Posted: Jan 28, 2019 7:10 pm
TopCat wrote:So would it not be unsurprising if men and women were different in a variety of brain/mind respects as well as the more obvious physical ones?
I agree with you, I think it would be surprising. In fact I think people were very surprised at just how equal the sexes turned out to be. It's presumably the fact that a lot of people were so surprised about so many aspects of gender inequality that leads to the belief that there are more surprises in store.
You only need to go back something like 60 or 70 years to find that it was commonly assumed that women could not run long distance races, let alone marathons (as recently as 1967 a woman was banned for trying to run one), due to physical incapability. We now accept that the very pronounced differences in stature, musculature and body fat (men tend to bottom out at about 4%, women at about 10% IIRC) actually only make women about 10% slower than men across most running distances. Given the much, much smaller differences in brain structure (and size, particularly the relevant measure of surface area is also much smaller) it would follow that we probably shouldn't expect too colossal of a difference when it comes to mental activities either.
So, I guess it's reasonable to think the balance point might not be at exact equality, that there might be some small residual differences in preferences and aptitudes in different areas (e.g. the systems vs. social preference discussed elsewhere), but on the other hand you probably can't find that balance point unless you push as far as you can go first.