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As evidenced by the infamous Google Memo debacle a few years ago, there is much confusion in our society regarding the best way to think about gender similarities and differences. From the vantage point of the unified theory, people are generally using only two “vectors” in thinking about sex and gender, when the reality is that we need three.
The two vectors are the so-called "biological" and "social" forces. The biological generally refers to the genetic, physiological, evolutionary, and hormonal “nature” dimension, whereas societal roles, norms, ideals, and expectations for how men and women ought to act form the "social force" dimension. What is missing in this analysis is a clear understanding of the human mental architecture that is neither a purely "biological" nor "social" force.
A recent article in the American Psychologist on gender stereotypes makes the problem clear. Alice Eagly and colleagues examined the gender stereotypes of people in the United State from 1946 to 2018.
Specifically, Eagly et al. examined perceptions of men and women on agency, which the authors define as the tendency to “orient toward the self and one’s own mastery and goal attainment (e.g., ambitious, assertive, competitive),” and communion, which the authors define as the tendency to orient toward the “other and their well-being (e.g., compassionate, warm, expressive).” The authors note: “Communion prevails in the female stereotype, and agency in the male stereotype.”
Consistent with my point above about "biology" versus "society," the Eagly article explains that there are two primary ways of understanding why people tend to see men as more agentic and women more communal. They state: “Although some people ascribe such trait essences to biology, others instead ascribe them to socialization and social position in society” (Rangel & Keller, 2011).
The article does not explore human mental architecture, nor core mental relational tendencies, like attachment style. For the article, the authors examined stereotypes on agency and communion over 50+ years in the U.S. They also included a third construct, competency (i.e., the extent to which men or women were perceived as the generally more or less competent or intelligent). What did they find?
Over the years, women were seen as increasingly more competent, such that they now are rated as the more competent and intelligent group. We should note that this is an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive finding, given the claims by some that modern society is pervasively sexist. I agree with Eagly et al.'s interpretation of this finding, which is that as women have been given the freedom to attain and have now regularly outpaced men in things like educational attainment, people are evaluating their general competence accordingly.
Our primary focus here is on the agency and communion variables. Given the remarkable change in attitudes toward gender in the last 50 years, and the huge societal push to see men and women as having no essential (i.e., nonsocially constructed) differences, and all the work to challenge gender stereotypes and move away from a socially constructed gender binary, it seems to me that a basic, straightforward prediction would be that the differences between the stereotypes that people have about men being more agentic and women being more communal would be expected to go way down.
After all, if we are awakening to the idea that the gender identity binary is simply a function of the social construction of reality, then shouldn't our newfound freedom allow us to be unshackled from these primitive notions and allow people to toss off the shell of rules imposed upon them by society?
What did the study find? A massive convergence, stemming from enlightenment about the true nature of gender as a social construction? Not at all. In fact, they found basically the opposite.
The perceived differences between men and women increased over the years. Women are now seen as even more communal, whereas men generally stayed the same on their perceived agentic advantage. This means that the perceived distance between the key personality features of the two genders is now even greater than 50 years ago.
In the words of the authors: “In sum, U.S. poll data show that it is only in competence that gender equality has come to dominate people’s thinking about women and men. For qualities of personality, the past 73 years have produced an accentuated stereotype of women as the more communal sex, with men retaining their agency advantage."
The authors used tortured logic to try to defend their social role construction view that “gender stereotypes stem from people’s direct and indirect observations of women and men in their social roles.” Although clearly social roles play a huge part in how people experience their gender and sexuality, from the vantage point of the unified theory, it is not the primary origin/source of the gender differences (see here, here, and here for analyses of gender from this perspective).
So what is the source of the gender differences in agency and communion? On aggregate, human males and females have different relational tendencies.
Just as the description of agency suggests, on average men tend to be more “self-over-other” oriented, whereas on average women are more “other-over-self” (i.e., communal). (Hopefully, readers will be clear that aggregate claims of population-level differences are different than claims about specific individuals).
