Baby, look at you now.

Gender differences are often thought to be largely the result of socialization. Many researchers use infant studies as a way to avoid the complications of socialization effect. Connellan et al (2000) found that newborns males would spend more time looking at a mobile whereas female newborns would spend more time looking at a face. This study was coauthored by Simon Baron-Cohen, best known for his "extreme male brain" theory of autism (or possibly for his famous cousin, Sacha Baron Cohen). Leeb and Rejskind (2000) were not able to find gender differences in face gazing in infants under 5 days old, but did find differences in infants at 13-18 weeks. Whether this is a socialization effect or a developmental effect is unclear. Tronick and Cohn (1989) suggest a developmental rate difference between boys and girls in their ability to synchronize with adults, but Culp (1983) demonstrated that adults react very differently to infants based on their perceived gender.

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I have no strong feelings either way about the gender socialization of infants. I am constantly baffled by the wide variety of clothing available for infants (and the often extreme gender specificity of the outfits) but I can't draw any conclusions about how people respond to infants. However, interpreting infant reactions seems to me to be as fuzzy a science as interpreting animal reactions; perhaps more, because the animal's brains are more often at their fully developed stage.

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Differences in religiosity (pt 2: Effects?)

As discussed yesterday, women are usually found to be more religious than men. What effects, if any, does this have on their lives? Norton et al (2006) found in an elderly population (ages 65-100, non-senile) of members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, religious involvement correlated with lower levels of depression in women, but higher levels in men. Ferraro and Albrecht-Jensen (1991) found that greater religious involvement was correlated with better health at all ages and genders, but that more conservative religious affiliation was correlated with worse health. Maselko and Kubzansky (2005) examined the effect of public religious activity, private religious activity, and spiritual experiences on "health and well-being" (a composite score of "psychological distress, happiness and self-rated health"). They found that while public religious activity had a positive effect on the well-being of both men and women, spiritual experiences had a positive effect on the well-being of women only. McCullough and Laurenceau (2005) examined health trajectory over a course of decades, and found that religiosity predicted better health trajectories in women, but not men.

What is the relationship suggested by these findings? Mitchell and Weatherly (2000) suggest that reduced health leads to less functional ability, and therefore, to reduced participation in church-based activities. Mitchell and Weatherly also suggest that reduced ability may lead to depressive symptoms. Conclusions about the effect of religious activity on health are so confounded with ability to participate that this example is used in Christenfeld et al's 2004 review on "the illusion of statistical control."

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Perhaps the correct question to be asking is: "what activities do people give up first?" When we looked at hip replacement (9/26/06), we found that women would put off hip replacement until they were far more incapacitated than their male counterparts. Reduced mobility didn't seem to be as much of a motivating factor for women, which might lead them to self-report their health as "acceptable" when their mobility is reduced.

Perhaps what we should be noting here is not that women with high religiosity tend to be healthier, but that women who are not healthy seem to have reduced religiosity. Perhaps women are expecting more results from their faith than men are.

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Differences in religiosity (pt 1: Causes)

Studies have consistently shown that women tend to be more religious than men. Researchers have associated this difference with such possible mediators as risk-taking (Miller and Hoffman, 1995), locus of control (Fiori et al, 2006), prioritization of values (Saroglou, 2004), and gender orientation (Thompson, 1991). L. J. Francis's 1997 review divided the theories into two types: socialization/structural location theories and individual/psychological personality theories. Francis concludes that investigations into gender orientation are likely to be the "most fruitful source." Feltey and Poloma (2004) go further with their finding that sex is not a significant predictor of religiosity, but that gender role ideology is.

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Religion plays such a small role in my own life that it never occurred to me to look to this area for gender differences when searching for subjects. A story in the Times of Malta (1/28/07) saying that all non-religious people in a survey were male reminded me of this issue. When I was younger (and female), religion and faith played a much deeper role in my life. Even spirituality stayed with me through the early stages of my transition; I went to a shaman for a rite of passage just before my top surgery (it's worth noting that I was raised in a pagan tradition). While I don't rule out the possibility that I may find a need for spiritual comfort at some point in the future, I think it's interesting that my taste for religion has faded as my masculinity has grown.

