Q&A with Dr. Robert Deaner, sex differences researcher

Through work I dealt with several FtM transsexuals and they are by far the most angry and prickish people I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. They were ridiculously confrontational and would fly off the handle for no reason. Either androgen therapy was causing this behavior or they all suffered from some terrible personality disorder. I don't need a scientific study to tell me that testosterone and estrogen affect behavior, nor do I need an epistemological analysis of gender theory to tell me they don't. Personal experience still counts for something.

levi strauss wrote:I don't understand how people get so bent out of shape when a study empirically proves something that everyone knows to be true in the first place. Men are generally more competitive than women and women are generally more nurturing than men. There is nothing more apparent in life, yet people construct complex, nonsensical arguments to convince themselves this isn't the case. Figuring out the cause of this dissonance would be a good anthropological study. Why is this something people don't want to believe? What advantage does one gain by having this sort of cognitive bias?

I suspect the reason is that accepting that the differences are biological means that no matter what women do, they will always lose to men. This is a hard pill to swallow and so instead they try to say that it's just societal forces and culture and things that can be overcome and so someday in the future, the average woman can be as strong, as fast, and as good at math and driving as the average man.

Personally I'd be more comforted with the idea that it's the fault of biology that I can't run like Bolt, than having to believe that I am either just not trying hard enough or have been outsmarted by others (i.e. "culture"/"society") and allowed myself to be held down from reaching my true potential. Why some women (and some men who think agreeing with them will get them laid) want to believe the latter is a mystery to me. It's a position that at its core is rather insulting to women, I think.

How about the fact that PEDs tend to help Females even more than males to separate themselves from their counterparts.

That would explain the really big gap in the top performances, like Flojo, the Chinese women, Radcliff, etc..

I don't know, get ugly. I don't do dirty arguments. I don't think your postings are anywhere near "pest" level. I looked at what you wrote, thought about whether it fitted with current theory (and evidence) and decided that it didn't.

I don't think you were vague -- you were very explicit:

"And I won't allow you to expand your definition of evolution to include social forces. There is a distinction."

You're not going to be able to substantiate this. It's just wrong. But maybe what you wrote isn't what you meant.

It could be that you've been taking the very long way around the barn to say that you think social and cultural forces are better explanations for what we found than are evolutionary pressures that had their effect in the past.

That's a perfectly reasonable statement, and (as an anthropologist) I can see a variety of ways to see whether it holds up or not (and I listed some of those earlier).

So if you'd just said that, I'd have responded by saying that it was reasonable and perhaps somebody has or will get to work testing it, but that in the meantime we had a result that appeared to hold up.

I'm trying to work out what you mean by "you are trying to take what I'm calling social or cultural forces and incorporating them into your theory . . . ." I don't understand what you mean by that. In your next sentence "The only evolutionary claim . . ." you say precisely what the paper is about.

Our claim isn't "the only," it's the key issue. I don't know why you have difficulty with that. Maybe you can tell us what other evolutionary claims the paper should have made.

When you write "It makes no claims . . ." I think you must mean that we don't consider social or cultural forces. But that's false.

Take another look at p. 601 and following. The great increase in female participation certainly reflects social and cultural factors and yet the M/F differences persist, and then around p. 611 we show that the difference persists whether we're talking about elites or ordinary runners (certainly this reflects social/cultural factors) and then I hope you'll agree that the "Proximate explanations" section treats social-cultural factors as well.

And then -- by implication, but I thought it obvious -- the demonstration that the difference was larger earlier, then became smaller, then stabilized is absolutely social/cultural in a historical sense.

Surely you know that gender attitudes (in this country, anyway) and attitudes about female sports participation have changed dramatically since the early 80s. If social/cultural factors were the prime movers, then as they changed so too should measures of athletic competition have changed.

For me (keep in mind that although I had extensive training in evolutionary theory, I'm a cultural anthropologist) that was the strongest evidence that something was going on that social/cultural factors couldn't explain entirely.

I interpret what emerged from my data as showing that social/cultural factors had an effect in the early years, but then after a certain time (roughly the early 1990s) had no effect.

In an earlier posting I likened this to M/F world record differences. M/F differences over a variety of distances, but most obviously in the longer ones, were great, then became smaller, and now are relatively stable. I interpret this (and I'm hardly alone) as showing that social/cultural factors (including bringing more women into running and training) were initially very important in bringing times down dramatically, but after a certain time in history the differences are biological differences in the largest sense.

It's not a matter of either-or. Everything we can measure about human beings results from a combination of forces. The hard task is to figure out how multiple forces are balanced.

