Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / How Evolution Shaped Men vs Women

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How Evolution Shaped Men vs Women · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. It's one of the doozies, the nature versus nurture debate. Are males and females just the same deep down, but trained to behave differently for cultural reasons? Or are men innately more violent and more proclamated?
• 0:23
  and women more peaceful and more person-oriented. What explains gay people and campness and transgenderism? And in the fight for gender equality, if women do have an evolutionary preference for working with people versus working with things, and men have the reverse—
• 0:45
  Then how much of a problem is it, really, if there aren't as many female engineers as male ones? These are all thorny questions. They only became more thorny during the great woke revolution, when any differences between the sexes were regarded as taboo. And today's guest joined me in 2023 to broach some of those topics. He is now unleashed and liberated in a way he never was before. He is not a raving gender rights activist for men.
• 1:12
  He indeed got a PhD in psychology and philosophy at Massey University in New Zealand, and he now works as a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia, that is the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, in its Malaysia campus. And he joins me to discuss sex differences, their biological roots, their cultural roots, and what recent research reveals about human behavior and evolution. I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only,
• 1:42
  How do we arrive at conclusions about biological differences versus cultural differences? Why isn't it possible that all of the differences that we see between sexes just happen to be universal cultural biases?
• 2:06
  Well, in the book, my new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, I lay out six lines of evidence that suggest that probably it's not just due to culture. Most of the sex differences that we're interested in and that I talk about in the book, that they're not just due to culture alone, although culture is important in shaping them, I think.
• 2:26
  One of them is the timing of the onset of sex differences. So often sex differences appear very, very early in life and maybe too early to be plausibly ascribed to socialization alone. Or they appear at puberty, they appear after puberty, which also is suggestive evidence that maybe they have a biological onset.
• 2:47
  Second line of evidence is that often sex differences that we see, they're associated with prenatal hormonal exposure. So sex differences, for instance, and aggression are associated with prenatal testosterone exposure in the womb. People's interests also partially explained in terms of prenatal hormonal exposure.
• 3:15
  Some other lines of evidence. So one of them is that a lot of sex differences that we see seem to appear despite culture rather than because of culture. So there's a sex difference in aggression, for instance. Males, on average, are more aggressive. And that seems to persist even though we spend a lot more time, parents and teachers, spend a lot more time trying to clamp down on boys' aggression than on girls' aggression for the simple reason that boys are more aggressive.
• 3:45
  A lot of sex differences have persisted for as long as we've been measuring them. So sex differences in mate preferences, for instance, sex differences in occupational preferences, those have persisted for more than a century during the course of, since we first started measuring them in the early 1900s. Despite massive social changes during that time, efforts to get more women into...
• 4:12
  like traditionally male occupations as well. They just persisted anyway. Another one you mentioned, you kind of touched on this, is that a lot of these differences appear across cultures. And you'd expect that if they were just due to socialization and there was no innate contribution, I'd expect, and I think most people would expect more, more variation, more variation in the differences across cultures.
• 4:36
  In some cultures, you'd find the differences that we find, some you wouldn't find that, and others you'd find the reverse differences, but they're very consistent. And the final line of evidence is that you find a lot of the same sex differences we see in humans are also found in other species.
• 4:52
  In other species, it's not plausible to explain it in terms of socialization or culture. Then when we find that these are the same sex differences in our species, it seems implausible to think that in our case, we have the same differences that you find in other species, but for a completely different reason. In our case, in other animals, it's due to evolution, natural selection. In our case, though, it's just due to socialization and culture, and it's just a coincidence that it mirrors the same pattern of sex differences we find in other species.
• 5:22
  Right. And so let's just touch on some of the biggies and then we can go on a loop back and come to some of the possible challenges to those claims. Obviously, there are physiological differences. You know, males have penises and produce sperm and females have vaginas and produce eggs. In terms of the emotional or psychological or behavioral side of things, what is the low-hanging fruit? Right.
• 5:51
  Um, so I guess, why don't we start with the single largest psychological sex difference in our species? Um, and I always ask people what that is, uh, what they think it might be. Um, I don't suppose you, you know what it is. I happen to know because of your work, but I, it's, it is, I was surprised when I heard it and I invite the listener or the viewer to noodle on what they think the biggest, most obvious psychological difference between men and women is.
• 6:21
  is that is predictive and and it is it is a big one right and it's it's very very large much larger than any other human sex differences and it's really it's really obvious no one's surprised to hear that men and women differ in this particular way and when you hear it like it makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms as well
• 6:42
  But the interesting thing is that people just, they tend not to guess it. I've asked lots of folks over the years what they think it might be. And I don't think anyone's got it right yet, first time. But then I tell them what it is and it's very, very obvious. And what it is, is the main, like the primary target of sexual attraction. So most men are primarily interested sexually in women. Most women are primarily interested sexually in men. And, yeah,
• 7:10
  There are exceptions, of course, but that's a big sex difference. It's the single biggest psychological sex difference that there is, rivals some of the physical sex differences that there is. I think that's one reason why we overlook it, because I think we actually code it as a physical sex difference, sort of psychologically. I think we sort of think, you know what I mean? It's like we sort of think of it as a byproduct of our reproductive physiology.
• 7:37
  Indeed, and I think it is. I guess the thing is that I think that a lot of the other psychological sex differences we see are also byproducts of that as well. So it is interesting, isn't it? I think you're probably right. That is why people don't think of it. It's just so, so obvious. Everyone's so aware of it, kind of take it for granted and don't think of it.
• 7:56
  including scientists i've read lots of papers where um scientists have listed all the main evolved sex differences and that one never makes the list for some reason and so and i want to get also get into homosexuality as well where the world that comes from as well and whether they're in fact why don't we just do an aside there anyway because when i heard that i was like oh i'm i'm in the minority of people who
• 8:19
  who feels attracted towards both sexes, but only really falls in love with members of the same sex. And so, and then what does that mean for, I mean, there's all kinds of strange evolutionary explanations. And this also brings us back to what you were talking about, about prenatal hormones and stuff. But let's just digress for a moment about bisexuality and homosexuality.
• 8:39
  Yeah, let's do it. I touch on that in the book. I've got a big section on that in the book because it's evolutionarily very interesting why that might be. And the reason it's interesting is just that –
• 8:52
  I guess exclusive same-sex sexual orientation is the one that's particularly mysterious. So I guess bisexual orientation, not so much because people who have a bisexual orientation, they have a similar chances of passing on.
• 9:09
  their genes and having kids. But with the exclusive same-sex sexual orientation, you'd expect that those individuals are going to have fewer offspring, and indeed they do have fewer offspring, which means that any genes, to the extent that it's genetic,
• 9:25
  any genes contributing to the development of that orientation are less likely to go down through the generations and you would expect maybe that they just wouldn't stay in the gene pool. And in fact, you would have the question of how they got into the gene pool in the first place, given that they're associated with lower rates of having offspring, which is what natural selection is all about, really, the number of offspring that you produce.
• 9:48
  Um, so what's going on there? Well, I guess then the first question is, is it genetic? And the answer is that it's not completely genetic, but, um, it is, it is partly genetic. So part of the variance in sexual orientation is, is explained by genes. Um, there's no single gay gene or it's not the case that there's just that one or a handful of, um, genes that.
• 10:09
  predispose people to same-sex sexual orientation. Many, many genes contribute, but the fact that those genes remain in the gene pool, there's a question mark over that. And just to clarify, something can be genetic without it showing up in either parent. In other words, to say that being gay has a genetic component does not mean that gayer people are likely to have gayer kids. Yeah.
• 10:38
  Yeah, and most people who have gay kids themselves are straight. Exactly. So the trait doesn't necessarily show up. There are just genes that sort of dispose, like many, many different genes that dispose people in that direction, but don't necessarily create same-sex sexual orientation. But then if you maybe get some from each parent and it just happens to, maybe you get…
• 11:04
  a larger handful of those genes than either parent has, or just for whatever reason, it can be found on offspring, but not the parents. Yeah. Yeah.
• 11:12
  Yeah. And there have been a bunch of evolutionary explanations that people have put forward like why it might actually be adaptive. Now, I personally don't find any of them persuasive. I guess the main one was E.O. Wilson suggested that it's a ken altruistic strategy, basically that people like gay men focus in particular on gay men, but lesbians as well, might help care for their nieces and nephews.
• 11:41
  and they may pass on their genes that way rather than directly. But I don't think that's actually plausible because they're only half as related to their nieces and nephews as they would be to their own kids, and therefore they'd have to have a massive impact on the reproductive success of basically their siblings. Right. They'd have to sort of double the chances of their nieces and nephews surviving to reproductive age in order to be a net benefit to the family over just having kids themselves. Yeah.
• 12:10
  Yeah, and that's not, I don't think they're realistic. And also, there isn't a lot of evidence suggesting that actually gay men and lesbians do put forward heaps more attention toward nieces and nephews. So I don't think that's true. I don't think it is an adaptation. I think that the gene, it's kind of a byproduct. So I think the most plausible explanations are that those genes remain in the gene pool because they have other effects that are,
• 12:39
  compensate for the lower reproductive rate of people with the same-sex sexual orientation. And it's those other effects that keep them in the gene pool. And one explanation of is probably the most plausible one at the moment is that
• 12:55
  Those genes, when those genes are found in people who don't develop a same-sex sexual orientation, that's associated with greater attractiveness to the other sex and higher fertility. And that's what compensates and keeps those genes in the gene pool. That's the idea I think is most plausible. Right. There's also a non-genetic contribution as well.
• 13:18
  I mean, just staying on the genetic contribution, one thing, this is purely my sort of spitballing, but I mean, just having thought about it myself, just to run by you, I've wondered whether it's possible that libido has something to do with it, and that the genes are associated, like...