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Sex and Music

David J. Hargreaves (2007) found significant correlations between gender and musical tastes in a U.K. sample. Out of 35 musical genres, the strongest male bias was for blues (72.3% of men vs. 27.7% of women). Women preferred "current chart pop" at an even more disparate rate (83.3% to 16.7%). Van Eijk (2001) found that "pop" preferences were not related to gender, and were more related to age and education. A breakdown by gender vs. age does not appear to be available for Hargreaves' sample. Hargreaves also found that women reported liking more different genres, which is consistent with previous research.

However, it may be that women and men are classifying music differently. Christenson and Peterson (1988) suggest that the "mapping" of music types has "crucial differences" between men and women. Rentfrow and Gosling (2003) found significant correlations with personality traits and musical preference. Given that many personality traits have been found to be correlated with gender, this could explain some divergence in male and female musical tastes. Rentfrow and Gosling also that high verbal IQ was associated with preference for "reflective and complex" and "intense and rebellious" music. Verbal IQ was negatively correlated with "upbeat and conventional" and "energetic and rhythmic" musical types.

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I was at a party a few years ago when a debate broke out over whether women liked classic rock. A woman at the party had expressed a liking for the local classic rock station, and men at the party were so surprised that they actually began quizzing her, to make sure she wasn't "faking" being a classic rock fan. Her music geekitude left them duly humbled. My own history with music is more of a story of subculture affiliation. I just don't care much about music, and most of my attempts to learn about one style or another have been tied into entering the subculture associated with the style. Lately, I've been playing with Last.fm, a music-listening tracking website, and attempting to categorize music. I find it much easier and more useful to tag a song based on the subject of the lyrics than the musical style, but apparently I'm in the minority on this one.

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Body deception

Many studies rely on self-reporting for their data, but this can be a serious weakness. Even for such measurable items as height and weight, self-report can differ significantly from reality. Brener et al (2003) compared the self-reported height and weight of over 2000 high school students to their measured height and weight, and found that on average, the teens reported themselves as 2.7 inches taller than they were and 3.5 pounds lighter. Female students were more likely to underreport their weight than males, but in a later study of high school students, Brener et al (2004) found that female students were more likely to consider themselves overweight. Spencer et al (2002) compared reported and measured values in a middle-aged British population, and again found height overreported and weight underreported. Gillum and Sempos (2005) suggest that there is also a cultural aspect to this phenomenon; they found that the difference between reported and actual values was greatest in Mexican Americans. The point of concern in all of these studies is that the unrealistic reports suggest that the populations will not engage in weight-control practices, because they do not consider themselves to be overweight.

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My driver's license says that I am 5'5" tall. That's purely wishful thinking. In reality, I'm probably about 5'4" (I think I'm a However, the fact that I overreported it doesn't mean that I don't know. When I 'm comparing myself to height and weight charts or talking to a doctor, I always look at the worst-case scenario: the shortest I think I could reasonably be measured and the heaviest I've been recently. However, for friends, my response varies. In short, I lie. However, I have to wonder about the standards these studies are using for "overweight" and "risk of overweight" In Brener 2004, for example, they report that 22.3% of students perceived themselves as overweight, compared to 47.4% who were "overweight or at risk for overweight." I have two problems with that assertion. First, only 26% of the students were actually in the "overweight category. They didn't give the students a "risk of overweight" category for self-assessment. Secondly, when half the students are "normal" and half the students are "overweight" (only 1.5% were in the underweight category by measured values), I don't know what basis for comparison they expect the students to use.

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Try not to smile

The Oxford English Dictionary describes a smile as "a slight and more or less involuntary movement of the countenance expressive of pleasure, amusement, affection, etc., or of amused contempt, disdain, incredulity, or similar emotion." An expression that can represent affection or contempt seems too confusing to have any utility, but many argue that a happy face is universally recognized. James Russell (1994) discusses flaws in this research, but concedes there is probably some association between facial expression and emotion labels.

