Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality

Oncefa2 · 2022-05-18T17:43:58+00:00

This study replicates findings from other studies that higher levels of gender equality and GDP lead to higher levels of gender differences in society. With the idea being that when people are free to make their own choices, they will gravitate towards biologically influenced gender differences, instead of socially influenced gender differences.

In other words, traditional social conditioning appears to push men and women to be more similar, which goes against the social construct theory that society is what creates gender differences.

Such an effect is likely mediated through the fact that both men and women, at their basic level, require food and shelter and will therefore gravitate towards strategies that satisfy those basic needs. Which decreases the manifestation of gender differences since everyone is doing the same thing. However, once food and shelter become easy to aquire, men and women go their separate ways based on biological impulses that go beyond basic survival.

This paper creates two models that they call the social role hypothesis and the resources hypothesis. These models represent the two ideas that gender differences are created by society or that gender differences are created by evolution / biology.

These hypothesis are then tested against the known data showing that gender differences increase with measures of GDP and gender equality, which of course contradicts the social role hypothesis and supports the resource hypothesis.

Abstract

Preferences – concerning time, risk and social interactions – systematically shape human behavior, and contribute to differential economic and social outcomes between the genders. Here, we present a global investigation of gender differences in six fundamental preferences. Our data consist of 80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples with measures on willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity as well as trust. Gender differences in preferences were positively related to economic development and gender equality. This suggests that greater availability of and equal access to material and social resources for both genders favor the manifestation of gender-differentiated preferences across countries.

This paper was discussed by Professor Guy Madison during the 2019 Male Psychology Conference. He is from Umeå University in Sweden and the context is about public policy in Sweden pushing for equality of outcome between the sexes as sex differences have gotten larger. Such a strategy contradicts the evidence of sex differences between men and women and has been failing as a public policy approach in Sweden and in other Scandinavian nations.

You can watch the presentation here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cPFKk4ibqGg

He has published some interesting looking research himself as well:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=s934K6cAAAAJ

Geiten · 2022-05-19T13:01:23+00:00

How did they measure how gender equal a country is? I have seen some previous studies where that was a major issue.

Title	Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality
Author	Oncefa2
Upvotes	10
Comments	2
Date	May 18, 2022 5:24 PM UTC (1 year ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/Male_Studies
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/Male_Studies/comments/usi1ao/relationship_of_gender_differences_in_preferences/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/Male_Studies/relationship-of-gender-differences-in-preferences.1215872 https://theredarchive.com/post/1215872