Talk:Biology of gender-specific human behavior

new information

I am new to Wikipedia and am part of a Honors class at North Carolina State University that is focusing on research about sex differences within the brain (neurobiological aspect). I have added some information under the "Brain" section on the structural differences of grey matter and white matter. I feel that the paragraph right after the first quote should be considered for deletion due to the fact that there is no cited source and is slightly redundant. I marked it as "needs citation".

Sonador412 (talk) 01:53, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

some style issues

Hi Alastair. I just came across your article here. I'm afraid there are a serious number of style issues with the page. I'm going to quote some sections that need to be rewritten within the manual of style guidelines - as they stand they read like a synthesis - which can make them look like origianl research.

For those who can understand technical biological language, Alexandra M. Lopes and others, recently published that:

In short, science has caught up with what feminists, Goldberg and common sense have said for a long time – on average, men are more aggressive in social behaviour. This does not justify patriarchy, it merely partially explains it.

It has long been known that there are correlations between the biological sex of animals and their behaviour.[1] [2] [3] It has also long been known that human behaviour is influenced by the brain.

Have a look at these lines again. BTW it'd be best if you didn't use the term "common sense" - see WP:CK--Cailil ^talk 20:11, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Cailil, "for those who can understand technical language", is not good style, too conversational, I agree. "Common sense" is also, as you say, just inviting someone to say, "I don't see it that way, so it's hardly common sense." I don't know many people who argue that men are not more aggressive on average, but I'll change it anyway.

Not guilty regarding Original research though. Yes, if there were a few experiments that could be taken as evidence of biological influence on gender, and I reported those and made the conclusion, and no-one else had done that, then clearly it would be synthetic original research.

I'll modify the language and cite a couple more sources, there are several peer-reviewed journals that major in this area.

Gender as experienced in daily life has plenty of non-biological features, purely cultural in expression. Cultural constructions of gender are real and worth studying. However, gender is now known to be influenced biologically in ways that simply were not known even 15 years ago. There are several popular works that maximize or minimize the implications of the biological research. Pinker jumps to mind.

Anyway, I'll get to this very soon, probably over the next day or so, good points, thanks again. Alastair Haines 02:31, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Just a quick note, I didn't mean to accuse you of original thought :) rather I was saying that the style could make it look that way--Cailil ^talk 10:39, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

No worries my friend, good points well made, didn't take them personally. I don't have any original ideas regarding biology, I don't know much about it. I'm completely dependent on what I've started reading in the last six months.

There's always likely to be something of an issue when scientific research challenges political opinion, though. That too needs care in this article. Things sound original when they go against what we've been taught in school. It'll probably be an ongoing issue of refining things by quoting more sources.

I'm working on too many projects atm. I'm going to be moving slowly here. Cheers. Alastair Haines 06:43, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Removed redundancy and kept facts

I removed redundancy and kept facts because I think Wikipedia should remain an encyclopaedia, instead of turning into a heavy novel. Informations should be available quickly- novels are rather a way to spend a lot of spare time. Mikael Häggström 08:19, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

By the way, I changed male dominance to patriarchy, since I assume we don't talk BDSM here. Mikael Häggström 08:51, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm relaxed about that terminological change. Male dominance is the terminology of ethology, but I agree it an patriarchy are effectively synonyms in ethnology. Because patriarchy is pejorative in feminist jargon, and replaced by androcentrism in many cases, I stick to male dominance as a neutral expression. Still, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. ;) Alastair Haines 11:43, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm returning some of the material from Sex and intelligence. Redundancy is only an issue within one specific article. There has to be redundancy across articles. We cannot, for example, remove all reference to Napoleon in the article on Battle of Waterloo because there is already an article on him. In fact, significant attention should be paid to Napoleon in setting context for that article.

Some still think gender is not biological. Removing evidence of brain differences from this article prevents people from having a one-stop shop that makes the point they are curious about. That makes it "heavy" work, rather than an encyclopedia in my thinking. Anyway, sourced text is not to be removed without consensus.

Generally speaking, I'm fairly happy with your restructuring, it's mainly a matter of moving refs to footnotes and providing a more detailed framework. That'll help with exanding the article. Thanks, cheers. Alastair Haines 12:07, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree; So patriarchy would, were he not patriarchy call'd.

It's good when readers can have a one-stop shop, but I'm afraid the whole subject of gender is too big to have everything in one single place. Sometimes it seems rather a question of definition; when the article is about the physical basis for behavioural differences, then it might be confusing to deal with non-biologic issues.

Anyhow, I think this article looks really informative now. Good work! Mikael Häggström 15:41, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

I only made minor adjustments to the structure you set up. Made a few more minor changes. There's a swag more info out there. Oh for more time. Cheers. Alastair Haines 11:56, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Badly worded and strange ideas

Under Motives and ethic:

Patriarchy ...Perhaps one day science may be able to tell us how we could stop patriarchy by biological intervention; but science can't tell us if patriarchy is right or wrong. All we know is that it is biological, so it will take more than politics to end it.

Ethics Even if it was possible to remove partriarchal behaviour by an injection, there are ethical questions that need answers before any such procedure could be performed:

• Should it be made law for such an injection to be given?
• Should parents be given the choice, or only mothers?

None of that sounds much like an Encyclopedia. And the Ethics section is ridiculous. This isn't a place for hypotheticals. It doesn't make sense either. An injection to remove "patriarchal behavior?"

Sex Differences in Science and Math

A paper was recently published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest that has relevance to this topic. The abstract can be found here and additional related resources can be found here. Cheers, JTBurman 03:52, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for this. The references are excellent and actually go well beyond this topic. This article is about how biology affects men and women's behaviour differently. There are endless ways this is so, some are simple -- men don't gestate. Many are complex -- what is spatial reasoning?