This is not hard to understand when we map the human relationship system using the "Influence Matrix." The Influence Matrix says that humans have an intuitive mental architecture that (pre-verbally) guides their perceptual-motivational-emotional ways of being the world in relation to others.
Specifically, we humans automatically and intuitively map our place in the “social influence matrix.” That is, we are constantly tracking self-in-relation-to-other, and use that to act accordingly. Here is the map.
The idea is that folks perceive self-in-relation-to-other on these dimensions. We track first our "relational value and social influence," which is the black line. And we also track our relative power (dominance-submission), love (affiliation-hostility), and freedom (autonomy-dependency).
How we see ourselves in relation to others on these process dimensions plays a guiding role in navigating the social world. It is important to note that basically all scholars of the human condition agree that humans are social animals and that they care about things like attachment and love and status and power.
And it is generally agreed that these drives are not socially constructed, but are at the core of our structure and existed long before modern society. From this vantage point, it is a function of our mental structure rather than our "socialization" that gives rise to patterns like the fact that if we don't experience high relational value in our development, then we are much more likely to get depressed (see here).
Directly relevant to the issue at hand, we see the Influence Matrix includes two “self-other” quadrants, one of which is the upper left corner and the other is the lower right. The upper left is “self over other” and emphasizes the poles of dominance, autonomy (i.e., independent goal attainment), and hostility. The lower right, aka the “other over self,” quadrant emphasizes affiliation, dependence (i.e., longing for connection and need for approval), and submissive deference to others.
In other words, the Influence Matrix clearly maps the core representations of the central features of "agency" and "communion."
It is essential that we recognize that this human mental architecture existed long before the social construction of reality (which is perhaps only 50,000 to 150,000 years old), and is certainly much older than ideas about what is socially justifiable for how men and women should act in the 21st century.
The Matrix goes back to a time when we were primates rather than persons; thus we are talking about tens of millions of years. The Influence Matrix analysis directly accounts for the counterintuitive finding from the Eagly article and provides a frame that explains why gender stereotypes are so "robust" (to use their word).
To begin with, the Matrix explains in a direct and straightforward way why there are “self-over-other” and “other-over-self” tendencies and archetypes in the first place. Notice, this says nothing about males/masculinity or females/femininity per se. It simply says something about the mental architecture needed to navigate the social world. However, we can then use basic logic to understand why, on aggregate, males/men tend toward the former and females/women the latter.
For example, long before we were humans, females were giving birth and taking care of their young. Is it any surprise at all that their architecture would be more relationally oriented? My point is that we can analyze the general relational features of being a male and female human primate and see that males tend to lean relatively more toward self-over-other, whereas females tend to lean toward other-over-self.
This analysis means that Eagly et al have the explanatory sequence backward. Rather than social roles driving the perception of difference, it is clear from this analysis that the mental architecture is prior, and is the primary driver of the personality differences and people's perception of them.
As such, the Matrix helps explain other "counterintuitive" findings about gender role/job preferences, like the Nordic gender-equity paradox, which is the finding that greater gender equity in social roles and expectations is associated with greater (not lesser) divergence in things like employment preferences.
The real point is that our society is painfully confused in its understanding of sex and gender differences (and similarities!). A core reason for our confusion is we have an unhelpful "biology" versus "sociology" binary—as if these are the only two forces, and we need to choose either one or the other.
Of course, in the real world, forces are interacting all over the place. Moreover, there are "mental" forces that are neither "biological" nor "social." Rather, we need a clear analysis of the animal-mental dimension of complexity, which as the Tree of Knowledge shows us, is its own plane of complex adaptive behavior and is different from both the "Cell-Life" biological plane and "Person-Culture" societal plane.
By mapping the mental architecture of the human relationship system, the Influence Matrix fills in the missing piece of the puzzle. With it, perhaps we can achieve more light and less heat on this polarizing issue.
