It 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
self-evident. 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
School There 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 isn’t 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
Sports In 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 Differences Men, 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. Biological]y, 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 Considerations However, 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 woman’s
destiny’ is striking." Relevant Findings
Out 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 visual-spatial 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 Jacklin’s 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. Females have more verbal ability than males, while males have better ______ skills.