sex differentiation

…in which characteristics of both sexes are clearly expressed in a single individual. In biology, androgyny refers to individuals with fully developed sexual organs of both sexes, also called hermaphrodites. Body build and other physical characteristics of these individuals are a blend of normal male and female features.

Gender has always been a topic of anthropological investigation, but the 1970s brought about a critical rethinking of assumptions about gender, spurred in part by the women’s movement and in part by the entrance of large numbers of women into academic careers. During the…

…height-velocity curves for the “typical” boy and girl in Britain in 1965, determined in this way. By “typical” is meant that boy or girl who has the mean (average) birth length, grows always at the mean velocity, has the peak of the adolescent growth spurt at the mean age, and…

Part of the sex difference in pelvic shape antedates puberty. Girls at birth already have a wider pelvic outlet. Thus the adaptation for childbearing is present from an early age. The changes at puberty are concerned more with widening the pelvic inlet and broadening the much more noticeable…

…tended to mirror the differing gender experiences of women and men, particularly as those affect the development of understanding with respect to the ways the ethical life is conducted. However, it has been noted that “feminist” moral theory is not “feminine” moral theory, as feminist perspectives are not fully determined…

From the 1960s onward the feminist movement and the scholarship it inspired have had a very obvious impact on kinship studies. This resulted first in a number of important works that documented the lives of women, which had previously been omitted…

It is difficult to assess the degree to which differences related to the sex of the perceiver are biologically based or are the cultural product of traditional differences in sex role. Biological sex and sex role thus far have been hopelessly confounded in experiments…

Although the assessment of sexual differences in perceptual and reactive abilities is complicated by a number of factors (including age and personality), girls and women tend to be more proficient than boys and men in such psychomotor skills as finger dexterity and inverted-alphabet printing.…

Animals and plants, apart from microscopic kinds of life, consist of enormous numbers of cells coordinated in various ways to form a single organism, and each consists of many different kinds of cells specialized for performing different functions. Certain tissues are…

In many animals, sexual differences are apparent in addition to the primary sex differentiation into males with testes and females with ovaries and apart from the accessory structures and tissues associated with the presence of one kind of sex gland or…

It is generally accepted that children are attracted to toys along gender lines. Modern studies demonstrate that while boys consistently choose trucks or soldiers, girls’ choices are more flexible and may include so-called masculine toys as well as baby dolls and household…

The most obvious division of labour arose from differences in age and sex. The oldest people in the tribe lacked strength and agility to hunt or forage far afield and so performed more-sedentary tasks. The very youngest members of the tribe were…

For most of written history, agriculture was the chief human occupation, and heavy physical labour was not confined to men. Women performed physically demanding chores such as grinding grain by hand in a stone quern, drawing and carrying water, gathering wood,…

…be important means by which gender is culturally defined. Some cultures maintain that genital surgery removes all vestiges of androgyny, as the anatomical parts correlating with the opposite sex are cut away. Cosmogonic myths justify the surgery as reiterating primordial acts that promoted fecundity; the myths thus define the sacred…

…of body position according to sex was maintained in the earliest Bronze Age in many areas, but at times the orientation was reversed, such as at Branč, in Slovakia, where 81 percent of females were on their left side and 61 percent of males on their right. As the period…

Throughout the Bronze Age, sex and age were the main components organizing the structures of daily life. Outside the Mediterranean area, there were few differences between the size and plan of most of the structures within individual sites, although the sites within a region often were internally ranked in…

…home and work by redefining gender roles, so that married men became the family breadwinners (aided, in the working class, by older children) and women were the domestic specialists.

…suggests a cause of prevailing differences between men’s and women’s rates of pay. Some women’s work is different in kind from men’s irrespective of the fact that it is done by women; and, where men and women both do work of the same description, some disabilities attaching to women as…

In some parts of Melanesia, male-female relationships were polarized. In New Guinea a zone of extreme polarization extended from the Papuan coast (Marind-anim and Asmat peoples) along the southern face of the Highlands (Anga speakers and Papuan plateau peoples) and the high central…

There are also marked sex differences in the incidence of certain types of mental illness. For instance, anorexia nervosa is more common in girls than in boys; men tend to develop schizophrenia at a younger age than women; depression is more common in women than in men; and many…

…is about the same for men and women. The onset of the illness often occurs at about age 30, and the illness persists over a long period. The predisposition to develop bipolar disorder is partly genetically inherited. Antipsychotic medications are used for the treatment of acute or psychotic mania. Mood-stabilizing…

…to, by members of one gender only; in certain instances instrumentalists, whether Greek kitharodists or Arab ʿūd players, were slaves with a low moral reputation. The playing of many stringed instruments by women has been either a low-caste occupation or an accomplishment to be savored in the confines of the…

With few exceptions, modern sports were devised by and for men, with the content, meaning, and significance of the contests reflecting male values, strengths, and interests. The 19th-century institutionalization of modern sports involved changes in personality, body deportment, and social interaction; the…