• 13:39
  Pulling back from a genetic talk for a moment and just talking about the sort of phenomenology of being alive, if it is possible that a species of homo sapien that has a sufficiently high libido to optimally procreate...
• 13:55
  also has some messiness around the edges of that libido where it spills over into same-sex attraction sometimes. And if you were to dial it back in such a way that you constrained everybody in order to have a very sort of focused and mannered approach towards procreative sex, that a byproduct of that would be lowering everybody's overall sexual libido in some way. Is that at all plausible? Yeah.
• 14:21
  Maybe so. Let me have a think. So, I mean, I guess most individuals are relatively constrained, are quite constrained in terms of who they're most attracted to. So I guess that would just be, the idea there would be that the whole distribution has been shifted to higher. Exactly. That the outliers of the group are likelier to have funky sexualities if the group as a whole is hornier than it would otherwise be.
• 14:50
  That rings truer to me for bisexuality than for homosexuality. Yes. Because bisexuality is just kind of a wider net, whereas with homosexuality it's kind of
• 15:05
  I think that's true, but my suspicion is also, I mean, I'm also a bit of a dissident on this, where I think that if you look at the vast expanse of human history and all of the cultures from the ancient Greeks to Paris in the 19th century to Pacific Island cultures, a case could be made that the way that we currently think about homosexuality is actually a bit more culturally constructed, and that in reality, it's probably likely that there'd be a bigger pool of bisexuals than we currently think.
• 15:34
  C, and a smaller pool of homosexuals. And straight people as well.
• 15:54
  that would be a really small minority of people and everybody in some sort of hypothetical cultural environment could probably stray in some way into some grey area, and that maybe that grey area is the consequence of us being an optimally high libido species.
• 16:14
  It could be. And actually, you know, the way I worded the big sex difference is taking that idea into account. And that's why I said that the vast majority of men are primarily attracted to women rather than are just attracted to women. Yeah. And vice versa. Interesting. And so you're also going to talk about the prenatal hormonal component of homosexuality? Yeah. I guess I'm second guessing you.
• 16:37
  You are second-guessing me correctly, yeah. So, yeah, so the non-genetic contributions, the big one seems to be prenatal hormonal exposure. And...
• 16:49
  There's pretty good evidence, I think it's pretty good, that lesbians, for instance, are typically exposed to higher levels of prenatal testosterone in the womb, bisexual women as well, and that gay guys are typically exposed to lower levels. With gay guys, there's a complication, which is that there's some evidence that gay guys are exposed to either...
• 17:15
  lower than average levels of testosterone in the womb or much higher levels. And there's some evidence that that might be the case in rodents as well. I've done rodent experiments, which seems to suggest that in the gay male case, it could be straying from the average in either direction.
• 17:34
  I love trying to figure out whether a rat is gay. Yeah, gay rats. What kind of gay rat porn are you showing the rat in these experiments? Yes, I heard the higher testosterone thing because isn't there some correlation between the number of boys that a woman has given birth to and their likelihood to be gay? Yeah.
• 17:52
  Yeah, yeah. So that's the fraternal birth order effect. And so the original finding, at least, the original claim was that the more sons that a woman has, each son further down the line is somewhat more likely to be gay than the previous ones. Now, that's got a little bit messy experience.
• 18:13
  lately, because it used to be claimed that doesn't apply to women, and it doesn't apply, it's not just the birth order, but it's only the birth order for sons, and that daughters, it doesn't have that effect.
• 18:25
  So if you've got older brothers, you might be more likely to be gay. If you've got older sisters, you're not. And sorry to interrupt before you get to the qualifier there. I mean, what was interesting about that to me, the way that I first heard it, was that if one is tempted to say, oh, maybe people are just acculturated to being more gay if they have older male siblings for some reason, that the finding also held if the child was adopted out to another family where they were the eldest son. So it was a strictly...
• 18:52
  biological or at least neonatal, I mean, prenatal thing, right, the way that it was originally claimed. But are you saying that that now has a question mark over it?
• 19:02
  It does have a bit of a question mark, yeah. But you are right, that was one of the things that made it particularly persuasive for me. People might say, well, maybe it's just that, you know, the younger brothers, they're just getting wrestled all the time by older siblings, maybe something like that. Maybe the wrestling has an effect on their sexual orientation. Yeah, but it didn't seem to apply.
• 19:25
  if they didn't grow up, they didn't have to grow up with the older brothers. The complication isn't just that it's not true, but the complication seems to be now that there's some evidence that
• 19:35
  that it applies to women as well as men. So lesbians are more likely to have more older siblings, not just gay guys. And also there's some evidence that it's not just older brothers that do it. There may be any older siblings. Either way, though, what seems to be happening is somehow earlier pregnancies are changing the prenatal environment in a way that just makes, for some reason, makes it more likely that same-sex sexual orientation will develop.
• 20:04
  Right. So there's something genetic, and then there's something hormonal. And again, that hormonal thing, in your opinion, is likely to be... And why would females who have that characteristic in which the hormonal environment of their uterus is likelier to produce gay kids, why would their genes not be disfavored versus females who didn't have that...
• 20:33
  uh, prenatal characteristic? Well, I guess to some degree that they probably would. And then the question is, so, so why does that stick around? And I don't have a definite answer to that, but I just think that, um, biology, biology isn't perfect. Things don't always go according to plan, metaphorically speaking. Um, you know, and so there are just,
• 21:00
  Just the machine, so to speak, isn't perfect in terms of realizing natural selection as metaphorical goals. Right. And I don't think there's any adaptive explanation for it.
• 21:11
  Yeah, interesting. Okay, so the rest of the sort of behavioral, and we should sort of preface this by the main thrust of your work, which is not that we should prescriptively, slavishly obey our own physiological biology and the psychological biases that it imbues us with, but that we should live whatever life.
• 21:34
  We want to, and if that is in the same direction as the biases of our sex, great. And if it's not, that's also great. But by understanding it, we can better navigate.
• 21:48
  Exactly. Yeah, that's an important proviso to everything I say. I think some people are uncomfortable with this whole discussion. And I think part of the reason they are is that they worry that they worry that it's prescriptive and they worry that to say that X, Y and Z is natural is to say X, Y and Z is what you should do and deviating from X, Y and Z.
• 22:09
  is unethical or bad or necessarily going to lead to unhappiness. Or indeed that it just gives us a pass for bad behavior if you're talking about something like aggression in males or the seeking out of sexual variety in males that somehow believing that we're biologically hardwired to do it means that domestic violence isn't quite as bad as it would otherwise be. Yeah, exactly. You can't punish people. It's not their fault.
• 22:37
  Yes, you make the point that even if there was a cultural explanation for it, that would also be depriving the individual of responsibility. So it is funny the way that we think that biological explanations give people a pass in a way that cultural explanations wouldn't. Yeah, exactly. Watching too many violent movies or whatever, if that's the explanation, that's equally an explanation. Explanations, explanations. If one kind of explanation absolves people of responsibility for their behavior, presumably they all do. But yeah. Yeah. I don't think...
• 23:06
  I don't think we could have a functioning society where we think that way. We do have to hold people responsible regardless of the causes of their behavior. So with that caveat made and with the digression about sexual preference set aside, what is the next big sort of psychological difference between males and females?
• 23:24
  Well, I've got four big chapters in the book that deal with four big sort of categories of differences. And then another chapter where I look at a whole bunch of other ones that are sort of maybe less significant. But the main ones, so first of all, there are sex differences in sexual psychology, sex differences in mate preferences, sex differences in aggression and risk taking, and sex differences in parental behavior.
• 23:54
  Those are the ones I think are the biggies for two reasons, really. One is that you see very, very similar differences to those four categories of differences in other species. And also, theories and evolutionary biology make a strong case that those differences have an evolutionary origin in our species as well. You see it in other animals. Yeah, and there's good explanations. What are the mating differences? The mating difference is,
• 24:21
  Um, the biggest one, I guess, is the fact that on average, on average, men are more interested in no strings attached sex and sexual variety than women are. Um, and people sometimes jump down my throat when I say that and they'll say, well, but, um, but women, um, lots of women are interested in casual sex and lots of women are interested in sexual variety. Uh, and that's not, and that's true. And it's not inconsistent with what I'm saying. And conversely, plenty of men aren't particularly interested in sexual variety.
• 24:48
  But there's an average difference there. There's a big distribution, tons of variation within both sexes and an overlap between the sexes in terms of these things. But there is also an average difference. And that average difference does make good sense, evolutionarily speaking.
• 25:05
  This is, I'm always reminded because I have eight-year-old children. I'm one of the rare people in a same-sex relationship from an evolutionary point of view who managed to use technology to conquer the procreative barrier. But, you know, I'm trying to explain this idea of likelihood and probability and distributions to them, which is a bit difficult to eight-year-olds. Yeah.
• 25:27
  you know, oh, I can climb that incredibly tall and dangerous looking tree to the very top because my friend did it the other day and didn't get hurt. And trying to explain to them that an N of one is not evidence and that they would have to do it a hundred times in order to get injured once, you know.
• 25:46
  It's like, it's quite complicated. And I'm sort of heartened when I read your work and realize that most people are still not very good at it. And most people, you know, a lot of people will say, my grandfather smoked a packet a day until he was 98. And it didn't, it never hurt him. And I'm like, absolutely. Absolutely.
• 26:03
  Yes, but on average, if you smoke a pack a day, you're likelier to get lung cancer than if you don't. And on average, yes, a male is likelier to want more sexual variety than a female is, which does not mean that no women want more sexual variety than any man who exists.
• 26:19
  Yeah, so it's difficult for everybody, let alone for eight-year-olds. It is really tricky to grasp those kind of statistical claims. So how does this show up in real life? It shows up in lots of ways. It shows up in lots of ways.
