized viewpoints on this topic ranging from neuroscientists to gender theorists, from trans activists to Andrew Tate. The subject of male and female difference is hot in the public arena right now, and people are arguing either that men and women aren’t really different or that they are different, and that’s a problem. So in this video, I’m going to highlight four of the most common and I think most dangerous false views, and then lay out a better vision about how we can recognize the difference between men and women and celebrate that fact. The first, let’s look at what goes wrong. The first objection I want to consider is this idea that men and women aren’t really different. That while we may behave differently, that’s purely cultural and that at the bodily level, neurologically for instance, we’re actually basically the same. And so one of the most prominent speakers on this is Dr. Ripen, who is a neuroscientist who is regularly called upon, particularly in the uk, to present the view that basically forget everything you’ve heard. There’s no such thing as differences between the male and female brain, and they’re all basically the same.
CLIP:
I think the most common myths that I’ve come across is that neuroscience has proved in inverted that there are clear cut differences between the brains of men and the brains of women, and that just isn’t the case. When I talk about the pink and blue tsunami, it’s really a reflection of how our culture codes differences between girls and boys. So that right from the moment a child is born, when people arrive with those awful, it’s a girl pink, it’s a boy blue cards, they’re very quickly being introduced to a gendered world. The multitasking versus map reading dichotomy where women are supposedly very good at doing lots of different things at once, and men are brilliant at math, reading and any kind of spatial tasks. And yet when we look at the data that we have for that, we’ll see that how you measure those skills makes a difference. And if we look at the brain imaging data, we’ll find that really there are no clear cut findings. Have we actually found any differences between the brains of men and the brains of women? The answer is no.
Speaker 1:
Now, Dr. Ripkin’s written an entire book called The Gendered Brain making this argument, but we know this to be false. So those comments that you just heard were from four years ago. This year, Stanford medical researchers created an AI model that could reliably distinguish between male and female brains. This would be impossible if there was no difference between them. And what’s more, we’ve known for a long time of four major areas of difference between male and female brains.
CLIP:
Let’s take a look at biology in the brain. When we look at biology in the brain, specifically with the male brain and the female brain, we know that there’s four primary differences. First in processing. And when we talk about processing, the male brain has seven times more gray matter than the female brain. The female brain has 10 times more white matters. We’ll talk a little about how that can impact the behaviors that you might be seeing. Second layer of difference is chemistry. We know that the male brain and the female brain produce the same chemicals, but we produce them at different rates and at different times. So different amounts at different times. It also impacts some of the things that you might be seen. The third difference is in structure when we talk about structure. Structure is the different sizes of different parts of the brain and also the division of labor, how there’s a difference in the division of labor within the male brain and the female brain that impacts behavior, especially the use of words. And then the final difference is in blood flow. And the blood flow impacts how we process different things and how we communicate with one another. So we’ll look at that difference between blood flow.
Speaker 1:
So the real question isn’t are there differences? Because there are clear differences, and we all know this in particularly a neuroscientist like Dr. Rippin knows this. The real question is are these differences biological or are they created by someone bringing in those disastrous pink, it’s a girl or blue, it’s a boy cards and balloons. Now, there are several reasons to be skeptical of that theory, but I want to actually give it credit where it’s due. There is an important role that society plays in determining how you express your sex or as we’re going to see it, how you express your gender. That we don’t want to deny that different cultures have different expectations and people from a very young age learn how to meet expectations. So some of the differences probably are cultural. Nevertheless, there’s very clear reason to believe that this can’t be true of all of them, for one, because there’s different cultures, right?
Some cultures are extremely segregated in their view of men and women that often segregating male and female spaces expecting certain behaviors, particularly from women, for instance, veiling or submissiveness or any number of things. Whereas other cultures are much more egalitarian, treating men and women as basically the same or even interchangeable. And you would expect if this is all cultural, that we would find major neurological differences and behavioral differences in the heavily sex segregated cultures and men and women to be virtually identical in the egalitarian cultures. And we simply don’t find that. In fact, we find the opposite of that for reasons that are a little bit be fondling. So this is a very famous 2008 journal of Personality and social psychology article that talks about how there’d already been previous research even by that point, suggesting that sex differences in personality traits are actually larger in prosperous, healthy and egalitarian cultures, and which women have more opportunities equal with those of men.
