The gender gap is, in at least one way, actually widening in modern societies.

No, we’re not talking about the gender pay gap, which is shrinking everywhere. Nor are we talking about the gender gap in legal rights, or opportunities, or in what it is that men and women are either allowed or encouraged to do.

No, all of those gender gaps are shrinking, some slower than others, to be sure, but they are shrinking.

But the gender gap in personality traits is widening. We might call it that Mars versus Venus sort of thing, or refer to our own EQSQ personality tests. Things about competetiveness, nurturing behaviours, cooperation: those things which we see as being typically male or female are becoming more obvious as markers of whether someone is indeed male or female.

Which is exceedingly odd when you think about it. If we’re all getting ever more freedom (which we are, most especially freedom from want) then wouldn’t we be growing more alike? Freed from the very rigid gender role allocations of only one or two generations ago, why should we be becoming less alike?

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

It is a puzzle but here’s my take on it (there are other ideas in the linked article too).

At root the argument is between those who say that gender attributes are simply part of being human. Have ovaries and (on average, of course) and you’ll be cautious, nurturung and so on. Have testes and you’ll be adventurous and competitive. The other side are saying that these are all social constructs.

Now there is a way to combine these two views and to also explain the above evidence, that we are becoming less alike as we become freer.

That these attributes are indeed inherent, but they can be socially modified. And it’s the 8,000 years of an agricultural society which was the unnatural modification of those innate attributes.

Thus, as we in a wealthy society regain many of the freedoms that our hunter gatherer forefathers had, those innate attributes aren’t modified quite so much as they were by the societal structure we had in the interim.

It’s well know, for example, that hunter gatherer societies has higher calorie intakes than our farming ancestors. That they had a great deal more leisure time. That they were more egalitarian. These are all things which are happening in our own societies now (sure, egalitarian income distributions we don’t have, but we’re a lot more egalitarian in opportunity). So why shouldn’t, freed from the restrictions of an agrarian lifestyle, the innate differences between the sexes flourish?