Matt Walsh is asking this question in his new book and movie and getting a variety of answers it seems. Being a data driven science type guy, I like to start answering questions like this with observations. What observations can we make about women (and men) besides the obvious physical differences? Well if I had to characterize women vs. men over the whole scope of what we call history — the past 6000 years or so — I’d probably characterize women (contrasted with men) as generally … more nurturing, more empathetic, more emotional, more discerning, less creative / more maintaining … and men (contrasted with women) as generally … less nurturing more conquering / destroying, less empathetic, less emotional, less discerning, more creative / less maintaining. To summarize … I would say that Woman = Discerner / Revealer / Nurturer … Man = Maker / Conqueror / Destroyer. Of course these are generalities and there are definitely areas of overlap. Also, there will be debate as to WHY these differences exist. Some say it’s social conditioning and some say it’s more biological. What say you?
158 thoughts on “What is a Woman?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
HMGuy submitted this post a while back, but it got stuck in the system.
Notwithstanding the reference to Matt Walsh’s documentary, HMGuy seems more interested in gender characteristics than in transgender issues.
And despite being a “data driven science type guy” I’m not seeing either data (even “observations”) or science in this post.
But have at it.
Another observation is that men (as contrasted with women) really love thinking in stereotypes.
Apologies to HMGuy. I did not notice the post in pending, as the system does not flag a new entry. To all needing admin help to publish a post, give an admin a headsup.
That is a rather sexist remark.
Oh, wait… 😉
It’s good that HMGuy recognises that “there is some overlap” though it’s not clear what he means by this.
Almost every study of gender differences in mental processes either finds no difference or finds a small but “statistically significant” difference that is dwarfed by amount of variability WITHIN each gender. And even then, it’s far from clear how much is due to socialisation and how much to intrinsic propensity. In stats terms, the effect size of any differences is tiny. Another way of saying the same thing is to say that gender is an extremely poor predictor of person’s mental strengths and propensities. Therefore basing your expectations of a person’s qualities on their gender is, literally, pre-judice. And also leads to self-fulfilling prophesies. If we socialise children such that “nurturing”, or “emotional” or “empathetic” qualities are commended in girls, but treated as “sissy” in boys (“boys don’t cry) and that “creative” or “destructive” qualities are commended (or at least excused – “boys will be boys”) but treated as inappropriate in girls, any perceived differences will tend to become reality, for some (while others will be deeply damaged by expectations they cannot meet, or opportunities they are denied).
Not an original PoV, but worth stating anyway, maybe.
For someone who claims to be “a data driven science type guy”, there is neither data or science in this post — just a rehashing of familiar old cultural myths.
Its always men asking what a woman is. Why not the reverse ?
Generally it just seems to be an annoying question. Like asking what is ‘nice’.
If we ever did arrive at an answer it would be like deciding Pluto is or is not a planet. What use would the answer be ?
A lot of the unease is driven by religious fundies upset that some people get about deciding on their own gender. Thats gods work.
Just found this:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05517-y?fbclid=IwAR0joSlop2egFD-jGBCoPgA4pHG5VzgKCNAtfFXXIH7mzFLuVwzCCxQj6gU
Okay, I’m just confused. Gender differences are culturally induced, but gender identity is inborn, to the extent that it is abusive not to help people transition if their body doesn’t match their identity.
I’m thinking the terminology is not ready for prime time. Too many unknown unknowns.
Put another way, gender behavior is a mythological stereotype; gender identity is so absolutely binary that we are okay with counseling children to undergo medical procedures that will shorten their lives by ten percent.
Sorry if my musings are offensive. I’m listening to your responses.
I’m sure that’s true, but there’s also the desire of parents that their children be “successful”.
That involves a bunch of seemingly unrelated things. Hierarchically, that might mean not dead, not in prison, employed, in a happy relationship, parent, and so forth.
Most of these things are outside of and beyond the control of parents and teachers. There are, in fact, many societal mechanisms designed to remove or minimize the influence of parents.
This is not anything new. My observation is kids are more influenced by peers than by adults. This starts at a very early age. This is the strongest impetus to conformity. And the cruelest, for kids who don’t fit in.
