The Perception of Sexual Attractiveness: Sex Differences in Variability - "Results of three independent studies supported predictions derived from evolutionary theory: Men's assessments of sexual attractiveness are determined more by objectively assessable physical attributes; women's assessments are more influenced by perceived ability and willingness to invest (e.g., partners' social status, potential interest in them). Consequently, women's assessments of potential partners' sexual attractiveness and coital acceptability vary more than men's assessments. The proposition that polygamous women's assessments of men's sexual attractiveness vary less than those of monogamous women (because the former allegedly are more influenced by target persons' physical attributes) was also tested. In Study 1 male college students showed more agreement than females in their rankings of the sexual attractiveness of opposite-sex target persons. Target persons' flesh and bodily display enhanced this sex difference. In Study 2 men exhibited less variance than did women in their ratings of target persons' acceptability for dating and sexual relations. Women who viewed models described as having low status showed more variability than did women in the high-status condition. In Study 3 women showed more variability than men did in their ratings of 20 opposite-sex celebrities' sexual attractiveness. Studies 2 and 3 included the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI)—a measure of polygamous attitudes and behavior. Women's SOI scores did not affect the variability of their assessments in either Study 2 or 3. In Study 3 men with low SOI scores showed less variability than did men with high SOI scores. Alternative explanations of the findings are examined. Theoretical and empirical implications are discussed."
Serial monogamy increases reproductive success in men but not in women - "Evolutionary theory predicts that males seek more sexual partners than females because of their higher fitness benefits from such a reproductive strategy. Accordingly, variance in numbers of partners and offspring is expected to be greater and association between mating and reproductive success to be stronger in males. Studies testing key predictions of this hypothesis in humans are lacking. Using data of 3700 men and 4010 women living in contemporary United States, we examined sex differences in the variance of number of spouses and offspring and in the association between spouse number and number of offspring. The results suggested a stronger selective advantage of serial monogamy in men than in women. Variance in spouse and offspring number was, respectively, 5% and 10% higher in men. In addition, the association between mating and reproductive success was stronger in men, so that men with 3 or more consecutive spouses had 19% more children than men with only spouse, whereas spouse number beyond the first partner was not associated with number of children in women. When the sample was stratified by ethnic group, the sex differences were stronger among Black and Hispanic participants than among White participants."
Crémieux on Twitter - "A new paper shows sex differences in subcortical brain region development from birth to about two years of age. Modest sex differences are visible from ~day 0 and all regions undergo swift, nonlinear growth after birth, except for amygdalar volumes, which linearly increase."
The power of patriarchy and socialisation!
“the claim (of substantial difference in mean) is currently not based on strong evidence” - "This kind of claim is very common, even among people who explicitly reject blank slatism. It is odd because there are such results around, and they have been around for a long time...
'It is a paradox that males have a larger average brain size than females, that brain size is positively associated with intelligence, and yet numerous experts have asserted that there is no sex difference in intelligence. This paper presents the developmental theory of sex differences in intelligence as a solution to this problem. This states that boys and girls have about the same IQ up to the age of 15 years but from the age of 16 the average IQ of males becomes higher than that of females with an advantage increasing to approximately 4 IQ points in adulthood.'...
In general, it is false to say that there is no strong evidence for sex differences in intelligence. As far as I know, all large recent meta-analyses of adults show this pattern. Meta-analyses are the strongest evidence we have. These studies have large samples, and low researcher degrees of freedom, and data were usually collected and reported by 3rd parties — indeed, 3rd parties with an interest in not finding such differences."
Being More Educated and Earning More Increases Romantic Interest: Data from 1.8 M Online Daters from 24 Nations - "How humans choose their mates is a central feature of adult life and an area of considerable disagreement among relationship researchers. However, few studies have examined mate choice (instead of mate preferences) around the world, and fewer still have considered data from online dating services. Using data from more than 1.8 million online daters from 24 countries, we examined the role of sex and resource-acquisition ability (as indicated by level of education and income) in mate choice using multilevel modeling. We then attempted to understand country-level variance by examining factors such as gender equality and the operational sex ratio. In every nation, a person’s resource-acquisition ability was positively associated with the amount of attention they received from other site members. There was a marked sex difference in this effect; resource-acquisition ability improved the attention received by men almost 2.5 times that of women. This sex difference was in every country, admittedly with some variance between nations. Several country-level traits moderated the effects of resource-acquisition ability, and in the case of unemployment this moderating role differed by sex. Overall, country-level effects were more consistent with evolutionary explanations than sociocultural ones. The results suggest a robust effect of resource-acquisition ability on real-life mate choice that transcends international boundaries and is reliably stronger for men than women. Cross-cultural variance in the role of resource-acquisition ability appears sensitive to local competition and gender equality at the country level."