Men and women seem to differ in their use of smiles. Hall and Friedman (1999) tested the hypothesis that status affects nonverbal communication more than gender, leading to more accommodating behaviours from (lower-status) women (after Nancy Henley, 1977 & 1985). They did not find any support for this hypothesis. In fact, Hall and Friedman found "gender differences became more pronounced when status differences were controlled." Women smiled significantly more than men in interactions with coworkers of both higher and lower status. This is consistent with LaFrance et al's (2003) meta-analysis of 162 reports, which found greater smiling rates in women and girls than men and boys. However, LaFrance et al's analysis is that these gender differences become more pronounced in environments where gender roles are more strictly enforced.

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One of the first pieces of advice I got when I began to transition was to try to stop smiling so much: "men don't smile." However, I think the various interpretations of smile haven't been thoroughly examined. A U.S. News and World Report article on Nancy Pelosi (Borger 11/26/06) seems to describe what I mean: "women recognize that kind of smile: pasted, forced, painful." Women smile not only to represent happiness or contempt, but also to cover anguish. The only similar example I can think of for a man is Tom Delay's mugshot. I know that I begin to grin when I have bad news to deliver, which has been a socially terrible habit for me, and I've been fighting it for years. I'm not happy, but I can't stop smiling.

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Diffusion tensor imaging

Adult women seem to have more white matter than men (see "Does Size Matter", 11/1/06), a finding that is popularly used to explain gender differences in cognitive processes. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a MRI technique that is being used to examine white matter connectivity, and as such, may have extensive applications in studying sex differences.

Silveri et al (2006) used DTI to assess differences in the white matter connectivity of adolescents, in an examination of impulse control and response inhibition: "sex-specific differences were observed for the relationship between FA [essentially, preferentiality of flow-direction] and impulsive behavior in the right anterior callosum for males and in the splenium for females." Szeszko et al (2003) found greater leftward asymmetry in the frontal lobe in women vs. men using DTI, correlating with verbal IQ. This is especially confusing in light of prior findings indicating greater asymmetry in men's language localization (see Speak My Languge, 1/19/07).

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I'm always slightly peeved by the "women have more white matter" arguments because they tend to set off my "wonk science" alarm. It always feels like it's just another justification to call women irrational and men logical. The really annoying part is that I can be aware of myself not giving the argument enough of a chance for completely irrational reasons, which makes it feel like the argument is legitimate. After all, my brain (probably) developed normally for a female, and therefore I'm doomed to irrationality and diffuse inference, right? Some days it feels like I don't need television; I can just sit back and watch my biases chase their own tails.

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The long way, baby

According to a National Institute of Health report (2006), there are significant differences in the way men and women use tobacco products. Women tend to smoke fewer cigarettes and inhale less deeply. Women also seem to have less success in quitting smoking. Smoking cessation-related weight gain seems to be a bigger concern to women than men as well (see "Smoking and Weight", 10/24/06).

In the United States, smoking in the general population has decreased, but more so for men than for women. While smoking was considered unfeminine in the 19th century, this may have contributed to the popularity of cigarettes with women in the 20th century. After the first world war, "more and more women started to use the cigarette as a weapon in their increasing challenge to traditional ideas about female behaviour" say Amos and Haglund (2000). Today, the percentages of men and women who smoke are very close: in 2004, 23.9% of American men smoked vs. 18.5% of women (Morbidity and Mortality report, 2006). American men's and women's smoking rates seem to vary by region at similar rates, according to the Center for Disease Control (2004). The lowest rate for smoking in both men and women in the U.S. is found in Utah (14.0%, 9.9%) whereas the highest is found in Kentucky (33.8%, 28.1%).