Lizzie:
It’s worth noting that even a small average difference between two groups on a particular trait can result in large differences out toward the tails of the distributions. Steven Pinker once made this point vividly in a discussion of Ashkenazi intelligence relative to the general population. I”ll see if I can track down a quote.
This is relevant, I would argue, because our concepts of masculinity and femininity are shaped more by our observations of folks who exemplify the associated traits most strongly, and less so by the folks who lie closer to the middle of the distributions of these traits.
I found a quote:
* A term he defines earlier in the article:
Also relevant: I’ve seen studies demonstrating that when you construct an individual’s overall personality profile, taking into account many distinct traits, it becomes possible to predict their sex with an astonishing degree of accuracy.
I’ll see if I can track down those studies, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.
Alan:
Alan,
Perhaps you could check the pending queue as part of your routine whenever visiting the site.
I found the two aforementioned papers.
From the first paper:
In a followup study, they replicated their findings using a different dataset.
People get nervous about the findings of intergroup comparisons like the above, fearing that sexists and racists will exploit them in an attempt to justify discrimination. I share those fears, and I think they are warranted.
There are also some well-meaning folks who believe that findings like these should be downplayed or even suppressed, or that it’s unethical to undertake such studies in the first place. (The more extreme among them even take it as a matter of dogma that there are no mental differences between men and women.)
It’s important to resist such temptations. We are ethically obliged, as a matter of scientific integrity, to acknowledge the results of studies even when they don’t comport with our hopes or our prior beliefs. (That doesn’t mean that such studies should be immune from criticism or falsification, of course.) But even apart from concerns about scientific integrity, accepting such findings is ultimately advantageous, because it undercuts the growing belief (especially among those on the right) that scientists, especially in controversial fields of study such as gender or climate change, are just eggheads abusing their profession to push a political agenda.
While ultimately advantageous, the objective stance leaves us with the problem of how to convey, to people who might not have a background in science or critical thinking, that intergroup differences don’t justify discrimination against an individual on the basis of sex/race/whatever. The massive overlap of the distributions, coupled with the magnitude of intragroup variation, make such discrimination irrational. Individuals need to be considered as individuals.
Unfortunately, it’s harder to explain that to someone than it is for a racist or misogynist to point to a study and say “See? Science proves I’m right.”
I found this on Reddit, and I suspect it will be compatible with Lizzy’s take.
I would add that surgery is not the only kind of transition, and for many trans people not even the most important. For small children, social transition is still transition – adopting social signifiers that match the child’s gender identity, e.g name, pronouns, hair cut, clothes. Once puberty starts, the acquisition of unwanted secondary sex characteristics that will be driven by your native hormones can be delayed with puberty blockers, and the “right” puberty induced later with cross-sex hormones. For trans boys, this will often obviate the desire for “top surgery” as they will not acquire unwanted breasts. For trans girls, this may be all they ever need.
For those who opt for biological transition post puberty, again, cross-sex hormones are the most commonly sought interventions, and they do a lot to change the visible signifiers of gender. Facial and body hair removal, and sometimes facial feminisation surgery are things that are sought by trans women. For trans men, cross-sex hormones do most of the work – voice, body hair, muscle, facial hair.
As transgender identity for many transgender people is about how you are “read” by others, genital surgery is often not a priority. In most societies, what is in your pants is largely hidden.
So the “controversial” surgery is usually the idea of mastectomy for young trans men who have not managed to avoid growing breasts during puberty. Breasts, unfortunately, tend to be socially visible.
My 15 year old daughter is a gymnastics instructor and we were talking one evening about her work and she volunteered that she likes boys classes better than girls classes because “boys are zoomy” but “girls are judgy” … her exact words!
In a different convo I had with a gal (she’s 48) I’m dating … she volunteered that “men are stupid” but “women are crazy” … and she theorized that women are DRIVEN crazy by men being stupid.
Both are interesting observations.
Let’s also not forget that there are SIGNIFICANT physical differences … why would we not expect the NON-physical differences to be significant as well?
