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Evaluating Gender Similarities and Differences Using Metasynthesis

Jaffacakes-and-Jesus

April 10, 2022

6 upvotes

/r/Male_Studies

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271722875_Evaluating_Gender_Similarities_and_Differences_Using_Metasynthesis

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Post Information

Title	Evaluating Gender Similarities and Differences Using Metasynthesis
Author	Jaffacakes-and-Jesus
Upvotes	6
Comments	2
Date	April 10, 2022 11:13 AM UTC (4 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/Male_Studies
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/Male_Studies/comments/u0fh8p/evaluating_gender_similarities_and_differences/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/Male_Studies/evaluating-gender-similarities-and-differences.1215932 https://theredarchive.com/post/1215932

Comments

[–]Jaffacakes-and-Jesus[S] 3 points4 points5 points 4 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

Turns out men and women have far more in common than we are different.

(I know this isn't strictly a study of men as men, rather a comparison of men and women - so please delete if appropriate)

Despite the common lay assumption that males and females are profoundly different, Hyde (2005) used data from 46 meta-analyses to demonstrate that males and females are highly similar. Nonetheless, the gender similarities hypothesis has remained controversial. Since Hyde's provocative report, there has been an explosion of meta-analytic interest in psychological gender differences. We utilized this enormous collection of 106 meta-analyses and 386 individual meta-analytic effects to reevaluate the gender similarities hypothesis. Furthermore, we employed a novel data-analytic approach called metasynthesis (Zell & Krizan, 2014) to estimate the average difference between males and females and to explore moderators of gender differences. The average, absolute difference between males and females across domains was relatively small (d = 0.21, SD = 0.14), with the majority of effects being either small (46%) or very small (39%). Magnitude of differences fluctuated somewhat as a function of the psychological domain (e.g., cognitive variables, social and personality variables, well-being), but remained largely constant across age, culture, and generations. These findings provide compelling support for the gender similarities hypothesis, but also underscore conditions under which gender differences are most pronounced.

[–]Oncefa2 0 points1 point2 points 4 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

The Hyde study has been widely debunked and some researchers have gone as far as to call it fraudulent (Hyde appears to have selectively included and ignored different factors and papers in their meta-analysis).

Even this study, despite the title and thesis, only found moderate support for the hypothesis.

And in the case of this study, it seems to me that it's largely an opinion over what constitutes "similar" and "different".

"In some ways men and women are very similar but in other ways there are important differences."

In fact such a broad and meaningless statement can basically summarize the findings of the paper.

[I]t is of course plausible that researchers are influenced by their own preconceptions about gender stereotypes to the degree that this impacts how they interpret their findings. This criticism applies to researchers whether they appear to focus on gender differences (alpha bias) or gender similarities (beta bias). For example, the work of Janet Hyde (2005) has been very influential in the social sciences, and her ‘gender similarities hypothesis’ -- with the notion that ‘there are more similarities between men and women than diferences’ -- has become axiomatic. However, Hyde’s hypothesis is based on the flawed notion that because there are more similarities, any differences are unimportant. By this logic, we could say that because mice and humans share 95% of their genes, the differences between mice and humans are unimportant. Readers of the present chapter might come to the conclusion that some of the differences between men and women are not only of statistical significance, but are of clinical significance and profound human significance. Hyde based her hypothesis on a meta-analysis (2005), which is flawed in failing to include research on many variables that show a sex difference (such as those listed in Ellis 2018) and toy preference, a behaviour that shows a large sex difference and which dozens of studies stretching over decades have replicated (Todd et al. 2017). Hyde’s reasons for these omissions are unclear, but the effect of the omissions is to bolster her case that gender differences are caused by context rather than biology. There is compelling evidence that sex differences in cognition and behaviour are seen internationally (Ellis 2018), and the fact that they are found worldwide and, in many cases, map onto our notions of gender (e.g. men are more competitive, interested in sports, work-orientated and fearless) suggests that masculinity is to some degree innate.

"From Fetuses to Boys to Men: The Impact of Testosterone on Male Lifespan Development" by John A. Barry and Rebecca Owens in The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health.