Sex differences between men and women are usually due to biology, not socialization or patriarchy, research shows.
It's a common misconception that men and women's gender differences are just socialized and caused by the "patriarchy", but that is false. Many people, particularly woke people, will deny that men and women are inherently different.
Men experience scored lower on fear, anxiety and emotional dependence than women, and the reason had to do with differences in physical strength.
Two studies found that differences in physical strength accounted for why men are less fearful or anxious than women. This study by Nicholas Kerry and Damian Murray found that because women score higher than men on neuroticism (a big 5 personality trait), it was due to differences in grip strength between men and women. They found that gender differences between men and women on the anxiety facet of Neuroticism was explained by differences in grip strength. This means that it did not account for differences in overall neuroticism, but the anxiety facet of neuroticism. This other study also found that the gender differences between men and women in anxiety were explained by grip strength differences. Cross-national research has shown that women in all countries scored higher than men on all 4 facets of emotionality, and the gender difference was bigger in rich, egalitarian countries except the honesty-humility facet. In a study of 1,399 undergraduates at 4 universities, the researchers found that grip strength accounted for more than half of the gender difference in fearfulness. In fact, the 8% of women who were stronger than the average man were less fearful than the 22% most fearful men. In two of the 5 samples, grip strength completely explained the gender experience, and when controlling for it, the gender difference was entirely gone. It did not explain the difference in sentimentality, but explained a considerable portion of the gender difference in anxiety and emotional dependence.
Handgrip strength tends to be evolutionarily beneficial for men.
Another finding is that differences in handgrip strength was correlated with promiscuity, shoulder-to-hip ratio, age at first intercourse, and aggressive behavior in men but not women when studying college students. In a meta-analysis, handgrip strength in men was correlated positively with facial attractiveness, self-perceived mate value, walking style attractiveness, dance quality attractiveness, hunting reputation (among hunter gatherers), number of sex partners, male typical body morphology (shoulder-to-hip ratio), self-reported popularity, number of children, self-reported aggression, self-perceived fighting ability and facial dominance/facial aggression. Handgrip strength in men was negatively correlated with being victimized by others and handgrip strength was associated with earlier age of first intercourse. This study found among Spanish teens that fighting ability and physical aggression were associated with each other for boys, but this relationship decreased with age. By late adolescence, fighting ability and anger become linked together for boys, which means their aggression strategy shifted from physical to nonphysical with age. Among late adolescent girls (ages 17/18), fighting ability and aggression have no association together.
Women are as likely to be angry as men, but men and women express it differently, but not necessarily due to social norms.
Men and women are just as likely to experience anger, but women's anger, on average, lasts longer. Men are more likely to be aggressive, passive aggressive or coercive when dealing with anger, but women are more likely to cut off contact with someone ever again. It's not because of socialization, but because men are more likely to be aggressive, even in the most "egalitarian" countries and among other species, and women engage in more relational aggression, like gossiping and character assassination. This is how women express their anger, and, as a result, they seem less angry. It's not because of socialization. In fact, although the gender differences in how anger manifests still existed after age 50, the difference decreased after that age.
Risk
This review of the literature shows that women and men's overlap in riskiness exceeds 80% and they're similar, with little difference. Nonetheless, men tend to be riskier under stress whereas women are less risky under stress: "These gender differences in behavior are associated with differences in activity in the insula and dorsal striatum, brain regions involved in computing risk and preparing to take action."
It could be women engage in other risk behaviors like pregnancy or cosmetic surgery whereas men engage in more obvious ones, like drinking and driving or getting in fights. As a result, this leads to research men are riskier. They're riskier in a different way. They get in more fights, drink and drive more, etc. Historically, men were stronger and had to risk their lives to protect others or hunt large game for food. Women will take risks that don't result in those types of injuries as much.
In fact, there's evolutionary reasons for why men might engage in a lot of risk behaviors more than women, such as unsafe sexual practices, drinking and driving, getting in fights, substance use, etc. This study elaborates on how it's linked to faster life history strategies, which is defined by low parental investment, high mating effort, criminality, high mating effort, low group altruism, and short-term mating. Slow life history strategy is characterized by long-term mating, high parental investment, low criminality, high group altruism and low risk-taking:
The present study analyzed the direct effect of LHS on risk-taking behaviors moderated by gender, and the mediating effect of evolu- tionary domain-specific risks between LHS and risk-taking behaviors. Results showed a moderating effect of gender over rule breaking, with fast LHS males expressing the highest levels of rule breaking and slow LHS males the lowest. However, there were no differences in rule breaking between slow LHS and fast LHS females. Strikingly, males showed higher variability in rule breaking compared to females, with slow LHS males engaging in less rule breaking in comparison with slow LHS females, and fast LHS males engaging in more rule breaking in comparison with fast LHS females. In addition to rule breaking, there were specific conditional direct effects in males over global risk-taking behaviors, unsafe sexual practices, and substance use, with fast LHS scoring higher than slow LHS.
