Reine - Over the past few months you've developed a very strong opinion that the only true differences between men and women are physical, and that aspects of personality and behavior exhibit such overlap between the sexes that they should be rendered meaningless as a means of distinction. Now I do not doubt the veracity of your view, but I think if you asked the average person on the street "are men and women different?" most would say yes, and they would probably cite things that could be refuted by providing a strong counter-example. Still, there are such things as general tendencies that are useful to make distinctions. They may not hold up to every specific case, but they are often reliable patterns. Most of those tendencies are socially programmed, but that does not make them any less real. Its a basic problem we have in biology because there is always a lot of variation about a trait within any group being studied. When comparing two different groups a distinction can only be recognized by seeing if the variation within each group is smaller than the variation between the two. I would like to see data regarding differences in emotional expression, preferred activities and all the other things conventional wisdom says makes women different from men. I have yet to see any, so I will not make assumptions as to the outcome, but they have to be out there somewhere. When trying to develop any generalization statistical tools are our best option.
Bridget
