GENDER DIFFERENCES : Chemistry or culture?

If you know about "fight or flight" responses in threatening situations, you are probably ready for "tend and befriend" strategies. Researchers in the most recent Psychological Review report that females react to danger by quieting and soothing their offspring and by affiliating with a group for protection. For if females fight, or flee, they endanger the survival of their progeny and of themselves. Better to calm down and blend into friendly networks.

In contrast, the classic male "fight or flight" response to threats activates the sympathetic nervous system with cascading adrenaline hormones secreted into the bloodstream. These highly aroused animals are then mobilized to attack or to flee. But in our civilized world, men cannot easily fight or flee from threats. The resulting buildup of frustrated stress responses has been blamed for the high rates of male cardiovascular disease, and for the fact that men live on the average seven and a half years less than women.

Females can have sympathetic arousal to stress as well, but as the new model of tending and befriending proposes, women more often respond with surges of sedating hormones, anxiety-calming oxytocin enhanced by estrogen. Since assaults and threats to females often come from aggressive males, even from a sexual partner, females who face stress turn to female networks of kin and friends. They create and maintain these cooperative female groups to enhance their survival and that of their offspring. As compared with males, women are thus more likely to "tend and befriend," to create and maintain networks, and to be less threatened by crowding. Such maternal strategies are part of an innate attachment-nurturing system that operates not only in females but in their infants. Such behavior rests on the neuroendocrine underpinnings of oxytocin, estrogen, and opioid mechanisms.

Aha! say those who argue for the importance of innate gender differences between males and females: here is more proof of the complementary nature of men and women. But many feminists like myself who stress gender similarities are quite ready to accept the fact that evolutionary mechanisms have produced some universal sex differences oriented to sexual reproduction. Who can deny that males always and everywhere exhibit more rough-and-tumble juvenile play, more physical aggression, more upper-body strength, and perhaps greater spatial abilities? And yes, females develop verbal abilities earlier, have different play patterns, and emotionally invest more in reproduction. But other differences--in SAT scores, in speech and behavioral patterns (such as the male inability to ask for directions)--can be explained as arising from specific cultural effects. Of course socialization always builds upon biology, but gender differences can be either accentuated or minimized in comparison to other individual differences and commonalities between the sexes.

I accept an evolutionary perspective that maintains there are biologically given human characteristics resulting from natural selection in the distant past, the so-called EEA or era of evolutionary adaptation. The environment that once determined human survival on the savannas was different from today's complex technological society. Cultural evolution also takes place, and is able to transform innate biological human responses. Those who want to affirm human progress must be ready to acknowledge what is, in order to work for what ought to be. (If, however, it turns out that women really are the superior sex, we will just have to accept this fact and move forward.)

Fortunately, at this point ignorance about gender differences keeps us from drawing conclusions about their significance and value. Since hardly any studies of male affiliation have been done, it may be true that males also possess "tend and befriend" responses that can be activated under certain conditions. It is also acknowledged that women are as aggressive as men, but express their hostility in less physical ways. As SAT scores even out, so do rates of female and male stress, addiction, and disease. It turns out that the female networks of kin and friends, created and maintained for mutual support, can themselves be sources of stress. Finally, full neuroendocrinal evidence is not in yet. We know, for example, that males also produce oxytocin and estrogen, and that females produce stress hormones. Most crucially, in the big-brained self-conscious human species, the full influence of consciousness on physiology, sex, gender, and reproductive behavior remains unknown.

Admittedly, my scientific intuitions about sex and gender are shaped by theological commitments as well as by reason, research, and interpretations of my experience. I believe in a God beyond gender ("I am who am") who creates human beings in God's own image as one human family. I am not surprised by new scientific findings demonstrating that the unity and genetic similarity of the human species are far greater than the relatively superficial differences of race. I expect that gender differences will be found to be less important than gender similarities and individual differences. After all, Jesus was born a male and yet displayed passionate "tend and befriend" responses in the face of threat. He loved and nurtured his friends and he desired to take the people of Jerusalem under his wings, like a mother hen. Surely Christian disciples, whether male or female, must mother each other--tending and befriending till kingdom come.

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