Analyzing 30 Years of Brain Research Finds No Meaningful Differences Between Male and Female Brains (theconversation.com) 256
"As a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences..." reports Lise Eliot in a recent article on The Conversation. "[T]here's no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals' brain measures across the population."
Bloomberg follows up: In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field... "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true.
In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women. Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's — as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either.
In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don't seem to appear.
"Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself," Eliot's original article had stated.
"Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware."
Bloomberg follows up: In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field... "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true.
In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women. Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's — as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either.
In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don't seem to appear.
"Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself," Eliot's original article had stated.
"Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware."
I'm not Surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
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My thought exactly. I guess there are also no differences in elbows or toes. Why would there be? It's not necessary to explain differences in behavior.
To continue the computer analogy at the end, remember that we probably have "software" (learned) and "firmware" (inherited), and both could explain the differences observed while running on similar "hardware".
In that case why ... (Score:2)
are men & women so bad at understanding each other ?
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I don't find it any easier to understand men that to understand women, except when it comes to issues specific to women that I do not experience as a man (or that they do not experience as women).
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I can't even understand other men!
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are men & women so bad at understanding each other ?
Because people insist on slathering gender over everything rather than treating people like just another person.
Cherry picking data, or ignoring such cherries? (Score:3)
https://www.inverse.com/scienc... [inverse.com]
fMRI? (Score:2)
You can't tell much about cognitive ability from fMRI and postmortem studies. Are they just saying neither men nor women typically have obvious brain defects? Doesn't seem very insightful.
Re:fMRI? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't tell much about cognitive ability from fMRI and postmortem studies.
Yes you can. Using fMRI to predict cognitive capability is borderline a field onto itself these days. There's been literally hundreds of papers written on this topic, how it works, the shortcomings and what you can tell from it (spoiler: If you have a comparable image and a control group you can tell a lot).
Re: fMRI? (Score:2)
The fact that expert musicians show far less activity while playing makes me assume you have to know what youâ(TM)re looking for to find it, since a lack of activity can be just as beneficial as an excess. But, I know nothing of this field.
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No, you can't, it's junk science; there is massive disagreement on how "cognitive capability" would even be tested.
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So go write a paper and dispute the other ones.
Finally (Score:2)
Then again, I'll show it to the next one who tries to explain to me why women are better than men.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
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We are in an era that advocates equality between men and women. Studies that tell otherwise may not have the same amount of publicity.
Yeah no news organisation would every have a story going against the grain just for page views. That never happens now. And I'm sure Fox is happy to continue pushing whatever you think this era advocates...
Sexual behavior? (Score:4, Informative)
And yet men overwhelmingly have sex with women, and vice-versa.
This is a large and robust behavioral difference, and I very much expect to find that it is grounded in some difference between their respective brains.
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Re: Sexual behavior? (Score:2)
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Re:Sexual behavior? (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternative hypothesis (Score:3)
Brains have receptors for hormones and neurotransmitters, and those inputs and control parameters could be different between males and females, and the expression of genes in neurons, and their dynamics and evolution might be so influenced. At a minimum, witness the personal experience of people who take hormones for either gender reassignment or other medical issues. Their anatomy & genome the same and yet emotional and potentially cognitive performance changes.
I read the review article---it's gener
"I'm a woman in a man's body!" (Score:2)
"Actually you're a sexless blob in a man's body."
"Oh yeah, I forgot."
There Are Researchers Who Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
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https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com]
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As their own article notes
The incidence and severity of diseases vary between the sexes and may be related to differences in exposures, routes of entry and the processing of a foreign agent, and cellular responses.
It also mentions hormones, which do have an effect, but that's not what is being said here. This study is saying that when accounting for things like hormones male and female brains are largely indistinguishable.
Quillette isn't a source of scientific information or a reasonable summary of the scientific consensus. It's a pseudo-scientific site with an agenda, that cherry picks in order to make its claims seem credible.
Gender identity is a meaningful difference (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that their idea of "meaningful" meant "relevant to admissions and hiring decisions".
Since the first autopsy studies in the 90s found a sexually dimorphic structure in the hypothalamus which consistently correlated with self-reported gender in trans people, the evidence has been piling up that our internal certainty of what kind of body we should be in is a function of brain hardware.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
As far as whether male and female brains have different capabilities, that idea was already in shreds when "Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences" by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young was published in 2011.
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"our internal certainty of what kind of body we should be in is a function of brain hardware"
I'm saying it's the other way around, the hormones produced by the body affect brain development which affects gender.
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You find what they want to find (Score:4, Interesting)
As being "liberal" in the original meaning of the word, I think everybody should be treated for whom they are, and what they can do, and not their sex, color of their skin or whatever. But modern political correctness have transformed that into equal representation at top posts in society to women and races. This study suspiciously support that conclusion.