Slow LHS men might increase reproductive success through offspring survival by avoiding risk, whereas fast LHS men engage in risk behaviors for mate attraction. Some men are better suited for parental effort and some are better for reproductive effort. Risks in fast LHS men is a form of intrasexual competition against other men. Women engaged in less risk behaviors because they focus more on parental investment for reproductive success:
More specifically, results have shown that fast LHS is related to higher risk propensity in mate attraction, which in turn increases global risk-taking behaviors, unsafe sexual practices, rule breaking, dangerous, destructive and illegal behaviors, self-injurious behaviors and substance use.
Furthermore, slow LHS women's involvement in breaking rules with kinship is due to obtaining benefits for relatives because their survival and reproductive success was about kin care. Extended family often took care of children historically, too.:
Finally, kinship also mediated the effect between LHS and rule breaking. As it was expected, slow LHS related to high risk propensity in kinship, as it has been previously seen; by contrast, and quite surprisingly, kinship predicted positively rule breaking. If we look at Fig. 3, we can see that slow LHS females showed higher levels of rule breaking compared to slow LHS males, contrary to LHT predictions. Both slow LHS and females are related to greater investment in kinship compared to fast LHS and males. We therefore suggest that slow LHS females’ involvement in rule breaking through kinship could be partially due to being a mean of obtaining benefits for their relatives, given their survival and reproductive success depend mainly on kin care.
In conclusion, men might engage in certain risk behaviors more because of mate attraction and reproductive success, and it could be because they engaged in more large-game hunting and were stronger, and could protect others. Men with fast life history strategies engage in these risks more. This is all in line with research showing dark triad traits like psychopathy and, to an extent, Machiavellianism are linked to faster life history strategies whereas narcissism is linked to slower ones. This study instead found that, after reviewing literature and conducting its own research, fast life history strategy was linked to certain facets of psychopathy (impulsive antisociality) and narcissism (entitlement/exploitativeness), and was linked to Machiavellianism, unrestricted sociosexuality, and aggression. The slow life history strategy was linked to the fearless dominance facet of psychopathy and the leadership/authority and grandiose exhibitionism of narcissism. Dark triad traits are more common in men than they are in women.
Sex differences in emotional expression are not necessarily socialized, and can actually be biological instead.
Men do cry less than women. So many studies across the world and time periods have found this almost consistently. In the 1980s, it was found that women cry an average of 5.3 times per month and men cry an average of 1.3 times per month, with crying defined as anything from moist eyes to outright sobbing. Later research in the 2010s found that these averages stayed the same. A study of people in 37 countries found consistently that women cry more than men. The difference is more pronounced in countries that allow more freedom of expression and social resources, like the United States, Chile and Sweden. Countries like Nepal, Ghana, and Nigeria reported higher rates of crying for women, but the difference was less pronounced despite being still pronounced. This is because even though people in these poorer countries have more to cry about, people in those countries repress the tears more because they're frowned upon in these countries more for expressing emotions. In countries that are considered more egalitarian, the gender gap is bigger. As a result, socialization does not cause the gender gap.
Men's testosterone may inhibit crying, whereas the hormone prolactin (which women have more of) tends to increase crying. This explains why it's possible that men cry more as they get to older ages after young adulthood when testosterone lowers. Furthermore, up until age 11, boys and girls cry equally often, but then boys gain more testosterone, and certain prostate cancer treatments that lower testosterone tend to lower crying rates among men. Additionally, fathers are more responsive to infants' cries when the father had lower testosterone or higher prolactin.
Furthermore, women have less of a fight or flight response than men. Women have more oxytocin, which makes them respond to stress with more tend and befriend behavior, typically through protecting and reassuring others or creating social networks. In fact, SKY is the gene that makes embryos become male infants, and it's the gene that makes men react more aggressively to stress than women.
