The two genders differ in their interests a lot more than in their innate attributes. Differences in interest persist in very egalitarian societies even as the differences in attributes diminish. This creates weird mismatches. E.g. there are a lot more women who want to be submissive in bed than there are men who want to sexually dominate (Aella has some good polls on this). Or the average woman finds the average man disgusting while the average man finds the average woman attractive. These distortions lead to both genders (but especially women) valuing relatively rare traits to a significant degree. Social media exacerbates this, heightening these expectations. The less exclusive members of both genders are thus forced to imitate genetically luckier men and women by acting more dominant, getting plastic surgery, wearing shoes to enhance one’s height, signaling youth and/or wealth that they don’t necessarily possess, etc. I’d therefore wager that most women see asking a man out as settling for a less exclusive partner, someone who can’t even bring himself to signal dominance, interest, pursuit (stuff women love, as we know from their revealed preferences in literature like romance novels). I think it’s completely unrealistic to expect these norms to change. People are more likely to get themselves AI-bfs/gfs that play out their fantasies than to lower their standards to such a degree.
"I have yet to see anyone successfully defend communicating indirectly."
Really?
I consider the face-value defense: "Sometimes indirect communication is optimal for a given context" to be obviously true and not worth arguing.
But I'd probably even be interested defending a stronger version of the case: "Many relationships or cultures would be improved with more indirect communication norms at the margins"
Cultural differences in personality are actually magnified the more egalitarian the society tries to be.
While non-traditional gender roles can work, they are much less likely to (e.g. rate of divorce for couples where the wife is the primary earner are a fair bit higher than where the man is the primary earner).
I dunno the fancy term for it but are you talking qualitatively or quantity? Because chimp dna is like 99% similar to human dna, which is 'relatively small' but the impact of those small differences is enormous. Metaphorically speaking the difference between Satan the lord of evil and Lucifer the bestest angel is a single small difference, it's just that that small difference has a mega impact.
Also I know that women don't like watching the movie Predator but all men across all time can bond over it. That says enough for how different they are.
One problem with a dichotomy like this is it fails to take into account that physical differences affect the psychology and behaviour of the person in question... not just their personality. So the six foot, two hundred pound, male who offers to walk the five foot, 110 lb female to her car may NOT be operating on his personality. And she may not be when she accepts.
Walking around smaller and weaker than another group of people all your life (and more vulnerable to sexual assaults, etc) affect one even regardless of any of the 'big five'.
You have a lot of really good points, and I ironically agree with you everyone should be free to play the role they want. There's no moral obligation to be at the mean personality for your gender.
But, the way the market shakes out means, if you're straight (or bi leaning straight, since there are more straight than gay people), it's usually optimal for you to perform the gender stereotypes, because most women are attracted to masculinity and most men to femininity. I had a large dose of feminist programming growing up and had to unlearn it when I finally wanted to date.
Also, until you have enough women asking men out, men who'd prefer to wait to be asked out will simply wait forever--the women asking the men out will go down their preference list and be paired off quickly. The game theory doesn't work on the other end.
Men shouldn't wait either! Everyone should be asking people out.
Re: the market - you're assuming the optimal strategy is to be as broadly appealing as possible. That has not been my experience, and does not match the data I've seen. In my estimation, the optimal dating strategy, especially if you're looking for a lifelong pair bond, is to be polarizing. You want to offer something that isn't dime-a-dozen. It's ok to repel most women if the right women are especially attracted to you.
I've seen this work brilliantly for some feminine guys. Most women aren't attracted, but the women who are into femme guys are VERY attracted. These guys get tons of attention from women.
There's also the consideration that not everything has to be about dating strategy. There's more to life than being sexually attractive, and lots of reasons other than dating to express your personality.
It's an interesting point. I spent a lot of time trying to suppress my 'nerd culture' interests on the (objectively observed) assumption there were very few women into that. Finally I gave up and found they didn't care, but that had become much more acceptable by that time (this was the late 2000s) and I had good earning potential so there's a major confounder.
I still think there's a real problem in that for some attributes, demand exceeds supply and, for others, vice versa. Is being a feminine man an overall effective strategy, or is it just that the few who can pull it off do well? Most guys aren't going to be David Bowie. (To take one of your earlier examples, there's a serious domme shortage, so being a submissive man is a *very* bad strategy from strictly a market point of view, though of course it's usually not chosen.)
You have a good point that not everything is about dating, though, and prior eras probably understood that better than ours. After all, some people became monks.