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Wasn't a key finding that individual differences were important and swamped any possible gender-specific differences? In other words, a full recognition we're not all the same?
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This reads like a manifesto (Score:5, Insightful)
When a scientist sets out to prove something, they usually are able to do it...by any number of methods.
Is there a reason the author wants this conclusion?
Taller people are on average smarter (Score:2)
Any correlation I don't like is not causally correlated.
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Resolution (Score:2)
Would the author actually claim that e.g. baby-rearing instincts aren't significantly different? Or was the resolution too low to notice hard-wired instincts?
Is the software downloaded? (Score:2)
No difference between men and women? (Score:5, Insightful)
Men and women ARE NOT the same.
um.. (Score:2)
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There was certainly a cognitive difference between this research and real research.
Amazing (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I guess we can dispense with all the diversity efforts related to gender, and the "convince girls to code" efforts ... and all the preferences in government contracts for "woman owned" businesses, and all the Title IX sports stuff, given that male and female are just fictional social constructs with no basis in biology and since gender can be changed at will (simply by wishing it) anyway.
What's that ... no?
Re: Amazing (Score:2)
Are you fucking retarded?
Tinkering forever (Score:2)
Men have two brains... (Score:2)
...but are stupider because they rely more on the one in their pants.
Same Brain. (Score:2)
Different Parameters.
Read The Blank Slate (Score:2)
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker does a great job compiling overwhelming evidence that about half of the software running in the brain comes pre-loaded. The other half is acquired. Learning is more like installing apps on a smartphone, and less like loading an operating system and all software on a personal computer.
How much can be seen of the human brainâ(TM)s internal structures and connections using modern brain research technology? The data to collect and crunch is too complex for our scanners and
No it doesn't. (Score:2)
This is TERF propaganda.
Another misrepresentation of Summers (Score:2)
Wikipedia suffers from the same woke oppression by calling this s
The headline is trash. (Score:2)
Follow the actual science (Score:2)
When someone says "follow the science", that doesn't mean political science.
This is topological, ie useless (Score:2)
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Nah, it's just typical superficial pop science.
Old:
Men are better at science therefore women shouldn't be allowed to do science.
New:
There are no differences between men and women's brains. Except size. NO DIFFERENCES.
Both are silly, superficial, and reflect the biases of whoever is making the statement.
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Both are silly, superficial, and reflect the biases of whoever is making the statement.
Unless they actually, maybe, measured something. I mean, if they are wrong they are still making a clear simple scientific statement: if you take men's brains and women's brains of the same size and compare them functionally (not e.g. genetically), and use that to guess which are the men's brains and which are the women's then you will get it wrong almost, but not quite, 50% of the time.
In order to prove them wrong, all you have to do is provide a comparison technique that works out which brain is which, based on function alone, most of the time. We are waiting. Handwaving arguments about other people being "silly, superficial" won't cut it.
Re:Meh. (Score:5, Interesting)
if you take men's brains and women's brains of the same size and compare them functionally
The "functionality" of brains is manifested in behavior.
Comparing adults won't work because the male brains are in male bodies, while female brains are in female bodies, and there is no way to randomly swap them.
So instead, let's say we compare the behavior of girl and boy toddlers before the physical differences matter much.
So do three-year-old boys behave the same as three-year-old girls?
Ask anyone who has been a parent of both, or observe any preschool classroom, and you will have your answer.
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So instead, let's say we compare the behavior of girl and boy toddlers before the physical differences matter much.
Do you really believe that a toddler's behavior is based solely on his/her brain function? Usually, nature vs. nurture arguements are about the relative contributions of each component; I don't think I've ever run into someone willing to commit entirely to one and exclude the other.
Re: Meh. (Score:5, Informative)
Potty training is notoriously harder with little boys. We have followed pretty much the same pattern with our boy. He just simply finds it harder to remember when heâ(TM)s wearing underwear. One day we realized he had effectively potty trained himself, but he just chooses to be obstinate or gets so enthralled in other activities that he forgets and has accidents.
Watching the girls play with each other be the boys it is again night and day. They just have different innate patterns to their behaviors.
I have done my best to observe and not try to steer particular patterns. But, I have come to the conclusion that there are differences in behaviors and inclinations from an early age. It is hard to deny when you have both little boys and little girls.
Re: Meh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Observationally / experimentally you are right. There are measured differences in the average behaviour of male and female children which seem independent of upbringing. There is, however plenty of evidence that hormones have a direct effect on behaviour [nih.gov] and that hormones are different between boys and girls.
I don't understand how the discussion that leads to your comment fits here? The researchers are claiming to have shown that there isn't enough brain function differences to explain gender differences and so the difference must be elsewhere. They aren't claiming that there aren't claiming that there are no differences in behavior.
