Naturalistic theories such as Natural law depend as their first premise upon the validity of deriving goodness from the way things are (natural features of the world). One way that things are different lies in the differences between men and women. Not only are these biological – one can have babies, the other can’t – but may also be based on the way the brain works. The problem is, which difference is seen to be morally significant, what we argue from these differences, and is the allocation of moral significance to difference just a cultural thing?

Remember how long it took to have women recognised as equal: for women to have equal rights to property (before 1876 a wife’s property all passed automatically to her husband), right to vote (1918 – but see the film suffragettes for the struggle it took), equal pay (1975 Equal Pay Act) right to divorce on grounds of incompatibility (1969 Divorce Reform Act). Think how long it took for women to be permitted play sport (Rugby, Football, Cricket) or be educated on equal terms. When women entered Cambridge for the first time, to Girton College, the men demonstrated against it, and when a woman won the top Maths prize, she wasn’t awarded it as it could only go to a man. When my mum, a working class girl, went to London University in 1939 she was one of just 2,240 women of her age group who were graduates. Women in 1939 were 25% of total graduates – which were a tiny proportion of the population.

All these struggles were against a naturalistic view of women as inferior: less intelligent, weaker, more emotional, less rational – women designed by nature to stay at home and have babies, be homemakers, not leaders. The Church of England, ever behind the times, only recognised the right of women to lead the Church in July, 2014 – and Libby Lane became the first Woman Bishop in 2014 (of Stockport). The Bible, unfortunately, produces a naturalistic argument for women’s inferiority – man was made first, then women, said Paul. Women were the tempters, the creators of original sin. It is not permitted for women to speak in church, Paul continues, or to go about ‘with hair uncovered’.

However, recent research (see picture for men, left, women, right) seems to have established that men and women do not think in precisely the same ways, at least as a generalised conclusion. Men, have better motor and spatial abilities than women, and so there is some (slight!) substance to the old prejudice that women can’t read maps. Women have better memories, are more socially empathetic, and are better at dealing with several things at once. There is a lot of overlap but on average these observations are true. Of course, this apparent fact has no moral significance whatever – it as an argument if anything for complementarity, not superiority or inferiority. But you can see how hard data can be misused as much as social observation of different roles was misused to produce discriminatory laws.

Why might these differences have come about in evolutionary terms? In the days of hunting and gathering, so evolutionary biologists argue, men spent more time wandering away from camp, so their brains needed to be adapted to able to get home. They also spent more time tracking and being aggressive – fighting and killing. Women by contrast, operated in more sociable, chatty groups, and brought up children, so they needed to be adapted to enable them to manipulate each other’s and their children’s emotions to succeed. Here’s an extract from the Economist on the latest research by Dr Verma of the University of Pennsylvania on the differences in brain function.

“Dr Verma and her team applied the technique to 428 men and boys, and 521 women and girls. Their results are summarised in the two diagrams above, which show connection trends averaged from the sum of participants’ brains.
The two main parts of a human brain are the cerebrum, above and towards the front, which does the thinking, and the cerebellum, below and towards the back, which does the acting. Each is divided into right and left hemispheres. As the diagrams show, in men (the left-hand picture) the dominant connections in the cerebrum are those, marked in blue, within hemispheres. In women, they are those, marked in orange, between hemispheres. In the cerebellum (not visible because it is under the cerebrum), it is the other way around.

What this means is open to interpretation, but Dr Verma’s take is that the wiring differences underlie some of the variations in male and female cognitive skills. The left and right sides of the cerebrum, in particular, are believed to be specialised for logical and intuitive thought respectively. In her view, the cross-talk between them in women, suggested by the wiring diagrams, helps explain their better memories, social adeptness and ability to multitask, all of which benefit from the hemispheres collaborating. In men, by contrast, within-hemisphere links let them focus on things that do not need complex inputs from both hemispheres. Hence the monomania.

When it comes to the cerebellum, the extra cross-links between hemispheres in men serve to co-ordinate the activity of the whole sub-organ. That is important because each half controls, by itself, only one half of the body. Hence men have better motor abilities—or, in layman’s terms, are better co-ordinated than women.”

Source http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21591157-new-technique-has-drawn-wiring-diagrams-brains-two-sexes