Women and Risk

"What caused the crunch?" asks a headline in The Times Online (UK, 2008): the answer it suggests is surprising. Columnist Matthew Syed suggests that the current financial crisis could have been averted had more women been involved in the world of international finance, because women are less prone to taking risks. Harris and Jenkins (2006) suggest that women's lower tolerance for risk is tied to different risk assessment style: women displayed "greater perceived likelihood of negative outcomes and lesser expectation of enjoyment" in their study.

Previously in Difference Blog, we've discussed findings that seem to support the idea that women see risk as more risky:

• women perceive more risk in participating in research studies (12/19/07)
• Weber et al (2002) made the distinction that women report being more risk-averse, but seem to participate equally in many risky behaviors (10/1/07)
• Women are more likely to play low-risk gambling games, like slot machines (5/3/07)
• Men tend to assess health risks as less serious than women do (3/12/07)
• Girls are more closely monitored as toddlers, which seems to be linked to greater risk-aversion (12/21/06)
• Chen et al (2005) found that differences in risk-aversion in an auction game disappeared during menstruation (10/5/06)
• Male poker players have been reported to lose more money than female poker players (8/18/06)

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The Risk-Aversion theory is one of the gender differences that goes on my list of major themes. I keep meaning to do a post where I actually enumerate the themes that seem to be consistently and robustly visited. However, applying it to the financial crisis seems so wrong-headed as to be inane. Regardless of the gender of the participants, high risk-taking is a necessary trait to end up in the position that these people were in to begin with. High power necessitates having taken high risk. If there were women in these positions, they would be risk-taking women. My favorite moment in Syed's article (from an eye-rolling point of view) is this gem:

The reality - familiar to anyone who has read Darwin - is that sex differences are, to a large extent, biological and would remain in place even in a society dominated by women.

Ignoring for a moment the distinction between a sex difference and a gender difference (something I'm guilty of fairly regularly), I've got to ask whether a society dominated by women would provide the same environmental pressures -- something Darwin was fairly aware of, even if Mr. Syed isn't.

The choice to call in sick

Hooftman et al (2008) examined reasons that employees with "musculoskeletal complaints" (e.g. back pain, broken bone) called in sick to work. The study was based on qualitative interviews with 16 men and 14 women with such complaints. Both men and women with an "unidentifiable complaint. . . . felt hesitant and insecure and found it hard to judge whether absenteeism was justified." Only women took into account whether attempting to work would hurt their home life.

This appears to contradict findings by Eagle et al (1997), who found no gender differences in the "asymmetric permeability" of work and home life demands. However, Eagle's finding is not common: previous posts on work-life balance have tended to show greater weight given to home life among women.

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I'm reminded of a comment that fuzzy left last week, saying that "a worker with a stay-at-home partner has an advantage over another worker with a working partner". I didn't see anything in Hooftman specifically controlling for the home situation of the injured parties. This seems like it would make a huge difference in the work-life calculation. Hell, even having a live-in partner would make a difference. In the past month or so, I have thrown myself fairly enthusiastically into my work, and my partner has quietly and awesomely picked up the slack. If he hadn't, I would have had to balance a little more at home, if only to do laundry so I could go into work.

Ruling the roost

According to a recent Pew Social & Demographic Trends survey (2008), men make the majority of the decisions in about a quarter of American households (26%). In 43%, women make the majority of the decisions, and the remainder split the decisions equally. Respondents were questioned about four areas of kinds of choices: shared weekend activities, major purchases for the home, television viewing, and managing household finances. It was extremely rare for respondents to report that a single partner dominated all four of these areas: only 2-4% of couples reported this pattern.

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I'm not sure my relationship counts as a "couple" to Pew. I don't just mean that we're two guys: I mean that we don't really share finances, so we each manage our own. I guess we make joint decisions about weekends: usually that decision is "I don't wannt go out!" We've only made a few major purchases, and except for the condo, one or the other of us pays for it. However, on one of these categories, there's a clear decision maker. The television is all my partner. He bought it, he turns it on, and he changes the channel. On the other hand, when he turns it on, he tunes it out, and I can't look away. It doesn't even occur to me to change the channel. Guests laugh at me when they ask me to use the TV, because I can barely figure out the remote. When my partner is out of town, I don't usually turn it on.

