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Gerardo Pimentel
Professor Allie Turner
English 114A
3 December 2016
Gender is based on Biology
In this meme it show a women that look like your stereotype hippie. She is use to
personify the people who believe that thinks gender is a social construct with no basis in
biology and thinks conservation are science deniers. The creator use humor to make fun of
the people who believe that gender is a social construct and thinks the right wing are the one who
deny science but it is the ones who believe that gender is a social construct are the real science
deniers. They are the real science deniers because gender is not a social construct it has basis in
biology. The kind of humor style that is use in this is aggressive humor to mock the people that
believe the idea that gender is a social construct. (Klein and Kuiper 72-73) The supporters of the
idea that gender is a social construct say that gender is taught to us by society and we are
socialize into gender roles which means a certain set of behaviors for boys and girls. The idea
that gender is a social is a myth by taking a look gender socialization theory because boys and
girls have a nature inclination when it comes to behaviors.
This paragraph is going to be about what the people who disagree with the last sentence
of the first paragraph. The gender socialization theory states that there is a process of learning
attitude and social expectation of the sex they are born into also known as gender roles. The three
supporter of the theory I found are from Norway. Two of the three work at University of Olso
and the other one is a columnist in Dagbladen. Joergen Lorenzten is a gender researcher working
at the Center of Interdisciplinary Gender Research was ask to help Harald Eia to answer the
question why the Norwegian Gender Paradox exist. Harald first ask him So the difference is just

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the genitalia? Joergen reply with Breast, hair, height and a few other things. But everything
outside of that is the same. Then he was asked feelings, interests? in which he reply with
yes Harald continue to ask Intelligent, capacity? Joergen responded with Thats basically
identical. Harald goes to aske another gender researcher Cathrine Egeland. She first said that
we still expect different things for girls and boys. And according treat them differently Then
she was asked If girls and boys were treated equal from the start you do think they would
develop similar interests? and answer with Yes thats the implication of what Im saying.
Joergen also said Children absorb the expectations for boys and girls. We treat girls and boys
differently from the very start. Martine Aurdal the columnist Harald talked to. She said A baby
is there with a pink blanket. Grown-up come and say what a beautiful princess! What a nice
baby. If the baby has blue blanket, they say what a tough little guy. Youre going to be a
strapping lad this is how the socialization begins as soon as possible. All three people that
support the gender socialization theory believe that if boys and girls were treated the same then
there would be fifty-fifty in all jobs. There been one time where a child was raise as the opposite
sex. As an experiment to see gender was nurture rather than nature and the results were
surprising.
There is a story where a child was born a boy and raise as a girl. The story begin in
Canada 1965 twins were born their names were Bruce and Brain Reiner. They were normal
healthy babies until the age of six months they were having problems urinating. The doctors told
the parents it can be fix by circumcising both of them but for Bruce the operation when wrong
leading to him having damage genitals. When his parents were told what happens at the
operating table they did not know what to do until they met a psychologist named Dr. Money
who suggested that they should raise him as a girl. Bruces parent did decide to raise him as a girl

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and to participant in Dr. Moneys experiment. The only rule to his experiment was to never tell
him that he was born a male. If Dr. Money hypothesis was true that gender is a result of nurture
and if Bruce know he was a boy then the experiment would have been ruined. The results from
the annual visits was that she had many tomboy traits. Bruce became Brenda at the age two look
like a little girl but she rejected her new identity from the start. She tried to rip off the first dress
that her mother sewed for her. When she saw her father shaving, she wanted a razor, too. She
favored toy guns and trucks over sewing machines and Barbies.(Woo) This quote show that the
experiment was a failure from the beginning because Bruce refuse to act like his new gender and
being interested in stereotype boy behavior. This suggest that Dr. Money hypothesis was wrong
and his experiment prove that gender is inborn.
This paragraph is going to have information synthesis from the following articles: Brain
Differences Between Gender, How Mens Brain Are Wired Differently Than Womens, and 9
Differences Between the Male and Female Brain. In order for the observation that we are
socialize into gender roles to be true the human brain needs to be a blank slate but in reality there
are differences in the male and female brains. Men are better in math than women because men
have a larger inferior-parietal lobule than women which is the area in the brain where math is
done. While females are better at language task than males because the language areas in the
brains are larger in females than males. Language is process in both hemispheres of the female
brain but in males it is process in one of the two hemispheres. Since females brain are better in
language that means that they are less likely to develop disorders like dyslexia while the opposite
is true for male because the male brain are not wire for language. Females are great at expressing
their feelings and are more in touch with their emotion; as a consequence of being emotional
females are more likely to get mood disorder than males. Some other differences are that women

