I've gone back and forth a great deal when it comes to the nature versus nurture debate. Some beleive there are no biological differences between men and women other than primary and secondary sexual characteristics.

So are our brains fundamentally wired differently? I just watched a Norweagian documentary, that argued the case that our brains indeed are wired differently. In order to account for the large amount of female nurses, and the huge number of male engineers, the host travels around investigating claims on both sides of the debate. I think I was convinced by the arguments in the documentary, and have now landed somewhere on the fence. Here are some of the arguments I found quite illuminating:

  1. Day-old babies tend to choose toys in accordance with their sex. That is, boys tend to choose typical boy toys (Machines), and girls tend to choose typical girl toys (Dolls). The fact that these babies are only a day old, pretty much excludes any chance of nurture influence in my book. Conversely, they find that this has something to do not so much with physical gender, as the amount of testosterone or estrogen produced in the brain.

  2. No matter the culture and place in the world, you tend to find an overabundance of males in technical work having to do with machinery, and an overbandance of females working with the so-called 'softer sciences'. That is, unless the country is developing, in which case there are proportionally less people in social sectors.

  3. An evolutionary psychologist made an excellent counter-argument. Suppose it's true that the only difference between men and women are physical sexual characteristics, then where do the physical differences come from? The brain. So clearly brains are fundementally different, at least statistically.

So, where do you stand in this debate?