Education Gap vs Earnings Gap

In May, the New York Times (2008) suggested that the pay gap between men and women had been closing since the 1970's -- but that this was largely due to higher percentages of women getting college degrees.

"For the last four decades, somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of men have graduated from a four-year college by the time they turned 35 years old. The story is quite different for women. In the 1960s, only 25 percent received a college degree. Among today’s young women almost 40 percent will end up with one." -- Leonhardt, 21 May 2008, NYT

This increase in education has led to a decrease in the pay gap, according to the article, with women working full-time earning 79% of full-time men's salaries in 2007, vs. 75% in 1992.

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I thought this was an interesting article, despite the fact that it doesn't quote a single source that I can fact-check. I actually found this story due to a link in the blog "Sammi says..." about the Judge and Livingston article discussed on Tuesday. Sammi claimed that Leonhardt reported higher earnings for women than men, but I suspect Sammi was thinking of the 2007 NYT article which said that young, never-married women in urban centers earn more than their male counterparts.

Brain aging hits men first, and harder

While studying aging-related gene activity in post-mortem brains, Carl Cotman and Nicole Berchtold began to debate whether gender differences might explain a variability they found in the data: "She thought it was the men, and I said it was the women," Cotman joked to Science News (2008). Cotman and Berchtold's study (which is supposed to be in this week's PNAS, according to ScienceNews, but doesn't appear to be) found that areas of the brain most susceptible to Alzheimer's, such as the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, don't seem to experience much change in gene activity with aging. However, the postcentral gyrus goes through a lot of change after age 60, according to Cotman and Berchtold's research.

Specifically, Cotman and Berchtold noted that men's brains experience age-related declines in gene activity earlier, but seem to level out. Women, in contrast, start their decline later, but the decline continues. These conclusions are based on mRNA concentrations in cadaver brains aged 20 to 99. More mRNA indicates a more active gene; the declines noted were in gene activity. Cotman's prior research suggests that exercise may have a protective effect against this kind of decline.

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So, I'm wondering if this is a greater variability issue: the idea that men display greater variability than women (which I'm still not entirely sold on). The assumption inherent in this model is that the brains involved would have proceeded along the same aging path. But if some men (for example, the ones who live into their 80's and 90's) don't suffer as much decline, and some suffer more (for example, those who die in their 60's), I'm not sure if you can draw a line saying that this decline "levels off." I'd love to examine this closer but, as noted above, the damn article doesn't seem to be where ScienceNews said it would be. *grumble*

Gender Role Orientation and the Earnings Gap

A recent analysis of interviews that accompanied the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth from 1979 through 2004 suggests that more than just gender affects the earnings gap between men and women, according to LiveScience (2008). Judge and Livingston (2008, PDF) found that men who held more traditional views of gender roles tended to earn $8,548 per year more than men with more egalitarian views. When restricted just to men working outside the home, this figure shot to $11,930. However, role orientation does not seem to have as big an effect on women's earnings: more egalitarian women earned on $1,495 more than their traditionalist counterparts, and only $1,051 more when restricted to those who worked outside the home.

A theory offered by Young and Hurlic (2007) may partially explain these results. Young and Hurlic's theoretical model for examining gender role orientation in the workplace suggests that the micro-cultures and macro-cultures within an organization have identifiable gender role orientations, and that a person's "fit" within the culture of their workplace will help or harm their efficacy.

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That's right, men -- feminism will hurt you! I mean, seriously, what the hell. This is when I start to wonder if Susan Pinker isn't right: maybe pay gaps are more about career choices. Maybe men with more egalitarian views are more likely to choose emotionally rewarding but lower paying jobs. Maybe they're part of a work culture that doesn't give them as much of a leg up versus women.

see also 6/3/08: Judge and Livingston suggest gender role orientation affects sense of work-life balance.

Relational aggression: a "Negligible" difference

Card et al (2008) is receiving press for a study with the catchy title: "Direct and Indirect Aggression During Childhood and Adolescence: A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Differences, Intercorrelations, and Relations to Maladjustment." News reporting of the study goes a little more punchy with titles like "Back off mean girls -- boys are just as mean" (LA Times) and "Boys gossip, spread rumours just like girls: study"(CTV.ca). Ir's arguable whether these headlines capture Card et al's findings: "a negligible, but statistically different from zero, average gender difference, with girls exhibiting more indirect aggression than boys." Additionally, indirect aggression was correlated with physical aggression in boys, but not in girls.

