The Economist has a survey of recent research (with references) into gender differences in human behaviour.
... [B]iological explanations of human behaviour are making a comeback as the generation of academics that feared them as a covert way of justifying eugenics, or of thwarting Marxist utopianism, is retiring. The success of neo-Darwinism has provided an intellectual underpinning for discussion about why some differences between the sexes might be innate. And new scanning techniques have enabled researchers to examine the brain's interior while it is working, showing that male and female brains do, at one level, operate differently. The results, however, do not always support past clichés about what the differences in question actually are.
2 Comments:
The problem with examining the brain while it is working is that you can see what parts of the brain are working while certain activities happen but you don't know what that means other than that part of the brain is used or lights up. We are not yet sophisitcated to understand which parts working together mean what thing. There may be subtle activities that make a difference with some areas of the brain than with other areas. Its a start. We can see differences of male and female behavior but we don't know biolgoically all that underpin them.
Interesting article. I have been trying to follow this issue for a while ( may be because I felt more close to my mother than father) and recently collected a few URLs while following similar issues in a mainly tamil site HUB. I posted some in Uma's site:
http://indianwriting.blogsome.com/2006/07/24/true/
and they are completely different from those in this article. There is an old book which is very readable called "The Red queen" by Matt Ridley. There has been much work since then but the conclusions seem to be basically the same; that men and women are different both physically and mentally. This of course has nothing to do with questions of equality. My own impression is that women make somewhat better administrators than men.
Swarup
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