As an anthropologist, I always look first at social/cultural factors, and I did so in this case. But it seemed to me, and still does seem to me, that in this case they cannot explain what the data show.

Putting it on a personal level, if I had thought that Rob was hostile to social/cultural factors as explanations, I wouldn't have offered him my data and I wouldn't have put my name on the paper.

levi strauss wrote:

I don't understand how people get so bent out of shape when a study empirically proves something that everyone knows to be true in the first place. Men are generally more competitive than women and women are generally more nurturing than men. There is nothing more apparent in life, yet people construct complex, nonsensical arguments to convince themselves this isn't the case. Figuring out the cause of this dissonance would be a good anthropological study. Why is this something people don't want to believe? What advantage does one gain by having this sort of cognitive bias?

I dated a self-described feminist for a while, and I'll try to explain her view of this kind of thing. She believed (just because she liked the idea; she didn't actually understand science at all) that men and women's brains are identical in every way and that any apparent difference there is between the sexes can be attributed 100% to society. In her mind, even acknowledging that biological differences existed was an attack on women and was a claim that women were inferior. Even saying that women were BETTER at such and such than men was horribly offensive to her. In her mind, if men and women were different, then women were inferior. To her, all women should be career focused, un-motherly, not care about makeup or dress, etc, and any woman who acted stereotypically was a disgrace. I found it ironic that a feminist hated women so much and saw men as perfect while simultaneously hating them as well. Without going into details, she turned out to be one of the craziest and unhappiest persons I've ever known, and I cut ties. I have a feeling that if one person like her exists, there're many more, though I'm not sure it's even worthwhile to try and rationalize their thoughts. You might as well go into a Christian fundamentalist church and try to convince them all that humans evolved. There's just no point.

I think less people would be resistant to why differences in athletic performance occur though. Most laypeople would probably say the research is stupid because it's common sense and common knowledge, but of course that's not how science operates.

The first thing that came to my mind was PED use among men and women and how PEDs help women much more than men, which would skew the results of the study on this thread, but it was never my intention to address this paper specifically. I was merely irritated by fools making stupid claims about things they do not understand.

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As I said, I think this idea is reasonable and, I've certainly run by many women with absolutely terrible form and thought "wow, no matter how she trained, she'd never be able to run a sub 7 minute mile." But I've run by plenty of men like that too.

One clear prediction this hypothesis does make is that women should generally be more variable than men in most skeletal/biomechanical characteristics. I don't know of data on skeletal characteristics but for almost all behavioral and physiological traits this prediction isn't supported: males (including in the human species) are more variable. But maybe there is a physical anthropologist out there who is interested in running that might be motivated to assemble (or draw our attention to) the relevant data? I recall that I've sent my work on this to Harvard's Dan Lieberman (of running evolution fame) but he never responded to it. Hopefully he or someone like him will eventually get interested. Maybe I'll contact one of my old anatomy colleagues at Duke.

I don't think doping is such an important point. The sex difference in relative performance can easily detected in long distance running where heightened testo doesn't seem to be so crucial, and the best women certainly don't seem to be masculinized. And the sex difference can easily be detected in high school runners (in the much greater spread of performances among girls than boys), and I don't think anyone would claim that there are large numbers of high school girls distance runnners who are doping.

How did Geertz get in here? Are you referring to his article in the NY Review of Books (v 42 no 9)?

"How Natives Think" was Sahlins' book, so Geertz wouldn't have been responding to Obeyesekere about it, would he? Where did Geertz accuse Obeyesekere of being so logically flawed that he wouldn't respond to him?

This amuses me because I'm writing this about 90 miles from Kealakekua Bay.

Are you playing some kind of post-modernist card? Maybe that's where Geertz comes in. His postmodernism is of the "weak" variety, recognizing that one's interpretations must be affected by one's own background. That's always seemed pretty obvious to me.

But I don't know what it has to do with logical flaws and more particularly I don't know what it has to do with gender differences, unless you're taking the "strong" pomo position that no one had better say anything about anybody else, particularly men about women or women about men.

Where are you going with all this? (True, this is letsrun so that's probably a foolish question.)

I'm baffled by the connection between "making explicit decisions . . . about the genetic make-up of the population" and how "it [that] means that our behavior are not reducible to drives."

Please say what the connection is.

To add to this: "Competitiveness" is physiology-- testosterone. There is likely greater variations in testosterone levels amongst females, which would also affect development and anatomy. One of my friends commented, watching the elite men vs. elite women at NYC, how the men all ran the same, with the same flowing stride, while the women all ran very differently and awkwardly from each other-- there was no 'ideal stride' amongst the women. They're not all built the same, making for different gaits, but still possessing similar but rare physical qualities for women (more testosterone, lower body fat, narrower hips, smaller boobs, higher VO2 max or blood parameters).