Card et al also looked for experimenter effects in this analysis. Most studies selected for this meta-analysis had female lead authors (78.2%). However, lead author gender did not appear to moderate the effect size reported. Adult bias did not appear to magnify gender differences either: magnitude of gender differences was greater in peer-nomination studies than in parent/teacher report studies or self-report studies. The magnitude of gender differences did tend to be larger in studies with "gender" or related words in the title. Studies were located by keyword searches for: indirect, relational, social or covert aggression.

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Card's study is the first I've seen address the "lead author gender" question, which is something I've wondered about myself. When DBlog was primarily on LiveJournal, I used to tag posts with author names including the first name, in order to quietly draw attention to lead author gender. Since I don't think I ever mentioned it, that was fairly passive-aggressive of me. *frown* Blogger has a character limit on tags-per-post, so I dropped the first name, which isn't ideal.

I don't find the fact that papers using gender in the title have larger effects surprising or troubling. I've been trying to write "gender similarities" posts for over two years. If inter-individual differences are based on something other than gender, it makes sense to put that other factor in the title instead. Of course, Hyde is a notable exception to this.

Marital and extra-marital sex

A Parade survey (2008) found that almost a third (31%) of married Americans are having sex less than once per month; 27% are having it "at least a few times a week". There was a slight gender difference in satisfaction with frequency: 40% of men and 49% of women, however, reported that they were having sex "often enough." Only 20% of the people answering the poll had been married 4 years or less; 37% had reached their china anniversary (had been married over 20 years). This may be showing a difference from an ABC News poll (2004). The ABC poll found that 72% of people married less than 3 years had sex "at least several times a week" compared to only 32% of those married over 10 years.

Parade found similar numbers of men and women dodging the extra-marital sex question: 3% of men and 4% women chose not to answer. The ABC poll didn't address non-respondents. The polls were nearly identical in the proportions of those who admitted to extra-marital sex. Parade found 19% men versus 11% women who admitted to having sex "outside your marriage". ABC reported 21% men versus 11% of women admitted to having sex outside of any committed relationship.

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It's been over a year since we talked about infidelity. I probably shouldn't let it go that long in between, because the differences are sexual appetites are probably one of the Family Feud Top Five answers of "what's different between men and women." One especially interesting bit in the Parade survey, I thought, was that more men than women had engaged in extra-marital sex, but more women than men had considered leaving their marriages. I was also curious about the 1,001 number, because it was 501 men, 500 women. Did someone lose count? Were any of these respondents married to each other? Or did they just want to say "over 1,000".

As for my personal experience, I find it hard to comment reasonably to this topic. I'm non-monogamous, so I find it hard not to react badly to the fact that both Parade and ABC assumed that "sex outside of the marriage" was synonymous with cheating. I'd be interested to know what percentage of marriages had tried some kind of non-monogamy, but that's a red herring. I was really surprised that the results were so close -- and so low!

Also: Yarr!

Depressive Symptoms

Crying seems to be more prevalent among women in the normal population. For this reason, Romans and Clarkson (2008) argue that crying should be removed from the diagnostic criteria for depression. Salokangas et al (2002) go further, based on the results of their survey of a Finnish population. Salokangas et al conclude that both crying and lack of interest in sex were "biologically, psychologically and culturally related to female gender." The widely-used Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) includes both of these symptoms, and Salokangas suggests that this may be a contributing factor to the higher rates of depression diagnoses among women.

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I'm never sure how to approach this. I've attempted to cover crying a couple of times in the past two years, because it seems like one of the more obvious gender differences. I'm deeply distrustful of "obvious" gender differences, and I haven't found any good sources indicating that it's valid. There's a retrospective survey where women report more incidences of crying in the past month than men (see 1/10/08), but that could easily be reporting error. I remember crying more often before I starting taking testosterone, but there have been a couple of times since where I have remembered "not crying", and friends have remembered me crying, so I am distrustful of my own memory on the subject.