I am a Kindergarten teacher. I can tell you that behavioural differences between little boys and girls are MASSIVE. A group of 20 little girls is completely different from a group of 20 little boys. Day and night type of differences....
> This is all true, but Yglesias conveniently leaves out the magnitude of the differences. He posts a striking graph when it comes to the height distribution, showing large differences and little overlap. But when it comes to personality, suddenly we have no numbers to discuss.
Well, personality is not as easily quantified, and those personality numeric scores are mostly moot. The personality trait numbers (for what they are worth) might show a big overlap, but when reflected to actual hard numbers they differences are huge.
E.g. number of murders commited by men vs women, violent attacks by men vs women, etc. Same for other hard numbers tied to personality (e.g. dating behaviors as shown in dating apps, political preferences, or kind of jobs they navigate to, and roles within those jobs). Not to mention similar hard observations on other primates close to us.
There's also the fact that if someone wants to have a career in modern social studies research (or any soft research area), and not be ousted as a pariah, they better not publish about significant differences on those areas (whereas hard physical differences like height and strength can't be hidden). So the studies and meta-studies and OpenAI's data sets have this big caveat.
The chart comparing workforce participation for women vs “both sexes” is just offensive. What possible reason could there be for not using women vs men than obfuscation!?
If you live in a society where 95% of the people would never burn down a church, you don’t have churches, because they all get burnt down. Sometimes all that matters is the people at the extreme ends of the bell curve.
Largely agreed, Wesley. I think what motivates a lot of discussion around gender/sex differences is that they are often novel and consequential. A lot of the ways in which we're similar, even the important ones, are quite mundane and not as exciting to talk about, although I'm starting to feel the exact same way about all gender discourse at this point. There's only so many times you can repeat Men-Mars/Women-Venus before it just gets corny.
The two genders differ in their interests a lot more than in their innate attributes. Differences in interest persist in very egalitarian societies even as the differences in attributes diminish. This creates weird mismatches. E.g. there are a lot more women who want to be submissive in bed than there are men who want to sexually dominate (Aella has some good polls on this). Or the average woman finds the average man disgusting while the average man finds the average woman attractive. These distortions lead to both genders (but especially women) valuing relatively rare traits to a significant degree. Social media exacerbates this, heightening these expectations. The less exclusive members of both genders are thus forced to imitate genetically luckier men and women by acting more dominant, getting plastic surgery, wearing shoes to enhance one’s height, signaling youth and/or wealth that they don’t necessarily possess, etc. I’d therefore wager that most women see asking a man out as settling for a less exclusive partner, someone who can’t even bring himself to signal dominance, interest, pursuit (stuff women love, as we know from their revealed preferences in literature like romance novels). I think it’s completely unrealistic to expect these norms to change. People are more likely to get themselves AI-bfs/gfs that play out their fantasies than to lower their standards to such a degree.
"I have yet to see anyone successfully defend communicating indirectly."
Really?
I consider the face-value defense: "Sometimes indirect communication is optimal for a given context" to be obviously true and not worth arguing.
But I'd probably even be interested defending a stronger version of the case: "Many relationships or cultures would be improved with more indirect communication norms at the margins"
I'd be interested in reading that defense
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Interesting essay, but I disagree on several points.
There are psychological differences between men and women that are much larger than the ones you mention. The biggest is also the most obvious: sexual attraction! Men are significantly more likely to desire women, and visa versa. You also have less banal differences that are significant in magnitude, such as occupational interests (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). Also (most relevant to this article) is the differences between what men and women want out of a relationship (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/sex-differences-in-human-mate-preferences-evolutionary-hypotheses-tested-in-37-cultures/0E112ACEB2E7BC877805E3AC11ABC889). The effect sizes for these differences are all quite large
Cultural differences in personality are actually magnified the more egalitarian the society tries to be.
While non-traditional gender roles can work, they are much less likely to (e.g. rate of divorce for couples where the wife is the primary earner are a fair bit higher than where the man is the primary earner).
One example personality factor is " object vs people/animal" interest. D=1.2 (AKA Very Large)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
I had forgotten about that essay. Thanks!
Single-variate personality measurement does a poor job capturing the real sex difference in personality.
Imagine describing human faces using measurements of eye width, nose length, etc
Sex differences are small
But faces as a whole are very different
The same is true for personality
Just based on Big Five with 2 factors each (10 factors), you can predict sex >85% of the time. So about as predictive as height (d=2.1)
See here for links to relevant studies:
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/
"personality differences are relatively small"
I dunno the fancy term for it but are you talking qualitatively or quantity? Because chimp dna is like 99% similar to human dna, which is 'relatively small' but the impact of those small differences is enormous. Metaphorically speaking the difference between Satan the lord of evil and Lucifer the bestest angel is a single small difference, it's just that that small difference has a mega impact.
