As John Gray was saying: Some Gender Gaps Widen / Older Dads / Black Holes - 9/9/08

[Smartmarriages]

Fascinating, counterintuitive stuff....diane


As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen
New York Times Science Section
September 9, 2008
Findings
By JOHN TIERNEY

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus
stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative,
nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more
competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences
appear in early childhood and never disappear.

What¹s not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary
psychologists contend that these are innate traits inherited from ancient
hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists asserts that both
sexes¹ personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that
personality differences will shrink as women spend less time nurturing
children and more time in jobs outside the home.

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly
analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries
around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the
size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role
psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong
direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are
smaller in traditional cultures like India¹s or Zimbabwe¹s than in the
Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a
patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in
Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar
jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued
they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests.
But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents,
David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr.
Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director
of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy
modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient
internal differences are being revived.

The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of
men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer
countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less
competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe
and North America.

To explain these differences, Dr. Schmitt and his collaborators from Austria
and Estonia point to the hardships of life in poorer countries. They note
that in some other species, environmental stress tends to disproportionately
affect the larger sex and mute costly secondary sexual characteristics (like
male birds¹ displays of plumage). And, they say, there are examples of
stress muting biological sex differences in humans. For instance, the
average disparity in height between men and women isn¹t as pronounced in
poor countries as it is in rich countries, because boys¹ growth is
disproportionately stunted by stresses like malnutrition and disease.

Personality is more complicated than height, of course, and Dr. Schmitt
suggests it¹s affected by not just the physical but also the social stresses
in traditional agricultural societies. These villagers have had to adapt
their personalities to rules, hierarchies and gender roles more constraining
than those in modern Western countries ‹ or in clans of hunter-gatherers.

³Humanity¹s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the
monopolization of power and resources by a few men was Œunnatural¹ in many
ways,² Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were
relatively egalitarian. ³In some ways modern progressive cultures are
returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots,² he argues. ³That
means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women
expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses
of traditional agricultural societies could allow men¹s, and to a lesser
extent women¹s, more Œnatural¹ personality traits to emerge.²

Some critics of this hypothesis question whether the international
variations in personality have more to do with the way people in different
cultures interpret questions on personality tests. (For more on this debate,
go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The critics would like to see more direct
measures of personality traits, and so would Dr. Schmitt. But he notes that
there¹s already an intriguing trend reported for one trait ‹ competitiveness
‹ based on direct measures of male and female runners.

Competitive running makes a good case study because, to mix athletic
metaphors, it has offered a level playing field to women the past two
decades in the United States. Similar numbers of males and females run on
high school and college teams and in road races. Female runners have been
competing for equal shares of prize money and receiving nearly 50 percent
more scholarship aid from Division I colleges than their male counterparts,
according to the N.C.A.A.

But these social changes have not shrunk a gender gap among runners analyzed
by Robert Deaner, a psychologist at Grand Valley State University in
Michigan, who classifies runners as relatively fast if they keep close to
the pace of the world¹s best runners of their own sex. When Dr. Deaner looks
at, say, the top 40 finishers of each sex in a race, he typically finds two
to four times as many relatively fast male runners as relatively fast female
runners.

This large gender gap has persisted for two decades in all kinds of races ‹
high school and college meets, elite and nonelite road races ‹ and it jibes
with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more
motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring ³sex difference in
competitiveness,² he concludes, ³must be considered a genuine failure for
the sociocultural conditions hypothesis² that the personality gap will
shrink as new roles open for women.

If he and Dr. Schmitt are right, then men and women shouldn¹t expect to
understand each other much better anytime soon. Things could get confusing
if the personality gap widens further as the sexes become equal. But then,
maybe it was that allure of the mysterious other that kept Mars and Venus
together so long on the savanna.

###################
And, while we're in the NY Times Science Section, another reason to help
couples gain confidence about marrying and mating at younger ages:
BIPOLOAR DISORDER TIED TO AGE OF FATHERS (along with autism and
schizophrenia) 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/health/09bipo.html?ref=science

##################
OR, maybe none of this matters.....we may all of us - gender gapped and
bipolar and all of us - be disappearing into a man-made black hole in a
couple of weeks as nuclear scientists at the Hadron Collider ramp up protons
to five trillion electon volts and collide them. Darn, just as we're getting
this marriage stuff figured out. It's a short, fascinating read. - diane

FINGERS CROSSED, PHYSICISTS ARE READY FOR COLLIDER TO ROLL: The world will
probably not end on Wednesday, but a lot of people will be holding their
breath anyway: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/science/09collide.html?ref=science

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