These data about greater censoriousness coming from women (and female-identifying??) strike me as being very important, and I've never seen this point made before. Doubtless it is a very unpopular point to make. I'm skeptical about some of the broad-based generalizations about gendered personality, though, so it would be nice to see follow-ups that focus a bit more on gender-related socialization mechanisms.
You mean for example that women score higher than men in terms of neuroticism? That's fairly well established but you don't even have to reference the factor analysis used by the Big Five personality traits to reach this conclusion. You can see it manifested in the diagnostic pattern of certain psychopathologies, such as the fact that women have higher rates of major depression and generalized anxiety disorder.
I think this is probably an issue of interpretation and disciplinary differences. I am trained as a sociologist, and the analysis of gender-related topics tends to be much more in terms of socialization processes, as opposed to categorical personality "diagnostics". But I am no great defender of sociology, so I will try to put the point differently. Rather than a semantic category to describe personality types, which seems to rather suspiciously overgeneralize, I would want to know more about the causal processes that are inferred to explain differences in character traits across gender or sex. Is the explanation purely genetic or is there some component of socialization, and if there is some component of socialization, how are those processes supposed to explain, say, higher rates of neuroticism? Incidentally, it seems like a rather unwise rhetorical strategy to describe women's personality in terms of neuroticism. Surely there is another category that could be used that is less semantically loaded? But I gather this is probably an issue of "path dependence," ie. the historical development of the field. Is the field in question psychology of personality?
Ah, thanks for explaining. There is literature on this. A 2015 study "Heritability estimates of the Big Five personality traits based on common genetic variants" states, "traits have substantial heritable components explaining 40–60% of the variance, but identification of associated genetic variants has remained elusive. Consequently, knowledge regarding the molecular genetic architecture of personality and to what extent it is shared across the different personality traits is limited." Not very satisfying, I know. I agree with you that the term "neuroticism" is loaded and therefore can be distracting outside academic discussion. I've also seen "sensitive" and "nervous" used but these are arguably even worse because in addition to the negative connotations they are more narrowly defined, so for instance "nervous" doesn't capture the experience of anxiety or depression. I am unaware of academic discussion regarding the problem with this term but it is noteworthy that the other Big Five traits -- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness -- are more neutral. You could argue that "disagreeable" does have the same problem, because as a Big Five trait, being disagreeable is more about being skeptical and competitive, though it can manifest as disagreeableness in the common sense. Neuroticism is more about having a maladaptive response to stressors, but I don't know offhand what a better term would be. Still, "neuroticism" is so close to "neurotic" that saying "women are high in neuroticism" will inevitably lead people to hear "women are neurotic," as in the Freudian mental disorder, which isn't the same thing, and is offensive. The best solution I've seen thus far is that some will write "Neuroticism" instead of "neuroticism" to make clear they are talking about a Big Five trait.
Regarding the weirdness around female students being more censorious than NB students. I think they've asked what gender identity the respondent has, since NB people are also male/female sex. This means the data isn't properly disaggregated as we don't know what female NB students think vs male NB students vs female students.
If the "females" set include males with female gender identity and vice versa, the data becomes extra murky. In conclusion, good luck social scientists.
These data about greater censoriousness coming from women (and female-identifying??) strike me as being very important, and I've never seen this point made before. Doubtless it is a very unpopular point to make. I'm skeptical about some of the broad-based generalizations about gendered personality, though, so it would be nice to see follow-ups that focus a bit more on gender-related socialization mechanisms.
You mean for example that women score higher than men in terms of neuroticism? That's fairly well established but you don't even have to reference the factor analysis used by the Big Five personality traits to reach this conclusion. You can see it manifested in the diagnostic pattern of certain psychopathologies, such as the fact that women have higher rates of major depression and generalized anxiety disorder.
I think this is probably an issue of interpretation and disciplinary differences. I am trained as a sociologist, and the analysis of gender-related topics tends to be much more in terms of socialization processes, as opposed to categorical personality "diagnostics". But I am no great defender of sociology, so I will try to put the point differently. Rather than a semantic category to describe personality types, which seems to rather suspiciously overgeneralize, I would want to know more about the causal processes that are inferred to explain differences in character traits across gender or sex. Is the explanation purely genetic or is there some component of socialization, and if there is some component of socialization, how are those processes supposed to explain, say, higher rates of neuroticism? Incidentally, it seems like a rather unwise rhetorical strategy to describe women's personality in terms of neuroticism. Surely there is another category that could be used that is less semantically loaded? But I gather this is probably an issue of "path dependence," ie. the historical development of the field. Is the field in question psychology of personality?
Ah, thanks for explaining. There is literature on this. A 2015 study "Heritability estimates of the Big Five personality traits based on common genetic variants" states, "traits have substantial heritable components explaining 40–60% of the variance, but identification of associated genetic variants has remained elusive. Consequently, knowledge regarding the molecular genetic architecture of personality and to what extent it is shared across the different personality traits is limited." Not very satisfying, I know. I agree with you that the term "neuroticism" is loaded and therefore can be distracting outside academic discussion. I've also seen "sensitive" and "nervous" used but these are arguably even worse because in addition to the negative connotations they are more narrowly defined, so for instance "nervous" doesn't capture the experience of anxiety or depression. I am unaware of academic discussion regarding the problem with this term but it is noteworthy that the other Big Five traits -- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness -- are more neutral. You could argue that "disagreeable" does have the same problem, because as a Big Five trait, being disagreeable is more about being skeptical and competitive, though it can manifest as disagreeableness in the common sense. Neuroticism is more about having a maladaptive response to stressors, but I don't know offhand what a better term would be. Still, "neuroticism" is so close to "neurotic" that saying "women are high in neuroticism" will inevitably lead people to hear "women are neurotic," as in the Freudian mental disorder, which isn't the same thing, and is offensive. The best solution I've seen thus far is that some will write "Neuroticism" instead of "neuroticism" to make clear they are talking about a Big Five trait.
Regarding the weirdness around female students being more censorious than NB students. I think they've asked what gender identity the respondent has, since NB people are also male/female sex. This means the data isn't properly disaggregated as we don't know what female NB students think vs male NB students vs female students.
If the "females" set include males with female gender identity and vice versa, the data becomes extra murky. In conclusion, good luck social scientists.
Good point, although I don't think it would make much difference since there were only 398 nonbinary students compared to 24,511 female students.