Some Truth about Differences between Men and Women

This leads to the question whether there really are any differences between men and women that matter when a preacher steps into the pulpit. To attempt to answer that question, we must distinguish between two interactive parts: our sex and our gender. They are not synonyms. Sex is the biological part of us. It includes all the differences in male and female reproductive structures, the differences in chromosomes (women are XX and men are XY), the differences in hormones (the balance of testosterone and estrogen, for example), and the differences in physical features such as body hair, muscle mass, skin tone, and strength. Gender, on the other hand, refers to everything we associate with being masculine or feminine — the ways we think, feel, and behave that express femininity or masculinity in culturally accepted patterns. As a general rule, therefore, sex refers to what is biologically determined and gender refers to what is socially learned — the things we have picked up since our infancy about the attitudes and behaviors that are appropriate to being male or female.

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Yet there is a strong interaction between our sex and our gender. Look at the role played by essential physiological differences in our reproductive systems. A woman has a uterus and breasts and thus, in most cases, can conceive, give birth to a baby, then nourish that infant. Such abilities have all kinds of ramifications for difference. There is no doubt that women experience physiological events associated with reproduction that have no counterpart in male experience. There is no male corollary to menstruation, pregnancy, parturition, lactation, and the physiology of menopause. Nor do women experience these events only physically. They also experience them emotionally. These events in a woman's body are not just biological. They are integral to the way a woman sees her body and, in many cases, her self-worth and her sexuality.

Does that force us to agree with Sigmund Freud that "biology is destiny"? Not necessarily. Ruth Bleier tells us that "biology defines possibilities but doesn't determine them."14 Biology is never irrelevant. But neither is it determinant. For each person — male and female — body, mind, behavior, history, and environment interact in unique ways. No two people emerge with exactly the same gender identities.

At issue here is the ongoing debate about gender difference between those who believe that the differences between men and women are innate and those who believe that the differences are the result of life experience. But when we examine a wide range of data, we find that it is not a question of all nature (biology) or all nurture (socialization). There is an interaction between the two in all of us. Some people want to exclude nature entirely and insist on 100 percent nurture. Others want to exclude nurture entirely and insist on 100 percent nature. The truth is somewhere in between. Gender differences do exist. The roots of those differences, however, lie in some combination of nature, nurture, and the environment in which the interaction occurs.