[DanaC]

A few thoughts:

Yes, there are some differences between male and female brains and experiences. But: they are not as fundamental or as innate as is often suggested.

This is the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus myth. And it is a dangerous and unhelpful myth. It says we are so different as to represent almost different species. It reduces the common ground we share and emphasizes the gap that divides us.

To go back to Undertoad's point about genetic difference being greater between human males and human females than exists between male humans and male chimpanzees: really? That's where we're at now is it? Are we really saying that we have more in common with a chimpanzee of our own gender than a human being of another gender?

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The male brain, the female brain. Innate, uncompromising, untranslatable difference.

It flies in the face of almost everything we know (admittedly not very much) about how our brains work, how we process information, how we develop cognitive skills and functions. But it fits with the lived experience of enough people to carry weight far beyond what the evidence tells us.

Time and again, initial studies will come out, get a mass reading in the press and become accepted as incontrovertible proof of absolute difference, and a bestseller book is born (for instance the recent: The Female Brain, followed shortly after by The Male Brain). And so the notion that women are genetically more competant with language, multi-tasking and emotional interaction, whilst men have evolved super computer, highly focused math and map reading brains takes root. It fits our existing prejudices (or rather our own lived experiences) and seems to make sense when set against our hunter gatherer past (about which, by the way, we all assume a certain set of gender roles which may well have been very different). And it comforts us, because it confirms our own sense of what it is to be male or female. Then the book gets revised (as with The Female Brain) and the headline fact about male and female language use and development that got everybody so excited gets removed because further study changes or even reverses the findings. But that gets a lot less press.

There is a comradeship in gender. When we laugh at the comedian who jokes about typical male or typical female behaviour, we include ourselves in that bigger picture, we fit a stereotype we want to to fit. And our partner fits a stereotype we want him/her to fit.

It is the ultimate confirmation bias.

But Men aren't from Mars, and I am not from Venus. And Undertoad does not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with me.

The war of the sexes hurts both sides. Why do we accept and embrace this perpetual conflict? The logic of a male brain / female brain model is deeply flawed. It is neat and tidy and simple. We have different brains, we think differently, we are different. And that difference is an unbridgeable gulf. It's not just a myth it is a dangerous myth.

In countries where there is a commonly held perception that males are naturally more suited to mathematics and science than are females, girls do badly in maths and science subjects and are largely missing from the higher levels of those fields. In countries where that is not a commonly held view, girls and women are well-represented in those fields. It isn't a case of girls not being allowed in (except for a few places), but rather they do badly. They are not good at maths and science.

In one study (which I can't recall the details of now, but will try to find it at some point) two groups of high performing maths students, of mixed gender, were given a maths test. One group were given information that showed boys to be naturally better at maths than girls. The other group was not given this information. In the group that was told boys are better at maths, the girls performed worse than the boys. In the group which was not told this, the girls did as well as the boys.

But this isn't just about the impact on girls. Think about what we tell our boys. That they are less emotionally intelligent than their sisters. That they are socially clumsy, and linguistically challenged. Whilst their sisters (they are told) share themselves and experience femaleness as some sort of warm and fuzzy love club, they're to be thrust out into the world, with their emotions battened down, never showing weakness, silently carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

There are differences between our brains and our experiences which stem from whether we are male or female (or where we are on that spectrum). But there are also differences between our brains that stem from your specific genetic heritage and lived experiences and my specific genetic heritage and lived experience. Why do we put so very much into the thing that divides us a little?

Men: you do not have more in common with a chimpanzee than with your wives and sisters.