• 26:37
  So there's lots of evidence pointing to the sex difference. So one is just you can ask people, you can give them anonymous questionnaires, you can ask them. And that difference comes up. It comes up everywhere. It doesn't just come up in the U.S. or in the West or in Anglophone nations. Just every country where we've done the research, that difference comes up.
• 26:56
  So self-report is fine as a line of evidence, but people might get it wrong, people might lie, and the question is, so you want to triangulate it with other evidence as well. But you see it in consumer patterns, so you see it in the fact that...
• 27:14
  men are much more interested in visual pornography, uh, than women are. They're the main consumers of that. Um, and, and pornography tends not to have storylines. It tends to be very, very focused on just, uh,
• 27:29
  No strings attached sex with multiple partners. You're not drawn in by the incredible plot lines of the librarian who turns out to be a sexy stepmom? I think that tends to be not the main drawcard. It's not the main drawcard, I would argue. Okay.
• 27:47
  uh yeah um so that's that's one big line of evidence um men spend more money and take more risks to seek sex with multiple partners um among people who have affairs uh there are more men than women who do it just because they want sexual variety and not because there's necessarily any problem in the relationship um uh what else oh yeah so historical line of evidence
• 28:11
  Another cross-cultural line of evidence is that despotic leaders, so male despotic leaders throughout history have typically taken large harems of youthful women, whereas despotic female leaders have not done, they haven't done that. They haven't taken large harems of youthful men.
• 28:32
  And, you know, there have been fewer of them, but there have been some, and that is a big discrepancy. Oh, yes, actually, another line of evidence, which is quite interesting, is that if you look at gay men versus lesbians, the number of sexual partners they typically have, that they have on average, and the argument has been made that
• 28:54
  the behavior of gay men and of lesbians, the sexual behavior, provides a clearer window on the sexual interests of men and women in general, because gay men and lesbians don't have to compromise with the desires of the other sex. And so what you find is that gay men on average have
• 29:16
  many more sexual partners than straight men, whereas lesbians have fewer sexual partners than straight women. And the argument that they're not having to compromise. So it's, yeah, that's a clear window. That's interesting. Yes. You don't have the confounding factor of the other sex to complicate the sexual preferences of each one. And to thwart your plans. Yeah.
• 29:37
  Yeah, that's right. I mean, interestingly, in the cliche of men just want to have sex and women want a long-term partner, the half of it that you're talking about there, which is men are more interested in random sex, is true. But the flip side, you say, is not true, that women want long-term romantic partners more than men do, that men want long-term relationships as much as women do, but they also just want the random sex on top?
• 30:08
  Yeah, that's what seems to be the case. Yeah. So if you ask those separate questions, just men are more enticed by the casual sex, but both sexes, on average, are about as interested in long-term relationships and forming a close bond with one individual.
• 30:25
  Interesting. And how does that, so there are like studies where, you know, they'll send a good looking guy and a good looking girl onto a university campus to sort of ask people out on dates or ask if they want to have sex with them and stuff like that. What is teased out by looking at the reactions of people during courtship?
• 30:47
  Yeah, that's interesting research that you're talking about. It's one of the sort of classic studies in psychology that's always very fun to teach because it always gets a big laugh. So, yeah, so basically, like you say, they've got people to go around campuses and say, hey, how you doing? I've noticed you around the campus. I've seen you around. Sounds a bit stalkerish, right? But still, this was the study, the first one in the 70s, and it went down okay, apparently. Seen you around the place.
• 31:16
  I find you very attractive. Would you like to, and then they finish the sentence with, would you like to go out with me? Would you like to come up to my room? Or would you like to go to bed with me? And each person asked one of those questions. It wasn't like a multi-choice question.
• 31:33
  That would be really weird. Yeah, I've been stalking you and I would like your answer, A, B or C. Right. And yes, I can imagine one can guess ahead of time the difference between the different sexes' responses to those three questions. Did the chips fall as you'd assume?
• 31:54
  They did. So in the first study, with the date question, in the first study, actually, they didn't fall as I would have expected. It was about 50-50. But later studies did fall as I expected. And usually men are more willing to go on a date with some random person. Although it's just not a massive difference, but there is a difference. From then on, though, there are massive differences for the next two questions. So for would you like to come up to my room?
• 32:23
  I think 69% of guys said yes, so more than said yes to the date in this first study, whereas only 6% of women said yes to that. And then for the would you go to bed with me question, 75% of guys said yes and 0% of women said yes to that request. Yeah.
• 32:43
  I love that more guys said yes to do you want to have sex with me than do you want to come up to my room. The difference between the two being like those guys who suspected that coming up to the room merely involved studying or having a cup of tea. Indeed. The moment you actually land. Yeah. The moment you make the sex explicit, they're like, oh, okay. Just as long as that's what we're talking about, I'm in. Yes. I wasn't wasting my time. That's right.
• 33:09
  Yeah, it's a funny result, isn't it? And actually, you know, 75% said yes, but some of the remaining 25%, they were very apologetic. They said, I'm busy, I'm meeting my fiancé. And a lot of them asked for a rain check on sex. Whereas none of the women who said no, none of them were polite about it for a start. The guys were polite. The women weren't polite about it. And they didn't say, I'm very, very sorry. You know, I'm meeting somebody and doing something else. They were more likely to say, you know, what's wrong with you?
• 33:37
  Why are you asking me that question is completely inappropriate. I mean, but could I say that though that actually I think so there's a massive sex difference and I think part of the reason for it is just that men are more favorably disposed to sex with people with casual sex, people that don't necessarily know. But I think the reason it's quite so big is.
• 34:01
  Because it's not just that. So I think it's not the case that zero percent of women are ever interested in casual sex, which is what this would suggest if it's just about casual sex. I think another big part of it, though, is that it's a lot riskier for a woman to go off with a guy that she doesn't know than for a guy to go off with a woman that he doesn't know.
• 34:17
  And so I think that is splitting the sex as a part. Yeah. I mean, I was going to throw in two possible retorts to that finding, one of which was what you're saying, which is that if men are in general, especially university-aged men, larger and stronger than women, then there's a risk component. And the second one would be...
• 34:42
  I guess a retort that's going to come up a lot and that I'm sure you hear a lot, which is how do you tease out the cultural norms from this in terms of the face that gets saved by a woman who claimed to have her purity being questioned when she's been acculturated into believing that being a good female means being somewhat prudish...
• 35:08
  So that even if she's ragingly horny inside, she is conforming to a cultural assumption that it would be unseemly to allow that out in public, even to a stranger. Indeed. Yeah, and I think with that one study, you can't tease that apart. And I'm sure that that is part of the reason. I'm sure that comes into it as well. The stigma, there's greater stigma on women than men for saying yes in that kind of situation. I'm sure that comes into it.
• 35:37
  Yeah, so you can't tease it apart with just that. And I think really that it's just the fact that there are multiple lines of evidence pointing to the difference suggests to me that it's not just that. And another thing is that, you know, there's less of a stigma these days than there used to be. The pill came along in the 1960s that lowered the costs of casual sex. For women in particular, they were much less likely to get pregnant all of a sudden. And with that, the...
• 36:07
  social norms changed quite a bit and it became less of a sort of moral taboo to engage in casual sex. And a lot of people back then did predict that in the wake of those changes that the difference would just disappear, the stigma would just go away completely.
• 36:25
  And the sex difference would just disappear. We'd just go away. But it didn't. And I think that the fact that it didn't even more than half a century after the advent of the pill and those social changes and the sexual revolution, it's not what people were predicting based on just a sociocultural explanation. It fits better with the idea that there's also an innate component.
• 36:45
  Just to expand that criticism of the culture thing, to deal with it before we get into more details about the psychological differences between the sexes from an evolutionary point of view, if I try to channel the most feminist blank slate...
• 37:04
  friends who I have who believe that really most of basically all differences between the sexes socio-culturally are artifacts of our culture their argument would be yes of course you see it across cultures and across time because males being stronger have been able to
• 37:24
  institute cultural norms by force that favor them. And so male aggression and male promiscuity and female coquettishness and loyalty and demureness are attributes that stronger men like to enforce. So even when you say that there are cultural ways, well, we've been trying to clamp down on cultural male aggression...
• 37:52
  you know, for decades, but it still shows up, they would say, yes, we try to clamp down on it using rather feckless institutional bureaucratic means, but we live inside a cultural swamp that valorizes male aggression unwittingly. And so, of course, young boys are brought up to be more aggressive than young girls are. They can't help but not be, no matter how many
• 38:16
  HR departments we try to employ to beat them out of it. How much truth is there in that, if any? I think that is a reasonable response. And to add to it, you could also add that in every single culture, women are the ones that get pregnant. And so women, for that reason, have to be more careful. Their family is going to want them to be more careful about their sexual behavior. And so cultural norms will develop around that.
• 38:43
  And those differences, those cultural norms and attitudes that are related to them come from the physical differences and the reproductive differences rather than being directly psychological. So I do think that's reasonable. I think that…
• 39:01
  It doesn't work as a complete explanation, though, for various reasons. It doesn't explain evidence, for instance, that interest in casual sex is related to prenatal hormonal exposure. It doesn't explain the fact that... So lesbians are...
• 39:19
  they're not going to get pregnant in their relationships. They don't have the physical risk associated with a partner who's significantly stronger than them. But nonetheless, lesbians have fewer sexual partners than straight women. Gay guys, conversely, they...
• 39:38
  They have partners who are, on average, going to be more dangerous than straight men, straight men's partners, and yet they are more interested in casual sex. And it also doesn't explain the fact that you find similar differences in terms of sexual proclivities in other species. So I think that Michelle contributes. And you do see differences. Unless the other species have the same physiological phenomenon, which they usually would. Well, they do, but they don't have cultural norms, right?
• 40:08
  Sorry. Well, I was just going to say, if chimpanzee males are stronger than chimpanzee females, you could say that they have a cultural norm in chimpanzee society for males to be more aggressive, couldn't you?