Sex differences in sex drive, sociosexuality, and height across 53 nations: testing evolutionary and social structural theories - "By analyzing cross-cultural patterns in five parameters--sex differences, male and female trait means, male and female trait standard deviations--researchers can better test evolutionary and social structural models of sex differences. Five models of biological and social structural influence are presented that illustrate this proposal. Using data from 53 nations and from over 200,000 participants surveyed in a recent BBC Internet survey, I examined cross-cultural patterns in these five parameters for two sexual traits--sex drive and sociosexuality--and for height, a physical trait with a biologically based sex difference. Sex drive, sociosexuality, and height all showed consistent sex differences across nations (mean ds = .62, .74, and 1.63). Women were consistently more variable than men in sex drive (mean female to male variance ratio = 1.64). Gender equality and economic development tended to predict, across nations, sex differences in sociosexuality, but not sex differences in sex drive or height. Parameters for sociosexuality tended to vary across nations more than parameters for sex drive and height did. The results for sociosexuality were most consistent with a hybrid model--that both biological and social structural influences contribute to sex differences, whereas the results for sex drive and height were most consistent with a biological model--that evolved biological factors are the primary cause of sex differences. The model testing proposed here encourages evolutionary and social structural theorists to make more precise and nuanced predictions about the patterning of sex differences across cultures."
More evidence that men are hornier than women
Zach Goldberg on Twitter - "Roughly 1 in 4 White liberals believe that differences in physical abilities between men and women mostly owe themselves to different societal expectations"
From the Pew American Trends Panel Survey (Wave 29, September 14-28, 2017)
I once articulated this position to spoof liberal gospel on gender differences, but it looks like the madness finally caught up with me
How Large Are Gender Differences in Toy Preferences? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Toy Preference Research - "It is generally recognized that there are gender-related differences in children's toy preferences. However, the magnitude of these differences has not been firmly established. Furthermore, not all studies of gender-related toy preferences find significant gender differences. These inconsistent findings could result from using different toys or methods to measure toy preferences or from studying children of different ages. Our systematic review and meta-analysis combined 113 effect sizes from 75 studies to estimate the magnitude of gender-related differences in toy preferences. We also assessed the impact of using different toys or methods to assess these differences, as well as the effect of age on gender-related toy preferences. Boys preferred boy-related toys more than girls did, and girls preferred girl-related toys more than boys did. These differences were large (d ≥ 1.60). Girls also preferred toys that researchers classified as neutral more than boys did (d = 0.29). Preferences for gender-typical over gender-atypical toys were also large and significant (d ≥ 1.20), and girls and boys showed gender-related differences of similar magnitude. When only dolls and vehicles were considered, within-sex differences were even larger and of comparable size for boys and girls. Researchers sometimes misclassified toys, perhaps contributing to an apparent gender difference in preference for neutral toys. Forced choice methods produced larger gender-related differences than other methods, and gender-related differences increased with age."
The push for gender neutral toys is good to lose money
Sex differences in children's toy preferences: A systematic review, meta‐regression, and meta‐analysis - "From an early age, most children choose to play with toys typed to their own gender. In order to identify variables that predict toy preference, we conducted a meta-analysis of observational studies of the free selection of toys by boys and girls aged between 1 and 8 years. From an initial pool of 1788 papers, 16 studies (787 boys and 813 girls) met our inclusion criteria. We found that boys played with male-typed toys more than girls did (Cohen's d = 1.03, p < .0001) and girls played with female-typed toys more than boys did (Cohen's d = −0.91, p < .0001). Meta-regression showed no significant effect of presence of an adult, study context, geographical location of the study, publication date, child's age, or the inclusion of gender-neutral toys. However, further analysis of data for boys and girls separately revealed that older boys played more with male-typed toys relative to female-typed toys than did younger boys (β = .68, p < .0001). Additionally, an effect of the length of time since study publication was found: girls played more with female-typed toys in earlier studies than in later studies (β = .70, p < .0001), whereas boys played more with male-typed toys (β = .46, p < .05) in earlier studies than in more recent studies. Boys also played with male-typed toys less when observed in the home than in a laboratory (β = −.46, p < .05). Findings are discussed in terms of possible contributions of environmental influences and age-related changes in boys' and girls' toy preferences."