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have better social cognition and verbal memory. While men are better at spatial skills and motor
skills. Male brains have more white matter, the part of nerves that connect one area of the brain
to another one. While female brains have more grey matter the body of the nerve cells. There are
clear differences in the male and female brain but are the difference between the two genders
brain starts much earlier.
The difference in male and female brain starts as early as the age of nine months old. A
Norwegian doctor named Professor Trond Diseth working at Norways National Hospital to
study early gender difference. He does this when he assigning a gender to a baby that are born
with deform genitals. The job is done by having a baby that have normal genitals putting them on
the floor with ten toys to choose from: four of them are masculine, four of them are feminine,
and two of them are gender neutral. He would observe which toys the babies went for so base on
the behavior of the healthy babies so he can assign a gender to the babies with the deform
genitals. From his observation on the babies with the normal genitals the boys went for the
masculine toys and the girls went for the feminine toys. In a recent study conduct by the City
University London and UCL they repeat the experiment that Professor Trond Diseth did and they
are finding the same results that boys go for masculine toys and girls go for feminine toys. These
findings suggest that the behavior is from biology. Remember if we socialize children into a set
of behavior base on their gender then we should see that the younger the child is the more gender
neutral they should be but we are finding that children as young as nine months have gendered
based behaviors. Could we see gendered based behavior earlier than nine months?
In a study to see if the sex differences in male and female were biological or of social
treatment to a specific gender. How the researchers were going to determine that it was from
biology or from society is by having babies as young as one day old to stare at a face or a

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mechanical object. The researchers were not aware what gender the infant was to avoid
confirmation bias during the experiment. They chose to observe the newborns because if the
babies shown no differences in behaviors regardless of gender then the sex difference between
male and female is of social reasons. If the babies shown differences in behavior because of their
gender then it is of biology. The results were that the male babies stared at the mechanical object
longer than the female babies did while the female babies stared at the face longer than the male
babies. (Connellan) This suggest that biology influences the interest of males and females which
mean that male will be more incline to go into object based jobs and female will be more incline
to go into people related jobs. Even at birth there are clear differences in behaviors between
males and females so for gender socialization theory to be true then the newborns need to have
no differences in behaviors. There is also biological influences seen in animals that do not
socialize their young into certain behavior based on their sex.
There was a study done in 2008 to see if toy preference was because of social pressure or
biology so they had monkey play with toys that have wheels or are plush. The wheeled toys
represented the boy toy preference and the plush ones represented the girl toy preference. They
wanted to know if the monkeys toy preferences would be like the preference of children. The
result of the experiment was that the male monkeys went for the wheeled toys and the female
monkeys went for the plush toys. The male monkeys had a high preference for the wheeled toys
and the female monkeys had a slight preference for the plush toys; the preferences the monkeys
had reflect the preference children have. They have observe that the monkeys never encourage
their infant or discourage them to play with the toys. The researcher found that the monkey toy
preference was not base on socialization but base on biology. Since the monkeys toy preference
and children toy preference were very similar so children toy preference is also biological. The

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reason why girls shown a slight preference towards feminine toys because there are girls that are
born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) which cause girls to produce more androgen
that led them to have a masculine toy preferences. Looking at the graph about boys toy
preference you can see that there is a small amount of boys who preference to play with feminine
toys. Just because those boys have feminine trait does not mean that they are girls. The
predication of the gender socialization theory is that the more gender equal a country becomes
the more likely to see close to fifty-fifty in all jobs and the interests of the gender would be the
same.
In 2008 Norway the country with the most gender equality but there was not fifty-fifty in
all jobs. A report states that almost 90% of all nurses in Norway are female but only 10% of all
engineers are. Its been this way since the 80s this quote suggest that men are 10% of all nurse
and 90% of all engineers. The government has for years tried to recruit male nurse and female
engineers. Kristin Mile was the Equal Opportunities Commissioner. She say these measure didnt
change things. You get one or twoyear effect. And then its falls again These quote are from the
documentary called The Gender Equality Paradox. Those two quotes shows how there is a gap in
jobs like engineering and nurse but this pattern shows up in other countries that has a lot gender
equality and countries that have less gender equality the smaller the gap got. This information
came from a survey done in fifty-three countries around the world and the data was collect by a
psychological named Richard Lippa. He also found a pattern that men go for the thing oriented
jobs and women go for the people oriented jobs. This is also true for the children that are in the
less gender equal countries according to the ROSE project. It is a series of questions in order to
find out what are the attitude of children across many countries towards science, how it taught in
school, their interest in science, thoughts on the environment, preferred work environment and