• 40:24
  I don't think it would be a cultural norm. They do have some culture, but I think that level of cultural sophistication is a bit beyond them. I suppose you could argue that it would be an individual norm, but it's not just sort of bright animals like chimps. It's just right across the animal kingdom. And the further away you get from humans and human-level intelligence, the less plausible any kind of cultural explanation becomes. Also, with the aggression...
• 40:48
  The aggression example, so men are stronger, and that could provide a sort of cultural explanation for male aggression toward females. But the main kind of aggression that you see is same-sex aggression. And...
• 41:07
  men don't have an advantage, by definition, don't have a physical advantage over other men because they're all, on average, stronger than women. And so it wouldn't explain that. And if it was just about relative strength of people involved, you'd expect that women would be just as aggressive to other women as men are to men, but then they're not, they're less so. Right. And you probably also assume that stronger men would be more aggressive than weaker men, which also doesn't seem to be
• 41:36
  Well, that I think is true. I think that people, because learning is involved, right? And so people who are more able to wield, to use a tactic successfully are more likely to do it. They might not feel much more aggressive, but they're more likely to act aggressive just because they're able to do it.
• 41:55
  Is that true, though, in society? I mean, just anecdotally, I don't see, I mean, there's often, I see just as much of a Napoleon complex in people where, you know, some little wiry guy is really aggressive and some big muscle head is a gentle giant, but that might just be the circles that I swim in.
• 42:13
  I think, yeah, it might be, you might swim in circles of gentle giants. I know too many Chris Williamson's and too many Joe Rogan's, these gentle muscle guys. But yes, I take your point on that. On the question of,
• 42:33
  I mean, I assume that puberty, which you mentioned earlier, also gives us some insights into the way in which hormones themselves create psychological changes as well as physiological ones. Because if a male is behaving completely differently at the age of 14 than they were at the age of nine, then it's not like we just suddenly injected culture into their head in those years. No, no, indeed.
• 42:58
  You know, and you probably could argue for some kind of cultural explanation, but I think it's much more plausible that it's a result of puberty and the changes that happen during puberty. Now, there's not much difference at all. In fact, there's no difference in boys and girls in terms of levels of testosterone. And yet boys are still more aggressive even at that age. But then puberty hits and it becomes – the gap just widens massively. Yeah.
• 43:27
  And it is interesting because it's not the case, I don't think, that society is saying, great, now that you're becoming a man, you need to be more aggressive. Often societies are not saying that. There are some more warlike societies that will say that. But I think it's much more common for societies to try to clamp down on male aggression because male aggression at that age, in adolescence and early adulthood,
• 43:57
  Male violence and risk-taking is a major problem that every society has to deal with, and they typically try to quell it rather than inflame it. But nonetheless, it still happens, and you do still have the sex difference where men are much more aggressive. Yeah, I mean, I must say I'm a bit skeptical of the quelling process.
• 44:16
  argument just on the basis of the fact that, again, you can have the school teacher trying to quell it, and you can have your boring parents trying to quell it. But if you're watching Mission Impossible movies, and like Bruce Willis movies, well, I was watching Bruce Willis movies. No one who's nine today is watching Bruce Willis movies, but...
• 44:35
  You know, you could totally make an argument that there's a normative expectation that masculinity means, you know, violence and virility and blowing shit up. And that no amount of trying to quell that is going to be able to match it. But that wouldn't mean that there's no physiological component as well.
• 45:00
  Fair enough. I guess maybe it's fair to say that the social pressure is going multiple directions. Yeah.
• 45:07
  rather than just one direction or another. But people do, they have often explained the aggression and sex difference in terms of, you know, parents at the very least turning a blind eye to male aggression. And teachers turning a blind eye just sort of thinking boys will be boys. So at the very least, I think it takes away that argument. And it complicates the picture. And, you know, it is going multiple directions. We're not all constantly saying, like, toughen up.
• 45:31
  Yeah. You know, you have to fight everybody the way that kids were taught. The way we used to. In some, yeah, sometimes in places. Do we know anything, Steve, about, I mean, I teach ethics at my kids' school. And so I have a weekly insight into the difference between eight and nine-year-old boys and girls.
• 45:50
  And the question of attention and the rise in attention disorders in boys and the rise of anxiety disorders in girls. Now, if I was talking to Jonathan Haidt, he'd have a whole bunch of different technological and sociological explanations for this. But do you have a hunch about what's going on? Because it is so stark, the ability of female adults
• 46:18
  children to focus and engage versus the ability of male children to do so and their desire to be involved in not violence, not aggression exactly, but behaviors that are in that direction.
• 46:37
  Yeah, and also just to run around heaps and totally. Yeah, yeah. Well, I do. I mean, I do think that those are some some basic sex differences and the differences themselves, I don't think I know.
• 46:52
  I don't think they're new. I think that it's always been the case that boys who have wanted to run around more have been less attentive. At the extreme of the distribution, you get more boys who have ADHD than girls who have ADHD. So there's sort of that basic sex difference magnified. Girls have been more attentive and so therefore tended to.
• 47:13
  to do better at school, and they tend to be, on average, less likely to take risks. So they do this kind of crazy stuff that boys sometimes do. And also, the flip side of the lower risk-taking, I guess, is that girls...
• 47:29
  from a very, very young age, tend to be more prone to anxiety. They just worry a bit more about stuff than boys on average. Whether that's become significantly more common recently, I'm a bit torn on. I do find it plausible, but I'm just not completely sure. So I think probably, well, I think maybe that there are some new social factors and maybe the technologies that Jonathan Haidt talks about.
• 47:56
  are sort of inflaming the existing sex differences. I guess, or actually maybe they're not inflaming it. I guess another possibility is that they're making everybody a little less attentive. There's still the sex difference, but maybe everyone's a little less attentive than they used to be boys and girls. I'm not sure if the differences have got bigger. Yeah.
• 48:16
  It's interesting. I mean, it could be, again, like everything, it could be working on a multiple of different variants and directions. It could be making everybody less attentive, and it could also be exacerbating whatever the pre-existing inclinations are, which in boys would be even more inattentiveness, and in girls would be the baseline inattentiveness plus an exacerbated anxiety or something like that. It could be. Yeah, it could be. That does seem plausible to me.
• 48:45
  But I guess there's a big debate in psychology at the moment, and I think we're a little bit uncertain of exactly what's changed, whether anything's changed or whether we just sort of lowered our threshold for noticing ADHD and diagnosing ADHD or diagnosing anxiety disorders. There's a debate about that and also debate about if there has been a change, what exactly are the causes?
• 49:07
  And in terms of pushing boys to be less aggressive and trying to, you know, put our finger on the scales of sex differences in order to iron out the bad things and, you know, turn the volume up on the good things, is it a problem that, I mean, I have read you right that there are some studies that show that, you know, examination markers like teachers will unconsciously
• 49:33
  give girls better grades on STEM subjects in order to presumably give them more encouragement than they actually deserve. And that, like, the whole question of, I mean, one of the most notorious moments during the
• 49:48
  social justice reckoning of peak wokeness was the Google memo, which James Damore wrote, who was an engineer at Google, when Google was trying to understand how to get more women interested in engineering at Google and one employee. And so they invited employees to write about it. And he suggested that there was some
• 50:11
  innate difference between the interests of men and women. He was fired for that. Where do we currently stand on our understanding of innate differences and how we should try to raise kids to either defy them or to conform? Yeah, interesting question. So for the first part, yeah, there is pretty good evidence that teachers on average do tend to
• 50:37
  give girls slightly higher mark for work of equal quality. And I think the big reason for that is statistical discrimination. So just on average, boys are less scholastic, they perform worse at school and they're naughtier.
• 50:52
  And having that stereotype in their heads, it does seem that teachers sometimes downgrade the work of boys compared to girls. It's a small effect, but it does seem to be real. And possibly within the STEM fields, there's also an inadvertent tendency to try to encourage and boost girls in that area. It's been suggested that that's part of the reason for the grading biases.
• 51:20
  As for D'Amour, yeah, I think a lot of what he said in that memo was perfectly reasonable given the research on the topic that is there. He got a few things wrong. I would have changed some of the stuff that he put and toned down some of the stuff that he put. He maybe put it too starkly and overestimated his importance. But he was on the right track in terms of what the research in psychology suggests.
• 51:46
  So, I think… Which is what, for people who haven't read that memo? I mean, is it basically that guys tend to like things and girls tend to like human beings and people? And so, guys are obviously going to want careers that are involved in widgets? Yeah, yeah. Is that the gist?
• 52:03
  That would be just the way I'd want to put it, the more nerdy way I'd want to put it, is that both sexes are fairly interested in things and both sexes are fairly interested in people, but not massively so. But there's an average difference there such that on average men are somewhat more interested in things than women are.
• 52:23
  And women are somewhat more interested in people than men are, and at the extremes of the distribution, often the differences are magnified. And so among the minority of people who are massively interested in things and want to have a things-related career, more of them are men than women. Among the minority of people who are extremely interested in people, more of them are women than men. And that does shape the fields that people go into.
• 52:45
  I think probably most guys wouldn't be hugely interested in going into physics or mathematics or the like, but more men than women are, and more men than women are interested in widgets and gadgets and fixing stuff and things-related occupations. And then conversely, more women than men are interested in people-oriented fields.
• 53:04
  like my field of psychology and also in areas that involve helping people, more women than men are interested in that. And the suggestion would be perfectly plausible. That's one of the factors determining the gender gaps that you see in the world. And in fact, that it would be implausible to suggest that those sex differences and interests are not one of the factors determining the gender gaps in occupations.
• 53:31
  So that's, I mean, that's one area where it would really be a red herring to try to force girls, you know, the whole like you go girl, like STEM thing, there should be the same number of female engineers as males, I think was, I think most reasonable people can assign that to the...
