Comment by piva00
1 day ago
Inherently? I'd say almost none except for the obvious physical ones and their higher order effects.
Culturally there's a lot of differences that won't be patched for generations, social expectations can come from parenting and/or environment, including their society, interactions between genders shaped by those cultural differences from an early age, so on and so forth. Such expectations shape their worldview and place in it, males being told to be tough, not be "a sissy", being shaped into clamming up emotionally. Females being told they can't achieve things solely due to their gender, having to learn to be guarded against potential male aggression, etc.
There's just too much to even start enumerating in a comment but it boils down to cultural expectations from early age, and how those shape people into gendered behaviours as a reaction, not only from the expectations but also the feedbacks happening across gendered higher order effects of those expectations.
Well but the physical difference must account for some natural social differences, my naive thinking is: other animals do act like that.
A simple example is that I can lift my wife's body but she cannot lift mine. Wouldn't that affect our social behavior in some form? My thinking is going to how other animals have different behavior based on sex
We're entering the treacherous path of determining nature vs nurture, other animals act like that but we're also not like other animals, there might be biological reasons to account for some baseline differences while the exaggeration of those traits can also be mostly cultural.
Reducing the comparison to other animals don't really make sense since our societies are many orders of magnitude more complex than other animals, e.g.: the fact of being physically stronger don't explain why until some 100-150 years ago women were considered less intelligent and unsuitable for intellectual work compared to men.
There will be different behaviours due to biological differences, it's just not possible to reduce the vast range of gendered pigeon holing into that, culture is a much higher drive of those, and is empirically visible in societies that moved away from traditionalist views of genders.
Could it be that at some point the biological sex differences sown the gendered culture? I can see that, doesn't mean the perpetuation of it in modern times is due to physical/biological differences.