Development of Brain Differences

Neufang et al (2008) suggest that sex differences in the brain develop during puberty. In their fMRI study of German teenagers, Neufang et al found that development of sexual dimorphisms in the brain related to the Tanner Stages of pubertal development. This is largely in agreement with the findings of Sisk and Foster (2004), who also suggested a pubertal emergence of neural differentiation between the sexes. These findings are especially important when considering Burman and Booth (2008), who argue for single-sex education based on supposed differences in brain organization between pre-pubertal boys and girls (see 3/11/08 for more).

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Until puberty, there's no reason to separate sports teams into boys and girls: the differences are negligible. What Neufang's study suggests to me is that the classroom is probably the same way. So, how to address the reported behavioral differences between boys and girls? What is the right way to answer the constant argument from parents, repeated in a recent Wall Street Journal blog, that parenting gives you a "window into gender differences in children's development" (one interesting thing about the WSJ is that it's written by the father). I have a Google Alert for "gender differences", and nearly half of my hits are blogs saying: "I didn't think there was much of a gender difference until I tried to raise a girl and a boy." These parents, in my experience, are never talking about teenagers, but usually about children under the age of 8.

Point-light figures

Fig. S1 from Brooks et al (2008):
Light points are placed at major joints
in a biological figure

Since the 1970's, researchers have been using "point light displays" to study what information observers get from biological motion. Point light displays are biological figures represented by light dots at each joint. Motionless, they are hard to identify as figures at all, but in motion, observers report many factors such as age, gender, and orientation (which direction they are walking). Cutting (1978) found that the apparent gender of these figures could be synthesized by manipulating lateral sway: "stimuli are ... identified by untrained viewers as male when the shoulder movement is greater than the hip movement, and female when the configuration is reversed." These manipulations made possible a whole body of research into the identification of gender by gait.

The popularity of point light figures to study perception has not lessened. Even this year, two studies have reported new findings about gender perception based on point light displays. Brooks et al (2008) found that when observers decided a figure was female, they were more likely to say she was walking away, while figures that appeared male appeared to be approaching the viewer. Provost et al (2008) found that women who were more fertile, or who had an "unrestricted sociosexual orientation" (more likely to engage in short-term mating) found greater masculinity more attractive in point light walkers.

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One of the first things that other transmen tried to teach me, when I was first transitioning, was how to walk like a man. I'll tell you flat out: I don't. I still catch myself with quite a bit of hip swing. Still, learning the correct walk is a huge step towards "passing" for most transfolk I've known. I am dubious but fascinated by Brooks et al's finding about walker orientation. This study used 3 men and 2 women as observers. I have to say: I probably spend more time watching men approach and women leave, but that's because I make an effort not to stare at women (when they can see me doing it).

If you're not with us...

On Saturday, I received the following reader comment:

"Dan, you talked about books on sex differences, but the same is true of some of the layperson articles. The other thing is I'm not sure Language Log is quite on the side of Hyde. Mark Liberman mentioned Doreen Kimura's book as fair, and Hyde was pretty critical of the book. Melissa Hines also seemed to disagree with Doreen Kimura" -- Nadia

I believe this comment was meant to be in response to a post from July, where I describe the gender difference debate in terms of "sides" ("Pop Science Reactions", 7/1/08). But this comment made me think about how that conceptualization of the gender difference debate can go very badly awry. The logic here seems to go a step beyond "if you're not with us, you're against us" and into "if you're not against our enemies, you are against us."

The debate about gender differences, and indeed about any science topic, doesn't really divide nicely into two sides, with each side in perfect agreement. There are not parties with mutually-agreed-upon platforms. I admit (see 8/29/08) that I am unnecessarily judgmental about Bailey, Baron-Cohen, both Pinkers, Sax, and Brody. It's a bias I try to take into account, and I know I don't do as good a job as I should. Basically, I'm saying that just because some author attacks a position you agree with doesn't mean that all their work is flawed.

So yes: a lot of pop-science books oversimplify the issues, and so do most newspaper articles. Hell, even some of the articles in scholarly journals don't justify their assumptions as well as they ought to. Most blogs (including this one) tend to make sweeping generalizations based on weak evidence with little or no critical review. I feel the pressure to make broad generalizations pretty constantly, because that brings in more readers and generates more discussion. The more specific and equivocal you make your findings, the fewer people they are interesting to. I hope that the readers who have stayed with Difference Blog are casting the same critical eye on my posts that I try to use with the sources I cite. Some of my favorite discussions on DBlog have been when a reader has called me out on a shoddy assumption.

