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.
That is John Tierney, here is more.
Sentences of interest
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But we already knew this, didn’t we?
Ah, but Tyler suggests that personalities as a whole should diverge more as we become wealthier.
On the other hand, the authors of this study suggest that agricultural society, which has a lower standard of living than hunter-gatherer life, puts male competitive/display characteristics into “hibernation,” and that the increasing wealth of our society is returning ourselves back to our natural equilibrium.
I am more inclined to believe the Tyler theory, since the authors point largely to physical characteristics that rationally should be muted when you have no food, as opposed to personality differences, which shouldn’t be affected directly by food supplies. If you don’t have nourishment, it doesn’t make much sense to try to develop a beautiful set of feathers to attract females…but if you’re a jerk, you should be a jerk regardless of how many Big Macs you have.
Possible flaw:
Men become taller relative to women in modern societies. What if taller people simply have more “male” traits?
Robert Olson:
Sex hormones affect personality, and I would venture to guess that they’re not fully expressed in malnourished individuals.
I thought this article was interesting and made some good points. It makes sense that personality differences between men and women vary among different cultures. Especially when you see such differences in cultures of more non-working non-competitive people than those with a larger class of working people in which there is always competition. The explanation given as to why this may be also has strong reasoning. It is easy to see why the hardships of other poorer countries could induse more stress and in turn affect the personality characteristivs of its people. Another big factor is adjusting different social as well as physical stresses from culture to culture. Adapting personalities to different rules, laws, hierarchies, or government would definitely have a significant impact on gender differences varying on what kind of culture you come from. All of this information makes me think that personality tests need to be based on specific stresses of each individual group or culture to get a valid measurement of a gender gap. I think it would be impossible to measure gender gaps based on one type of personality test for everyone.
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