As for expressing emotions, research shows men are as emotional as women. Nonetheless, research showing psychological similarity between men and women tends to have poor methodology in how it measures sex differences, and generally, there's a lot of psychological difference between men and women. In a meta-analysis of sex differences in feeling moral emotions, women tend to experience more guilt, shame, and to a lesser extent, embarrassment. Similar results were found in a study of children's emotions. In a cross-cultural study of 37 nations, women tended to report more negative emotionality. In more egalitarian countries, sex differences were found in the intensity of sadness, fear, shame and guilt. Sex differences in social anxiety across cultures found universally that women score higher than men, as do studies of test anxiety among high school students. Most of these negative emotions were small though, but sex differences with larger d values are not more real than ones with smaller d values, nor are they more attributable to biology or less attributable to socialization. Not all men have to be taller than women for a sex difference to be real. In studies measuring emotionality with observer reports or clinical evaluations, sex differences in negative emotionality are not always, but usually, found. Women experience more cognitive rumination and seek social support more, and react more negatively to unpleasant experiences in experimental settings. Women also reacted more sadly to sad films, reacted with more fear-disgust to fear-disgust films, and differed in their brain activation in response to negative slides. Women also had shorter reaction times and fewer atypical responses. Men, on the other hand, reacted more happily to happy films. Women responded more to negative, but not positive, emotion-inducing slides. Studies also constantly find that women score much higher than men on neuroticism and anxiety. Women scored higher on neuroticism compared to men across many nations and cultures. In fact, this sex difference was bigger in more egalitarian countries than less egalitarian ones.
They even looked at 70 nations and found that women valued benevolence and universalism values more than men and this sex difference was larger in more egalitarian countries. In fact, in more egalitarian countries, there were larger sex differences in cognitive ability and physical size (i.e.: height). This important article elaborates more on this.
This study found that women smile a bit more than men, and these sex differences peak in the teens but decrease with age. However, when being watched or when in similar roles or positions in society, these differences disappear. They also found the differences exists among white people but not among black people, and the difference is slight, with some studies showing men smile more even if most studies show women do. This large analysis found women do not universally tend to be more express than men across all facial actions, nor are they more expressive in all positive valence actions or less so in all negative valence actions. Women do often express actions more, especially positive valence, "however, expressiveness is not greater in women for all negative valence actions and is dependent on the discrete emotional state". Women express angry actions less and sad or fearful actions more than men. Additionally:
The general pattern of findings was consistent across the five countries (US, Germany, UK, China, France) included in the study. Although the magnitude of the sex differences varied somewhat across cultures (e.g., women smiled reliably more than men in Germany, the UK and the US but not France or China), the directionality of the data were the same regardless of the country.
Women and men handle stress differently, and women might process and talk about it to others, whereas men look for escape activities, like golf or music. Women also internalize stress more, and men react more with anger or impulsivity. Research also shows that women have longer, faster, and larger stress responses than men. In fact, this sex difference even exists among rats:
As an example, the locus coeruleus (LC) is one of the stress centers in the brain. A study out of the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia found that in response to a blood pressure stress test, female LC neurons fire faster than those of males. Female rats also have more receptors for stress-related neurotransmitters than male rats, and their neurons don’t clear the neurotransmitters as quickly from the synapses as males do, meaning a stress reaction lasts longer in females than males.
Sex hormones also play a role. Testosterone inhibits stress response whereas estrogen sensitizes the stress system. This study, however, finds that testosterone affects stress depending on social context, and that it is in line with research showing that testosterone can reduce social anxiety and modulate the effects of stress in socially challenging situations. In fact, a study had found that among prepubescent boys and girls, there is no difference in anxiety disorder prevalence, but by puberty and beyond, the difference appears more among women than men. They found that among adult mice, females were far more likely than males to avoid new, different mice after encounters with aggressive mice, whereas males acted the same around unfamiliar mice even after dealing with aggressive mice. However, among younger mice, males and females acted equally wary after dealing with aggressive mice. Something changed in puberty. Additionally, when they removed the testes of the male mice before puberty began, the male mice grew up without exposure to sex hormones like testosterone, and these mice showed the same response to stress in the experiment as adult female mice. The most noteworthy part of the study is when the study used an implant that only used dihydrotestosterone, a strong version of testosterone, in male mice that had testes removed before puberty. The team also gave these implants of dihydrotestosterone to female mice during puberty to see their results:
On its own, the dihydrotestosterone implants caused no immediate behavioral changes in males or females. However, after exposure to the social stress of an aggressive mouse, the effect was clear: Mice that had received the dihydrotestosterone implants showed almost no effect of stress. With the implants, both males and females behaved just like adult males that had gone through puberty. “Dihydrotestosterone by itself does nothing,” said Wright. “But once placed in a stressful situation the effect became clear.”
The researchers also measured amygdala responses in mice and found that mice with testosterone exposure did not experience increases in that neural activity whereas mice without testosterone did, and this part of the brain does cause stress response. The researchers conclude that testosterone is why men and women respond differently to social stress. This probably explains why male victims of violent crime experience less socio-emotional problems than female victims. Furthermore, a study found that women tend to prefer stoic men as long-term mates compared to other men, and that men, consciously or subconsciously, downplay their health problems to attract women as a long-term relationship partner, presumably because it shows that these men will take lots of risks to protect their own family or engage in large-game hunting.