• 53:48
  dustbin of history in the sense that there is really no advantage economically or professionally to being a computer engineer than there is to working in medicine or something that a woman might want to do. I mean, the kinds of careers that are people-oriented are likely to be more enduring and potentially more lucrative
• 54:09
  in the 21st century than the kinds of things that are dealing with things. So I think that's sort of a wash, like, you know, if women are great at nursing and HR and being professors and stuff like that, that's great and the boys can tinker with their cars or whatever. But where the gender gap really sort of gets people angry is when,
• 54:33
  C-suite, boardroom, you know, political leaders are disproportionately male, you know, justices on high courts and things like that. And sometimes an argument is made, well, you're likely, as someone who is insanely motivated to put everything into their work and do the number of hours and be as audacious as it takes to become...
• 54:59
  a CEO, entrepreneur, or president or something is just likelier to be male. But that's a bit more galling to women, because then you're basically just saying, you have to be batshit crazy in order to run the world. And you guys aren't crazy enough on average. Yeah.
• 55:17
  Well, I think it's calling to plenty of men as well, right? Because I think plenty of men as well see it as an injustice and they don't want that to be the case. And they would prefer to explain the gender gap at the top levels purely in terms of discrimination and socialization.
• 55:35
  So going to a lot of people, of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is just due to discrimination. Whether we like it or not, it could be that those other factors are coming in as well. And I would have to say I would be surprised if they're not. I do think that, like most guys, would hate to work 80-hour weeks. But among the minority of people who are crazy enough to want to flush work-life balance down the toilet and just devote everything to their career, it is the case that more of them are men than women.
• 56:06
  And yeah, the question is, what's the solution to that? I don't know. I don't know. I think, yeah, I think,
• 56:16
  I fully get why people don't. We don't just want guys in those positions, but at the same time, do we want to be encouraging women to do the ATR weeks and lose the work-life balance? If anything, we might want to encourage guys. Guys might be a bit more sensible to...
• 56:37
  not do the eight-hour weeks and to have more of a work-life balance. I mean, you can force, I suppose there's probably nothing you can do for the outlier, entrepreneur, genius freak who's going to go off and do their own thing, but there are probably things that you can do around the edges for the band of people just below that. You know, maybe president of the United States is a sui generis category, but I'm
• 57:04
  Probably member of Congress or member of parliament could be a lot more amenable to women if you adjusted the hours that parliament sits and, you know, you sort of made things a bit more family friendly and viewed things through the prism of what would work-life balance look like if you were trying to take that into account when you're picking forwards or political committees. Totally.
• 57:26
  I agree. And I do actually think that that's one area where looking at the science of sex differences fairly squarely in the face helps us because it does suggest that there are going to be these average differences in lifestyle preferences between men and women.
• 57:42
  those do exist. Perhaps they're not going to be going anywhere anytime soon. So maybe we need to, instead of trying to adjust women, try to adjust workplace circumstances to make it more favorable to the differences that we have between men and women. So I think it can actually, it can help in that respect rather than hinder. I do think that one thing is that we need to
• 58:04
  not get complacent about the role of discrimination in shaping these things, and that we should do what we can to rid the workplace of bias and barriers. But then I just think, yeah, it's better to attack bias and discrimination than attack sex differences themselves, at least in general. You know, I think,
• 58:24
  Maybe you could put your thumb on the scale in some areas and maybe the C-suite is one area where you might consider doing them. But I think it's generally we should let the cards fall where they may unless there's a solid argument that...
• 58:40
  Doing so creates harm. And I think when considering putting thumbs on the scales, when considering things like quotas for C-suites and the like, I think we need to have the honest and sometimes unpleasant conversation about the negative sides of doing those things as well as just the positives and as well as shuffling the numbers around.
• 58:58
  I think it's considered on both sides of it.
• 59:23
  men and women, what are the differences? If we've talked about mating differences and we skimmed over aggression, which we can return to if we have time. But in terms of parenting, what are the differences? The differences are, first of all, behaviorally, right across cultures, women spend more time in terms of direct care of the young, and especially when they're very young. So especially with infants and young children, women spend more of the time involved in that way.
• 59:51
  And then, and that's just sort of a fact, I guess most people would probably accept that. Where it gets more awkward is the explanations for that. Is it just a question of society having sort of arbitrary norms that have put women in that role? Or maybe not arbitrary norms, but norms maybe because women are the ones that get pregnant and nurse the young, then maybe the norms have grown around that, but there's no innate norm.
• 1:00:16
  psychological tendency for women to be more interested than men in being involved in childcare. Now, I suspect that there probably is that for several reasons. It's associated with prenatal hormonal exposure, parental motivation is. So, for instance, women who are exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb tend to be less interested in infants when they're kids and
• 1:00:46
  and less likely to become mothers later on and less interested in parenting. How do we measure that, by the way? Are there longitudinal studies where they measure the testosterone in the womb and then look at what the person grew up to be?
• 1:00:56
  The main way is that there's this condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and that happens to male and female fetuses. It's a sort of reproductive disorder where they're exposed to very high levels of testosterone in the womb. It doesn't have much of an impact on boys because they're exposed to high levels anyway. But with girls, it seems to masculinize their behavior.
• 1:01:18
  and their psychology to some degree shifts them in a male typical direction. There's that. There's also convergent evidence from research on other mammals where if you expose females to high levels of testosterone in the womb, they...
• 1:01:33
  grow up to be less parentally inclined and more aggressive, like the males of the species, and more likely to mount other females sexually in the way that the males typically do. So that's done on other mammals. Are we now getting more evidence because of the acceptance of transgender people about this? I mean, I would have thought that, I mean, we've got a lot more people who are in the fold who are taking testosterone. Yeah.
• 1:02:01
  Now, in order to transition their sexes, and presumably we can look at the behavioral differences and their self-reporting of their motivations and their psychology and try to tease apart what testosterone does. Yeah, there's some research on that. It's early days, though, and a lot of the research that I've seen...
• 1:02:22
  is suggestive rather than definitive because it typically has small samples. But the general thrust of it is in the direction you'd expect, which is that when biological females start taking testosterone, it does shift them toward sort of sometimes feeling more aggressive. They report that. Sometimes a bump, at least early on, a bump in sex drive and other sort of stereotypically male traits seem to come in the wake of taking cross-sex hormones.
• 1:02:51
  And the reverse of biological males for trans women.
• 1:02:57
  And then staying on the parenting thing, obviously there's a big difference between the sexes in the sense that not only do women have to carry the baby and then nurse the baby, but also they are certain that it's their baby because they gave birth to it. Whereas for men, they have zero responsibility, physiologically at least. And also a question mark always over knowing for certain that it's their baby. How does that show up behaviorally?
• 1:03:27
  Well, that's one of the explanations, the sex difference in parental certainty. It's one of the explanations for the fact that, on average, men's parental motivation is somewhat lower. So right across the mammalian world, and in fact in all species with internal fertilization, you do have that asymmetry where females are more likely to end up investing in offspring of their own rather than being the offspring of the good-looking next-door neighbor.
• 1:03:55
  And yes, and that reduces the average payoff for parental care for males relative to females. And the argument, which I think is plausible, is that that reduces the average parental motivation. I think it's not just that. I think also it is something that's called mating opportunity cost.
• 1:04:15
  which refers to the fact that for men, so yeah, so selection favors whatever traits lead to the highest number of offspring. And for females, investing heavily in the young doesn't lower the number of offspring they're likely to have in their lifetime much because –
• 1:04:35
  because they put so much into each offspring physiologically that that brings down the maximum number that they can have. Whereas for males, in principle at least, males can have a lot more offspring by mating with multiple females. And therefore, investing heavily in the young is costlier for males' fitness than for females' fitness.
• 1:04:57
  And that's another explanation for why you have low average levels of parental investment right across the mammalian world. I think humans are a bit exceptional. We are a biparental species to quite a high degree. Males do invest quite heavily. And I think that that's because our young are so...
• 1:05:18
  so vulnerable and dependent at birth. And actually for a long time after that, I think several decades to become independent. And it's much more than females alone can supply. They need much more parental investment. Other species, the mother alone can do it, not so much us. And so I think for that reason, we've evolved that males invest quite highly, quite highly in their lives.
• 1:05:43
  And they're young, they're much more parental than most male mammals. That reduces the maximum offspring number that the vast majority of males can have. It actually reduces the size of most of the sex differences that we're talking about. So I think the fact that we're bi-parental is the reason that compared to most mammals, we're less dimorphic than most mammals because the males have evolved to invest more.
• 1:06:09
  There's also the cliche, Steve, of the male being, you know, jealously guarding his wife and being much more paranoid about extramarital affairs and so on in order to try to exert whatever influence he can on ensuring that the offspring actually are his and that he's not cuckolded into raising someone else's genes. I assume that that's borne out. I mean, certainly seems anecdotally true.
• 1:06:34
  Yeah, I mean, both sexes do get jealous and both sexes are quite wary about their partner going off with someone else. Guys, though, do seem to be more focused on the risk of their partner getting sexually involved with somebody else.
• 1:06:50
  Whereas women, obviously, they don't want that to happen either. The vast majority of them don't want that either. But they tend to be more worried about their partner getting emotionally close to somebody else, falling in love potentially with somebody else, than with just the sex. So basically, yes, if you ask men and women...
• 1:07:09
  If you imagine your current partner getting involved with somebody else, which would upset you more, the sex or the emotional bond? Men are more likely than women to say the sex would be just really, really upsetting. Women are a lot more likely than men to say that the emotional bond would be very upsetting.
• 1:07:26
  And that's borne out in real-world data as well, in reactions to discoveries of infidelity. You know, there was a TV, there was a very fascinating paper based on a TV show where people live on camera were informed that their partner had been unfaithful to them. And men were much more likely than women to say, to ask the woman, did you fuck him? Whereas women were more likely to ask, are you in love with her?