Nadia, I hope this answers your question. There are no "sides", and it was sloppy of me to frame it that way. Or perhaps it makes more sense to say: there are more sides than there are good scientists, and more bad assumptions than good controls.

Podcasts

According to a recent Pew Internet survey (2008), more men than women have ever downloaded podcasts (22% vs. 16%), but on a typical day, equal numbers of men and women download a podcast (3%). However, some groups are working to even the podcast-playing field. Much like BlogHer provides additional exposure for women bloggers, Women in Podcasting provides a directory of women podcasters.

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Now, who got this far and was ready to say "but Dan, downloading a podcast isn't the same as making one." Yup, sorry. I didn't find any statistics on how many men versus women are making podcasts. I'd welcome help on this one. For the record, I don't subscribe to any podcasts right now. I tried them when I first got an iPod, and I don't care for them. I tried a few different podcasts, all video: Suicide Girls, Happy Tree Friends, Joe Cartoon, and an instructional one on computer skills.

With the proportions reported by Pew, it sounds like twice as many women as men who try podcasts stick with them. I'd be interested to see if there's a difference between usage on audio-only podcasts vs. video podcasts. That would seem to lend strength to the auditory-vs-visual gender difference argument.

Dream recall frequency

Jennifer Parker, as part of her doctorate on the methodological approaches to dream research, told BBC News (2008) that she found no gender differences in dream recall frequency. This finding seems to be a matter of ongoing debate. For example, Stepansky et al (1998) (in an Austrian study of 1,000) also failed to find gender differences in dream recall frequency. However, Schredl (2002) questions the categories used in the Austrian study, and reports a "marked difference" between men and women in dream recall. In a later meta-analysis, Schredl and Reinhard (2004), (discussed in 7/15/08) also claimed higher dream recall rates in women.

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Honestly, I live for these kinds of debates. I love when there's an ongoing discussion over whether or not a particular gender difference actually exists. Stepansky claims that dream recall frequency differs with age, but not with gender, while Schredl counters that the effect size of the gender difference varies by age, with the strongest differences being during adolescence. Having never been sociologically a teenaged boy (just hormonally), I can't speak personally about that experience. But I know that my dreams, like everything else, took on levels of importance an meaning in adolescence that are distinctly lacking in adulthood (thank goodness!) To this day, I remember dreams I had as a teenager better than dreams I had this week.

Cultural effects on Career choice, continued

To continue yesterday's discussion on cultural differences' effects on gender differences, it is appropriate to look at Kingsley Browne's 2006 review entitled "Evolved sex differences and occupational segregation" is an evolutionary psychology treatise on differences in the sexes, but still maintains some level of sanity near the end when Browne points out that statistical differences should not dictate individual choices:

"Although it is important that women (and men) be permitted to choose the direction in which their careers take them, it is not sensible to assume a priori that those choices will be, or should be, identical for the two sexes."

In contrast, Schachner et al (2005) suggest that the correlation found between economic development and liberal sexual attitudes belies many of the claims of evolutionary psychology.

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Last night, when thinking about this, I realized that it doesn't surprise me at all that there are more women in "feminine" careers in richer countries. "Feminine" careers are typically "people" careers: either service or support roles. There are not going to be as many service careers in a poorer culture. I do think that your career choice impacts your personality. In the past 6 years, I believe my personality has absolutely adjusted to my career track. On a similar note, I'm reminded of an argument I had 6 years ago, where the following point was made:

I worked for an answering service that, at the request of its clients, doctors, hired only women operators. This is because patients, both male and female, were more comfortable sharing health problems with female operators than with male. It's a professional consideration. (link).

My partner Grayskale brought up the point that most people-service professions are female-dominated, but concierges are overwhelmingly male. It's an interesting difference.

