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Sexual Dimorphism
Sexual dimorphism is the difference in size and appearance of males and females. In some species, like in the peacock, it’s colors, but in the primates mostly we’re dealing with size differences, and the size difference in humans is actually fairly small compared to many other primates. For example, in the gorilla, the male is twice the size of a female, which is clearly not the case in our species, and chimps and bonobos, which are our closest relatives, there are also fairly small differences between the males and the females. But in terms of physical strengths, there is a huge difference.
There are several studies. The most recent one was a German study where they compared the grip strength, so that’s upper body strength, basically, of males and females – humans – and found that there was almost no overlap. Men are so much stronger than women that there’s almost no overlap, and when they compared for the women, they took Olympic athletes, so women who are very well trained. These women only reached the average strength of the untrained man.
And then an additional difference that we have is the tone of voice, the timbre of the voice, which for men is lower, which also allows men to drown out women in a discussion, and they do that. We all know that they do that – they talk over them, and they have these deeper voices that give them an edge in the discussion.
Recognizing Biases
We humans, of course, we rely less on physical strength than most of the other primates. We look at experience and intellectual abilities and your education – all of these things we consider extremely important. And so even though in our society, physical strength is not so important anymore, as it is in the old primate society, so to speak, we still pay attention to it. And we are still biased by it.
When psychologists have done experiments where they show people pictures of men and they ask “Do you want this man as a leader?” if the man looks taller, they are preferred. So it is, for example, well known that in presidential elections in the US, the taller candidate usually wins. He wins far more often than you would expect. And the voice levels also still make a difference.
There are actually anecdotal reports of transgender men who get testosterone and their voice deepens, and I remember one account where he said, “When my voice started to deepen, everyone was suddenly listening to me. Before that time, they ignored me and they didn’t want to hear my opinion. But now that my voice was deeper, they wanted to hear my opinion, and they leaned in and they want to listen to me.” If you want, for example, equal relationships between the genders, you have to break through these patterns. It remains hard because they’re very deep in our psychology.
Addressing Biases in Conversation
I am in the psychology faculty at Emory University, and we have sort of equal numbers of men and women. Men have a tendency to talk over women, and so it’s very tough for women to get in between that. So I say, I think for men, one of the main things to do is to tone that down on occasion and to inhibit that and to create room for women to give their opinions and say what they have to say.
There was a study done in academic settings where they looked at who asks the first question after a lecture, and it’s almost always a man who asks the first question. Since I’ve learned about that research, sometimes when I give a lecture – I give a lot of lectures for big groups of people – I try to equalize things. If I have had one man, then I point at a woman, and then I point at a man, because if you don’t, sometimes you may get 20 men in a row. So you get this bias that is in the discussion, always present.
So if you recognize your own biases, you may want to do that. When I listen to, for example, public debates between politicians, I personally turn off the sound because I want to see their body language and their facial expressions and how they behave and how they move, which is easier to do if you’re not distracted by the language. So then you focus on the body language. But of course, I’m a bit different because I look at them as primates, more or less. But if you detect these biases, I don’t know if you want to react to them, but they are, of course, not in tune necessarily with the experience or the competence of the people that you’re looking at.