• 1:07:57
  Fascinating, because the great liability for a female is that the male who is better as a protector and, you know, a hunter is going to go away and fall in love with somebody else and become useless to you and your offspring. Whereas the great threat for the male is that the woman is going to be impregnated by somebody else's genes. Yeah.
• 1:08:22
  Exactly, and that's why both sexes get jealous, whereas in other species where the males don't invest, the males really will guard the females, but the females don't guard the males in return because there's nothing to guard. This is an interesting contrast to the contrast we were making about gay couples and how gay relationships tease out the differences between male sexual desire and female sexual desire more cleanly.
• 1:08:49
  than straight relationships do. Men are more promiscuous, women are less promiscuous. Here it seems to be complicated because in more same-sex male relationships, there's a greater tolerance for sexual infidelity, I would say, than among straight relationships.
• 1:09:09
  but an almost female-like antipathy towards the partner falling in love with somebody else. It's not like polyamory is widespread in the gay world, but an honestly open relationship is more common in the gay world. So it's almost like once you remove fertility from the equation, then men actually behave a bit less like straight men.
• 1:09:39
  That's really interesting. So I knew that sort of sexual jealousy, jealousy just about the sex act, is often lower among gay guys. I didn't realize that there's jealousy, like love jealousy. Yes, I would think that... Is just as common or more common. Yeah, I think...
• 1:09:57
  It is, and maybe it just has to be in an environment in which sex jealousy is lower because the risk of love, the risk of your partner falling in love with someone else is higher if they are able to play the field than if they're, you know, rigidly monogamous. So maybe it's just an artifact of opportunity. Yeah, that's interesting. But I guess it could just be. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:10:21
  It could just be a shift. Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely not the case, I was just going to say, that gay people are more okay with their partner falling in love than straight people are. So I was going to say, is that a shift maybe toward a more female typical psychology among gay guys? But I'm not sure it is actually, because I think it's not the case that straight women are worried about their partner falling in love but not worried about them sleeping with somebody else.
• 1:10:49
  They don't like either of those things. I think you're right. I think the tidier explanation is just that nobody particularly likes the idea of their partner falling in love with somebody else. And in the case of a gay male relationship, that is an additionally likely hazard that they have to guard against because of the more open sexual ethos.
• 1:11:13
  Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. You've said that humans are more like birds than like other mammals in some ways, in terms of our psychological sex differences. How? Well, actually, that's related to what I touched on earlier, which is the fact that guys invest quite a lot in their offspring, and that we're quite a bi-parental species. So in most mammals, the males contribute the sex act, and then that's at their office. So they're basically sperm donors, and then they're deadbeat dads.
• 1:11:42
  That's the mammalian norm. The norm among birds, on the other hand, birds are really exceptional in this respect, but 90% of birds, they instead form pair bonds and they're biparental. So the males are investing in the young as well as the females. And we're more like birds in the fact that we had them
• 1:12:02
  That sort of reproductive arrangement that is more common among birds, that's what we have as well. We form love, we form pair bonds, quite durable pair bonds. And both sexes typically invest, at least to some degree, in the young, making us more bird-like than mammal-like.
• 1:12:20
  And in terms of our ability to tell whether or not a potential sexual partner is into us, are men or women better or worse at estimating how appealing they are? Uh...
• 1:12:36
  women are better, they're better socially in general, but there seems to be a bias among men, which is called the sexual over-perception bias. And that refers to the fact that guys are much more likely to err in the direction of assuming that, yeah, yeah, she's really into me. And they have such a low threshold, in fact, on average for inferring that, that they quite often assume that a woman is into them when actually she's not.
• 1:13:02
  And there's been an evolutionary explanation put forward for that, which is that natural selection favors traits that lead to more offspring. It doesn't favor traits that lead to fewer embarrassing situations where you think she's really into me, you make a move, and it turns out that you're completely wrong about that and muddled about that.
• 1:13:23
  Embarrassing situation, but yeah, natural selection doesn't care how many embarrassments you go through. It's just about the number of offspring you have. And by erring them in that direction, guys are more likely to try their hair there and everywhere. Interesting. And not miss out on potential sexual opportunities.
• 1:13:39
  That reminds me a little bit of our bias towards thinking that there is a cause or an intention behind inanimate things in the world. You know, part of the explanation for our religiosity and our spirituality is that, you know, when you're on the savannah and there's a rustling in the bushes, you're much better off assuming that it's a tiger than assuming that it's the wind.
• 1:14:03
  And so we're always inferring meaning into things. Yeah, we're finding… …being wrong about there not being a tiger a thousand times and right once. Yeah, exactly. It's that same logical framework for that argument.
• 1:14:17
  Yeah, interesting. And just on the question of the physiological fact of women carrying babies, it's a bit sensitive to talk about sexual violence here, but let's just sort of touch on it anyway whilst acknowledging the taboo.
• 1:14:37
  Is there a difference in the way that men and women think about sexual, about being, about their own victimization of sexual violence on the basis of the fact that for men, they're promiscuous and they have sort of no stakes in terms of birthing kids? Yeah.
• 1:15:01
  Yeah, there is. I mean, there's this general trend that women are choosier about their sexual partners than men are. And I think a sort of offshoot of that is the fact that any kind of act that might take away your sexual choice is much more upsetting to women than to men. So sexual violence, sexual coercion, at the extreme, rape, of course, um...
• 1:15:25
  Yeah, those are particularly difficult and unpleasant things and upsetting things for women. I think quite plausibly because of the fact that women are the ones that are going to be tied up with a nine-month pregnancy. And then until very recently, several years of nursing as well. And therefore, the stakes are much, much higher. So I think that...
• 1:15:50
  I think that the fact that women find it so much more upsetting, sexual harassment as well, find it so much more upsetting is built into human nature, bionatural selection, rather than just being something that's socialized. I don't think it's just socialized. I think it's much more deep-seated than that because of the reproductive differences and evolutionary differences between the sexes.
• 1:16:10
  Right. And we're not saying that the woman is consciously aware of the risk of getting pregnant. And we're also not saying that male sexual violence against men isn't incredibly traumatizing, or indeed female sexual violence against men. But I think male-on-male sexual violence is particularly galling for a lot of men because it has the same-sex component. But that for women...
• 1:16:37
  that the ability, the autonomy to select their own mate is hardwired in a way that it's not for men who are able to spread their seed with greater impunity and that therefore there is a sacredness to female sexuality from the perspective of the woman that there might not be to men. And it's that that's being violated, which is a greater violation during sexual assault. Is that?
• 1:17:03
  That's the gist, yeah, that's the argument, yeah. Yeah, interesting. In terms of bonding behavior within the sexes, like we've touched briefly on aggression, you know, male-to-male aggression. Are there different ways in which males bond and females bond?
• 1:17:22
  Yeah, the big sex difference there is that typically boys and men will form bonds with larger groups of guys, but less intimate bonds on average. Whereas women will typically form closer relationships with a fewer number of individuals.
• 1:17:42
  Right. And do they, I mean, the violence question is an interesting one because I understand that males are more overtly physically violent, but are they more aggressive? Like, how are we defining aggression and violence? And I'm thinking specifically of the fact that when I look at adolescent girls and adolescent women,
• 1:18:03
  Boys, I don't think there's actually less hostility and hierarchy and adversarial gameplay among the girls than there is with boys. It's just more subtle.
• 1:18:18
  Agreed. So where men dominate and boys dominate is in what's called direct aggression. So face-to-face aggression, face-to-face verbal aggression, face-to-face physical aggression or violence. And basically the more extreme the direct aggression is, the more that males dominate. So for verbal aggression, it's not actually a huge difference. There is typically a difference throughout the lifespan, but it's not huge. But then when you get to
• 1:18:48
  low-level physical aggression, the gap gets bigger. When you get to high-level physical aggression and violent crime and homicide, the gap is just huge.
• 1:18:57
  But when it comes to subtler forms, like you say, like subtler forms of aggression, the gaps are much smaller. And actually, there's pretty good evidence that women are slightly more likely to engage in indirect aggression than men are. So more likely to spread rumors and try to get a person ostracized from the group and so on. And that does seem to be particularly common in the high school years.
• 1:19:22
  that you had a sort of mean girls phase that a lot of girls seem to go through. Now, the sort of stereotype there is that girls engage massively more than that than boys do. It seems, as far as I can tell from the literature, the gap is real, but it's not huge. But it is a real difference where women, if anything, engage in more introvert aggression than guys do.
• 1:19:47
  In terms of the differences between the sexes, I mean, the last time we spoke, Steve, was three years ago. So it was still the tail end of what I would regard as being a fairly censorious time for conversations about gender in particular. You know, the things that you are allowed to say about transgenderism and the sort of basic biological differences between the sexes were much more curtailed.
• 1:20:14
  And I saw what was – you tweeted something which was a quote, I'm going to find it here, from a prominent figure which continues to this day to baffle me. This is the head of the American Anthropological Association saying that –
• 1:20:37
  The idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, this is a direct quote, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don't know why we're debating that, this person said. You may not like it, I don't know, maybe you just want to kill babies that aren't just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XX.
• 1:20:57
  XY, but you can have XY and you can present it as a woman, you can have XXY, they're all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect. I mean, that's still the case. How have you noticed the evolution of the conversation over the time that you've been talking about it?
• 1:21:22
  I have the same impression that you do, which is that it's a lot less hot than it was three years ago or five years ago when I started writing the book. So, yeah, so back then, in 2021, I published an academic paper on sex differences in STEM and the causes of them, and I argued that...
• 1:21:41
  discrimination and socialization are part of the story, but not the whole story, and that various sex differences contribute as well, in particular sex differences and interests. And in 2021, that did not go down well at all. There was a...