What do you mean by “SIGNIFICANT” (your caps)?
It’s not obvs?
Certainly not to the average reader who is unaware of the background.
Alan,
What “background”, apart from existing as a human among other humans, is required in order to observe that there are significant physical differences between men and women?
A relevant article from Scientific American:
Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously
The article refers to the studies I mentioned previously and makes this observation:
That suggests anyone can divorce themselves from their cultural background. I think Dennett’s first-person third-person distinction is helpful. My guess is that keiths is biologically male and thinks of himself as intellectually male based on US cultural norms. Perhaps his style of clothing, haircut, way of speaking, choice of friends, type of sexual activity he enjoys stem to some extent from that cultural influence within which he was raised. But I don’t know and I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be keiths.
So, without knowing the background of another human being, I can’t know anything of their first-person experience. I can make the sweeping assumption that people are all very much alike under the skin and that people are deeply honest about the details they reveal of themselves in internet discussions but are those assumptions reliable?
Anyway the background I was referring to was HMGuy’s discussions in other venues.
I remember a conversation with one of my cousins many years ago. He already had three boys and we were talking about our toddler daughters who were about the same age. He insisted differences in sex were innate as “there’s no doubt Gail is a little girl. She plays differently. She hates getting her hands dirty [other examples but memory fades], she’s a proper little girl”.
I only had the experience of raising my first toddler daughter. She certainly loved pink.
There are certainly physical differences between men and women, e.g. men are taller then women on average and this difference is statistically significant. Such claims are entirely uncontroversial, but personally I get the impression that HMGuy’s OP and comments hint at something beyond trivial platitudes. I too would like a little more clarity in these statements.
I try to control my optimism in some circumstances. For instance, I might start reading a book and think to myself when a few pages in: “this isn’t very good, but maybe it will improve”. Invariably for me, so far, first impressions are confirmed.
Yes, is it innate that little girls love pink? Wow, Google tells me research has been done recently:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8451877/
The reason I ask is that “significant” can mean many things. It could indeed mean “obvious”. There are obvious differences between men and women, and between pre-pubertal boys and girls at least when wearing underwear.
Those differences are also “signficant” in that they “signify”, or “signal” to other people whether you are male or female.
They are also “statistically significant” in that while many men are shorter than many women, and this overlap is substantial on a number of other visible characteristics as well, leading to occasional confusion as to which category someone belongs to, you don’t need a very large sample of people to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the average height, shoe-size, voice pitch, amount of head hair, amount of facial hair, breast size, etc is really different in men than it is in women.
But you then extrapolate and make the inference that given these “real” differences in the AVERAGES on these physical feature, there are likely to be differences in personality or cognitive aptitude averages as well.
Which might be true. But it’s not an obvious inference. There are loads of physical features like height, skin colour, head shape, facial features, etc that differ, for instance between people of different recent ancestral origin, but NO reason to think that there “must” be differences in personality or cognitive aptitude to go along with them.
And that’s before we even get on to the issue of what might CAUSE such differences, should we “observe” them. Human development is a complex interplay between endogenous factors like genes and hormones, and exogenous environmental factors including social/cultural factors.
Three points:
1. Being able to predict a person’s sex given measures on a large number of personality traits with some degree of confidence (you cite 85% which isn’t especially astonishing, given that chance will give you ~50%) is NOT the same as being able to predict a person’s personality given their sex. This matters, because EVEN IF it were the case that there are real inbuilt differences in the AVERAGE of these traits between the sexes, it would be an utterly terrible way of picking, say, a candidate for a job, or even a life-partner.
2. Again EVEN IF there were biologically driven propensities for girls to develop a different personality profile than boys, initial assumptions as to what is “normal” (in the statistical sense) for girls and what is “normal” for boys will tend to be amplified into much larger differences by social and cultural expectations.
