When one starts looking at men and women and comparing them, the first thing that becomes apparent is that man is a more vulnerable creature.
At every age from conception onwards more males die than females and to compensate for this more males are conceived. Male babies are more likely to be miscarried, to be stillborn, to have birth injuries and to have congenital disorders. Even so, about 105 boys are born to every 100 girls.
Throughout life about 4 per cent more males die at any given age than females, and whilst our life expectancy has been rising the most striking advantages have been to women, who are living longer than men (currently on average seventy-five years to men’s sixty-seven). Men are more likely to die younger because they have more illnesses, more diseases and more accidents than women. Men are more prone to ulcers, heart attacks, virus infections, cerebral palsy, bronchitis, sex-linked diseases (such as haemophilia), various infectious diseases, lung cancer, successful suicide, mental retardation, autism, speech defects, visual and hearing defects, truancy, delinquency, alcoholism, anti-social behaviour and many other conditions. Ironically, although men spend less time in the home they have more domestic accidents!
From birth, and even before, boys and girls are constitutionally different. Male foetuses grow faster than female ones and at birth boys are on average longer and heavier than girls. Boys grow faster up to the age of about seven months after which girls grow faster to the age of four years.
Boys eat more food than girls and at all ages females have a greater proportion of fat to muscle than do males. Males have a higher blood pressure, perhaps linked to their greater physical strength and capabilities. But although boys start off larger at birth, girls are always more mature up to and past adolescence. Girls’ bones and teeth mature earlier and they experience puberty earlier.
As well as these developmental differences there are sensory ones that are well proven. Girls are more sensitive to touch and pain stimulation (right from birth)! They can also hear and smell better. Boys tend to do better at visual ‘tasks’.
Of course there is a considerable overlap of all of these characteristics between males and females but on balance the differences are measurable and meaningful.
Most people are happy enough to accept that such physical differences exist but it is when it comes to less tangible things such as differences in intelligence that the controversy really begins. For our purposes this is not important and is discussed no further.
Personality is another area to look at when comparing men and women. There are undoubted differences between boys and girls even very early on. Boys are more active (could this be because their mothers are more active with them?) and more liable to explore in play and girls are less active and sit still for longer. Boys run, jump, push, pull and are rougher, whilst girls tend to choose cutting-out, modelling drawing and other sedentary pursuits. A mass of personality-difference studies come basically to the same conclusions. Women tend to be ‘inward looking’, more concerned with people and relationships, more sympathetic, more tearful, more easily disgusted, more helpless, more emotional, more passive, moodier, more suspicious and more susceptible to social pressure than men. Men, on the other hand, tend to be more aggressive, more adventurous, more assertive, more exhibitionist and boastful, more rebellious and revengeful and more tough-minded. However at the level of the individual there are many exceptions to these generalisations and we all have a mixture of classical ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ personality traits.
Men and women are measurably different but that does not make either sex better or worse. In certain circumstances a woman’s intrinsic personality traits are particularly valuable and in others a man’s are needed. In raising a family both are essential because it has been proved time and again that balanced children need an adult of each sex to bring them up as they will have to live in a world populated by males and females and the characteristics of the sexes are unlikely to change dramatically one way or the other inside a few generations.
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