Look at a women's ring finger in relation to her index finger-- those who were exposed to more testosterone in the womb will have a longer ring finger than index finger. Very few women have this, but they're more likely to become athletes and have masculine traits.

One interesting thing about the sex hormone hypothesis is that higher androgens would also tend to make women more competitive, and perhaps more "male" in the sense that you were talking about earlier (desire to attain status and so on).

When I said that women were more variable, I was only talking about androgen levels. All elite men should have some baseline of reasonable testosterone levels, whereas women generally have low levels. A woman with higher levels would have a large advantage, as shown by the incredible results attained by the Soviet Bloc and China via steroids.

As much as the Balinese man flaunts his machismo around the cockfighting ring, the Buffalo, NY man does much the same running 5k road races through Delaware Park.

And here's a study backing up what I said:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajhb.20449/abstract

Therefore, the purpose of our study was to test the hypothesis that women engaged in sports have lower 2D:4D ratio—a marker of high prenatal androgen exposure. We measured the 2D:4D ratios in elite and non-elite female athletes and compared them with female individuals not engaged in any sport activities. Our results showed that elite female athletes have significantly lower left hand 2D:4D ratios compared to the control group (P < 0.05). Therefore, we can speculate that low 2D:4D ratio may be a positive correlate of sports potential in females.

You're right that I got the reference wrong because I was thinking about Geertz' point about interpretative research. Of course, this is letsrun and a mistaken reference will be used to discredit my entire argument regardless of it's coherence.

My primary assertion is that the authors do not have the data to make the claims they are making--even according to logical positivist epistemology. I also took issue with the assertion that I am ignorant about biology and gender studies because I have had advanced training in both. That is the irony of guppy's post and the link with sahlins. Not only does he get it wrong when he tries to pigeonhole me, but he also screws up some of the basic tenents of science. Note how people here resort to dogmatic positions on gender when anybody says something that conflicts with what they think. For example, some have made the claim that the naturalness of sex differences is obvious, then go into cite their own anecdotal experience saying they don't need science to tell them this. Consider how people needed science to prove that the world is round; most of our daily experiences suggest otherwise. It is the role of researchers to investigate truth claims and not simply accept the premise that common sense is grounded in fact. Many comments in this thread are eerily similar to biological arguments about race differences. Civil rights first caused a dramatic improvement in the lives of African Americans, but things have leveled off. Who wants to argue that this is natural?

If the authors had compellingly ruled out alternative explanations for their findings, i would not take issue with the conclusions they draw. They do not, and cannot successfuly rule out other explanations. However, they are telling most of the letsrun crowd exactly what they want to hear, so people are quick to accuse critics of ignorance. This, despite the fact that the critical posters have been relatively cautious in interpretating scientific evidence.

"As much as the Balinese man flaunts his machismo around the cockfighting ring, the Buffalo, NY man does much the same running 5k road races through Delaware Park."

Not bad, not bad at all. In fact it's pretty damn good, and I admire it.

Even so -- wouldn't the last part be more of a jab if it read:

". . . timing 5k road races through Delaware Park?"

No matter. It's a excellent one, and a welcome bit of wit.

It's a bit of a leap to be linking "competitiveness" with race times don't you think? If PED Paula forgets to take her epo on schedule and finished out of the top 1% does that make her less competitive? Lets go ahead and take as fact your claim that women high school-elite races are more spread out than the men's races. Why in the world would you assume this is because of differences in competitiveness? Maybe it's a difference in racing style. Maybe women don't like running close to each other....they want more personal space, and here is a leap.... maybe women are more competitive, they want 1st not 2nd or 3rd....racing for the win is way harder than finishing in your competitive top X%....define competitiveness. I think Women do react differently than men to a lot of situations and a lot of it is due to physical strength, same as men react differently to men who are taller and look like they could kick your a$$ etc. & If we are talking evolution.....hahahaha well just think about competitiveness as it relates to mate selection....women are the most passive aggressive people I have ever met in a club... astronauts driving across the country in diapers to confront cheating spouses etc depends on your personal definition of competitive

As a coach, and a grad student who has recently been grilled about having an answer to the "so what?" question for any research endeavor, I find the discussion here very interesting but I'm at a little bit of a loss for what all this research is accomplishing. Is it just people having a need to compare apples to oranges, or to prove that one gender is superior?

Any sane person knows that genetic variation/innate talent contributes to athletic success. There is a reason short people are "discriminated against" in basketball or tall people can’t be jockeys, and guys with relatively low testosterone would rather hide out in the library rather than get laughed out of the weight room. Societal influences are themselves influenced by biology/evolutionary history. But is that a problem? Is it a bad thing to be influenced by nature? We're not equal, but like a previous poster said, thank God! Life would be pretty boring if we all had the same talents.