Mathematician Sarah Hart on Why Numbers are Music to Our Ears - Freakonomics - "HART: I’m not perhaps an expert in why people make educational choices, but this is just my feeling here — that socially women are perhaps brought up to be more accommodating somehow and polite, and those things that don’t go well with focusing for 22 hours a day and not leaving the house and not changing your clothes and stuff. And there is perhaps this slight aura of some sort of macho thing in pure maths of, “We do really hard problems and you’ve got to just go all in.” And perhaps the things that women are brought up with our social conditioning to be like. We are forced to learn some other skills, which might mean there are more avenues open to us and subconsciously you’re drawn maybe away from those areas of pure mathematics a little bit. But that’s all very wishy washy. It doesn’t appeal to my sense of wanting to give you a proper researched answer. So this is just my feeling.
LEVITT: That fits with my own advice, which I don’t think is gendered, but I try to talk every one I can out of getting an economics Ph.D., because I think for almost everyone, it’s a bad choice. I hate to say this, because maybe some of the people I’ve encouraged to get an economics Ph.D. are listening — the only people I encourage are the people who have such poor social skills that they have no chance of succeeding in a more demanding social setting. I’ll tell you a story. I suspect it’s true in math because it’s true in economics, but at least when I was younger, there was a sense that if you were too normal, you couldn’t possibly be a good economist. And one of my colleagues — who’s been a very successful economist — and he was incredibly normal and he also had the burden of being very good looking. The older faculty — my older colleagues, they would literally say, “He’s too normal. That guy can’t really be a good economist. He doesn’t have any quirks.”...
LEVITT: Over a decade ago, I did some academic research with Roland Fryer on the gender gap in math performance for younger kids in the U.S.A. And in those data, we found that girls and boys performed equally well when they entered school in kindergarten, but already by fifth grade, the girls had lost 0.2 standard deviations relative to the boys. It was true across every racial group, every region, every socioeconomic level and family structure, and it was especially pronounced at the top of the distribution. And we completely failed in understanding why. We could look at some explanations — it didn’t seem to be lower expectations by teachers. It turned out, interestingly, and probably surprisingly to you, that girls who had moms in math related occupations lost just as much as girls whose moms weren’t. Parents reported spending as much time on math with sons and daughters. So, it was really a frustrating project because we got such discouraging results, and yet we couldn’t offer any answers at all.
HART: The only thing I can even begin to think is that it’s like unconscious bias that you do to yourself, maybe. A long time ago I read that a study had been done where they gave girls and boys some tests to do, and then they repeated this and the only difference was at the top, you had to tick whether you were male or female and doing that made the girls do worse. So just becoming aware of their own gender, temporarily.
LEVITT: So, interestingly again, with Roland Fryer, and also with John List and Sally Sadoff, we went and tried to replicate those results here at the University of Chicago and we absolutely could not. So that research in psychology goes under the name of “stereotype threat.” I became very interested in that because the implication was that girls forgot they were girls until you made them remind themselves they’re a girl — that made no sense to me. So we started out doing subtle things where we would give math tests and we would have people circle their gender — no impact. Then we just got more and more extreme because in the original results, the more extreme you got, the more extreme the impact was. And so we would have Sally Sadoff — my cousin and an economist and my co-author — she would go in front of the room of students and she would say, “Look, this is a test where girls have—” well, women, these were really women, these were M.B.A. students, mostly, “—women have done very poorly on this test before.” And the more we said, the better the women did on the test. The women were crushing the men by the end. And I really don’t know what to say. But let me tell you the other thing we did in our paper, which I think is much more interesting; this is the research I did with Roland Fryer. We looked at these cross-country math tests that are given. These are the ones where the United States always does terribly and there are headlines in the papers, bemoaning how bad math education is in the U.S. — and there were interesting findings related to gender. The first was that, indeed, across the planet, girls tended to underperform boys in math, but there was also a very strong relationship overall between broader measures of gender equality in a country and how well the girls did relatively on math. So countries like Norway and Sweden and Finland that have a lot of gender equality, girls did just as well as boys did and that makes a lot of sense with your story of implicit biases. Okay, here’s the thing that was really crazy. There was a second set of countries where girls dominated boys in math: Iran, Jordan, Bahrain, and Egypt. And the girls didn’t outperform the boys because the boys did badly. The girls were really, truly off-the-charts good at math. And the only real explanation we could come up with is that those were countries in which they had single-sex schools, and it really made us wonder whether maybe teaching girls math away from boys could have huge benefits. Maybe much broader than in these countries. And we tried without any success to convince a bunch of different school districts in the United States to let us do some female-only classrooms, and in the end they all said “No,” but I still think it’s possibly an experiment we should be doing because I’d love to know the answer to that.