Women are not as interested in casual sex, masturbation, etc. as men unless they're ovulating and can get pregnant.
Many feminists believe women are just as into casual sex, masturbation, etc. as men or have just as much of a libido as men, but aren't as likely to admit it or are socialized not to. This is false. An article here provides lots of evidence that shows women are genuinely not as interested in casual sex as men, regardless of sexual orientation. Across all regions, research found that lesbians were no more interested or engaged in it than straight women, and gay men were just as likely to be into it as straight men. Gay men do have casual sex more than straight men because they search for men, not women. In fact, the gap between men vs. women's interest in casual sex was bigger in gender-egalitarian countries like the Nordic countries. Additionally, even when women were confirmed that they would be safe with a stranger, they were still not as interested in casual sex as men. The research found women's smaller interest in casual sex was not due to concerns about safety, pregnancy, STDs, contraception, etc.
What should be noted is that women become much more interested in casual sex when they ovulate, and they also tend to be more into relationships when ovulating. Contrary to popular belief, they don't find masculine faces more attractive when ovulating. They always find masculine faces or attractive men more attractive, but and they prefer them both for both long and short-term relationships. However, when ovulating, women find men in general more attractive. The fact that men using dating apps more (even gay men use it more than lesbians) is because men get aroused or attracted to someone more quickly, including by just looking at a photo of a person. Women's libidos are more likely to be responsive than men's, often based on what is happening, and women's libidos tend to be like men's or more spontaneous when women ovulate. This is why there's some anecdotal evidence online that women use dating apps more when ovulating, and they probably swipe right more when ovulating.
In fact, a study that measured ovulation more correctly found that women's mate preferences did not change when ovulating but they had better body images and heightened sexual desire when ovulating. Their sociosexual orientation did not change either. Their interest in casual sex increases when ovulating, but their interest in long-term relationships increases just as much, and, therefore, the gap between their interest in short-term vs. long-term relationships (they're more interested in the latter, even when ovulating) stays the same (see chart below, provided by this article). Nonetheless, women had more interest in long-term relationships and casual sex when ovulating. During ovulation, they also perceived themselves as far more sexually attractive, had far more sexual fantasies and desires and more intense sexual fantasies and desires, had more sex with a partner, had their partner initiate sex more, initiated sex themselves more, mutually initiated sex more, masturbated far more, and perceived their partner as far more well-toned.
Women's libidos are not as high as men's unless they're ovulating. When ovulating, they masturbate, think about sex frequently, want to have sex and even casual sex alongside long-term relationships, have spontaneous sexual desire, etc. just as much as men. Men can regularly have the ability to impregnate a woman, but women cannot get pregnant easily unless they're ovulating. That's why women are not as sexual as men unless they're ovulating. That's all.
Men are more likely to be aggressive than women, and it is for biological reasons. Women have evolutionary reasons for why when they commit crime, it's more likely to be property crime compared to violent crime. Even other species have men being violent more than women.
This article elaborates more on this. Men are inherently more likely to be violent than women, and even among bonobos and chimpanzees, aggressive males have more mating success, and male bonobos actually are more aggressive than male chimpanzees. Also, a study of many nations found that sex differences in adolescent physical aggression tend to be bigger in countries with more gender equality and smaller in countries with less gender equality. Sex differences also did not vary according to societal rule of law or income inequality. In fact, in all countries, most murderers were men (although women who commit murder do get suspected less and use sneakier methods, getting away with it more). In fact, even among the youngest children before socialization, boys engage in rough and tumble play more than girls, and this difference appears in juvenile primates. In fact, among chimpanzees, 92% of chimps who kill are males and 73% of the victims are males. Even among very early childhood toddlers, boys were the majority of physically aggressive children, and the sex difference widened as childhood went on, but most perpetrators of indirect aggression (i.e.: relational aggression) were girls.
In fact, boys are not taught to be violent. In fact, people perceived aggressive women more leniently than aggressive men, and saw women's aggression as less aggressive. Male criminals get punished more harshly than female ones even when controlling for various factors. In fact, female criminals are overrepresented among property crime offenders compared to criminals in general. Research shows that resource scarcity might drive offending in women, and maternal survival is vital for female reproductive success, so women have a lower fear threshold than men when dealing with physical danger, which explains why women are much less likely to commit violent crime or engage in risky behaviors involving injury or death, and it explains why they engage in property crime instead or use low-risk or indirect tactics when dealing with direct confrontation. Women are just as likely to commit intimate partner violence as men, but not general violence, and this is probably due to women's oxytocin and her tendency to attack her partner to engage in mate guarding to increase male investment, whereas men use it to mate guard in order to ensure paternity certainty.