Also I know that women don't like watching the movie Predator but all men across all time can bond over it. That says enough for how different they are.
The Dirty Dozen scene in Sleepless in Seattle is famous for this.
One problem with a dichotomy like this is it fails to take into account that physical differences affect the psychology and behaviour of the person in question... not just their personality. So the six foot, two hundred pound, male who offers to walk the five foot, 110 lb female to her car may NOT be operating on his personality. And she may not be when she accepts.
Walking around smaller and weaker than another group of people all your life (and more vulnerable to sexual assaults, etc) affect one even regardless of any of the 'big five'.
You have a lot of really good points, and I ironically agree with you everyone should be free to play the role they want. There's no moral obligation to be at the mean personality for your gender.
But, the way the market shakes out means, if you're straight (or bi leaning straight, since there are more straight than gay people), it's usually optimal for you to perform the gender stereotypes, because most women are attracted to masculinity and most men to femininity. I had a large dose of feminist programming growing up and had to unlearn it when I finally wanted to date.
Also, until you have enough women asking men out, men who'd prefer to wait to be asked out will simply wait forever--the women asking the men out will go down their preference list and be paired off quickly. The game theory doesn't work on the other end.
Men shouldn't wait either! Everyone should be asking people out.
Re: the market - you're assuming the optimal strategy is to be as broadly appealing as possible. That has not been my experience, and does not match the data I've seen. In my estimation, the optimal dating strategy, especially if you're looking for a lifelong pair bond, is to be polarizing. You want to offer something that isn't dime-a-dozen. It's ok to repel most women if the right women are especially attracted to you.
I've seen this work brilliantly for some feminine guys. Most women aren't attracted, but the women who are into femme guys are VERY attracted. These guys get tons of attention from women.
There's also the consideration that not everything has to be about dating strategy. There's more to life than being sexually attractive, and lots of reasons other than dating to express your personality.
It's an interesting point. I spent a lot of time trying to suppress my 'nerd culture' interests on the (objectively observed) assumption there were very few women into that. Finally I gave up and found they didn't care, but that had become much more acceptable by that time (this was the late 2000s) and I had good earning potential so there's a major confounder.
I still think there's a real problem in that for some attributes, demand exceeds supply and, for others, vice versa. Is being a feminine man an overall effective strategy, or is it just that the few who can pull it off do well? Most guys aren't going to be David Bowie. (To take one of your earlier examples, there's a serious domme shortage, so being a submissive man is a *very* bad strategy from strictly a market point of view, though of course it's usually not chosen.)
You have a good point that not everything is about dating, though, and prior eras probably understood that better than ours. After all, some people became monks.
I am a Kindergarten teacher. I can tell you that behavioural differences between little boys and girls are MASSIVE. A group of 20 little girls is completely different from a group of 20 little boys. Day and night type of differences....
> This is all true, but Yglesias conveniently leaves out the magnitude of the differences. He posts a striking graph when it comes to the height distribution, showing large differences and little overlap. But when it comes to personality, suddenly we have no numbers to discuss.
Well, personality is not as easily quantified, and those personality numeric scores are mostly moot. The personality trait numbers (for what they are worth) might show a big overlap, but when reflected to actual hard numbers they differences are huge.
E.g. number of murders commited by men vs women, violent attacks by men vs women, etc. Same for other hard numbers tied to personality (e.g. dating behaviors as shown in dating apps, political preferences, or kind of jobs they navigate to, and roles within those jobs). Not to mention similar hard observations on other primates close to us.
There's also the fact that if someone wants to have a career in modern social studies research (or any soft research area), and not be ousted as a pariah, they better not publish about significant differences on those areas (whereas hard physical differences like height and strength can't be hidden). So the studies and meta-studies and OpenAI's data sets have this big caveat.
The chart comparing workforce participation for women vs “both sexes” is just offensive. What possible reason could there be for not using women vs men than obfuscation!?
If you live in a society where 95% of the people would never burn down a church, you don’t have churches, because they all get burnt down. Sometimes all that matters is the people at the extreme ends of the bell curve.
Largely agreed, Wesley. I think what motivates a lot of discussion around gender/sex differences is that they are often novel and consequential. A lot of the ways in which we're similar, even the important ones, are quite mundane and not as exciting to talk about, although I'm starting to feel the exact same way about all gender discourse at this point. There's only so many times you can repeat Men-Mars/Women-Venus before it just gets corny.