Amid the debates over what makes us male and female, or whether we can be neither, I see a tendency to grasp at stereotypes or superficial examples to describe gender differences.
Stereotypes, for all they get a bad rap, usually exist because there’s a nugget of truth in there somewhere. However, imprecise language can conflate commonly gendered traits with gender itself.
It’s neither helpful nor accurate to say that caring about fashion is a feminine trait or that preferring dangerous, fast-paced jobs is a masculine one. Individual personalities, cultural expressions of gender, and reactions against those expressions all influence the traits and activities women and men engage in.
The challenge we face now is that understandings of sex and gender have undergone so many transformations our shared language has evaporated. Beneath the politicization and polarization of these issues, there’s a deep longing to be seen as fully human, and to express that humanity in complex ways.
This longing and the upheaval that surrounds it suggests we need a more robust way of thinking about sex and gender, one that is careful and precise about what it claims as masculine or feminine.
Clearer Thinking’s Gender Continuum Test offers a useful example. The test guesses whether a person is male or female based on the aggregated personality traits of over 15,000 people. Drawing from this data and the test taker’s responses to 36 questions, it can predict with varying percentages of certainty whether it believes you to be a woman or a man.
The premise is that if there are enough traits more commonly found in one sex than the other, on average, then it is possible to predict whether someone is male or female with reasonable accuracy. For example, being less agreeable, thick-skinned, risk-taking, and improvising are common male behaviours. Traits like emotional awareness, peacefulness, and compassion are more commonly associated with female behaviour.
Clearer Thinking’s data demonstrates that every person has a mix of these personality traits in varying degrees. Thus a better way to think of these traits and how they relate to gender would be to put it this way: People who display the highest proportions of “masculine” traits are more likely to be men; people who display the highest proportions of “feminine” traits are more likely to be women.
This can help us understand why certain traits are more commonly associated with men or women, without creating a rigid or over-simple conclusion. The amount of variety on an individual level, regardless of aggregate results, means there is a lot of diversity between personalities. It also means there are plenty of overlapping traits between the sexes.
Traits more common to men or women are relevant because they can help us understand ourselves and each other. But they are not intrinsic to maleness and femaleness. Saying a trait is more likely to be associated with women at the extremes does not imply that those who don’t embody that trait (or who embody more traits in common with the opposite sex) are lacking in some way.
Rather than calling my passion for debating ideas (a form of disagreeableness) a masculine trait, this act is an expression of my femininity simply because I am a woman. Unlearning the habit of gender-categorizing our behaviour allows us to reclaim traits we’ve over or under valued due to personal discomfort or cultural ostracization.
If we view these traits as simply human, we can welcome them as a natural part of us, whether we’re male or female.
We are not lopsided beings, with only some traits available to us. Training, formation, and personal choices all contribute to developing our best selves and helping us fulfill individual vocations. Perhaps then, it is factually incorrect to call a girl a tomboy or encourage a man to get in touch with his feminine side. A man who patiently comforts his crying child is not showing motherly instincts, but fatherly ones. A woman who takes charge of a crisis and directs others on how to respond is not showing a kind of male assertiveness, but a female one.
Thinking this way affirms the full range of emotions and skills women and men are capable of. And expanding our sense of what’s normal to reflect the diversities and commonalities between men and women help us be hospitable to those whose “atypical” traits have so often led to marginalization.
Love this, Ilana! Logical and compassionate 🙌🏻