Steve Stewart-Williams on Sex Differences and Human Nature

There's this phenomenon called the gender equality paradox, which reflects the fact that for many, many traits, including career-related preferences and job choices, it's the exact opposite. And you just find that the more gender equal and the wealthier, more individualistic a nation is, the larger those sex differences become rather than the smaller. Very counterintuitive. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk.

Well, today I decided to tackle one of the age-old questions. What are the differences between men and women? Are they downstream from nature or from nurture? How do these differences shape our society? And what are the different kinds of biases that we bring to understanding them from traditionalist biases like thinking that people should act like their sex, to perhaps other biases that try to correct for those, that try to deny sex differences that really do have a biological root?

To talk about this, I invited onto the podcast Steve Stewart Williams. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia. He is the author of a new book called A Billion Years of Sex Differences, How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women, and he's also the author of the Accent Nature Nurture Substack. We talked about all kinds of fun and potentially controversial things from differences in uh the appetite for casual sex, mate choosiness, the tendency towards aggression.

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