So already researchers were aware something strange is going on here. And so the authors of this study researched 55 different nations looking all these different cultures, and what they found was exactly this. Now they’re looking in particular at what are called the big five personality traits and the big five are pretty well rigorously researched. These are important factors in terms of analyzing your behavior and often looking at things like life outcomes and how are you going to do at work and any of these things. The big five are fairly uncontroversial and they’re pretty obviously important. They include agreeableness or agreeability openness to experience neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extroversion. So just thinking in the employment context, there are certain jobs that you are less likely to take if you’re not open to new experiences. There are certain jobs you’re less likely to take if you’re very introverted or conversely, there may be some jobs you shy away from because you’re very extroverted, right?
You don’t want to work all by yourself at a cubicle somewhere because you want to be socializing being with people or you’re very neurotic. So you don’t want a really high stress job, even if it’s high pain or you have very high agreeableness, and so you’re fun to work with, but you’re not going to go ask for a race. All of these things play an incredibly important role in things like male and female wages, for instance. And what do we find when we’re looking at this cross-cultural sample of 55 different countries? Well, on four of them we find marked differences. Women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscious conscientiousness than men did across most nations. Now, let’s caveat that and say if what Dr. Rippin means is simply that you can’t simply have a bifurcated thing and say all women are extroverted and all men are introverted, that’s fine.
Nobody’s arguing that we agree on that. I’m an extroverted man. I recognize it is true that these are different tendencies based on male and female biology, but they’re not automatic realities. That’s the first thing. But second, we see these marked differences and we see them more marked, not less in egalitarian culture. That’s a major strike against the kind of cultural theory that this is because we’re bringing in the pink balloons. But the second one is what are called toy studies. So the problem with interviewing infants is that they don’t know how to speak and they can’t put words to their experience, and they’ve not even taken a single women’s studies class, so they have no way of articulating their relationship to the patriarchy. Fortunately though, researchers have found some ways around that because one thing infants from about the age of nine months can do is choose to play with toys.
And so in 2016, to give just one of the examples of one of these studies from Infinite Child Development, they took a group of 101 boys and girls and they had them in three age ranges. The first group is from nine to 17 at the age at which infants first demonstrate toy preferences and independent play. So if you put the truck and you put the doll, which one are they going to gravitate towards before nine months? They can’t crawl usually, so they can’t do much. They kind of just play with the toy. You hand them. After that, you see a much more determined baby. And I have a 10 month old, so I’m going to personally witness to that fact. Our baby was extremely chill. We’d do whatever we wanted him to do, and now he’s decided his favorite toy is any electrical wire he can find.
So it’s a new reality, right? So that developmental milestone happens around nine months. So that’s the first group they look at. The second group they look at is from 18 to 23 months, when critical advances in gender knowledge occur, they get their first Gloria Steinem kids reader. No, but I mean in seriousness, they start to recognize that men and women are different. Boys and girls are different, and they start to maybe even have a sense of themselves. And then the third group is from 24 to 32 months when knowledge becomes further established. So they’re looking at these three sequential stages of child development beginning with nine months, and what they found in all three groups was the stereotypical toy preferences that boys and girls were being flagrantly stereotypical. I can’t believe that they would behave this way, but sure enough they do. And I can attest to this, again, my 10 month old, given the choice between his sister’s dolls and his brother’s dinosaur toys, he will overwhelmingly consistently choose the dinosaur toys.
Now, he’ll play with whatever you give him, but when he’s given a choice, when he is in the living room crawling around, you can see the choices that he makes. And that’s anecdotal. Sure. But the point here is that these are studies that back up what many parents will tell you that if you’re in a house with both boy and girl toys, infants tend to gravitate overwhelmingly towards the sex specific toys of their sex. That’s not because you’re forcing them on them, right? Because you could have, I’m not saying we do, you could have a messy living room with different kinds of toys in it, but that’s from nine months on when they’re old enough to crawl after the toys. Before that they can’t crawl after the toys, but they can look at them. And what researchers have found is that girls age between three and eight months showed more visual interest in a doll than a truck, whereas boys fixated more on the truck than girls did.
