DEBATENATE

Topics / Culture

The challenge

“Men and women are the same, apart from anatomy”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Men and women are equal in worth and different by design, and the differences go a lot deeper than anatomy. Start with the body. A twenty eighteen review in Endocrine Reviews traced the male edge in elite sport, about ten percent or more, mainly to testosterone after puberty. Then interests. A big meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin found men on average lean toward things and women toward people. You'll say that's culture. But economists writing in Science found the gaps in traits like risk-taking get bigger in richer, more equal countries. Free people to choose and they choose differently. Genesis one says God made them male and female, both in his image. Let me ask you this. If it's all social pressure, why do the gaps grow when the pressure lets up? A violin and a cello both make music. Nobody calls them the same instrument.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The physical gap comes from hormones acting on the whole body after puberty. It isn't one stray anatomical detail.

    Handelsman, Hirschberg and Bermon reviewed the evidence and concluded that higher circulating testosterone after male puberty largely explains the male advantage in elite athletic performance, a gap of roughly ten percent or more in many events.

  2. Average differences show up in what men and women want to do, not just in their bodies.

    A meta-analysis by Su, Rounds and Armstrong found a large average sex difference in vocational interests, with men leaning more toward working with things and women more toward working with people.

  3. If it were all social pressure, the gaps would shrink as societies get freer. In some areas they grow.

    Falk and Hermle found that sex differences in preferences such as risk-taking, patience and altruism were larger in wealthier and more gender-equal countries.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Those are averages, and plenty of individuals break them. So we should treat people as individuals and stop talking about men and women as categories.

Nate: Judge the individual in front of you, always. But averages that hold up across cultures and economies tell you the differences run deeper than anatomy, and that's the claim on the table. Overlap is not sameness.

The lines

Sources

  1. Handelsman, Hirschberg and Bermon, Endocrine Reviews, Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance (2018)
  2. Su, Rounds and Armstrong, Psychological Bulletin, Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests (2009)
  3. Falk and Hermle, Science, Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality (2018)
  4. The Bible, Genesis 1:27

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