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The arguments for the relative increase in women's smoking (compared to men's) seem to focus on two main influences: marketing and social acceptance. It strikes me as odd that there are not greater effects of location on women's smoking, if the main reasons are so overwhelmingly sociological. However, I've found that my own justifications vary depending on social pressure. I've been an on-again-off-again (mostly on-again) smoker for 14 years. When I was a woman, and people told me that women shouldn't smoke, I felt like smoking was an act of defiance and rebellion against restrictive sex roles. When I was in environments where men and women were equally encouraged to quit, I saw smoking as a sort of subculture. The issue is that I wanted to smoke (being addicted) no matter what the social environment, and looking for social reasons made me more likely to find excuses.

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Speak my language

Men and women are often said to "speak a different language." The primary explanations given for this tend to be sociological, such as Cheris Kramarae's "muted group theory." However, some anatomical theories of sex differences in language are emerging.

Shaywitz et al (1995) suggest that men's brains have greater language lateralization than women's; that is, language is almost entirely localized to the left hemisphere in men, but represented on both sides in women. Miller et al (2005) found right-hemisphere or bilateral language representation more often in women than men in a group of 170 survivors of early brain injury, which they suggest may indicate greater adaptability in female brains. However, this result doesn't seem to take into account the greater prevalence of bilateral representation in women in general. On the other hand, supporting the idea that women's brains may have an easier time preserving language function, Walder et al (2006) male schizophrenics suffered deeper language impairment than female schizophrenics, when compared to healthy controls.

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In 1995, I broke a bone for the first time; it was my skull. It's the only bone I've ever broken, and it was a hairline fracture in my forehead over my right eye. It was the summer before my third year of college, which was when I was due to take the major writing requirement course for my degree. That fall, I found I had a much harder time concentrating and putting ideas into words than I'd ever had before. I ended up writing my professor a letter asking for help, because I blamed my difficulty on the head injury that summer. I needn't have worried, but at the time, I ended up very stressed out worrying about how much I'd impaired myself with my car accident. I passed the course without trouble, and in retrospect, it seems more likely that stress was the culprit, rather than trauma, but at the time, I was scared as hell that I'd killed my ability to write.

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Judging gender

Humans make judgements about the perceived gender of other humans so quickly that we are usually not aware of having done it. What factors influence these snap decisions? Ganel et al (2002) suggest that identity and gender are inseparably linked in cognitive facial recognition. This is in contrast to other models that suggest identity and sex are processed in separate pathways; Ganel et al only found these routes separable when gender decisions were based on hairstyle. Kovacs et al (2004) found that exposing male raters to gender-specific steroid scents influenced their gender judgment. Hoss et al (2005) found that attractiveness increased speed and accuracy of both male and female classification of faces by adults. Masculinity facilitated classification of males by both adults and children, but facial femininity did not affect identification of females.

A lack of clarity in this decision may be distinctly unsettling. Krendl et al (2006) found (via fMRI) that amygdala activation was stronger in evaluating transsexual and "unattractive" faces than in evaluating pierced, overweight, or control faces. Baudouin and Gallay (2006) found that raters responded to composite faces of males or females as more "distinctive" than composite faces that were not specifically gendered.

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When I was first transitioning, I tried to stop classifying people by gender. This proved to be a lot more difficult than I expected. All I succeeded in doing was being wrong more often, which was enlightening in and of itself. Still, it's upsetting when you realize that the "lesbian" you've been checking out really is a teenaged boy. The only success I've managed on this front is in being less unsettled when I turn out to be wrong. Since I'm very bad at admitting when I'm wrong in other areas of my life, I consider this a major victory.

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Spitting image

Anxiety about going to the dentist is very common, affecting as much as 7-10% of the population, according to Addex Pharmaceuticals, who are working on a new drug to control it. Liddell and Locker (1997) replicated previous findings that women and younger people had more anxiety about going to the dentist than men and older people. Their study tied this anxiety to the main themes of pain and control, which they concluded had gendered correlates. However, it's also possible that women have more anxiety because they get worse news.

Women tend to have more dental caries (cavities) than men cross culturally. The traditional anthropological view holds that this is caused by behavioral and dietary differences. Lukacs and Largaespada (2006) offer an alternative explanation, based on changes in saliva brought on by puberty, menses, and pregnancy. Lukacs and Largaespada suggest that the differences in women's saliva makes their mouths more cariogenic.

