and you might say well what's your
evidence that those differences in
personality aren't culturally
constructed and the evidence for that is
quite clear you can go online you can
look up the Scandinavian studies just go
online and look up gender differences in
personality cross-culturally you'll find
the relevant studies they've been done
with tens of thousands of people and
what they've showed quite clearly is
that in those societies where the most
has been done to move move the social
world into a position of radical
equality and so that would roughly be
the the Scandinavian countries because
they've done more than that more of that
than any other country the personality
differences between men and women
maximize they don't minimize they
maximize and I'll say that again in the
countries where the most has been done
to equalize the playing field between
men and women men and women get more
different rather than more the same so
for all you social constructionists out
there in the audience and there's
probably not that many of you because
you wouldn't come and hear me talk if
you were a social instructionist you're
actually
wrong
yeah yeah well the thing is you know
that you know the so one of the things
you might be interested in is that it's
all the same to me in some sense like
when when I was looking into this to
begin with and this would started
probably 25 years ago looking at
differences in personality between men
and women you know it wasn't obvious at
all whether they were fundamentally
biologically biological or fundamentally
sociological or or what mix produced the
differences you know no one knew and the
most logical hypothesis really I thought
was that as you equalized the society
that men and women would become more the
same but that is not what happened and
so we've actually put the social
constructionist hypothesis with regards
to gender uh differences in in Sex and
personality we put that to the test in a
very intense way and the social
constructionist Viewpoint failed so it's
very strange because no one would have
really believed that right you make this
make Society more the same and men and
women get more different it's like
what's up with that well the answer
seems to be is that there's
fundamentally two sources of variability
in personality right there's perhaps
more but you can categorize them as
roughly genetic and roughly sociological
well if you take out all the
sociological differences between the
landscape in which men and women are
raised all you have left are the
biological and genetic differences so
they maximize well that's exactly what
happened this actually matters it really
matters and this is why the demands for
Equity are so well there's about 15
reasons why demands for Equity border on
between men and women should not be
Overlook partly because it's it's wrong
to overlook the genuine differences
between men and women it's not good for
the men it's not good for the women so
one of the things you see in Scandinavia
for example is there's an overwhelming
preponderance of female nurses
and there's an overwhelming
preponderance of male engineers and
actually the data on on personality
differences um there's there's there's
the standard traits which I'll continue
to go through um I can do that quite
quickly um there's not much difference
in trait conscientiousness between men
and women if you break it down into the
aspects women are a bit more orderly
than men uh but there's no difference in
industriousness um and then with regards
to openness which is the intell
intellect cre ity Dimension overall
there's no difference between men and
women but if you break it up into the
aspects then the differences are
actually quite pronounced so what you
have is the openness to experience is
the technical trait and it roughly
breaks down into something that's sort
of like create creativity and aesthetic
interests versus interest in ideas and
what you see is that women are a third
of the standard deviation higher than
men in terms of of creativity and
aesthetic of aesthetic proclivity let's
say and men are onethird of a standard
deviation higher than women in terms of
interest in ideas and it's not a trivial
difference and it makes a difference so
but the biggest difference between men
and women as it turns out and this is
almost one standard deviation which is a
walloping difference you never see that
in social science it's a massive
difference is um difference between
difference in interest and the masculine
interest roughly speaking is in things
and the female interest corly speaking
is in people and that's what underlies
the differences say in in in career
choice preference between things like
nursing and psychology and social work
and that and that sort of thing and
engineering and uh because engineering
is is perhaps the most male oriented of
all the disciplines and and the evidence
that that's um sociological is very very
me