ISDP in the NYT

Yesterday, the New York Times (2008) published a story about the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), a topic visited several times in past Difference Blogs (2007 - 2008). The ISDP, which measures sex differences in personality across cultures, has come up with a counterintuitive trend: sex differences in personality seem to be narrower in less-egalitarian cultures. ISDP leader David Schmitt explains this trend through greater stresses on the larger sex (men) in harsher cultures: "men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive", according to the NYT article. One argument against Schmitt's theory is cultural differences in the way psychological questions are interpreted, as detailed in the NYT blog TierneyLab's response (2008)

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Honestly, the thing in the NYT article that I found most exciting was the nearly unprecedented use of links to primary sources. It's been one of my main complaints about the Times' science coverage that they've failed to do this, and it's damn refreshing to see the change. If they keep it up, DBlog may well become obsolete, which would be great.

I don't think the arguments raised by the ISDP are likely to be settled any time soon. There are good arguments on either side. One new question that occurred to me in today's reading is the assumption of absolutes in personality tests. The NYT (attributed to Schmitt) says that "the biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women" -- basically, the article argues that women in rich and poor countries show very similar levels of Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. But Neurotic compared to what, or to whom? I don't mean in the sense that Tierney argues, where "[in] Bangladesh... a man rates his aggressiveness as average because he’s comparing himself only to other men, whereas a similar man in Austria would rate himself above-average because he’s comparing himself to both men and women." I mean more in the sense that the Bangladeshi man is probably comparing himself to the people he knows, so that in each culture, I would expect to see a distribution that approached normal, even if there are massive cultural differences.

Thumb-sucking

Oh the thumb-sucker's thumb
May look wrinkled and wet
And withered, and white as the snow,
But the taste of a thumb
Is the sweetest taste yet
(As only we thumb-sucker's know).
-Shel Silverstein (1974)

Honzik and McKee (1962) suggested that girls (after one year of age) were more likely to suck their thumbs due to "greater pleasure from tactile stimulation" -- that is, they liked it more. Ooki (2005) also found a slightly higher rate of finger sucking in girls under age 2 in a japanese mother's survey -- and suggested that there may be a genetic factor in this behavior. Even as adults, surveys report that the ratio of adult thumb suckers is 2:1 female biased ("And then thumb" website, 2004).

Patrick C. Friman published several psychological experiments on thumb-sucking in the 1980's-90's, apparently fixed on debunking Freudian theories about psychological development and thumb-sucking. Friman et al (1993) found that first-graders were more likely to rate thumb-suckers of the same sex as likable, despite finding thumb-suckers generally less likable than non-thumb-suckers. However, no main effect of sex was found on the rating of thumb-sucking on peer acceptance. Friman et al (1994) found no link between thumb-sucking and pediatric psychopathology, and no interaction between sex and psychological symptoms in thumb-suckers.

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I was a fairly persistent thumb-sucker as a kid, but not of the type studied here, because I didn't suck in multiple environments. I sucked my thumb to fall asleep. According to my mother, I didn't do this as a small child, but only after I had started grade school. She figured it was a stress reaction, and I'm not likely to contradict her on this. I found school very stressful. Also, I tend to slip back into it (or slip it back in?) under stressful situations. I've found thumb-sucking a comforting way to fall asleep several times as an adult, but not for any stretch of successive nights that I could really call a relapse.

Response to Cars

Wired (Cars) has published two stories this year about attracting women with your car. In May, "Chicks Dig My Tiny Carbon Footprint" (2008) discussed General Motors claim that 88% of women say "say they’d rather chat up someone with the latest fuel-efficient car versus the latest sports car" (GM 2008). In contrast is a study sponsored by Hiscox insurance in the UK: "Science Proves Exotic Cars Turn Women On" (Wired, 2008). In the Hiscox study, arousal was measured by salivary testosterone, and 100% of women displayed increased testosterone after listening to a Maserati (Hiscox press release, 2008). Men preferred the Lamborghini's sound.

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Silliness. In my psychology class this summer, a "social psychology" evangelist suggested that you should take dates to frightening or exhausting events, because social psychology had proved that physical arousal would be mistaken for emotional arousal by your date. That is: if she's scared, she'll think she likes you. The story about the sound of cars suggests the same to me. I am one of the assholes who will comment "oh. yes. it's. so. big." when someone revvs their engine near me. The roar of engines puts me on edge, and it's not a good edge. I'd bet my testosterone is up, though.

