Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

I started lifting weights because of you a year ago, so I'm getting there, but I'll never get to where you are.

Also, I'm older.

But physically, men are developed for competition, essentially male-male competition for mates.

This plays out in this destructive way in society.

And I believe that the ultimate reason for the difference is testosterone.

However, the murder rates in Canada, men are committing fewer murders in Canada than they are in the U.S.

So that's not because of differences in testosterone level.

It is because socialization and culture, religion, the laws all have a huge impact on what the values are in any particular society, what is tolerated, what is encouraged.

Some societies basically allow men to beat and rape their wives.

So you have higher rates of those male behaviors.

Where it's not tolerated and the culture is totally different, you have lower rates of those behaviors.

But everywhere you will have the sex difference with all of these behaviors higher in men.

I'm glad you asked this because I think the main reason people don't like biological explanations for sex differences is

is because they misinterpret a tendency or a predisposition for a behavior or a biological explanation as suggesting that it's impossible to change behavior.

It's not, you know, that there's no variation across the sexes in behavior.

There is.

Just because there might be a biological explanation or even a genetic explanation, the important thing to remember is that we develop within an environment.

It's gene-environment interactions.

We develop within a society.

And how we develop and even how our hormones, say, respond to different kinds of interactions is impacted by the social system and by the ecology and everything else.