3. Human development is a complex interplay between propensities that develop in utero under the influence of both genes and hormonal environment (and interactions between the two) and socialisation in the early years and beyond. We are not born “gay” or “trans” or “zoomy” or “judgy” but we probably ARE born with the propensity for those things, and the track we develop along depends very much on our subsequent interactions with our family, our society, our culture, and the world in general, as well, of course, as the strength of that congenital propensity.
keiths:
Alan:
The observation of physical differences doesn’t require knowledge of others’ first-person experiences, nor does it require observers to divorce themselves from their cultural backgrounds. I don’t know what it’s like to be a member of an isolated highland New Guinea tribe, and I certainly don’t share their culture, but I can perceive the obvious physical differences between their men and their women.
Corneel:
Except to Alan, judging by his comment above.
Me too, especially given that he cites a book by Matt Walsh, a man not known for evenhandedness, to put it mildly. I hope he’ll clarify his position.
LIzzie, to HMGuy:
You’re right that physical differences between the sexes, even large ones, don’t by themselves warrant the expectation of significant differences in cognition or personality. However, there are other reasons to expect such differences. For example, there are large sex-based differences in behavior across animal species, including those species (the majority) in which cultural influences are a minor factor if they exist at all. I see no reason to think that such differences have been erased by our recent evolutionary history, particularly when they are still salient in our primate relatives.
Lizzie:
A classification accuracy of 85% is HUGE. It puts paid to the notion that personality differences between the sexes are small and insignificant.
Agreed, which is why I’ve been stressing the need to treat people as individuals — as opposed to group members — when making judgments of that kind. Not only is it a matter of fairness to the persons being judged; it also benefits those doing the judging by keeping them from overlooking superior candidates who happen to come from the “wrong” group.
Regarding your points #2 and #3, the degree to which any personality differences between the sexes are shaped 1) by genes and the physical environment on the one hand, versus 2) by socialization and cultural influence on the other, is an empirical question that is up to science to answer. While I believe that the importance of the former has been underestimated of late, my main point in this thread is to emphasize that regardless of the causes, differences do exist and their magnitude is striking.
Scientific integrity obliges us to acknowledge that while at the same time not allowing sexists, homophobes and transphobes to misuse it as a bogus justification for discrimination and persecution.
HMGuy,
Your position isn’t entirely clear to me (or to others, judging by their comments). Let me suggest a thought experiment that might help us understand your thinking.
Suppose that in the near future it becomes possible to transplant brains — or perhaps more appropriately, let’s say it becomes possible to transplant bodies, since personhood attaches more to the brain than to the body. Either way, imagine that you are in a terrible accident and that your body is so badly damaged that doctors can save your brain only by transferring it into a different body. Problem is, the only available body comes from a woman donor.
To everyone’s relief, the operation is a success and your brain lives on, though in a female body. People see your female body, refer to you as a woman, and treat you accordingly. Are you a woman? Are you a man in a woman’s body? Are you something else? How do you feel about being treated as a woman? Do you object, or do you consider it entirely justified and appropriate since you really are a woman now, given that you occupy a woman’s body?
Along with your answers, please let us know your reasoning.
First up, the accuracy would be only 72% if you skip the “correcting for the unreliability of personality tests”, as one should if you are making “ability to discriminate” claims.
Secondly, they are measuring responses to personality questionnaires. The fact that there are gender differences in responses to statements such as “I believe laws should be strictly enforced” and “I like to stand during the national anthem” (or even “I have a soft heart” !!) is not terribly dispositive. Cultural effects will contaminate. It’s like the old joke about the IQ test: what does it measure? It measures the ability to take the IQ test.
What is a woman? In most cases easy to recognize but not so easy to define. Recognition suffices in most everyday cases, but a general definition is an attempt to deaden that which is naturally fluidic. LIving systems never exists in simple black and white categories. But laws need definitions, and I can understand how difficult it is to make laws which deal with these issues in a way that satisfies everyone.
Humans are becoming more and more individualized. In past times people were defined less as individuals and more by their clan, tribe, gender, and their position in those societies. Passing into adulthood probably involved each member of the tribe going through gender specific initiation rites. None of the people I grew up with went through such a collective experience as this.
In modern times cultural, social boundaries are disappearing and this allows people have more freedom to express their individuality. In tribal cultures individual destinies were basically mapped out from birth. In the modern world many of us have much more freedom to control our own paths through life.
