A New Perspective on Gender Differences

Hello friends! Can you believe it's practically half-way through the semester now?! I feel like I just barely started writing these blogs haha, time sure does fly when you're having fun! Today I would like to include my learnings and thoughts regarding a hot topic nowadays: gender. I want to focus mainly on the research behind gender tendencies and roles and why they are important to understand and honor throughout our lives. Feel free to include any of your thoughts in the comments. I am open to any and all opinions as long as they are done with kindness and respect. 

I want you first to take a second and think about the word gender. What does it mean to you? Do you believe gender differences, particularly their strengths and tendencies, are needed or are they unfair/controversial? I myself have struggled to understand gender differences, and I have had feelings of exclusion and discrimination from the opposite sex. Through my studying this week, I was able to examine several articles and videos addressing this very topic. I am not here to say that there is zero gender discrimination and unfairness, because there is. I am here to give you more understanding and hopefully newfound appreciation for gender differences just like I have. Before I begin, I want to clarify which genders I will be addressing: male and female. Because this is heavily a research-based post, I have decided to go with the traditional biological genders.

Women have varied talents, strengths, and tendencies. Let's start at the beginning of early childhood and dive into what science tells us. It has been observed and proven that baby girls tend to look at faces more than baby boys, and girls have gender-typical toy preferences. Later in life, lots of women begin to show qualities and tendencies that contrast from that of male propensities. Females are typically more social, better at communication and reading emotions (verbal and nonverbal), more cooperative in the way they play and interact, more detail oriented, more relationship oriented, have more connective tissue in their brains in order to make mental connections between several things, and ultimately these qualities and many more drive women to become more nurturing. Can you kind of see how these qualities would help a women be a more nurturing mother and individual? It truly is incredible to realize that women are naturally designed to be nurturers if we choose to be.

Let's talk about the male tendencies now. Research has showed us that men are more likely to be more aggressive and competitive, more spatially oriented, become providers and protectors for their family and friends, and they tend to have more grey matter in their brains (storage). Men also have the incredible ability to hyperfocus on one thing at a time. Another interesting male preference I discovered this week was that men are typically more comfortable and better at communicating when they are shoulder to shoulder with someone, as opposed to face-to-face communication. That is why men typically like to be doing something or working on something while they have deeper conversations (working on a car, playing sporty, etc.). 

But these examples of typical gender behavior raises the question: what about the androgynous individuals? I want to emphasize the fact that none of these male and female tendencies are rigid and unmoving. It is a very fluid list of attributes that are interchangeable. It is completely ok and normal to have feminine tendencies as a male, and masculine tendencies as a girl. I think as a culture and society, we rapidly slap labels onto everything without consideration. So many of us are confused by mistaken thinking, and that creates huge identity crises. Let me better illustrate the importance of this by asking a question: Wouldn't you want a spouse/partner who demonstrated qualities of the opposite gender? I surely want a husband who is nurturing and good at communication!

To wrap this up, I want to ask another important question: Why do we need both? Talents are varied between sexes, and both girls and boys can and should try all activities. We need uniqueness just as desperately as we need oxygen. "Saying that men and women have different aptitudes isn't sexism, it's a statement about the true nature of the world" (Male vs. Female Brains Video). We are supposed to be different, and we can work in harmony with our differences to create a wider scope of knowledge and success.