Feminist logic on girls doing worse: this shows how powerful patriarchy is, and the lack of a dose-response effect to "discrimination" shows that we need to work even harder to quash "stereotypes"
Stereotype threat: another liberal myth debunked
Equal ≠ The Same: Sex Differences in the Human Brain - "Regarding sex differences research, Gloria Steinem once said that it's "anti-American, crazy thinking to do this kind of research." Indeed, in about the year 2000, senior colleagues strongly advised me against studying sex differences because it would "kill" my career... it is false to conclude that because a particular behavior starts small in children and grows, that behavior has little or no biological basis. One has only to think of handedness, walking, and language to see the point. Second, this argument presupposes that human "cultural" influences are somehow formed independent of the existing biological predispositions of the human brain. But third, and most important, is the key fallacy in the plasticity argument: the implication that the brain is perfectly plastic. It is not. The brain is plastic only within the limits set by biology... J. Richard Udry. In his important but underappreciated paper entitled "Biological Limits of Gender Construction," Udry examines the interaction between two factors-how much a mother encouraged her daughter to behave in "feminine" ways, and how much the daughter had been exposed to masculinizing hormonal influences in the womb-on how "feminine" the daughter behaved when she was older... the more mothers encouraged "femininity" in their daughters, the more feminine the daughters behaved as adults, but only in those daughters exposed to little masculinizing hormone in utero. Crucially, the greater the exposure to masculinizing hormonal effects in utero (the progressively lower lines), the less effective was the mother's encouragement, to the point where encouragement either did not work at all (line with squares) or even tended toward producing the opposite effect on the daughters' behavior (line with diamonds)."
It is shocking that even in 2000 studying sex differences was already not kosher
Intriguingly, Udry's paper shows that 'socialisation' can actually be counterproductive and do the opposite of what it's supposed to, which is even more evidence against blank slate claims
A New Study Blows Up Old Ideas About Girls and Boys - "If there are superstar scholars, Berkeley professor Judith Butler is a superstar. She is best known for pioneering the idea that “male” and “female” are merely social constructs. She writes that “because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.” For this insight, she has been rewarded with an avalanche of scholarly honors and prizes, including the Mellon Prize, which carries with it a $1.5 million cash award. (By comparison, the Nobel Prize gets you just $1.1 million.)Butler is a professor of comparative literature, not a neuroscientist, but her ideas about gender have become widely accepted worldwide in the nearly 30 years since the publication of her book Gender Trouble... The worldview promulgated by Butler, Fine, and their followers now constrains what neuroscientists are allowed to say in public. A professor of neurophysiology at Lund University in Sweden recently told undergraduates that the categories of female and male are, to some degree, biological realities rather than social constructs and that some differences in behavior between women and men might, therefore, have a biological basis. He was promptly denounced by students who claimed that his remarks were “anti-feminist.” The dean of the medical school duly launched an investigation... In recent years, there have been fascinating studies in which neuroscientists have studied the brains of babies in their mothers’ wombs... the biggest female/male difference in gene transcription in the human brain, for many genes, is in the prenatal period... American researchers managed to do MRI scans of pregnant mothers in the second and third trimesters, with sufficient resolution to image the brains of the babies inside the uterus. They found dramatic differences between female and male fetuses.