On a personal note, my grandkids are individuals, and they are given the relative freedom to develop as individuals. I know my grandkids conform physically to the gender assigned to them at birth because I have done my share of nappy (diaper) changes. But these days, more often than not, on meeting them strangers refer to them both as ‘girls’. This is no doubt because my grandson has never had a haircut in six years, and also, he loves to imitate his big sister. If she has a ponytail tied up with a pink scrunchie, he quite often wants and gets the same. They are judged on initial appearance. But at the same time, he shows a greater interest than his sister in working with tools and building things. She has more of an artistic nature. That is just the way they are.
My daughter tries not to force any stereotypical traits on them. They have been physically defined as female and male, but hopefully as adults they will become what they want to be.
Acceptance of people as they are, begins in the home. And I am grateful for my upbringing and appreciate the relationship daughter and her partner have with their kids.
Well it’s not HUGE given that you have a fifty fifty chance of getting it right on chance alone.
More importantly, it tells us nothing about whether measured personality differences are innate or culturally acquired, or indeed the results of an interaction between the two.
Lizzie:
Well, I suppose we can differ on how high the number has to be in order to qualify as “huge”, but I think 85% qualifies, even taking into account the fact that chance alone gets you to 50%. Being able to correctly classify correctly on 17 out of 20 attempts is an enormous improvement over being able to do so only10 times out of 20.
Here’s another way of looking at it: Chance alone gets you 50%. A perfect classifier would get you to 100%, the theoretical maximum. There is 50 percentage points’ worth of “headroom” between the two. An accuracy of 85% means you’ve leapfrogged 35 percentage points, getting you 35/50 or 70% of the way toward a perfect classifier. That, to me, qualifies as a huge leap.
Anyway, my real point here is not to argue in favor of a particular adjective, but rather to point out that the intersex differences are considerably larger than previously believed. It’s a significant finding, in light of which it is no longer tenable to argue that the differences are small and insignificant.
The question posed by the OP — “What is a woman?” — needn’t be answered solely in terms of innate characteristics, as I’m sure you’ll agree, especially given your daughter’s experience and your earlier comment about propensities:
DNA_Jock:
The 85% figure is the relevant one, because the goal of the study was to determine the magnitude of the personality differences, not to develop a tool for classifying individuals as men or women. The true magnitude of the personality differences is a function of the true personality profiles, so correcting for unreliability is appropriate here, and the post-correction accuracy figure — the 85% — is the figure of interest.
I’m not sure why you consider cultural effects to be “contamination”. The authors weren’t trying to exclude cultural effects, nor did they claim to have done so. They were simply trying to measure the personality differences between men and women, full stop.
CharlieM:
Yes, and the insistence on definitions, particularly as a ‘gotcha’ move, is often counterproductive. Many things are hard to pin down with a simple definition, art being a classic example. The lack of an easy definition doesn’t indicate that a concept is problematic.
Yes, keiths, the 85% figure is the correct one, if you are talking about the theoretical differences between the unobtainable “true” personality profiles that these questionnaires attempt to measure. You may not have understood the rider that I included in my comment to you, pointing out that the 72% figure is the appropriate one ‘if you are making “ability to discriminate” claims.’
“Discriminate” here means “to recognize a distinction”; I hope you didn’t read that as “to make an unjust or prejudicial distinction”, geez, what would the “ability” mean?
So we’re all good here, so long as nobody claims they can use the results of the questionnaire to tell men and women apart.
Oh crap. That is precisely the sort of statement that needs to use the 72% number.
Well, I think that is what they were aiming for, but what they measured was the differences in the way men and women answer so-called personality questionnaires. Hence the old joke about IQ tests.
If, for the sake of argument, we find that women are more likely to voice agreement with the statement “I have a soft heart”, do you really think that this demonstrates that women actually do have “softer hearts”? Are you entirely unaware of the way that respondents tend to conform to the ‘expected’ answer? It’s not measuring personality.
Can you? That is amazing. What you can’t do is share the experience of a woman in a culture far removed from your own. The only option for you is third person observation and assumptions, which I admit you are very good at.
