Remember that Gender Gap That Wasn't Supposed to Be There? It's Bigger and More Real Than Ever

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

What do you call people who refuse to admit the obvious? They are called "reality disadvantaged." That describes the legions of leftists in academia, media, and government who continue to deny important differences between men and women.

...a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

....When Dr. Deaner looks at, say, the top 40 finishers of each sex in a race, he typically finds two to four times as many relatively fast male runners as relatively fast female runners.

This large gender gap has persisted for two decades in all kinds of races — high school and college meets, elite and nonelite road races — and it jibes with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring “sex difference in competitiveness,” he concludes, “must be considered a genuine failure for the sociocultural conditions hypothesis” that the personality gap will shrink as new roles open for women. _NYT_via_Impactlab

While it is clear that men make up the vast majority of high achievers in math-intensive fields such as physics, rigorous engineering fields, mathematics, theoretical computer science, and the more math-intensive subfields in chemistry and other sciences, it is also clear that greater male competitiveness explains much of the relatively high achievement by males in fields that accept as many women as men at the entry level.

Testosterone makes a difference in the trajectory of a person's life, from the intrauterine environment to the neural development at critical developmental periods, to mature adult interests and personality quirks. In modern societies, both men and women are freer to be who they want to be. And guess what? They choose to be different from each other in overwhelming numbers.

But why do they make these divergent choices? Testosterone is far more of an explanatory factor than social programming. From conception to death, that one steroid hormone drives men to be who they are, while the much lower concentrations of vitamin T in women has a huge influence in who a woman chooses to become.