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Posts archived in Gender


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The Olympics and gender

August 1, 2012 by .

Sex testing for elite female athletes is a highly charged issue. In the A2 Complete Companion (page 105 3rd edition) we have written about the past decision by the Olympic committee to decide gender on the basis of obvious physical differences. Just before the 2012 Olympics the committee released new regulations which involve measuring testosterone levels. There are many who regard this as a flawed approach (see, for example, Katrina Karkazis’s blog or click on CBS news item on right).

One argument is that there is little evidence that testosterone does confer an athletic advantage in a predictable way. In fact women who have AIS (andogen insensitivity syndrome), and are thus insensitive to testosterone, are actually overrepresented among elite athletes. A further argument is the question of whether other biological abnormalities should also be banned (high levels of testosterone in women are due to medical conditions, so should people with conditions that enhance aerobic conditions also be banned?).

Such discussions continue to highlight the role of gender research in understanding what determines male-female differences.

 

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Gender – the biosocial approach

July 25, 2011 by .

I was a bit uncertain about a comment in the AQA guide to specification changes regarding gender dysphoria. The topic of gender dysphoria has now been moved to be included with the biosocial approach (the new specification says ‘The biosocial approach to gender development including gender dysphoria’). The AQA guide to the specification changes points out that ‘This may require re structuring your delivery to emphasise links to biosocial approach’.

Feeling a bit concerned about the implications I wrote to AQA for clarification. They say that the biosocial approach in general does not refer to any specific theory but simply assumes an interaction between biological (e.g. genetic) and psychosocial factors.

“If a candidate describes genetic and psychosocial contributions to gender development and how they might interact, this would be an ideal approach to the question. Of course, it would be equally acceptable for a candidate to describe a specific theory of biosocial interactions in gender development.”

When it comes to gender dysphoria I think it might be difficult to make biosocial theories relevant (in our A2 book we have discussed two specific theories). Students should simply emphasise the biological + the psychosocial in their answers. In exam questions on the biosocial approach, the theories would provide a good basis for an answer.

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Can you tell if someone throws like a girl?

December 26, 2010 by .

Interesting range of online experiments involving bio-motion here

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Evolutionary Psychology explains why men are better at Scrabble

December 2, 2010 by .

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world’s 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.

The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like ‘khat,’ doing computerised drills and memorising long lists of letter combinations, called alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.

. . .

The guys who memorise these lists have a hard time explaining their passion. But the evolutionary roots of it seem clear to anthropologists like Helen Fisher of Rutgers University.

‘Evolution has selected for men with a taste for risking everything to get to the top of the hierarchy,’ she said, ‘because those males get more reproductive opportunities, not only among primates but also among human beings. Women don’t get as big a reproductive payoff by reaching the top. They’re just as competitive with themselves – they want to do a good job just as much as men do – but men want to be more competitive with others.’”

From New York Times

Images from Adverblog

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Finger length and promiscuity

November 7, 2010 by .

It seems that you can tell whether a person is promiscuous or monogamous just by looking at the fingers! Well, maybe it doesn’t work for individuals but researchers curious about human evolution have used finger length to make an educated guess about some of our distant ancestors’ mating habits.

According to evolutionary theory male characteristics such as aggressiveness and competitiveness are more likely in promiscuous species than monogamous ones. Looking at fossil skeletons we can therefore suggest that Australopithecus, which lived three to four million years ago was monogamous whereas an even earlier group, Ardipithecus, was highly promiscuous – all because of their finger length!

Of course it isn’t the finger length that causes sexual behaviour – it is levels of the male hormone androgen. Higher aggression and competitiveness in males is related to intrasexual selection (the more androgens the more competitive) and is also related to higher levels of androgens. An effect of higherlevels of androgens is that they cause a short forefinger and longer ring finger. This means that males high in androgens have a low forefinger to ring finger ratio whereas males low in androgens have a high ratio.

Finger length ratios have been linked to lots of other things, such as numeracy and literacy (see The A2 Complete Companion page 288).

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Meat for sex

June 20, 2010 by .

Meat was an important source of nutrition for ancestral humans (as it is today, MacDonalds aside). It has been suggested that the importance of meat meant that men often traded it for other favours such as forging allegiances or for sex  (Stanford, 1999 – see pages 101, 130 and 131 of our A2 Complete Companion). Observations of animal and human behaviour have been used to support this ‘meat for sex’ hypothesis, however a recently published study says the suggestion is baseless. Gilby et al. (2010) conducted an observational study of chimpanzees over a 28 year period (see here and here) and found no evidence that males hunted more when females were most fertile, nor were they more likely to share meat with fertile females. However there continues to be evidence that supports the meat for sex hypothesis (see here). This study  by Gomes and Boesch (2006) found direct evidence of meat exchange in another study of wild chimpanzees. It may be that males exchange meat on a long-term basis i.e. they don’t do it just when a female is fertile but provide meat continually so they can take advantage of fertile periods when they occur.