Why Men this and Women that

Despite the publication of the results of a 25 year study in development, concluding among other things that the way the nervous system of a human being is hard-wired depends on the amount of testosterone in the womb at a certain point of embryo development, people still insist on saying 'men this' and 'women that'.

It ain't that simple.

First, you have to consider a continuum between the high testosterone leves at that time and the low levels. A continuum. Not either/or.

So what if male gender humans tend to be more to one end and female gender humans tend to be more at the other. That's just a correlation that is not high enough to draw all the Woman's Day conclusions that people bandy about.

Better, perhaps, to classify people as High-T and Low-T. Or maybe remove possible pejorative evaluations and call them T and N.

What is more, you can now do a normalised test to see where on the continuum your own nervous system sits. Wow.

I am about 60% T and 40% N.

No. That does not mean I am a big girl. It means I can read maps without turning them around and I don't lose my keys as often.

The T nervous system allows its owner to unthinkingly, naturally and without thought or effort make maps of reality and respond to those.

When the T puts his or her keys down, it is recorded in the map. If someone else moves them, that person, male or female, will not be able to easily find them. This is because they are working with the map they made, not the reality in front of them.

The N puts something down, again male or female, and makes no map. That step is not there. They see the reality directly. So if someone moves it, no problem.

I reckon there is a great opportunity here for researchers - redo ALL the research that has compared gender males with gender females. Do it on the basis of T - N, after testing the participants.

This will separate out the differences that are actually based on physical gender and those that are based on T-N nervous system differences. Across a continuum.

Research grants anyone?

Anyone got money to fund this?

It might not look important but the results could be staggering if we find much higher correlation N-T than we do M-F.