Women's interest in STEM appears to be biological.
Women are underrepresented in STEM fields like computer science or engineering, but it's not because of discrimination. In fact, studies found that men tend to face more discrimination compared to women in the hiring process on STEM tenure track.
In fact, even among neonate infants, males showed more interest in the physical-mechanical mobile whereas female infants showed more interest in faces. Another study found that among infants ages 9 to 17 months (when infants can already play with toys independently), toddlers ages 18 to 23 months (when gender knowledge begins), and toddlers ages 24 to 32 months (when further knowledge happens), boys and girls both had a preference for toys suiting their gender's roles. People weren't socialized to be interested in it, especially when preferences with male-oriented toys increased for not just boys but even girls with age. Admittedly, in Lithuania, women tend to be overrepresented in this field because:
In the early 1990s, when Lithuania underwent an economic transition and a massive economic contraction, the prestige of scientific professions went down alongside academic salaries and social security in the field, and the number of women doctoral candidates started to go up.
Science research funding is low in Lithuania and the science jobs there are often part-time and open-ended, which makes men there pursue other fields instead.
Sex differences are bigger in egalitarian countries vs. less egalitarian ones.
Men and women's differences are bigger in egalitarian countries:
However, sex differences in many aspects of personality, sexuality, and cognition are actually much larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. This includes sex differences in extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, Machiavellianism, Narcissism, psychopathy, social dominance orientation, dismissing attachment, intimate partner violence, spatial location ability, spatial rotation ability, crying behavior, depression, benevolence values, love, empathetic occupational preferences, enjoying casual sex, mate preferences for attractiveness, self-esteem, and subjective well-being. Even sex differences in physical traits such as height, obesity, and blood pressure are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. This suggests it is unlikely that larger psychological sex differences are due to more traditional sex role socialization or patriarchy. Again, evolutionary theories involving life history strategies and ecological factors may be better at explaining the size of psychological sex differences, in this case how and why sizes vary across cultures.
Across various nations, sex differences did not shrink as gender equality increased. In fact, it remained stable or widened. The factors that shrunk the differences were religiosity and ecological stress, the latter of which hinders survival or reproduction. It's not gender roles, sexism, patriarchy, socialization, etc. that causes sex differences between men and women. Other research has also shown that in countries with more gender equality, sex differences in various traits, including personality traits, risk taking, revenge, altruism, trust, patience, etc. between men and women widen significantly. These findings were statistically significant, but the size of the effect is not that large because taking a random man or a woman in a country and knowing their gender will tell little about their preferences, but these are about sex differences that occur on average. There was enough variability across cultures to show people respond to the conditions they grow up in, so differences between men and women isn't always biological, but can be, depending on the trait. This study finds that countries with better living conditions have greater sex differences in personality, verbal ability, episodic memory and negative emotions but smaller sex differences in partner preference, sexual behavior and math. This could be because these countries have more available contraception or condoms, have better sexual education, less stigma against premarital sex, and less concern about paternity certainty, making women more able to engage in premarital sex or casual sex. Furthermore, these countries have low child mortality rates and less poverty, so women don't have to have many children or rely on a somewhat older or much wealthier man who can help support the family with her:
Taken together, results indicate that more sex differences are larger, rather than smaller, in countries with higher living conditions. It should therefore be expected that the magnitude of most psychological sex differences will remain unchanged or become more pronounced with improvements in living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education.
This study investigates whether gender equality itself causes the gender differences in values. They found that in more egalitarian countries, gender differences in values were more pronounced, with cohen's d sizes being small, but this doesn't actually suggest that sex differences are actually small. Researcher David P. Schmitt elaborates on this in an article.
The study found that in gender-equal countries, sex differences in values are bigger, but men and women's values converged to some degree (although not a high degree) over time (from the 2002 to 2004 era to the 2014 to 2016 era). The researchers found no evidence that gender equality itself causes the gender difference in values. They say it's important to research what else would cause it, and it appears that better living conditions cause gender differences to widen in more egalitarian countries because these countries have better living conditions. As a result, men and women have all the wealth and prosperity to have freedom to pursue their genuine goals in their life.
Conclusion
This is not suggesting that there aren't any harmful or unfair gender roles. This is not suggesting sex differences can never be socialized. This is not saying sex differences are always biological, but usually, they are biological in the vast majority of cases. Sex differences are usually biological, not caused by socialization or the "patriarchy".