With no other information given, I would probably call myself a “hybrid”. But I’m not sure how this question is helpful for this discussion. I for one am not nearly as interested in “what IF” as I am in understanding “what IS” or “how things are.” Seems like we have a hard enough time getting THAT right and then of course there’s the “how things came to be” questions and that’s hard too although to me it’s more interesting than “what if.”
Anyway, my original question is “What is a Woman?” and the corollary question “What is a Man?” In other words, I’m trying to learn what a woman is *with man as a reference* … or we could reverse this and try to learn what a man is *with woman as a reference.*
Without giving it a lot of thought, I could say the following about women … pretty, soft, curvy, smaller / shorter, weaker, emotional, perceptive, empathetic, nurturing, not logical … and about men I could say … handsome, tough, chiseled, larger / taller, stronger, non-emotional, not very perceptive, unfeeling, conquering, logical …
These are words that just come to mind about each sex … admittedly this may not be very scientific … but it IS something, namely, these are the words that naturally come to (my) mind when I think about women vs. men.
keiths:
Alan:
You are much too easily impressed if you regard that ability as “amazing”. It’s a simple matter of observation. As Lizzie put it:
Alan:
You don’t need to share the first-person experiences of the women in that tribe in order to make observations about the physical differences between them and the men. To suggest otherwise is like saying “You don’t know what it’s like to be a Galapagos tortoise, so you can’t make any observations about their size differences relative to North American tortoises.” The latter does not follow from the former. Tortoise size can be observed from a third-person perspective, and so can the height, shoe size, voice pitch, etcetera of human beings.
Alan,
The SciAm article I cited earlier mentions a fascinating study that tested subjects’ ability to classify human faces as male or female. The accuracy was an astounding 96%, and that was after the images had been scrubbed of cultural cues such as hairstyle and makeup. Will you argue that no, that result can’t possibly be correct, since the subjects were unable to share the first-person experiences of the people whose faces they were classifying?
You don’t need to “share the experience” of people in order to observe their faces and classify them, quite accurately, as male or female.
Sex discrimination: how do we tell the difference between male and female faces?
DNA_Jock:
I understood it, but I disagree with it. You are assuming that “ability to discriminate” claims are necessarily about the real-life performance of personality testing as applied to the classification problem. That is incorrect. The 85% figure is an indication of what the performance would be if the reliability issues weren’t there. It is not a claim about real-life performance.
The point of the study, as you acknowledge, is to quantify the differences in the actual personality profiles, not to characterize the performance of the personality tests. That means it is desirable to “subtract out” the effects of the reliability shortcomings. The number thus obtained — the corrected number of 85% — more accurately reflects the magnitude of the actual differences, which is what the study attempts to measure.
keiths:
Jock:
Um, no. The question Lizzie and I were discussing was whether a classification accuracy of 85% should be considered “huge”. Since the topic of discussion was an 85% figure, my choice of “17 out of 20 attempts”, which equates to 85%, was the correct one.
Regarding personality tests, you raise the issue of whether subjects respond truthfully to questionnaire items versus responding in the societally ‘expected’ way. That’s a valid concern, and while I’m no expert on personality testing, I do know that the designers of these tests (or at least of the scientifically reputable ones) are cognizant of the danger and try to measure and minimize it. This also applies to other problems, such as the fact that some subjects won’t make a good faith effort and instead will just pick answers at random, perhaps in rebellion at being “forced” to complete the questionnaire. While it would clearly be a mistake to assume that every response is trustworthy and accurate — something that the test designers don’t do — it is also a mistake to assume that the tests don’t measure personality at all, as you suggest.
Speaking strictly for myself, I respond to such questionnaires as accurately and honestly as I can, because a) I want to support the science by supplying “good” data, and b) I’m interested in my own results and want them to be accurate. Societal expectations aren’t a factor, at least not consciously.
A woman has two X chromosomes, mammary glands and a uterus.
Of these three, the uterus is the greatest influencer of what a woman is. It is the traumatic experience (both good and bad) of giving birth and nurturing a child that make a woman (psychologically).