This is sometimes called the people versus object orientation distinction. So females broadly speaking from three month old infants up to adult women tend to gravitate more towards people. They keep eye contact with people longer from infancy. They tend to be more relational in their approach towards other people, whereas baby boys all the way up to grown men tend to be more fascinated by, for instance, how does the fan work? What can I take apart and put back together again? Or at a certain age, what can I take apart? Those kind of things that object orientation. Now, as you might imagine, this plays a really important role if boys are overwhelmingly more likely to be object oriented, and girls are overwhelmingly more likely to be people oriented. Think about the kind of professions that men and women are going to be drawn to. So for instance, there’s constantly this worry that there’s not enough women in stem.
Now, some of that may be due to sexism in those fields. Other aspects may be that stem is incredibly object oriented. Elementary ed on the other hand, is more than 90% female. I don’t hear a lot of worry about that, but it makes sense that it’s because it’s much more people oriented. It’s much more like caring for small children. So you can see free choices being made in an egalitarian culture that might reflect biology there in terms of that object versus people orientation. Now, the only thing I’d want to add here is that from a parent’s perspective, usually you want them to make more eye contact as babies. So the idea that parents are choosing to engage less with their sons and with their daughter, so their sons will become more interested in engineering doesn’t really make any sense. So all of this, like the toy selection stuff, as well as all of the cross-cultural stuff that we see in terms of the biological differences and the differences in the big five, and then all the neurological differences in terms of the brain chemistry point to the fact that there appear to be real differences between men and women.
But acknowledging these differences can be disastrous for you in terms of your career. So there’s a pretty famous case involving Google with one of the engineers, James de Moore, who suggests that maybe one of the reasons they’re having trouble filling engineering spots with women is because women are less interested in engineering than men are on average.
CLIP:
When Google engineer James de Moore merely suggested that gender differences might explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech, he was fired.
Speaker 1:
Now, I’m not going to get into the weeds on everything with the James Moore situation. In fact, I don’t feel qualified to do that, but I would point out this because he makes a really important point that when we talk about differences between men and women, we’re talking about group dynamics, and as a result, we can expect significant overlap in those groups. So imagine a bell curve and another bell curve, they’re going to have a lot of overlap with them. It’s not like we’re saying again, all women are extroverts, all men are introverts, all women are agreeable, all men are disagreeable. That is not the claim. It’s rather that as you plot those things out, you’re going to see some marked and obvious differences, even though you’re also going to see some overlapping behaviors. So I’ll give you two examples of what I mean by this.
First take Los Angeles, the weather. August is the hottest month. In LA the average high is 85, the average low is 66. In contrast, November is one of the cooler, colder months. The high is only 73, still amazing, and the low is 53. If you were to chart this on a chart, you’d very clearly see when is summer and when is winter. However, if you wanted to say, are there clear cut differences, and by that apparently mean, are there differences with no exceptions, it’s a little bit of a different story, right? LA had two days last year in the seventies in August. Meanwhile in November, they had five days in the eighties. So even though any fool could tell you November is a cooler month than August, there are actually exceptions in both directions when we’re talking about gender behavior or the behavior between the two sexes.
Of course there’s going to be some overlap. And so if Dr. Rippens claim about there being no clear cut differences is just that there’s going to be some warm winter days and some cold summer days. That’s an unremarkable and unsurprising sort of finding. If you were to measure, for instance, the average heights of cats and dogs, I have no doubt that you could find some very short dogs and some very tall cats. But if someone drew from that, well, we can’t really say whether cats or dogs are taller. That would be quite a silly conclusion to draw. So that’s the first category I want to address that you’ll find people who sort of pedantically try to work their way around the fact that there are known and obvious neurological, biological, and behavioral differences between men and women, and that these cannot be reduced to merely cultural factors, but those differences exist for all to see if you’re interested in reading the available evidence. The second group that presents a false vision of this is what’s known as gender theory, and so gender theorists will treat all of this as malleable. They’re going to make a sharp and actually possibly helpful distinction between sex and gender, and then they’re going to screw that distinction up themselves. Before I jump the gun completely, let’s turn to Dr. Judith Butler, one of the most famous gender theorists of all time. To introduce this vision of gender,
CLIP:
I insist that what it is to be a woman or indeed what it is to be a man or any other gender is an open-ended question. We have a whole range of differences biological in nature, so I don’t deny them, but I don’t think they determine who we are in some sort of final way. At the heart of these controversies is the distinction between sex and gender. What is that distinction? How do we think about it?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so what is that distinction? Well, that’s a tricky question to answer. On the one hand, gender theorists like Dr. Butler are going to present sex as kind of the biological reality, which you’ll notice. She said she doesn’t deny. She doesn’t seem to be in the first category. She’s not claiming there are no biological differences or I mean, obviously there’s biological differences between men and women, but you’ll have people downplaying those biological differences. She’s instead focused on the cultural element of gender rather than the scientific or biological element of sex. Think about it this way. You have this biological reality, sex or gender, and then on top of it, you have the way society expects you to behave. This is that whole idea of the pink balloons and the blue balloons and all of this. From a very young age, you are sent cues about what your behavior is supposed to be.
