Evolutionary Explanations of Gender Roles

Evolutionary Explanations of Gender Roles

1. Mate choice

   • Men look for partners who are physically attractive (suggests fertility). Women are additionally interested in the resources a partner might be able to provide
     • Buss, 1989 - Cross Cultural Study

2. IDAs

   • Approaches
     • Biosocial
     • Alternative view is that behaviour is affected by nurture
   • Determinism
     • Evolutionary approach is deterministic but genes don't determine our behaviour only predispose us to certain behaviours

3. Division of labour

   • Role division may have evolved because women would have spent most of their adult life pregnant or producing milk
     • If women hunted the reproductive success of the group would decrease
       • Kuhn and Stiner, 2006 - suggests gender division of labour might explain survival of the homo sapiens and not the Neanderthals
         • Both men and female Neanderthals used to hunt

4. Cognitive style

   • Tend and befriend
     • Women may also be more focused on interpersonal relationships
       • Taylor et al, 2000 - proposed might stem from different challenges faced when dealing with stress in EEA
   • E-S theory
     • Women are better at empathising whereas men are better at systematising
     • Baron-Cohen, 2002 - proposed that this gender difference may by the result of selection pressure
       • - Suggested that males who were able to systematise with greater precision would have gained an evolutionary advantage

5. Evaluation

   • Research methods
     • Problems with the degree to which data collected actually represents the behaviour of people from different cultures
   • Speculative theories
     • Do not have a firm factual basis
       • Example is explanation for the disappearance of the Neanderthals
         • Other theories just as plausible include climate change in Europe
           • Tzedakis et al, 2007
   • Implications
     • The meat-sharing hypothesis
       • An outcome of men becoming hunters due to selective pressures is meat being used as a means of attracting female interest
         • Stanford, 1999
     • Autism
       • Baron-Cohen, 2004 - Proposed that autism may be an example of the extreme male brain
         • - Those with autism score high at systematising and low on empathising
   • Research support
     • Tend and befriend
       • Taylor et al, 2000 - showed that in women levels of oxytocin increased with stress
       • Ennis et al, 2001 - conducted a natural experiment to test male-female differences in stress responses
         • - Sampled cortisol levels and found it increased in males and decreased in females
           • Supports view that women respond to stress of others in a different way
     • Mate choice
       • Differences in how males and females advertise themselves
         • Waynforth and Dunbar, 1995 - 44% of males sought physical attractiveness compared to women
           • - 50% of women offered attractiveness whereas only 34% of males did
   • Cognitive style
     • Baron-Cohen, 2004 - conducted research to demonstrate that men and women do think in different ways which align with predicted differences in cognitive style
       • - Developed a Systematising Quotient Questionnaire
         • Found that males tended to be systematisers and females tended to be emphathising