For a whole host of reasons it is important to think through our concepts of gender & sex. What is a man or a woman? How are we the same and how are we different? Can you stop being one sex and start being another? How do you do that?

It matters because defining, in particular, what or who is a woman, has suddenly become extremely political and extremely contentious. Significant physical differences (reproductive systems, a cervix or a prostate) are now ignored. We will eventually see studies on the ‘increase of men with cervical cancer and women with prostate cancer.’ To be a man or a woman, in some people’s thinking, it is not necessary to have all the necessary physical components or maybe even any of them to be known as a man or a woman. This thinking will end up being catastrophic for women’s sport, women’s safety, women’s equality, language, education, sciences and of course children.

It will also be catastrophic for the transgender ideologues. A transwoman who has prostate cancer must be treated as a male and yet to do so would be considered a violence against their very sense of self. Men & women react differently to drugs and so to give someone the correct treatment they must be treated according to their biology and not their sense of self. It makes a nonsense of biology and medicine to simply say, ‘Some women have prostates and some don’t.’ Maybe, but all males have prostates and females don’t. There, I’ve separated sex and gender.

But even if we say the physical differences are of no essential consequence (forget the chromosomes, DNA, testosterone, reproductive systems and other inconvenient bits of biology) there are other differences. So while you might not be able to tell whether someone is male or female by looking at their brain (or maybe you can), you can tell whether someone is male or female ‘by their personality traits almost as well as by looking at their face‘.

There are significant differences. Really significant.

On average, 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, even though sex differences in general intelligence measured as an ability are negligible [2]. 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– which can be interpreted as a form of dominant behavior.

…

In contrast, females, on average, tend to be more sociable, sensitive, warm, compassionate, polite, anxious, self-doubting, and more open to aesthetics. On average, 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, and tend to be more expressive in both their facial expressions and bodily language (although men tend to adopt a more expansive, open posture). On average, women also tend to smile and cry more frequently than men, although these effects are very contextual and the differences are substantially larger when males and females believe they are being observed than when they believe they are alone.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-sex-differences-in-personality-seriously/

Now, if you take any single one of those traits, they will be shared by some men and women. These traits overlap, they exist to differing degrees in both men and women but overall and taken together there are clearly discernible differences. The science it seems is clear. Why this is the case, not so much.

It means that you could with 85% accuracy take someone’s personality traits and tell whether that person is male or female. It’s 95% for looking at someone’s face. So this explains why transwomen when they get offended on Twitter by all the transphobia around they react and respond, well, like men. They get aggressive, they interrupt, they threaten violence and seek to dominate and assert themselves. Because well, that’s what men tend to do.

It also explains why the more equal the society (like Sweden and the Nordic nations) the greater the differences in career choices. The richer you are, the freer you are, and the more empowered you are to make your own decisions the greater the likelihood that you’ll choose a course of action in line with who you are and what you’re good at. Girls are better than boys at reading, everywhere. In some places, they are also better than boys at maths and sciences. Girls are really smart! But because they are better and in places like Finland, relatively rich, free and empowered they choose according to their relative strengths. It works like this.

Thus, even when girls outperformed boys in science, as was the case in Finland, girls generally performed even better in reading, which means that their individual strength was, unlike boys’ strength, reading.

Now consider what happens when students are told. Do what you are good at! Loosely speaking the situation will be something like this: females will say I got As in history and English and B’s in Science and Math, therefore, I should follow my strengthens and specialize in drawing on the same skills as history and English. Boys will say I got B’s in Science and Math and C’s in history and English, therefore, I should follow my strengths and do something involving Science and Math.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/boys-comparative-advantage-math-science.html

Voila! Male domination of STEM subjects and females of humanities. Equality of opportunity but not of outcome.

But all this has important implications for churches too. Churches of all persuasions, whether egalitarian or, sorry especially complementarian churches. Go back and read the paragraph on average differences and then decide whether you think a church culture that is only defined and shaped by male leadership sounds like a good and healthy one? I hope the answer is, no. We clearly need the strengths of both men and women at work in our church but we also don’t want a leadership culture that ends up erasing the strengths of men because they too bring something vital to the table.