About Gender DifferencesIt is said that the first thing we ask about a newborn baby is “Is it a boy or a girl？” But it might be considered that this is the first thing we ask ourselves whenever we meet anyone new. Perhaps this is why we find it so threatening if the cues are uncertain, and even more so if we find our first assumptions turns out to be incorrect.Men are different from women. That would seem to be selfevident. They are different in ability, skill and behavior, but then, so is every individual person. So why do we make such a fuss about it？ It seems not unreasonable to suggest that the sexes are different because their brains are different, but then no two human brains are the same. It is suggested that our culture is in trouble because many women have been brought up to believe they should be as good as men. Well, why not？Why will only touch on these topics briefly? There is enough material for a dozen books. Suffice it to say that all the studies report on the way boys and girls are, not how they got to be that way, or rather how they were at the time of the study. Commonality across cultures and species implies some biological basis. The fact that the situation is changing reflects the power of socialization.At SchoolThere are studies about relative abilities of perception, vision, sound and touch. Certainly, if you watched a carpenter run his fingers along a planed surface and being able to tell how smooth it was, you would find it difficult to believe that boys lack tactile(触觉的) sensitivity.Another is that girls tend to pick up auditory information while boys do better visually. Several studies suggested that, from school age on, boys outperformed girls in areas of mathematics involving abstract concepts of space, relationships and theory. The big issue is the difference in the spatial abilities between boys and girls. It seems that boys find it much easier to visualize and deal with spaces, the position of objects, relative heights and dimensions. In a test involving a three dimensional mechanical device, only a quarter of the girls could perform the task as well as the boys and it isnt recorded if any boys were actually worse.Why are girls more successful at school？ Perhaps emphasis on communication in projects and exams could explain the situation. Success at school nowadays depends on being able to write essays and examination papers. If girls are better at verbal communication than boys, then they are likely to succeed. But, if there are more boys than girls who find difficulty learning at school, does it not imply a serious defect in our educational system？In SportsIn general, men are taller and heavier than women. In sports, men tend to outperform women in strength and speed. Women seem to have greater endurance. In spite of many attempts, sports have never become completely intended for both men and women.Yet, for example, running speeds for male and female athletes have improved steadily through the 20th century, but women have improved much more than men. The same is found for, athletics, swimming and cycling. Hence it is predicted that sex differences might disappear by the middle of the next century. However S. Seiler and S. Sailer, in “The Gender Gap: Elite Women Are Running Further Behind”, point out that, since the date of their studies, the rate of improvement has much reduced. They suggest a correlation with the use of drugs enhancing performance, and their more recent prohibition. These have a greater effect on women than they do with men.Biological DifferencesMen, it is said, are generally more aggressive, physically and verbally, and enjoy taking risks. They play fighting games and enjoy “dares”. More men than women are convicted for crimes, especially crimes of violence.Some say that this is simply a matter of biology, others suggest that it is a function of the way we organize the sex and gender roles in our society. In fact, many of the findings, in this area, have turned out to be unsatisfactory, and often they turn out to be very small differences.Biologically, men certainly seem to be the weaker sex. Although one would expect there to be an equal chance of the fetus(胎儿) being a boy or girl, it appears that the ratio for boys is about 20 percent higher, yet only about the same number come to term. On average, men experience heart attacks 10 years earlier than women, and have a better rate of survival after one year. Symptoms also vary by sex: women experience shortness of breath, fatigue, and chest pain; most male heart attacks come on as a sudden, striking pain in the chest. In adulthood, men are more easily to be infected by viruses and have a shorter average life span.In recent years, a great many biological sex differences have been found throughout the body, including the brain. Some have raised worries about differences in the effectiveness and side effects of various drugs.Social ConsiderationsHowever, regardless of the findings that sex differences really do exist after all, or the pressure to deny them, socially we still expect women to behave like women and men like men.The real problem is not that sex differences exist, but that in our everyday instinct of what sexual or gender behavior is appropriate, our concepts may be too narrow or too rigid. The “biological determinism” argument, too often, reinforces this.While others now say that there is too much biological evidence to deny the fact of sexual difference, we cannot ignore the effect of learning. To start with, the idea that we are the helpless products of our heredity(遗传) takes away our free will. We must not allow those who insist on the difference to blind us to the similarities and we must not allow the biological stereotypes to get away with the idea that there is only one kind of man and one kind of woman.As J. Sayers in Biological Politics puts it: “When one examines these supposedly purely biological accounts of gender roles one finds that they are rooted in appeal to social, not biological, considerations. This is true not only of recent biological analyses of sexual divisions in society but also of the biological explanations of these divisions advanced in the 19th century. The similarity between earlier and current versions of the theses that ‘biology is womans destiny’ is striking.”Relevant FindingsOut of the large number of papers that had been produced up until 1974, about differences between men and women, E. E. Maccoby and C. N. Jacklin in The Psychology of Sex Differences found only the following main differences:Males are more aggressive than females.Though this finding has been challenged, and the definition of aggression itself questioned, it is a fairly common feature, both of human cultures and of the more complex species, male children are more likely to engage in play fighting and adults more likely to fight. Many challenge this, while others assert that it is the primary indicator of masculinity and femininity.Females have more verbal ability than males, while males have better visualspatial skills.The distinction seems to appear at about the age of eleven and, because of the relevance to education, it has received a great deal of attention. Although girls and boys seem to have the same ability for computational arithmetic, teenage boys also seem to do better at the more abstract mathematics. It might seem that a childhood of social experience is the primary factor. However, the biological argument suggests that the hormonal(荷尔蒙的) changes of puberty activate those differences which did not grow in the past.Maccoby and Jacklins 1974 review of the papers on gender and sex differences is the one most often quoted, and it may be that, more than thirty years later, another is urgently needed.
1. According to this passage, the idea that men are different from women is .
A) questioned by the authorB) certainly true
C) widely deniedD) not commented on
.
