From one of the Scientific American blogs, an interesting overview of sex differences in personality, plus some masculine-personality naivete about how discussing these things is just about truth and the marketplace of ideas, no one need get cancelled or upset.

• the differences add up.  Along any one personality dimension, the differences won’t be great and there will be a lot of overlap between men and women.  But add them up, the differences are stark
• These differences are about averages and tendencies.  Individuals are individual and express a variety of different traits at different times.
• These differences obtain across cultures.  In other words, if being risk-prone is  a masculine trait, and culture X is generally cautious and conservative, the men in Culture X will be risk-takers compared to the women in Culture X even if still more cautious than men in other cultures
• males tend to be more dominant, assertive, risk-prone, thrill-seeking, tough-minded, emotionally stable, utilitarian, and open to abstract ideas.
• Males also tend to score higher on self-estimates of intelligence  (key phrase is “self-estimates”).
• For intelligence men show more variability than women.  There are more men at either extreme.
• Men also tend to form larger, competitive groups in which hierarchies tend to be stable and in which individual relationships tend to require little emotional investment.
• In terms of communication style, males tend to use more assertive speech and are more likely to interrupt people (both men and women) more often– especially intrusive interruptions
• Men are interested in things
• females tend to be more sociable, sensitive, warm, compassionate, polite, anxious, self-doubting, and more open to aesthetics.
• Women are more interested in intimate, cooperative dyadic relationships that are more emotion-focused and characterized by unstable hierarchies and strong egalitarian norms.
• Where aggression does arise, it tends to be more indirect and less openly confrontational.
• Females also tend to display better communication skills, displaying higher verbal ability and the ability to decode other people’s nonverbal behavior.
• Women also tend to use more affiliative and tentative speech in their language.
• Women tend to be more expressive in both their facial expressions and bodily language (although men tend to adopt a more expansive, open posture).
• Women also tend to smile and cry more frequently than men, although context matters a lot.
• Women are interested in people
• sex differences are larger in more egalitarian, individual countries
• Even relatively small differences at the average level can lead to very large differences in the proportion of groups at the extremes.
• Many couples go into a marriage assuming that sex differences in personality are minimal. However, we know that on average, females in relationships want constant emotional connections whereas on average men don’t

Scientists now believe your lying eyes may be right.

It’s pioneer week, so it got me thinking about the pioneers.  Times were hard, so would we find the pioneer men and the pioneer women less different from each other than we are today?  On the other hand, the Saints were early adapters of some forms of sex egalitarianism.  It would be a mistake to call Joseph Smith and Brigham Young early feminists, but it wouldn’t be completely a mistake.  Would that early egalitarianism lead to more pronounced sex differences and paradoxically lead to the Saints being more comfortable with sex differences and therefore more resistant to feminism and attacks on the family?