Gender Gap

As a relief & change from the onslaught of online dating site relationship assessment reviews that I have been blogging about for the last couple of months, this post on the gender gap has been triggered by a few online articles I recently read.
Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton.

They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild — and what happened? The men wilted. Erica Jong

I read a New York Times article recently ‘As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen‘

Great picture above and interesting studies that were quoted in the article, personality assessments were used to study the differences between men & women.  To quote from the article:

It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States.
The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.
Humanity’s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was unnatural in many ways, Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. In some ways modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots, he argues. That means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men’s, and to a lesser extent women’s, more natural personality traits to emerge.
Some critics of this hypothesis question whether the international variations in personality have more to do with the way people in different cultures interpret questions on personality tests.
This large gender gap has persisted for two decades in all kinds of races high school and college meets, elite and nonelite road races and it jibes with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring sex difference in competitiveness, he concludes, must be considered a genuine failure for the sociocultural conditions hypothesis that the personality gap will shrink as new roles open for women.
If he and Dr. Schmitt are right, then men and women shouldn’t expect to understand each other much better anytime soon. Things could get confusing if the personality gap widens further as the sexes become equal.

Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women. Lady Nancy Astor
The other article from USA Today Blog was, The perfect match: Who makes an ideal wife for a successful man? A new reality show points Cupid in the wrong direction

Certainly, the dating market for successful men and women is complicated. The conventional wisdom that men don’t want to be outdone by their wives has some basis in fact. Columbia Business School economist Ray Fisman has run many experiments over the years in which he recruits Columbia graduate students to try “speed dating,” where men and women meet several potential partners for a few minutes apiece. Time after time, he found that men were a lot less likely to follow up with dates whom they perceived as more intelligent or ambitious than they are.
Men’s attitudes have been evolving over the past century. A study of women born in the 1920s found that smart women were less likely to marry, but Fisman’s modern male graduate students did exhibit a preference for intelligence and ambition in women — to a point. “What seemed to be the magic number is whatever the man thought of himself,” Fisman says.
In other words, an extremely ambitious man who started a $30 million business would probably prefer an attractive doctor or businesswoman as long as her ambitions didn’t exceed his own to someone with more limited aspirations. In his sample, Fisman says, “men are not looking for someone who is just going to bear their children and make them sandwiches every day. They’re looking for a little more than that.”
According to a Harris Interactive Poll commissioned for Christine Whelan’s 2006 book Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, 85% of single high-achieving men said they were looking for a wife who is as or more ambitious than they are. People lie to pollsters; men might lie about the “more” part. But there’s no reason to doubt the “as.” One reason the rich are getting richer in the USA is that high-earning men and women are marrying each other.

It is not women’s fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men’s lives and women’s also. Which is precisely what has happened today — to women. Selma James

The last article from New Scientist has a great title, Nerds rejoice: Braininess boosts likelihood of sex

“There could be aspects of intelligence that we pick up on when we interact with a person and that affect our assessment of them, even if we wouldn’t label it as intelligence,” she says.
But some things never change. Looks were still a much more powerful predictor of sex appeal than brains. “Women are still going for the hunk,” Prokosch says. “If you had an option to pick from five different people, you would pick the most attractive one.”
So in a perfect world, women want a Nobel prize winner with movie-star looks. Creativity also proved to be a sought-after trait, and Prokosch’s team is currently working on an objective measure of creativity, similar to the intelligence test they used.
However, in a world of limited resources, not every woman gets what she wants, and some are bound to fall for ugly, unintelligent and uncreative men. “There’s always other people out there that find everything attractive,” Prokosch says.

So what do you think about these studies & theories in the ongoing challenges of the gender gap?  Would love to hear your comments, ideas & feedback in the Comments below.

In the meantime I would like to leave with you a very funny video that has 2 ads one about women & one about men.  Stereotypes but funny none the less, enjoy…….

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