Patriarchy is so powerful it socialises unborn children
Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man? - "A fascinating paper about sex differences in the human brain was published last week in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex. It’s the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants (2,466 male and 2,750 female)... For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women’s brains, this paper is something of a reality check. The team of researchers from Edinburgh University, led by Stuart Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters, found that men’s brains are generally larger in volume and surface area, while women’s brains, on average, have thicker cortices. ‘The differences were substantial: in some cases, such as total brain volume, more than a standard deviation,’ they write. This is not a new finding – it has been known for some time that the total volume of men’s brains is, in general, larger than that of women’s, even when adjusted for men’s larger average body size – but all the studies before now have involved much smaller sample sizes... feminists won’t like this confirmation that men, on average, have bigger brains than women because there’s a well-established connection between total brain volume and IQ... the male brains they studied were, on most measures, more variable than the female ones. He was excited about the fact that this discovery complemented a 2008 study of male-female IQ differences, also carried out by a team from Edinburgh, which found only negligible differences in the mean scores of men and women on intelligence tests, but that men outnumbered women at either end of the cognitive bell curve. So greater variability among men when it comes to cognitive ability. That was also the conclusion of a 2007 paper which found that among those scoring in the top two per cent of the Armed Forces Qualification Test, men outnumbered women by a ratio of 2:1... According to most progressives, the fact that only 48 of the almost 900 people awarded Nobel Prizes since 1901 were women – and the Fields Medal has only been won by a woman once – is entirely due to social/cultural factors... Ironically, writers like Saini who are so eager to ascribe the low numbers of female professors in science and maths to sexism are guilty of something like sexism themselves – namely, under-estimating the agency of the women who could go into these fields but choose not to... The differences between men and women are such that gender parity in STEM fields, particularly at the top of those professions, is unlikely to be achieved without some highly intrusive state interventions. And I don’t mean equal pay or paternity leave legislation which, as we’ve seen in Scandinavia, has resulted in fewer women going into engineering and tech, not more. What this data tells us is that hard gender equality of the kind favoured by intersectional feminists can only be achieved at a huge cost to human freedom, particularly the freedom of women... Whether it’s the new genetics or cutting-edge neuroscience, the egalitarian left is on a collision course with science"
Sex differences in mental rotation and line angle judgments are positively associated with gender equality and economic development across 53 nations - "Mental rotation and line angle judgment performance were assessed in more than 90,000 women and 111,000 men from 53 nations. In all nations, men's mean performance exceeded women's on these two visuospatial tasks. Gender equality (as assessed by United Nations indices) and economic development (as assessed by per capita income and life expectancy) were significantly associated, across nations, with larger sex differences, contrary to the predictions of social role theory. For both men and women, across nations, gender equality and economic development were significantly associated with better performance on the two visuospatial tasks. However, these associations were stronger for the mental rotation task than for the line angle judgment task, and they were stronger for men than for women"
The power of patriarchy - once again more gender equality leads to bigger gender differences
Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality - "What contributes to gender-associated differences in preferences such as the willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust? Falk and Hermle studied 80,000 individuals in 76 countries who participated in a Global Preference Survey and compared the data with country-level variables such as gross domestic product and indices of gender inequality. They observed that the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences."
Dopamine, the Left Brain, Women, and Men - "Psychiatrically speaking, it is probably not a coincidence that dopamine related disorders, such as schizophrenia, addiction, ADHD and autism are more common in men, whereas the serotonin/norepinephrine linked anxiety and depressive disorders are more common in women. Of course dopamine is also associated with depression and opiates with addiction, and men get depressed and anxious while women have ADHD and autism"
Sex differences in play fighting revisited: traditional and nontraditional mechanisms of sexual differentiation in rats - " In the traditional model for sexual differentiation in mammals, the female phenotype is the default condition. That is, the female-typical pattern will persist unless acted upon by hormones early in development. The frequency of play fighting in rats, as in most other mammals, is sexually differentiated, and conforms to the traditional model. Males engage in more play fighting than females, and this can be reduced to female-typical levels by neonatal castration. Furthermore, females can be induced to play fight at male-typical levels if treated with testosterone neonatally. Fractionation of play fighting into its constituent components, attack and defense, reveals that it is the frequency of attack that is sexually differentiated, not the likelihood of defense. However, in males, defensive behavior changes at puberty so that the play becomes "rougher." For males to switch to this rougher form of play fighting, they have to be androgenized perinatally. Hence, for males, this second aspect of play fighting that is sexually differentiated also follows the traditional model. In marked contrast, development of the female-typical pattern does not. Neonatal treatment of females with testosterone has no effect; at puberty, they still show the female-typical pattern. On the the other hand, ovariectomy, either at birth or at weaning, leads to females exhibiting the male-typical transition to rougher play fighting at puberty. That is, ovarian hormones appear to actively inhibit the expression of a male-typical trait in females. Play fighting, then, is a mixture of traits, with some features conforming to the traditional model and some not. For some phenotypic features, ovarian hormones appear to exert an active role in their development."
Testosterone Rex strikes again - this is the power of Patriarchy!
Locus of control and the gender gap in mental health - "We examine whether gender differences in locus of control (LoC) explain gender gaps in mental health using longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. We find that gender differences in LoC is an important factor contributing to the well-recognised gender gap in mental health in favour of males. Our preferred estimates, that take into account differences in the distribution of characteristics of males and females, suggest that at the mean a unit increase in internal LoC for females would narrow the mental health gender gap by 2.2% and that if LoC of women were the same as that of men, it could close the gender gap in mental health by as much as 18.8%. This general conclusion is generally robust to evaluating the gender gap at the 10th and 90th quantile and a suite of sensitivity checks including different ways of measuring key variables and alternative approaches to the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. Our findings suggest that resilience education programs that teach positive control beliefs to children should be designed particularly with girls in mind and in such a way as to encourage participation by girls."
Damn patriarchy!
