Gender: Health and Fitness

The next few blogs will begin to talk about gender issues in health and fitness. However first we must define a two terms, sex and gender. Sex is our little boy bits and our little girl bits and mostly this is determined pre-birth. Gender is our role in society.

The social learning theory of gender is quite straight forward; we learn our gender, and therefore our role in society, from the community that surrounds us. Little boys are dressed in blue and are given toy hammers and toy trucks to play with and little girls are dressed in pink and are given toy tea sets. There is a classic experiment. A group of babies ranging from fifteen months to two years was recruited, 50% were boys and 50% were girls. Half the boys were dressed in blue jump suits and half in pink, similarly for the girls. So half the children were dressed in gender appropriate colour and half were not. Next a group of university students were recruited, and told that the children were being used in a study and that the students were need to mind individual children for fifteen minutes between tests. The students were placed in a room with one chair, soft carpet and different toys, all designed  to encourage the students to play with the children. There were cameras in the room and the students were told these cameras were required for O.H.S. reasons. In fact the student’s interaction with the children was the subject of the experiment. Of course the students gave the children gender appropriate toys based on the colour of the jumpsuit. Even though half the children were not dressed in gender appropriate colours the children appeared happy to play with whatever toy they were given.  However the behaviour of the students towards the children was quite different depending on the colour of the jumpsuit. Children in pink were held longer and more often. Students waited longer to attend to crying child dressed in blue and tended to use verbal reassurances before touching or holding the child dressed in blue. This experiment has been repeated many times and the results have always been similar, supporting the view that children are treated differently depending on their gender from an early age and that the distinction is quite arbitrary. Boys are expected to be more independent than girls and better able to cope.

A quite different view of gender is the evolutionary psychology perspective, which says that our gender roles are partly based on sexual differences. Now stay with this one for a while before making up your mind. As a general comment for all animals, males can never be sure that any offspring are the product of their genes, where as females can always be sure that any offspring are there’s. Also the opportunity for females to reproduce is limited; once a female is pregnant they must wait until the offspring is suckled before reproducing again. Whereas males do not have these restrains on their reproductive opportunities and males can reproduce for a longer proportion of their lives than females. So if a male wants to ensure that his genes are propagated his best strategy is to have as many mating as possible and not invest time in any offspring. For a female the strategy is completely different, a female’s best strategy is to very selective about who they chose as a mate and invest all their resources into ensuring any off spring survive, particularly female offspring.  So you might ask, thousands of years ago on the plains of Africa, who were the most valuable member of any troop of humans? Well it was females of reproductive age, then female children, then males, because only reproductive females could ensure the longevity of any one troop. Hence it makes evolutionary sense to group females together in the relative safety of the centre of the troop’s territory and have males patrol the edges of the territory for danger. If males get killed by marauding baboons so what? Also being at the extremities of the territory gives males better mating opportunities with females from other troops. A high risk of death but higher mating opportunities, for a male this is no contest. So how does this relate to gender, health and fitness? Evolutionary theory would suggest that females are geared towards longevity and looking after themselves, where as males are not.

Over the next few blogs both these theories will be related to modern day issues of health and fitness.