On the other hand, both female and male brains respond to the environment they experience, as do animal brains, that's the whole point of a brain. As these sources (like many thousands of others) say, understanding the differences between the way male and female brains work is complex and involves both what shapes them from within, and what shapes them from without. Social factors are only one class (but a profound and complex one) of influences beyond biology.

There is an article on the sociology of gender. That article and this one need to interact a bit. It's not as though they are alternative views, both are demonstrably true, and have been written about almost since writing was invented.

There was also a bizarre debate in late 20th century western society, where extreme points of view were widely published, like the irrelevance of biology or of sociology to study of gender. There are articles covering some of those POVs and the history of that debate also, for example nature versus nurture.

Finally, there are important ethical and political debates that utilize the raw biological and sociological data (sometimes, sadly, quite selectively, but that is the nature of politics). Those discussions, though, can't be adequately treated in a humble science entry.

I rather like the conclusion of the abstract -- from a scientific point of view, simply getting a grip on either the biology or the sociology is complex enough, without trying to establish any sweeping generalizations, other than that male and female brains are different, and influenced by both biology and society.

It's absolutely stunning that the assertions the article does make need to be made at all. Biological and social difference between men and women have been axiomatic in all societies but our own. What they do about it though, lol, that's a very long story, and not the topic of this entry. Alastair Haines (talk) 12:18, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

POV stuff

I notice a fair bit of "women are under-represented in science" POV has been added to the article. Wiki is not a platform for feminism, however noble the cause. The biology of gender is a constellation of reliable, published scientific data, not a political agenda.

Articles like this one tend to need maintenance, because people:

• simply delete information they don't like;
• introduce weasle words to minimize the facts or undermine the sources; or,
• provide discussion of political, ethical and other issues that are simply irrelevant.

It's a waste of everyone's time to do such things.

The discussion of "women in science" at one US campus, however notable, is not a description of the biology of gender. I'm removing it. It can be recovered from the history and relocated to a more appropriate article. Alastair Haines (talk) 12:45, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Verbal and mathematical skills

I'm confused by the "Aptitude" section. First better female verbal skills are mentioned paired with no gender differences in the mathematical ability, than an older study is cited in which the results seem to be reversed (unless "distributions [..] essentially equivalent" is taken to mean same variance but different average). Anyway this contradiction, pertaining at least the mathematical skills, is not adressed.--88.72.201.11 (talk) 18:12, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I suggest finding a source that addresses it, then. Our job, as I understand it, is not to reconcile conflicting information from different sources, but simply to report the information neutrally. Blackworm (talk) 21:20, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

John Money and Milton Diamond

"John Money and Milton Diamond made great progress towards understanding the formation of gender identity in humans." Although John Money was considered a pioneer in gender research in the 60s and 70s, his ideas and methods have been largely discredited by the scientific community since the 90s. Saying that he made "great progress towards understanding the formation of gender identity" is somewhat misleading and a bit too generous I'm afraid. It's also strange that Milton Diamond is mentioned in the same sentence, as he was one of the people involved in discrediting Money. This sentence makes it sound like they were colleagues! Robert Stoller would be a better person to mention in regard to pioneering gender research. Kaldari (talk) 20:48, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

I've changed the sentence to just "Scientists made great progress towards understanding..." instead, which avoids any controversies or differing opinions on the impact or importance of individual researchers in the field. Kaldari (talk) 20:52, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

POV in Differences section

I was surprised to see statements like "The brains of many animals, including humans, are significantly different for males and females of the species" and "It is commonly accepted that there are many sex-related differences in behavior in the human species." in this section presented as established facts, since recently the book Delusion of Gender has been discussed with high praise seemingly everywhere. Here is an example headline from Salon.com: ""Delusions of Gender": The bad science of brain sexism- Some studies claim that women are innately bad at math, and men are bad at empathy. Here's why they're wrong" and the NYT: "“Delusions of Gender” takes on that tricky question, Why exactly are men from Mars and women from Venus?, and eviscerates both the neuroscientists who claim to have found the answers and the popularizers who take their findings and run with them."

I'm not an expert on this subject, but with only this one example in mind, it seems very POV to write about gender differences as if the biological basis is completely unchallenged and widely accepted in the scientific community. I plan to read this book myself, do more research, and work on changing the language in this section to make it more neutral. --Aronoel (talk) 18:04, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

It is not a good idea to base scientific Wikipedia articles (or your own, personal views) on popular, non-scientific magazines. Journalists often have an agenda, and are out to sell papers. And journalists are rarely real experts in the subjects they cover. Instead of NYT and Salon.com, we should base this article on scientific studies that have gone through peer-review.

There are in fact a large number of actual studies that show that women are more empathic than men, and that men are better at math than women. Koyos (talk) 02:32, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry I missed this before. I wasn't proposing adding NYT or magazine articles as sources, I was proposing adding a well-regarded, third-party published, secondary source book written by an expert. --Aronoel (talk) 16:04, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

seems a WP:MADEUP field of study

The article starts off by claiming "The biology of gender is scientific analysis of the physical basis for behavioural differences between men and women. It is more specific than sexual dimorphism [...]" But practically every biology source I've looked at contradicts this, e.g. [1] It may be defined as the lead claims in women's studies, but in that case it shouldn't try to pretend it's a biology article. Tijfo098 (talk) 21:36, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I've moved to a self-descriptive title that needs no citation, but it's still doubtful that this article is justified. It's a hodge-podge of topics. Tijfo098 (talk) 22:29, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

What is the difference between this article and Sex and intelligence?

Could someone please comment on my question at Talk:Sex and intelligence? Thanks. --Aronoel (talk) 16:18, 30 December 2010 (UTC)