#gender differences

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See also:

Abstract

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

Abstract

Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

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Not that the ggs I stan don’t tease each other, but with bgs it has always seems so mean to me even when everyone involved is laughing it off.

Maybe it’s my years of going to an girls school showing through 😅

I also went to a girls' school for middle school! Is that why I find it extra upsetting? My school was a small convent school taught and run by nuns and almost all the teachers and staff were women too. Huh...

I went to Itzy's fan meeting type concert recently where they announced their contract renewal, and in preparation I watched most of Season to of It'zzz, their reality tv content, and I found it INCREDIBLY relaxing because it felt so gentle, sweet, pink, fluffy. They have very similar set ups to Ateez or Stray Kids, and yet it's done in a way that feels incredibly charming and loving. Even when they're dissing each other and exposing each other's flaws! (I keep meaning to do a write up of this and then getting sidetracked.)

The reasons appear to be multi-layered: partly biological, partly developmental, partly social conditioning.

1. Socialization and suppression

From early childhood, boys are discouraged from seeking or expressing physical comfort except in narrow contexts (sports, aggression, sex). Girls, meanwhile, are permitted — even expected — to use touch for bonding: hugging friends, leaning close, soothing others.

By adulthood, that conditioning is so deep that many autistic men simply don’t recognize their deprivation as touch hunger; they reinterpret it as fatigue, irritability, or a need to withdraw. It’s not that they don’t have the biology — it’s that the language of the body has been culturally silenced in them.

2. Masking styles and attachment imprint

Autistic women are often hyper-attuned to others’ emotional states as part of social masking — scanning faces, tones, micro-movements to stay safe. That hyper-attunement means they also register co-regulation cues more vividly. When those cues vanish, the absence feels like falling out of sync with gravity.

Many autistic men, by contrast, mask through avoidance or intellectualization: distancing from embodied cues to manage overwhelm. The result is a kind of disembodied competence — they live in their heads, sometimes barely registering sensory deprivation until it becomes physical pain or shutdown.

3. Hormonal and neurochemical modulation

Oxytocin and estrogen interact closely. Estrogen increases the sensitivity of oxytocin receptors and amplifies the calming response to touch. Testosterone tends to dampen oxytocin sensitivity and shift reward salience toward dominance or achievement rather than affiliation.

That doesn’t mean men lack the capacity for tenderness — just that the same physical stimulus produces a weaker regulatory signal. In autistic men, where baseline arousal and sensory gating already differ, that smaller oxytocin effect may not register as compelling relief, so they don’t crave it in the same way.

4. Sensory integration profiles

Autistic females statistically show more tactile seeking and tactile defensiveness overlap — meaning touch can be overwhelming and deeply needed, depending on context. That paradox keeps the body’s awareness of touch front-of-mind.

Autistic males more often present with tactile avoidance without the craving side; they shut down the whole channel early in life because of overstimulation or social confusion around touch. Over time, their nervous systems may simply adapt by numbing to that sensory dimension.

5. Safety and context

For many autistic women, touch is one of the few reliable routes to grounding when words and logic fail — but it’s also where trauma often happens. So when safe, consensual touch does exist, it can feel transcendent — the nervous system finally exhaling after years of defensive tension.

Okay, let's talk about the specific event that touched this off, Italy's Angela Carini abandoned a boxing match with Algeria's Imane Khelif after only 46 seconds, citing Khelif's strength and power. Some of the less reputable people in politics and media then began to speculate that she had some gender advantage despite having passed a gender and drug test which would have discovered something.

Look, let's get this out of the way at the start, Imane Khelif is a woman. She was born a girl and matured into a woman. She lives in and competes for a country where gender transition is illegal and there's no indication to any reasonable person that she's anything other than a woman who is very good at boxing. Perhaps she has some genetics that help her but, let's face it, every single athlete capable of competing at the Olympic level does; no one complained that Michael Phelp's low production of lactic acid was an unfair advantage! The only reason that there's any "controversy" at all is that people have this ingrained idea that women should NOT be too good at boxing.

And, ultimately, that's the biggest problem with this whole gender panic. There are three (count 'em, three) transgender athletes in the Olympics this year, Canada's Quinn (soccer), New Zealand's Laurel Hubbard (weightlifting), and the US's Chelsea Wolfe (BMX Freestyle - Reserve). Every other athlete in the Olympics was born in their assigned gender and has been tested as such in order to compete.

So why are people panicking about trans athletes? Simple, because their ideas about gender do not match the reality. Not every woman is physically smaller and weaker than every man, not every man has a hulking physique, and there is no clear dividing line between the testosterone levels of women and men. There's also racism at work, African and Middle Eastern women tend to have facial features associated with masculinity in the west while Asian men tend to have facial features associated with femininity in the west making it easy for white audiences without exposure to minorities to assume the worst.

Ultimately, though, the problem is this idea of a sharp gender binary as if men and women were two clearly different species with no overlap between them. Let's say this as clearly as possible: there is no way to define "woman" in a way that excludes all trans women and includes all cisgender women. There is simply too much overlap between men and women; biologically speaking, mammals in general have very small gender differences compared to other groups of species such as insects or certain groups of fish (look up the differences between male and female spiders or anglerfish sometime, THAT'S a gender binary).

What that means is that, no matter how you try to define "woman" or "man", you will always end up with a category that includes some people who every reasonable person would consider to be the opposite.

So here's the question I think we all need to answer before we go any further: what is the purpose of separating sports by gender? Is it so that inferior female athletes can get medals that would be denied to them by superior male athletes? Is it to reinforce our cultural gender norms? Is it another way to divide the competition for fairness like weight classes in boxing?