Gender differences in charitable giving

Much research on whether men or women are more generous has had inconsistent results; Cox and Deck (2006) found that this may be explained by greater sensitivity on the part of women to the cost of a generous action. Andreoni et al (2000) found that in most married couples, conflicts over charitable giving were typically resolved favoring the husband's preference. When the wife decided, Andreoni et al found that smaller amounts were given to a greater number of charities.

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I believe these two results are pretty intertwined. It seems that a large gift or contribution would feel like more of a sacrifice than several small contributions that actually total more. This strikes me as a fairly good representation of the traditional male-female social roles: man makes one big contribution to household well-being (work outside home) while woman makes many "smaller" contributions to household well-being (work inside the home).

Neural Attractiveness

Recent studies have suggested that men enjoy looking at attractive female faces more than women enjoy looking at attractive male faces (Hayden et al, 2007). In order to test this, Cloutier et al (2008) performed fMRI scans on men and women while they rated the attractiveness of faces of the opposite sex. There were no sex differences in response times, and the only significant differences in rating distribution was that women were more likely to rate faces as Not attractive at all. The fMRI scan revealed that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was recruited preferentially for attractive faces in men, but not in women. The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) also showed an effect of attractiveness, supporting the theory that looking at attractive faces activates neural reward.

[EDIT, 4/27/09: I examined Cloutier's study again in the post for 4/27/09, and discovered I misreported the results. Male brains were more likely to recruit OFC -- while looking at female faces -- so this result does not apply to attractiveness in male faces.]

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The all-pleasant-things-activate-neural-reward model is one that I've seen tossed around a lot in my psychology and neuroscience classes, and it's one that I'm fairly skeptical of. There are a lot of things that feel "rewarding", for lack of a better word, but I suspect there are different kinds of reward. I have no proof, but the assumption that "food" creates the same neural environment as "accomplishment" strikes me as something that needs proving. I feel like this study went some of the way towards that.

Measuring Body Dysmorphic Disorder

As previously discussed, women typically have greater risk of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD)than men, although rates in men are rising (April 2008, August 2006). One factor that may complicate interpretation is Phillips et al's (2006) finding that men and women appear to score differently on different BDD measures. In the same group of 200 patients known to have BDD, women's symptoms were rated more severe on one measure, while men's were rated more severe on another.

These measures appear to have differed on the specific body parts and coping methods participants were asked about, and this may influence the difference. A German study (Rief et al, 2006) found no significant difference in men's and women's rates of dissatisfaction with their hair, eyes, nose, or mouth. This is notable especially because hair and nose were the two biggest areas of concern for men, while breasts were the biggest area of concern for women. However, Phillips notes that when one of the measures was controlled for eating disorders, the difference between men and women disappeared, so comorbidity may be the uncontrolled confound of interest.

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You know, thinking about priming effects, I would expect that the list and wording of body part questionnaires would affect responses on all items, not just on those items which differed. I would also expect to see significant cultural effects. In the literature review, Phillips shows a few differences between an Italian and a U.S. sample on several gender-specific items: Italian men are more likely to be concerned about excess body hair than U.S. men; Italian women are more likely to be concerned about their breasts than U.S. women.

Men and The Barbecue

veggie and traditional burgers,
by Dan4th, May 2008

The traditional image of barbecuing is well-summed up by a joke at the site Anvari.com: "the only type of cooking a 'real' man will do". Two parts of the Anvari joke say that women do the shopping for a barbecue and all the prep work and side dishes. A survey by UK Propane company Calor (2004) actually seems to test the joke, and finds very different levels of reporting for some items: 48% of men versus 78% of women said that women did the majority of shopping for a barbecue. 38% of men versus 14% of women thought that men prepared most of the food. Unsurprisingly, Pellard et al (2006), in a Welsh sample, found that men and boys were more likely to be burned at barbecues than women and girls.

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Today being Labor Day, I figured I could look at labor unions or barbecuing. I used to have a real thing about Southern men, and I asked a couple of them to barbecue for me. I don't know if it says anything about my taste in men that they both admitted that they didn't know how. I don't recall my father grilling per se, but he did cook steak over the woodfire every Christmas eve. My partner and I only started experimenting with the fiery arts last year, and while I find the idea exciting, the practice may be a little too Zen for me. I get bored and end up handing off the Spatula of Power.