Are there any real differences between men and women apart from the obvious, physical ones, or have the differences all to do with the way we’re formed by society?

This article by Professor William Reville in the Irish Times the other day sets out the precise scientific basis for why the sexual differences between men and women are not “socially constructed” but natural.

Admittedly this should be obvious to everyone, but as Reville explains in his article, there are many who claim otherwise.  

In Sweden, as he points out, toy catalogues must show images of boys playing with dolls and girls with guns, and vice versa, and in 2012 the Swedes introduced the genderless pronoun “hen” instead of “han” (he) and “hon” (she).

Reville writes: “In Stockholm, a state-sponsored preschool Egalia tries to obliterate the male/female distinction among children. The children are not called boys and girls, but friends, and stories like two male giraffes parenting abandoned crocodile eggs have replaced classic fairy tales such as Cinderella. The Swedish Green party want Egalia to become the norm.

Such a move would prove unhealthy, he insists: “Males and females are different and behave differently from an early age. Sex stereotyped play is a persistent difference – boys generally prefer rough-and-tumble play and girls prefer nurturing play. This also holds across species; monkeys behave similarly.

“Biology plays a major role in determining male and female patterns of behaviour. Sex hormones come in two varieties, male and female. Males are predominantly exposed to male sex hormones in the womb and throughout life, and females to female sex hormones. These hormones condition play behaviour.

“Female monkeys exposed prenatally to male sex hormones later prefer male rough-and-tumble play. The human genetic disease congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) exposes the female foetus to unusually large amounts of male sex hormone and toy-preference studies have shown that girls with CAH prefer to play with cars than with dolls.

“Few deny that biology plays a major role in determining gender-specific play. However, those who make proposals such as described for Sweden argue that ‘we should not accept biology as destiny’ and parents/teachers should oppose certain biologically inbuilt tendencies with social conditioning, just as we do in medicine by vaccination or medications.

In other words, it is proposed that we should treat the different behaviours of boys and girls as children “as a disease in need of a cure,” as Reville puts it.

But as he points out, this pursuit of gender neutrality “would eliminate variety, generally seen as a valuable asset in the biological world and a vital basic element contributing to normal human interrelations”.

The whole article is well worth a read.