• 1:22:00
  bit of an online controversy, and I got reported by someone to the DEI office at the UK branch of the university where I teach, Nottingham University, which is all a bit unpleasant. And I found out very recently, actually a couple of weeks ago, I found out from the editor of that paper that there were calls for retraction of the paper.
• 1:22:25
  And so that was a bit unpleasant. And part of the reason I decided to write the book, actually, is that I thought, well, this is ridiculous. The view I'm expressing is quite moderate. It's well within the Overton window for the vast majority of people, if not for academics at that time. It's perfectly reasonable based on the evidence that we have. And it's ridiculous that people are reacting that way. You know, maybe I should write a book.
• 1:22:50
  on this topic and just try to get it all down. I am relieved though that it has become, that the whole thing has cooled off to some degree. Um, it's, I mean, it's, it's amazing that, I mean, when you first came to my attention, you know, three years ago, you were as this kind of defiant voice of like, uh, you know, standing up to the mob. And now fortunately you're just the, no offense, but boring academic that you should be by, you know, just,
• 1:23:18
  saying true things accurately. But what interests me is the long tail of these ideas that still seem to exist in activism and academia. I mean, I feel like what is going on when a senior person at a major scientific institution is saying stuff like what I just quoted? Like, do you have an evolutionary theory for that behavioural?
• 1:23:46
  Pattern? Evolutionary explanation I don't have, but I do think that those ideas just aren't going to go away instantly. I just think what has changed is that just the willingness of everyone to just sort of go along with those views and...
• 1:24:02
  And the likelihood of people mobbing people who disagree has gone down. And in part just because more people are willing just to say, yeah, I just I don't actually agree with that view. I think the silent majority that always disagreed with that just has more of a voice these days. And it's just the social norms have just changed. And that was a trend. And, you know, trends just don't last. Just different things become trendy.
• 1:24:26
  And, yeah, so... I mean, the tenacity, it's the enduring way in which, like, I mean, there was an event that I was recently a part of, and I had to fill out the questionnaire and, you know, name, address, and, you know, all those details just for their data collection and demographics.
• 1:24:57
  gender female identified gender non-binary gender or other and there was no option to state what your sex was it was all framed as if it was a choice which is fine because gender is a choice it's just not relevant in the
• 1:25:21
  In the context of a demographic assessment of like, who is this individual? Like, what is their name? What name were they given on their birth certificate? And where do they physically reside? I would have thought that sex, so this muddling of sex and gender...
• 1:25:37
  I fear is more, uh, is going to be more just pervasive, yeah, than just being like, oh, well, it was just a fad and it'll go away. I mean, the norm is a fad, but the consequences seem much more resilient than I thought they might have been. Yeah, that's true. That's interesting. And I guess, uh...
• 1:25:55
  You know, to the extent that it gets enshrined in, well, laws, but just also in the formal ways that institutions decide to do things, that's going to change slower than the conversation. I think it's a problem, though, I think, blurring sex and gender.
• 1:26:12
  You know, it's a problem in medical contexts, just for a start. That's probably the big one, right, is medical context. It's quite important to keep sight of... Yeah, what if an attendee at this conference that I'm filling out the form of is in a... You know, needs to be rushed to hospital and they're unconscious, and the only information that they have about the person is what gender they identify as.
• 1:26:33
  Yeah, that's not going to be ideal, right? I guess also the information of their body right there as well, I guess. Well, yes. I'm just going to save the day. This is true. At the end of the day, yes, physiology will do it. And it's also, of course, a problem that laws do take – they're so much slower than norms. So, I mean, I think it's only within the past 12 months that –
• 1:26:52
  New South Wales, the state that I live in, the most populous state in Australia, passed a self-ID law on gender such that, you know, if I can find one other person to say that I'm sincere in my being a woman, then I am legally.
• 1:27:21
  That was already going out of fashion as a cultural norm that everybody had to agree with. And in two or three years, I think that law is going to look retrograde and not the progressive stroke of social justice genius that the people who wrote the bill thought it would be.
• 1:27:40
  Yeah, I mean, maybe it already looks that way, regressive to most people, but just not, I guess, the bubble in which those laws are being put together. So what do you make of gender performativity then from an evolutionary point of view, like if there is such a thing? Like, obviously, gender and sex are two different things.
• 1:28:03
  Obviously, there are sex differences, but those are not exactly the same as the fact that boys like blue and girls are associated with pink and whatever. You know, there are all kinds of things that are culturally contingent. And there's this way in which female coded mannerisms are understood as sex.
• 1:28:25
  biologically female and male-coded ones as male. So there's the phenomenon of the very camp effete male who, you know, that's usually associated with gay people where it's almost like an impersonation of a woman. At its most extreme version, that can become a transvestite or now a transgender person or, you know, an actual woman, so to speak, or a person who presents as a woman.
• 1:28:52
  What's going on there? Like why these particular attributes associated with one sex or another?
• 1:29:01
  That is a tricky one. Some of it's arbitrary. I do think some of it's arbitrary. I don't think there's any plausible explanation for a blue preference among boys and a pink preference among girls, for instance. I think that's the equivalent of just as arbitrary as having different names for boys and girls in the culture. Some behaviors associated stereotypically with each sex, I think, are not entirely different.
• 1:29:25
  arbitrary, not entirely socialized. I think that there is a contribution from nature as well. So I don't know. So just like men's greater aggression, for instance, might express itself to some degree in different mannerisms or different ways of speaking. If you see what I mean, that could be one of the factors shaping male typical behavior. Yeah, but I don't know what is
• 1:29:55
  It's interesting. I mean, I'm trying to think. I was just joking with a friend. We were reminiscing about the birdcage that has hilarious Nathan Lane and Robin Williams movie where both of them, I mean, you couldn't make that movie today, probably because you couldn't have a straight person camping up a super gay character.
• 1:30:12
  And you certainly couldn't have – there's also a character, a very funny character played by Hank Azaria who does a lot of voices on The Simpsons who's a super camp gay Latino Guatemalan guy with this very thick Hispanic accent. You couldn't have that kind of caricature either. But one of the scenes is –
• 1:30:31
  um uh robin williams coaching nathan lane to be more masculine because they have to have to pretend to pass as straight uh when he's buttering his toast and his toast breaks and he squeals like the toast breaks and and robin williams is like you know don't worry don't worry you can always get more toast and he's like yeah
• 1:30:54
  I can always get more toasts. I just have to remember, I can always get more toasts." And it's like, what is that? Also, it's a red rag to a bull to say to a woman, oh, stop being so hysterical or don't be so emotional about something. You know, this phenomenon of masculine being steady and rational and unflappable,
• 1:31:18
  and feminine or gay or queer or girly being prone to panic, hysteria, overblown emotionality. Where do you put that in the culture, in the nature versus nurture scale? I would say, I guess, two things about that. One is, I think that...
• 1:31:41
  we maybe have an innate tendency to identify with members of the same sex. Like most people identify with members of the same sex and will tend to copy those individuals rather than copying and imitating members of the other sex. That's inbuilt, but it sort of predisposes us to pick up certain culture rather than certain other culture.
• 1:31:59
  But I think in a lot of ways, I don't know, I think there is an innate contribution to some of those kind of differences. I do think there are certain emotions that women are more prone to than guys. Anxiety is one. Depression is another one. I think in terms of guys being rational and unflappable, I think we are often flappable, but we're flapped in different ways. So I think rather than going eek.
• 1:32:26
  or getting anxious, guys might be more likely to respond irrationally with anger. Both sexes are about equally prone to anger, apparently, but I think guys are more likely to act on it. And I think those particular differences, I think, probably have a – there's an innate contribution, I think, to those differences. Mm-hmm.
• 1:32:43
  Yes, that makes sense. Guys will stew on it and then lash out instead of just lashing out in a tiny way when it actually happens. I mean, you mentioned depression, but there are differences between suicide and help seeking between men and women too. What are those?
• 1:33:01
  Well, guys, women are more likely to attempt suicide, but guys are a lot more likely to actually kill themselves. And that is the case in the vast majority of nations. And typically, they're about three or four times more likely to kill themselves.
• 1:33:17
  A big part of the – and I don't think – it's not necessarily because, yeah, those are a subset of males that are particularly depressed necessarily. They may be no more depressed than the women who are attempting to kill themselves or maybe less so. They're just more likely to use more lethal methods.
• 1:33:37
  of suicide, I think. And I think it probably stems from their greater risk proneness, their higher pain threshold, their greater recklessness on average. I think those are some of the main reasons there. So you think, because I mean, there are a couple of possible explanations for the discrepancy between the success rates of suicide. One that I've heard is,
• 1:34:00
  that women are doing it more as a cry for help, and they don't really want to as much as the men do. And then the alternative explanation is closer to what I think you just articulated, which is they probably do want to just as much as men, but the men have such a, I don't know, a glorification of violence and sort of a high tolerance of blood and brutality that they're able to stomach the actual act. I think it's all of the above.
• 1:34:30
  It is more likely, women do more often do it more as a cry for help and as a gesture. Guys do as well, just women more often. And also women are more likely to seek help as well. You mentioned a sort of help seeking difference. Women are more likely to, well,
• 1:34:51
  go ahead and seek professional help, but also to talk more about stuff and try to sort things out with friends. It's a bit of a double sword in that it can lead to dwelling more than is helpful sometimes on problems, which can predispose people to depression. I guess it's a happy medium because if you do too much ruminating, that can be a problem. But if you don't do enough, that can be a problem as well if you just don't deal with your problems and let them mount.
• 1:35:19
  Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Is the gossiping, you know, and the pouring your heart out constructive? And at what point does it become a self-reinforcing feedback loop where you're creating many problems as you're resolving?
• 1:35:34
  A few myths that you go through about gender differences, such as that voters are sexist and that women's health issues are ignored. Just give us a brief litany and whether or not they're true or false. There are a bunch of those like that. So there is pretty good evidence that people are not anywhere near as sexist when it comes to voting, as people have assumed.