And so theorists often with literally no research supporting them, will make these sweeping claims about how important those social cues are in the formation of a person’s self-identity. In their later behavior, they’ll downplay any evolutionary aspect. They’ll down play any biological aspect and just look at this social dimension. Now, when we’re talking about sex and gender, there’s a few things to note. First, we’re redefining gender Here. Gender’s had a very strange kind of history as a word, so when you’re reading older things, it’s not going to use sex and gender in this way. Originally, gender, which comes from the same word as generation, it means give birth or be getting. This is also where the word genus comes from. If you think about genus and species, that word gets taken into English as a substitute for the word sex. So before male or female was sex, but then as sex began to mean erotic, sexual intercourse, everything else, people wanted a less sexual term, and so they chose the word gender.
So for many, many years, sex and gender meant the exact same thing. It was in the mid 20th century that this change gets introduced. So let’s just acknowledge it. There’s some controversy about should we even treat sex and gender as different, but I think if you understand them properly, this could still work. And I’ll give you a few examples. The World Health Organization argues that gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls, and boys that are socially constructed. So the characteristics of traits, this includes norms, behaviors, and roles associated with being a man, woman, girl, or boy, as well as relationships with each other. They note that because it’s a social construct, gender can vary from society to society and can change over time. Maybe in some cultures, women are expected to be talkative and brash and outgoing, and in other cultures they’re expected to be quiet and submissive and meek, and maybe going from one culture to another, you modify your behavior.
This is at least on face a plausible theory, and I would speak into this that we find this even in linguistic pattern. So I taught an afterschool religion class in Italy in English to Italian students, and as soon as they were done with my class, they would switch back into Italian. And I, again, this is very much anecdotal, but I could tell you that the behavior changed pretty markedly that even as they switched languages, their way of interacting with one another changed the amount of just body language, the whole relationship they had was marked. And so it’s not strange or implausible to suggest that the culture can play an important role in how we live out our maleness or our femaleness. That’s also going to include in addition to the external pressures of culture, the internal decision of, well, how do I want to live this out?
And so all of that’s going to come in the realm of gender, and that’s going to be different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics, things like chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs. That is a perfectly satisfying distinction for me. The problem I have with it is gender theorists who will bring up this distinction and will accuse people who believe in two sexes of conflating sex and gender will themselves conflate sex and gender all the time. I’m going to get into that in just a moment here. But before I do, I want to suggest that the Vatican has signaled an openness to using these words in more or less this way. The Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education says in this cultural context, it’s clear that sex and gender are no longer synonyms or interchangeable concepts. They used to be, as we saw, they’re not anymore.
They’re instead used to describe two different realities. Sex is the biological deriving from the original feminine, masculine dyad, whereas gender is the way in which the differences between the sexes are lived in each culture. Now, the Vatican goes on to warn that you don’t want to divorce sex and gender as if they’re totally unrelated. So again, if you think of sex as being male or female, gender is what’s understood as masculine or feminine. But masculine is clearly tied to male. Feminine is clearly tied to female. That is a perfectly sound, coherent distinction between the biological level and the cultural level between nature and nurture if you want. The problem as I say, is that even though people like Dr. Judas Butler present this distincti... Read more on Catholic.com