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their interested in getting a job in science or technology. They found that children in developing
countries both genders were very interested how computers work while there was a gap between
boys and girls interest in how computers work in the developed countries. Boys were more
interested how computers than the girls in the developed countries and the girls in the developing
countries were more interested in how computer work than the girls in the rich countries. They
found that Girls priority: working with, and helping people. Boys priority: working with their
hands, with things, machines and tools. Boys, more than the girls favor: Earning lots of money,
becoming the boss at the job and becoming famous. (Sjoberg and Schreiner) The girls in
developing countries are more interested in getting jobs in technology than the girls in developed
countries. Base on this information you can come to the conclusion that the more free people are
to choose their job they go into the jobs they are naturally incline to.
In conclusion these inborn differences between the sexes lead to an inequality though the
lens of equality of outcome in the developed part of the world because in a free country people
will go to jobs that they are naturally interested in. The fact is you cannot raise a boy as a girl
because social engineering is hard by that I mean that changing nature behavior is hard. Boys
and girls from the start just interested in difference things because their brains are wired
differently which results in them going separate fields of employment. For example in general
boys brains are thing orientate and girls brains are people orientate which lead men going to
thing orientate jobs and women going to people orientate jobs. The differences in behavior in sex
is also seen in monkeys which turn out to parallel to the behavior in children.

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Work Cite
Connellan, Jennifer, Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, Anna Batki, and Jag Ahluwalia.
"Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception." Infant Behavior and
Development 23.1 (2000): 113-18.
http://www.sciencedirect.com.libproxy.csun.edu/science/article/pii/S0163638300000321.
28 Oct. 2016
"Gender Socialization Lesson." Chegg. N.p., n.d. http://www.chegg.com/homework-`
help/definitions/gender-socialization-49. 1 Nov. 2016
Hassett, Janice M. Siebert, Erin R. and Wallen Kim "Sex Differences in Rhesus Monkey Toy
Preferences Parallel Those of Children." Hormones and Behavior 54.3 (2008): 359-6
http://www.sciencedirect.com.libproxy.csun.edu/science/article/pii/S0018506X0800094
. 28 Oct. 2016https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201402/brain
differences-between-genders 16 Oct. 2016
"Infants Prefer Toys Typed to Their Gender, Says Study." ScienceDaily. TrendMD, 15 July
2016. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.htm 25 Oct. 2016

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Klein, Dana, and Nicholas Kuiper. Humor Styles, Peer Relationships, and Bullying in Middle
Childhood. N.p.: n.p.,2006. Print
Jantz, Gregory L. "Brain Differences Between Genders." Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers,
27 Feb. 2014.
Lippa, R.A. Arch Sex Behav (2010) 39: 619. doi:10.1007/s10508-008-9380-7. 27 Oct. 2016
Lewis, Tanya. "How Men's Brains Are Wired Differently Than Women's." Live Science. Purch,
2 Dec. 2013. http://www.livescience.com/41619-male-female-brains-wired
differently.html. 26 Oct. 2016
Reporter, Daily Mail. "The Tragic Twin Boy Who Was Brought up as a Girl after Horrific
Hospital Blunder." Mail Online. Associated Newspapers, 23 Nov. 2010.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332396/Bruce-Reimer-Tragic-twin-boy
brought-girl.html. 27 Oct 2016
Sjoberg, Svein, and Camilla Schreiner. "The ROSE Project An and Key

Findings."

http://roseproject.no/network/countries/norway/eng/nor-Sjoberg-Schreiner overview-2010.pdf. 4
Nov 2016
The Gender Equality Paradox. Youtube. N.p., 9 Dec. 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=p5LRdW8xw70. 26 Oct. 2016
Woo, Elaine. "David Reimer, 38; After Botched Surgery, He Was Raised as a Girl in Gender
Experiment." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 13 May 2004.
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/may/13/local/me-reimer13/2. 24 Oct. 2016

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9 Differences Between the Male and Female Brain." Brain Fitness For Life. N.p., n.d
http://www.brainfitnessforlife.com/differences-between-the-male-and-female-brain/ .25
Oct. 2016