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I had no idea that women get more cavities than men. It never turned up in any of my searches, and seems to go against some of the other patterns we've noticed. Women seem to spend more time on self-care than men, and more time at the doctor (of course, we have seen support that this is because women have more health needs). Personally, I've seen more men than women complain that societal standards of oral hygiene are unreasonable, but perhaps a slack attitude is a luxury they can afford.

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The power of persuasion: Computers vs. People

Gualdagno and Cialdini (2007) examined persuasive techniques on counter-attitudinal topics. While they found that both men and women were more easily swayed by people they believed to be like themselves, men were more likely to be persuaded via e-mail, and women responded better to face-to-face interaction. This effect was especially pronounced when the persuader was considered "unlike" the subject.

Stern and Mullinix (2004) examined the persuasiveness of human vs. computer-generated speech. While they found that women were more persuaded than men in general, and that human speech was more persuasive than computer-generated speech in general, there was no gender-by-modality effect. Audio vs. video presentation seemed to have no effect.

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Who among us hasn't gotten a computer to swear? It seems to be a truism of human nature that if you sit someone down in front of a speech-generating-computer, the first thing they'll do is try to get it to curse, sometimes at length (stupid Speak & Spell, and its curse filters). The swearing computer never fails to amuse, perhaps because the computer has no meaning, no emotional tone behind its words. The removal of emotional tone may explain part of why men are more easily convinced by email, and why women are not. Gualdagno and Cialdini used same-sex confederates in their experiments on persuasion; I would be interested to see whether there was an opposite-sex effect.

In fairness, I should admit that I am fairly easy to persuade, but I could probably be talked out of that.

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We were only freshmen

Noel-Levitz higher education consultants (2007) surveyed nearly 100,000 college freshmen in 2006, and found some interesting gender differences in their responses. Men tended to be more confident about their ability, but women tended to report better study habits. The Noel-Levitz report states that only 73 men graduate college for every 100 women who do. Diprete and Buchmann (2006) suggest that the benefits of a college education have also increased more for women than for men over the past forty years. However, Tanaguchi and Kaufman (2005) unsurprisingly found that being divorced and having young children made completing a degree less likely for "non-traditional college students" (entering college years after high school) of both genders, although they note that these conditions more traditionally affect women.

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The last time I got angry enough to physically attack someone, I was 16, and a college freshman. One of the guys from my dorm saw that he was getting under my skin, and wanted to see how far he could push. He suggested that the only reason women entered college was to get the "Mrs." degree, and (being young, dumb, and unrealistic) I attempted to clock him with a dumbbell. Even fourteen years later, I have a hard time thinking dispassionately about the topic.

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Boy Nurses!

Connie Llanos (2007), reporting for the L.A. Daily News, says that "men are ignoring the social stigmas associated with nursing and finding that the job is not just women's work." The medical industry is actively recruiting men to combat the nationwide nursing shortage. Jerry Lucas, editor of Male Nurse Magazine, told Llanos he "felt compelled" to get men interested in nursing after working in New York City after September 11th. Progress, however, is slow. Jean P. Fisher (2007) reporting for the NC News & Observer says that 3% of RNs in North Carolina were male in 1985. Twenty years later, men still make up only 7%. "The biggest challenge is still getting men to see nursing as a masculine role," Billy Bevill (VP of recruiting at NCCN) told Fisher.

Simpson (2004) reported that men in female-dominated careers "adopt a variety of strategies to re-establish a masculinity that has been undermined by the ‘feminine‘ nature of their work." Beck et al (2006) found that boys were less comfortable than girls in entering into a non-traditionally-gendered career. Gender stereotypes do have a significant effect on the workplace conditions for male nurses. Evans (2002) suggests that the stereotype of males as sexual aggressors impacts the ability of a male nurse to do his work. Yassi et al (1995) did not find significant gender differences in workplace injury rates between male and female nurses, despite Floge and Merrill's (1986) observation that male nurses were asked to lift things more often than female nurses.