In the context of running, I think if we stepped away from the science a little and looked at the patterns we would notice that we lose a lot of women in high school due to the frustration of maturation. When we allow prepubescent females to compete against young women as estrogen is flooding their systems we are asking for disaster both physically and mentally. Who want to go from effortlessly running in the top ten in the state to working their butt off (literally :) ) to barely make the varsity team. Look at any high school meet and you'll notice the age difference in the top girls compared to the top boys. It's a pattern any college coach who has any experience with recruiting in fully aware of. This alone could have a large effect on the shortage of "relative" talent in women's running. It is a problem with physiological, psychological, and environmental influences.

Another trend I’ve noticed relates to the similar debate about why there is a relative lack of interest for women in the coaching profession. Both women athletes and women coaches have to make pretty big sacrifices in order to what they do. Pregnancy isn't usually part of a well-devised training plan, and having a family is for both biological and societal reasons a bigger life stress for women than it is for men. We're much more likely to lose women athletes and coaches to family priorities than we are to lose men. But again the question is "so what?" If more women feel more inclined to prioritize raising kids than men is it necessarily a problem? Or something that needs to be countered.

I apologize for the rambling, I realize this is an academic thread but as much as I like reading research I think its important to not too get to lost in the statistical significance and forget about the practical significance.

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Sure, systematically assessing men's and women's variability in running efficiency or testosterone levels (prenatal or circulating) are both very good ideas.

Like a lot of good ideas, though, the studies are easier to suggest than to conduct. The reason is that to really test the variablity hypothesis thoroughly you'd want data from very large and representative samples. This could easily be done for digit ratios (and plenty of data already exist), but digit ratios are very crude (and possibly biased) indicators of prenatal testosterone.

Hey, "implications." Don't worry about rambling. I hear you about the "so what," for sure.

I got grilled in a job interview (post-PhD) for not having had a well-defined hypothesis before doing the research. I said to the guy -- and the epithet "scientistic as*hole" would fit him -- my hypothesis was that something was going on out there in the SW Pacific, on an island not very well studied, among people whose agriculture and land use patterns had never been described by anybody, using a research design that no one before me had ever used . . . but the guy kept saying that if I didn't have a pre-existing hypothesis then my work wasn't worth talking about.

Anyway. You make many good and interesting points, especially about maturing female runners. I can't find anything to disagree with.

But the thing is - we excluded everybody under 20, we didn't include college meets, and we dealt with professional runners only as they happened to show up at the races. Entry into our sample was by entering a road race as an individual.

If I understand you correctly, you would argue that enough of the talented female runners dropped out of running early, making that quality of runner seriously under-represented even in mass participation road races. And therefore it could be that our results reflect a a kind of sampling error.

That could be. What we don't know, though, is how many of those young women would have -- as twenty-somethings -- started running road races. If they dropped out of HS/collegiate athletics but later came charging back into road races, then in fact they wouldn't be under-represented.

I can imagine several ways to work that out, and maybe somebody will do it.

For the benefit of those who didn't read the paper, here's another part of the conclusion (I gave the other part in an earlier comment):

" . . . although it has been argued that the stable sex difference in performance depth for U.S. runners is best explained by the evolved male predisposition hypothesis, this conclusion should be taken as provisional, and more work remains to be done. For instance, scientists should explore explanations for the sex difference in performance depth besides differences in the motivation to train. Similarly, even if it turns out that the sex difference in performance depth in running is best accounted for by the evolved male predisposition hypothesis, it would be unwise to assume that this hypothesis will apply to all domains and contexts. Scientists should investigate whether the sex difference in performance depth in running holds in other nations (see Frick, 2011); they should explore possible sex differences in performance depth in other easily quantifiable athletic domains, such as swimming and biking; they should explore sex differences in enduring competitiveness in non-athletic domains, such as chess (de Bruin, Smits, Rikers, Henk, and Schmidt, 2008); and they should study the factors that affect individual decisions to pursue achievement in particular domains (e.g., Lubinski and Benbow, 2007).

Good points Implications. Some of my thoughts below are preceded by *****

why would any sane woman be interested in the coaching profession! the pay is low, you have to put up with all kinds of sexual harassment, male coaches hate you because they feel like you were only hired due to gender (even though you only make up about 20% of all assistant NCAA coaches or 1% of head coaches), you must go above and beyond on everything because you are representing all of female kind...you can't blend in and be normal like an average coach, you must start out above average and stay above average