Are there really evolutionary reasons for gender differences?

A recent NY Times article titled "Darwin was Wrong about Mating" caught my eye, as I'm never a fan of the whole "it's biological" argument about supposed differences between men and women. You should read the whole article, but I wanted to point out a few key things I took away from it.

A few researchers have been testing previous studies that "prove" that men are more interested in casual sex and less selective of their sexual partners. However, some researchers tested this out by using a fake lie detector, and found that when men were not hooked up to it, the numbers reinforced the idea that men have more sexual partners than women. But when they were hooked up to a machine that they believed would go off if they lied about the number of actual sexual partners, the numbers shot down. Both men and women reported sleeping with an average of 4 partners. (Actually, women's average was 4.4 to men's 4.0 - take that, gender stereotypes).

Some further thoughts on findings like this from the article:

"But the fact that some gender differences can be manipulated, if not eliminated, by controlling for cultural norms suggests that the explanatory power of evolution can’t sustain itself when applied to mating behavior. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve pushed these theories too far. How many stereotypical racial and ethnic differences, once declared evolutionarily determined under the banner of science, have been revealed instead as vestiges of power dynamics from earlier societies"

So let's think about that - just as scientists used to find bogus data to "prove" that white people had larger brains than black people, or that women were ill-suited to life outside the home, so is it still possible that so-called scientific findings are used to enforce current societal power dynamics. After all, why even question men being promiscuous and not invested in the lives of their children if it's all biological and there's nothing you can do about it?

But according to this article, these gendered traits are not biological, but probably more a reflection of societal norms. Pretty cool.

So what does it all mean?
To me anyway, it means that men don't have a biological excuse to be promiscuous or absent fathers. If you cheat, it's on you, not your biology. And further, it means that the whole double standard of men being cheered for sleeping around while women are castigated is purely a reflection of our unequal society. Women aren't actually subconsciously thinking about the fact that if they get pregnant they will have to be more invested in the child than their promiscuous partner, and most importantly, men aren't actually sleeping with tons of women. And for those who are, it's not for some kind "spread the seed!" biological reason.

The takeaway: it's time to stop using biology as an excuse for gender differences. Gender is just a social construct anyway, right? If we talk about why a woman wears make up, or why a man sleeps around, it's time to leave out evolutionary reasons that make things seem so simple and easy, and start turning a more critical eye on societal norms that are telling men and women to behave in certain ways. If there's no root in our biology about how we mate, then someday men and women will be able to reach a place of mutual understanding and respect - a place where it's acceptable for men and women to all behave sexually how they want, and not how they think they should, to name one example. But we won't get there if we continue to put supposed "differences" of gender in the unchangeable category of biology. We can change these stereotypes. They're societal, not biological. Let's start talking about them as such.