• 1:36:05
  very good evidence, I think, that in STEM fields in particular, but jobs in general, it's no longer the case that there's a massive bias against women. And in STEM jobs in particular, it seems to have flipped, at least in a lot of Western countries. And that is that two equally qualified individuals, one woman, one man,
• 1:36:26
  the woman actually has a better chance of getting the job. Now, it is the case that you find that fewer women are hired into mathematics, for instance, or physics. But the reason for that is that fewer women apply for those positions. And among those who do apply, the women are more likely than men to get an interview, more likely to be offered the job.
• 1:36:48
  there is the grading bias against boys that we saw earlier. I think people typically assume it's gone the other way. There is the gender pay gap is somewhat of a myth. People tend to assume that the gender pay gap is the difference in how much men versus women are paid for the same work. But the vast majority of it is not that. It's to do with...
• 1:37:15
  different areas that men versus women go into, different hours that they put into the job, the fact that there are more crazy men and crazy women who put 80 hours into the job. And that gap only appears actually among people with children. So before people had children, women typically earn just as much as men and in some cases somewhat more than men.
• 1:37:38
  Yeah, the gender pay gap is this weirdly tenacious myth, isn't it? I mean, it's because I remember hearing about it and then going, but isn't that illegal? And I looked it up and yes, it's illegal in most Western democracies for a man and a woman to be paid differently for the same job. And it has been for ages. The pay gap is that men and women do different jobs and work different numbers of hours. Yeah.
• 1:38:06
  And you can say that that's sexist because we've set up an economy in which the kinds of jobs that men do are more valued or whatever. But as you say, if you remove pregnancy and child rearing from the equation, then everything basically flattens out.
• 1:38:21
  And what about health? I actually assumed this was true, that you often hear, well, I mean, if the world is run by men and that's why erectile dysfunction is a disease that you can get a pharmaceutical benefit for on Medicare or something, but there are all kinds of women's issues that are not covered the same way, and I assume that that's true. What's the reality? Yeah.
• 1:38:50
  It does seem that I've seen several data sets from several different countries that suggest that actually there's more investment in female health problems than in male health problems. The ones that are uniquely female versus uniquely male. Most of the investment goes into areas that are for both sexes, but where it's for one sex or the other, it more often seems to be female than male.
• 1:39:15
  And you see, like in the US, there are several offices for women's health, but none for men's health. And that's fairly typical. It's kind of evening out in some Anglophone countries. But it is fairly typical that – it's interesting, we sort of –
• 1:39:33
  under the impression that women have been completely neglected in the past, they certainly were. But with that idea in mind, we have kind of inadvertently kind of reversed the direction of the bias there. And we actually are putting more investment into women's issues while talking as if we're still living in the past when it's going into men's issues.
• 1:39:56
  Yeah. And I mean, you know, overtly redressing a historical injustice is fine during the period in which it needs to be, you know, like affirmative action for marginalized racial communities or something like that is one thing when they actually are oppressed. Once you reach a point at which everything's at parity, then it becomes somewhat harder to justify. So we may be just living on the fumes of a zombie scenario. Yeah.
• 1:40:22
  Yeah, we could be, and maybe there are arguments why we should continue doing it, but I think we should have the discussion, and we should have the facts in front of us for that discussion.
• 1:40:32
  One interesting quirk about voters, we mentioned are voters racist and this is a, I'm sorry, are voters sexist and this is an ongoing conversation alongside the racial one. But I heard Emily Bazelon say an interesting thing. She's a writer for the New York Times magazine and a proud feminist. But she was also saying that actually voters don't seem to be particularly sexist in politics.
• 1:40:55
  America because we have such a low number of data sets for the presidency that you can't really infer anything from presidential candidates. And when you look at governor's races and mayoral races, and so
• 1:41:10
  it's not just that you go around asking people, you know, would you be less likely to vote for a female candidate? And you take their word for it. You actually just look at the willingness of Americans to vote for female candidates at lower levels of the political process. And it seems that there isn't a huge amount of sexism there. Yeah, I've heard that research. And it's interesting, right, because people...
• 1:41:35
  I often don't like hearing this. And so I sometimes feel like, oh, we're talking about something that's quite bad to talk about, you know, but actually it's really, really good news. And I hope that research is right. It's just not great news for the two bad candidates who have previously run for president. Well, indeed. It means that there was something else, something other than their ovaries going on and how unappealing they were.
• 1:41:57
  And lastly, let's just talk about the paradox, which I don't quite understand, and I hope you can explain, Steve, which I've heard before, but you also talk about the fact that in societies where there is greater...
• 1:42:14
  freedom of behavior between the sexes, there seem to be more conventional gender roles, and in ones that have greater formalized gender roles, there is less deviance? Can you, what is that? Am I getting that wrong? No.
• 1:42:33
  No, that's right. So that's called the gender equality paradox. And the idea is that for a lot of traits, you'd expect that in more patriarchal societies and in societies where men and women are treated very differently, you'd expect that the sex differences would be bigger in those societies. Even if there's an innate push, you'd think that treating the sexes differently would make the differences even bigger still. And then conversely, you'd
• 1:43:02
  and the like, where men and women are treated more similarly and the doors are more open for both sexes. You'd expect that the differences would be smaller, the sex differences would be smaller. But for a lot of traits, that seems not to be the case. For a lot of traits, it seems to be, in fact, surprisingly enough, the reverse. So you find that actually sex differences are larger in the more gender-equal nations. Now, I think maybe the gender equality paradox is,
• 1:43:29
  name is maybe not the ideal name for it, because I personally think that it's probably not gender equality per se that is creating that effect. Can you just explain the effect a little bit more? So, you know, you take a very culturally libertine society with the fewest amount of rigid gender conceptions. Maybe we're talking about Sweden or Denmark or something. I don't know. What is it that you're seeing there that you're not seeing
• 1:43:56
  in, I don't know, Saudi Arabia or what is it? Pick your patriarchal culture. Yeah, the Middle East or India or the like, yeah. Well, one of the most famous ones is the sex differences and career-related interests. So the people versus things interests, those sex differences actually get bigger.
• 1:44:17
  in Scandinavian countries and the more gender-equal countries. And they're actually smaller in places like the Middle East and the like. Personality differences as well. Sorry, how do you measure career differences in a place where women don't have the freedom to choose? Yeah.
• 1:44:36
  You can look at their expressed interests. The cultures where you find this, women do go into careers. So in societies where women just can't do it, where they just can't go into STEM, you would just have 100% representation of men. But in societies where they can do, then you can look at it. In India, for instance,
• 1:44:59
  The gap in the number of people that could go into STEM fields, the gender gap is much smaller than it is in places like Scandinavia. So, yeah, you can measure it by self-report and you can measure it by behavioural outcomes as well. Personality sex differences tend to be bigger in more gender equal nations. There's a very long list, actually, so I have it in my book, even some.
• 1:45:26
  sort of objectively measurable ones, not self-report, but just things like spatial abilities, which are sort of just like a test of an ability. You find that they actually seem to be larger than the more the gender equal nations. But I'm saying that I'm saying it's gender equal nations. But I think actually what's my guess about what's going on is that it's not about gender equality. It's about any societal level trait.
• 1:45:49
  that increases the freedom that people have to follow their own interests, develop their own talents. So gender equality is probably part of that, but I think also just individualism is part of that. The wealth of a nation is part of that. So in wealthier nations, people just have more scope to pursue what interests them. Maybe they are
• 1:46:10
  Not interested in STEM, maybe they're interested in impressionistic dancing or something. In wealthy nations, they have more scope to do that. Then in poorer nations, we're just going to think, well, I'd like to follow my heart, but instead I just need to go for the career that's going to be a big learner for me. Yeah, so anything that's associated with freedom, I think, increases the differences. There's an analogy with physical freedom.
• 1:46:33
  traits as well. So in societies where people have plenty of food and there's not too much disease cutting people down, people grow taller, but also the gap between the sexes grows as well. So you get a sort of comparable phenomenon in the physical realm. I think this is the gender equality paradox is the sort of psychological equivalent of that.
• 1:46:54
  where when you have good soil, so to speak, for people to grow as individuals, their personalities to come out, their preferences to develop, they grow more, and the individual differences...
• 1:47:07
  differences between individuals come out more, but then also average differences between the sexes come out more. Right, right. Yeah, but I mean, it is interesting that when women are allowed to be as womanly as they want,
• 1:47:25
  Sorry, when women are allowed to do whatever they want, they tend to become more womanly than the women who are suppressed in doing whatever they want, are able to choose to be.
• 1:47:39
  Yeah. Right? You know, like, it does imply something interesting about what our actual collective wants are as males and females. It does. The greater liberation we have, that more liberation does not iron out the differences but allows them to blossom.
• 1:47:59
  Yeah, exactly. And it does iron out some. So some sex differences do actually get smaller. I think one good example is the sex difference in math ability. And the most equal nations just kind of disappears. So I suspect that the average difference is plausibly not innate at all and was just due to social factors. But yeah, with some of the other differences where they expand...
• 1:48:22
  You can at least make a reasonable argument that maybe that's because they are kind of inbuilt differences that are just flourishing to a greater extent. Fascinating. Well, may we all flourish as much as we possibly can. Steve, thanks for your insights. Fascinating to talk to you. And I'm glad that you're in from the cold wilds of being the heterodox dissident and back to being a boring but fascinating academic. Thanks. Boring but fascinating sounds great. Yeah.
• 1:48:47
  It's kind of cool. There's some sort of street cred, though, to being a dissident. Yep, nope. Kind of funny. I thought it was quite funny that I was able to be this, like, badass dude just to say really, really common sense things that basically everybody believes. Men and women are different. Let's get him! Bring the mob with the flaming torches and throw it out a window. Yeah, crazy.