Re: Meh. (Score:4, Informative)
Fuck off with that bullshit. Gender difference in human toy choice is present in chimpanzees, so unless you're suffering from the delusion they're taking their gender cues about what toys to play with from humans it's definitely a hardware issue, not a software one.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/sc... [bbc.com]
Re: Meh. (Score:2)
Sure nurture can have an effect. But that doesnt mean they dont have natural inclinations. The moron who did this meta analysis is saying it's all nurture and that nature has nothing to do with it, thus her hardware/software comment. Meanwhile, anyone who doesn't have their head up their ass will look at her conclusion and ask why she thinks that fMRIs are a particularly good tool considering the spatial resolution is still mediocre outside of the absolute best equipment and the temporal resolution is compl
Re: Meh. (Score:3, Informative)
Research with rhesus monkeys.
A link to it, to show up the feminaz1 liars:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Re: Meh. (Score:3)
Oh, I'm sorry, I confused it with another study where the tracked development of infant chimps and found other differences as well.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=... [google.com]
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So do three-year-old boys behave the same as three-year-old girls? Ask anyone who has been a parent of both, or observe any preschool classroom, and you will have your answer.
So you're implying upbringing has no effect up to, at least, three years old?
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Three years of social conditioning (Score:2)
Unless they're raised identically it's not a sound experiment.
Anecdotally, though, people who try hard to raise their infants without gender stereotypes often report that the infants behave stereotypically anyway.
It's overlapping bell curves in any case. Just knowing that someone's a girl doesn't tell you for sure whether she will want to play with trucks.
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Anecdotally, though, people who try hard to raise their infants without gender stereotypes often report that the infants behave stereotypically anyway.
For it to be fully valid, you'd have to isolate the children from TV, books, relatives, etc., too. It's not really viable to do it ethically.
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Interesting)
if you take men's brains and women's brains of the same size and compare them functionally
The "functionality" of brains is manifested in behavior.
I think we are using a different meaning of the word "brain" here. Your "brain" is all of the physical set of neurons and their interconnections and the relative weight of the connections and other "software". My meaning, and the one these researchers are using separates the physical from the interconnections and other "software" configuration. In my case, you can get different behaviour from the same functionality by having different weighting.
I don't think that, under your definition we disagree at this level. Men's brains end up with measurably different behaviour. Check whether the person can successfully control a birth canal during giving birth and you have an immediate functional difference 100% of people who can control birth canals will be female sexed (possibly independent of gender). QED.
With my definition of the word "brain", if these researchers are correct, the birth canal control software is just a routine which becomes available by having a brain that is wired up to a womb and vagina. The implications of that would be really interesting. This would seem to me to imply that "gender dysphoria" in the brain is environmentally triggered, however in that "environment" you have to include the body and society.
The really really funny thing here is how clearly people's reaction is anti-scientific and entirely based on their prejudices against ideas of change. A fear that trans people might represent something new. This entire discussion in no way clearly supports gender reassignment but they fear that it might and so they react against the discussion. Probably the opposite in fact - speculating a bit here, however - it suggests that you might be able to treat "gender dysphoria" more easily by making helping a "trans-man" actually come to wish to be a woman. If the brain is identical and plastic then early treatment with, for example, "want-to-be-a-woman" drugs might help the person come to terms with they were born with.
N.B. I'm not saying this is right or wrong. This is a scientific theory that needs to be tested by research and experiment. I'm just saying that coming out and guessing based on prejudices is stupid.
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I don't recall saying anything about function.
You can tell the difference by size, connectivity patterns, and a few other factors that they mention right in the article, and hand wave away. You can also look at microstructure. Boy's axons grow faster than girls during adolescence, which is what makes up most of the size difference, and the effect is related to testosterone (e.g. https://www.jneurosci.org/cont... [jneurosci.org] and https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]).
They hand wave that 60% away as "almost chance," which it
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https://www.the-scientist.com/... [the-scientist.com]
I don't want to say it's settled science, but... this has been known for many decades. Scientists can determine the gender a brain belongs to by examining its physical structure.
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Re:Meh. (Score:4, Interesting)
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It depends a lot on context. There have been studies in the past (on gay/lesbian and trans deceased individuals) that show there are very tiny parts in the brain that are different, but we're not talking about "this hair-sized cluster of the brain is responsible for this" rather those behavior centers in the brains are wired different for what are likely reasons related to hormones or insensitivity to hormones.
Like AIS (androgen insensitivity syndrome) and gender dysphoria are linked, but so is autism and B
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Ah so science that tells you something you don't want to hear is "woke" to you. Interesting.
It's notable you don't actually have any criticisms of the paper itself.
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Re:I hope this once and for all proves... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I hope this once and for all proves... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you look at the actual science then it turns out that there really is not an that much difference even when factoring in the rest of the biology. Certainly not enough to account for what is sometimes claimed about men and women.
