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From: randy@umcp-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: innate passiveness?
Message-ID: <973@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Jul-83 10:52:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.973
Posted: Wed Jul 20 10:52:57 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Jul-83 14:52:35 EDT
Organization: Univ. of Maryland, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 26

The discussion about women as world leaders brings to mind (to me) the
question of whether women are innately less aggressive than men.
One side of the fence claims the societal environment and upbringing
causes the differences one observes today.  Others say genes and
hormones do the trick.  Consider the following:

There is a strange (likely genetic) disease in which male babies are
born with a drastic hormone imbalance giving them the appearance of females.
This persists until puberty when suddenly (over a period of only months)
the child's hormones return to male levels and he acquires male
genitalia, etc.  This is of course VERY rare.  A few years ago in
the Philipines, several cases were discovered.  As you can imagine,
the anthropologists flocked out there in droves about the time the
children were to reach puberty (11 or 12 years old).  The point here
is that these kids had been raised as girls with all the upbringing
this primitive culture bestows on girls.  The idea was to see if
they would "suddenly" acquire "male" traits such as aggressiveness after
the change.  Well, supposedly they did.  (Does anyone have any further
information, like a reference, on this?)  Hearing about this had a
big effect on me as I was always on the 'environment' side of the fence.

			- Randy
-- 
Randy Trigg
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