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As I've mentioned before, I gravitate towards other-gendered fields. There may be some truth to my mother's insistence that I have to put myself in the minority. However, I think that the important thing to look at between yesterday's Girl Geeks! and today's post is the implication that women are empowered by entering into male fields, whereas men are weakened by entering into female fields. This inherent sexism is probably too obvious to be worth stating, but I don't see any obvious solution.

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Girl Geeks!

Annalee Newitz, co-editor of the book and blog She's Such a Geek!, declared 2007 the "Year of Women in Science." Newitz attributes recent focus on women in the sciences to backlash against Larry Summers' "ass-minded comments." Her post (12/19/06) highlights some 2006 studies investigating the role of women in the sciences. This week, the "Conference of Women Leaders in Science, Technology and Engineering" in Kuwait examined increasing opportunies for women scientists in Muslim-majority countries.

Web content for and about girl geeks doesn't seem to be in short supply, but often seem to focus more on the girl than the geek. CNET published a list of the Top Ten Girl Geeks in November that sparked quite a buzz, by completely missing the point*. GeekZine's GeekGirl of the Month and Geek Girls Rule! (both possibly NSFW) appear to be equally clue-free.

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Newitz, and co-editor Charlie Anders, will be reading from She's Such a Geek at The Center for New Words in Cambridge, MA tonight. The anthology of essays discusses "the growing role of women in the sciences, fandom, gaming and other areas." While I constantly trip over girlgeek content in my personal browsing, searching for it this morning to provide links was more frustrating than I expected. While I'm all for the sexualization of... well, just about everything ... the very few sites that actually focus on these women's "geek cred" is annoying. She's Such a Geek is a good one, as is GirlGeeks.org.

Having completely failed to tie this into gender differences, I suppose I'll have to write about male nurses tomorrow, or something.

*bloggers were annoyed that Darryl Hannah and Paris Hilton made the cut. I didn't think the list was that bad, honestly.

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Cohabitation and Marriage

The literature on the health effects of marriage status is substantial and of varying levels of reliability. Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton (2001) provide a decent review. Generally, men get more health benefit from marriage than do women, but women in unsatisfactory marriages complain of more health problems than do men (or women in happy marriages).

A major question in more recent research is whether non-marital cohabitation has the same benefits as marriage. Studies on this question have had mixed results. Age seems to be a factor. Brown et al (2005) examined an older population (over 50) and found that marriage was associated with lower levels of depression as compared to cohabitation, but only in males. Mastekaasa (2006) studied a younger population (19-30) and found that marriage or cohabitation was associated with more distress in males 19-23, when compared to living alone. In females 19-30, and males 23-30, living alone was associated with more distress than either partnered condition. Unsurprisingly, both Mastekaasa and Brown et al found that breaking up was a source of major stress and distress for both cohabiting and married couples.

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I don't think marriage and cohabitation are exactly the same; it seems foolish to argue that. However, I have been accused of shacking up at the drop of a hat. I enjoy living with my partner (in the general and specific senses). I have cohabited with four partners over the past 10 years, and if I'd been through 4 marriages in that span of time, I'd say something was very, very wrong. However, I do think there's probably a point in cohabitation where it approaches the significance of marriage, and I haven't seen any studies examining a way to divide up cohabitating couples into categories. Musick and Bumpas (2006) comes closest with their "trajectory" analysis of relationships.

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Too bad, so SAD

Psychology Info Online (2003) defines Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as "a pattern of depressive or manic episodes that occurs with the onset of the winter months... [which] abate once the days become longer and warmer in the Spring." "Affective" refers to affect, or mood, and not to the seasons affecting a person. The site also says that SAD is more often diagnosed in women than men. It may be that this is related to women's higher rates of depression in general (see 30 Aug 2006), but it could also be tied to daily routine.