Wired did an article about it a few years back: https://www.google.com/amp/s/w... [google.com]
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If you ignore the genetically programmed differences in the sexes, you could reasonably come to this conclusion. The female of of the species is drawn to males most likely to provide security for her and her eventual offspring, and the male is attracted to those females exhibiting traits of fertility and mothering skills.
If nothing else, western society has removed the security issue from the dominant physical males who, maybe, hunted or fought the best, but there are thousand year old precedents in our mat
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If human beings really were that simplistic then society would look very different. Many men would be partnerless, while some would have many.
If that sounds familiar it's because it's the standard incel model. Chad has 20 girlfriends and the poor incels have none. Of course the world isn't really like that and the reason those guys don't have girlfriends is not because they lack the alpha male muscles and square jaw to be a Chad.
Re: I hope this once and for all proves... (Score:2)
Re:I hope this once and for all proves... (Score:5, Interesting)
The article rejects the notion of "sexually dimorphic brain" in the sense of a significantly different organ, but it still considers the possibility of smaller effects.
Furthermore, the article do still describe significant differences in brain size (due to males being on average overall larger than females) and time of development (female brains develop faster, reaching their "final" size years before the male counterparts).
The article also states that while they don't find any difference in task-based MRI activity, they didn't expect to since the currently available MRI studies are not suitable for that kind of research.
My impression from the article is that it's far too soon to draw any kind of definitive conclusion on the matter.
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It's useful because it's adds yet more evidence to the idea that much of what we used to think was inherent to each gender is actually learned.
For example, the old "men have better special skills, making them good as engineering and parking." Turns out it's mostly, or maybe entirely, down to practice. Particularly at a young age where boy's toys help develop those skills.
There is a BBC documentary from a few years ago called "No more boys and girls". Well worth tracking down if you can, it's far from perfec
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Careful with that line of thinking... it comes dangerously close to shooting down the whole "I was born this way" argument that people sometimes use to defend atypical sexual preferences from less tolerant people who might question it.
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I never agreed with the born this way shit anyway, it distracts from the issue and begs the question. It assumes you need to be born that way to make whatever choice you want to make.
The slogan shouldn't be "I was born this way" it should be "Fuck you, I do what I want asshole."
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To be clear then I'm talking mostly about behaviours and skills, not things like sexual orientation or gender itself, or of course things like physical differences between body types.
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It's useful because it's adds yet more evidence to the idea that much of what we used to think was inherent to each gender is actually learned.
I don't think this is the right approach: even assuming it's "learned" the question would simply switch to why males and females tend to "learn different things". Different nurturing due to social customs cannot explain all differences AFAIK and I think there are papers showing differences emerging already in very small children even when controlling for these factors.
Note that even a small fundamental difference in interests and attitude will likely reinforce itself during development, leading to a much mo
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There are studies showing that it is the way adults treat even very small children.
The BBC did a documentary about it, and they illustrated it with an experiment where they gave some nursery staff a toddler to look after but told them the boys were girls and vice-versa. The adults didn't notice that they had been given incorrect information, not from the looks or behaviour of the child, or from the toys they found interesting or anything. Turns out that at that age they pretty much take their cues from the
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You should be aware that fMRI is not a tool that directly visualizes brain metabolic activity. All fMRI data is pre-cooked by algorithms in the class that most of us would now call "AI". The Discover article is from 2009, before the AI label became really trendy. The current definition of "AI" seems to be "no human being knows what is happening on the inside of this black box", and as far as I can tell, any fMRI capture at high resolution use these algorithms.
Discover article [discovermagazine.com] - appears to be a paywall wi
Re: Computer analogy, huh? (Score:2)
I would rather.not be from Berkeley. ðY
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No meaningful differences is not the same thing as saying that there are no differences at all.
Since no fixed-length study can ever exhaustively cover the scope of every conceivable human experience, you can only infer from it that any differences which may actually exist are only inconsequential with respect to the issues that the study actually examined.
Re: Let The Dick Chopping Faggots Rule (Score:4, Insightful)
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North Korea? Or maybe Zimbabwe, though you better go quick, since human rights seems to be a thing that's happening in Zimbabwe recently, so North Korea might be your best option.
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Hmm. N. Korea doesn't sound too bad. At least weed is legal there!
Re: All right then, no excuses. (Score:2)
work the hours of a man for the years of a man and retire the same number of years before you die as a man.
then you got equality, feminaz1s.
Re:All right then, no excuses. (Score:4, Insightful)
Next question - where are the fathers? You blame this on women when it's the men's fault that nobody else will stay home with the sick child / take them to dr. appointments, pick up child from daycare, etc.
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Told to go to work 'cause the woman wants to tend the child.
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Why are you rewarding people who can't manage their time effectively and must stay late to finish their jobs?