A popular explanation of the sex difference in SAD is that women with small children will be more isolated during winter months. Women are more likely than men to stay home with children, and this could also help explain age differences: older adults are less often diagnosed with SAD. Surprisingly, comparisons between women with and without children in SAD incidence do not seem to have been made. Wang et al (2003) did not find a difference in levels of light exposure between women who had just given birth and controls. Graw et al (1999) did not find that women with SAD had any lower levels of light exposure in the winter than women without, but did find higher levels of light exposure in the summer among woemn with SAD. In a possible contradiction to the parenting explanation, a Norwegian study, Oyane et al (2005), found that being single was a risk factor for SAD in both men and women.

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I must have been 6 or 7 when my mother got a light box to fight the "winter blues." I'm not sure if it helped her; in retrospect, she seemed depressed for much of my childhood. While I do think isolation of stay-at-home parents is a serious issue, I have to consider how little my father saw the sun during the winters. He would often get to work just as it was getting light and not return home until well after dark, and that's an issue that I encounter myself regularly, now that I am working a regular office job. I certainly don't see a lot of daylight during work hours, but when I do exit from my corporate cave, blinking and confused, the people I see out on the streets are overwhelmingly women and children.

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Crash into me

Researchers at Purdue University (2007) report that age and gender may have significant effects on the severity of injuries sustained in a car crash. The research, published in The Journal of Safety Research (Islam & Mannering, 2006) was based on Indiana traffic data from 1999. The authors suggest that vehicles designed to adapt to the specific drivers could lessen the severity of injuries. For example, rollover accidents are especially dangerous for older women (over 65). Middle-aged men (25-64) were more likely to have a fatality falling asleep at the wheel, while middle-aged women were more likely to have a fatality on a curvy road. Ulfarsson and Mannering (2004) compared gender outcomes in SUV-related crashes, and found that striking a guardrail was a major risk for female drivers, while male drivers had an increased risk of fatality in SUV-related collisions on starting.

Lee Evans (2006) points out that males are more likely than females to die in traffic accidents starting in infancy. In terms of non-physical impact of an automobile accident, Stallard et al (2004) found that among children (7-18 years), girls were more likely than boys to develop PTSD following a traffic accident.

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There's a tradition among women in my family of flipping VW vans. This "tradition" gets mentioned at family gatherings every couple of years. At least 3 women in my family have done it. I was in the van for one of them -- in a car seat, because I was all of 4 years old. Other accidents in my family have been almost entirely overshadowed by this "pattern" -- including my biggest accident as driver, a head-on collision.

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Pink and Blue revisited

Gerianne M. Alexander's 2003 review suggests that there may be evolutionary reasons why girls prefer some toys and boys prefer others. She suggests that there may be innate visual biases that draw children to specific features of the toys, including color:

Compared to boys, girls are also more likely to use a greater number of colors and to prefer warmer colors (i.e., pink and red) to cooler colors (i.e., blue and green). In toy choices and free drawings, then, boys appear to assign greater attention or interest to object movement and location, whereas girls appear to assign greater attention or interest to form and color."

Suggested explanations for this greater female emphasis on color include aid in foraging, spectral qualities of the human face (apparently males tend to have redder faces), or the idea that infant faces are more red-pink than adult faces.

The traditional assumption has been that children's associations of color with sex role is a socialization artifact. Picariello et al's (1990) experiments seem to show that children as young as 3 identify colors with sex roles. Children were asked to identify the sex of toy pigs who differed only in color, and their choices were consistent with adult sex-color stereotypes.

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So the hypothesis, as far as I can tell, is not that boys like blue, but that girls really like pink. I find Alexander's (2002) study of toy preferences among vervet monkeys interesting, but I question the interpretation of results. I'm fairly certain that a vervet monkey doesn't know what a cooking pot is for. Therefore, the result that more female vervets initiated contact with the pot than with the ball seems like an over extension to me. If there were other features of the pot to explain this (color or decoration) these were not explained in the article.

[edit]: According to Color Matters, pink was traditionally for boys and blue for girls through the 1920's, and in Belgium, this is still the case.

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New Year's Resolutions

A telephone survey conducted by WNBC and the Marist Institute for Public Opinion found gender differences in the keeping and making of New Year's Resoltutions, Reuters (2006) reports. While the differences between men and women on making resolutions were small (41% to 46%, with a 3% margin of error), the differences on keeping resolutions were much larger. Men reported keeping "at least part" of their resolutions from the previous year at a rate of 71%, whereas 57% of women answered this way. The poll also found that women's most common resolution was to lose weight, whereas men tended to resolve to "be a better person."

Unsurprisingly, various companies have their own recommendations for New Year's resolutions.

• Oppenheimer Funds (2007) recommends women resolve to pay off credit card debt, after their survey found that 60% of women have over $5000 in household debt, and that most of those list credit card debt as the major source.
• WebMD.com (2007) suggests making health-related resolutions. They advise women to "Eat, but don't pig out" and get more calcium. Men, they suggest, need to "Get Fit" rather than focusing on bicep building, and go to the doctor.
• Adecco (2005) says that most American workers put "Getting a Raise" on their annual to-do list, but that women were more likely than men to make a raise their top priority. Men were more likely than women to prioritize "increasing productivity."

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So, can anyone else spot the difference between "increase productivity"/"be a better person" and "lose weight"/"get a raise"? The main difference I notice is that the ratings for the first set are extremely subjective. It seems to me to be a lot easier to say "I feel like I was a better person this year" than to say "I feel like I lost weight this year." I used to make huge lists of resolutions, not just at New Year's, but year-round. I looked at myself as a "fixer upper opportunity." This year, I sat down and couldn't think of one thing that I was desperate to change. Personally, I call that progress.

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The female genome

Patri Friedman pointed out Robert Lee Hotz's (2005) report on research by Hunt Willard and Laura Carrel. Willard and Carrel's work has focused largely on x chromosome inactivation, and the way in which this expresses itself in between-and-within sex phenotypes. Hotz quotes Willard: "In essence, there is not one human genome, but two: male and female."

As discussed in a previous post, Steven Pinker (2005) theorizes that there is greater variation in ability in males; basically, that males are the guinea pigs for evolutionary change. This is part of Pinker's explanation of why men are overrepresented at the highest levels of achievement. Critics such as Chabris and Glickman (2006) have attempted to disprove this using examples such as chess achievement, but Hotz suggests that Willard and Carrel's research may have found genetic evidence to the contrary: "Females can differ from each other almost as much as they do from males in the way many genes at the heart of sexual identity behave."

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The assertion that there is a male and female genome, as exciting as it is, troubles me. It reminds me of a "lie my teacher told me" -- I was taught that women missed being a separate species from men by only a couple of votes, when animal classification was standardized. However, I'm not finding anything online to back this up. But more importantly, unless this is a distinctly human characteristic (that is, that males and females of other species are more similar) the statement that women are more unlike men than men are unlike chimpanzees seems meaningless: like male or female chimpanzees?

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The Homo Hypothalamus

The Times Online (UK) reports that PETA, with the support of tennis star Martina Navratilova is protesting research on "male-oriented" rams by researcher Charles Roselli. PETA claims that Roselli is trying to turn gay sheep straight, but in an interview with The Next Hurrah, Roselli says he finds accusations that he is looking for a cure for homosexuality "appalling and offensive."

In many ways, Roselli's research is reminiscent of Simon LeVay's (1991) findings about the human hypothalamus. The correlation drawn in both is that the same-sex orientation may be related to a nucleus that is closer to the female average than the male average.

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LGBT bloggers are in an uproar, convinced that screening and aborting of homosexual babies is on the doorstep. I'm dubious, myself, but largely because I tend to disbelieve anything endorsed by PETA, and The Next Hurrah's piece sort of sums up my feelings on that. I wasn't sure that this story was really appropriate to Difference Blog, but considering how much time I spend documenting other differences between male-average and female-average brains, this really is right down my alley. I have a hard time arguing that research is a bad thing. Honestly, I think that designer babies are so far in the future that it's useless to extrapolate current social attitudes to their application.

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