All sources I've found of the mbti-population shows that women are over-represented by the feelings types. Especially the NF and SF.
How come?
Is it because women are naturally more caring due to their natural maternal instinct? gender-roles are planted into their DNA through thousand years of history?
My thoughts / why I mention nature:
Such as myself believe personality is something you are born with, highly genetic with a random factor (probably not 100 %). I mean, gender is random, why can't personality also be. Intelligence is another topic for another day. Human nature and birth is so complex saying it is based on the environment would in my opinion be a big underestimation to the power and complexity of nature and genes. The environment shapes you based on your foundation, not necessarily the foundation itself. However people do mature with age and get influenced in various ways.
Most statistics on gender and the T/F dichotomy show significant percentages of each gender - often 40% or more - holding the "opposite" preference. That is a large minority for something that is biologically hard wired. MBTI data are also based on self-reporting, which has been consistently demonstrated to reflect gender bias, especially when preceded by any reference to gender. Even being asked to check a box to indicate whether one is male or female has influenced outcomes, both on self-reported preferences and behavior and also skills tests like math exams. (See
Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine for many examples.) Explaining that "women usually do this way on this test and men that way" will further bias results. I wonder, then, how close the self-reported T/F difference is to the margin of error of the survey.
In my personal experience, which granted is only anecdotal, type has been a much more reliable indicator than gender of how someone will behave and interact. It is certainly the case for me. Gender based assumptions are mostly wrong, while assumptions based on knowing I am INTJ are mostly correct. Best case, of course, is that people don't assume, but approach each person as an individual and get to know who and how they really are.
Hormones have a major influence....If estrogen is too (high) or too (low) for a male, then emotional outbursts/irrationality tends to follow. You'll notice the pattern when females undergo menopause.... They start to become less nurturing and more logical/cold following hormone dissipation. Feelings and anxiety are interconnected. That is, the most logical/stoic tend to be the most calm whereas the most emotional tend to be highly anxious. Estrogen is connected with anxiety, so it's likely estrogen increases empathy/feeling.....Having high empathy indirectly leads to a higher propensity to worry. Now, females also have to bear children and nuture them, so it makes sense that empathy/feeling would be magnified in the earlier stages of life. Males on the other hand, have to protect the offspring...So, the ability to logically solve problems is key here. Of course, both Males and Females can use sound logic and it doesn't necessarily follow that if you're a feeler, then your ability to use logic is less sound. We adapt over time to our modes of thinking as a function of the environment. Thus, if females are now starting to translate to a more independent domain (working upper level jobs, independence), then the mind will adapt to new incoming stimulus. Now, suppose all males decided to be dependent and stay at home...Then over time, their minds too would adapt to a new scenario of environmental outcomes/situations/stimulus. I've noticed that females (on avg) tends to be better communicators most likely because energy was invested over time for this purpose....Suppose you take a subset of the population and expose them to physical labor for extended period and not permit any communication...It will then follow that their communication skills would dim over time and translate to new generations if the conditions were imposed for long period....The benefit would be that the new generations would be more physically fit/robust given that nourishment was supplied. Now, if females have to invest more time to take care of child, then it should follow that empathy will become more natural or the skills necessary to nuture.
I would question any links between hormones and behavior, to the extent that is based on self-reporting, as described above. Those justifications based on speculations about primitive life cut both ways. A reliance on logic, for instance, would make just as much sense among a sub-population concerned about self-protection and raising the next generation, as it does among those concerned with protection and whatever else one is assigning to males of the species in such a society. Recall also that in most of nature, the fiercest protectors are mothers defending their young. Measured against that standard, the human stereotype is quite unnatural. In any case, learned abilities are not inherited. It takes many generations for genetics to reflect the kind of external pressures that might encourage such adaptation.
Of course, that might indeed be the case, leading to a second hypothesis about the T/F difference, namely that over the centuries, women have been "bred" for F, and men for T. In a society that values women who exhibit more F-like qualities, F women will be more likely to find mates and reproduce, and similar for T men. That might account for why the difference is as small as it is.
Truthfully, I'm not sure I believe the gap is that large. I think a lot of men and women mistype one way or the other because of unconscious bias, especially if relying solely on dichotomy which is where the data for the most common stats come from. I don't think I've ever met a feeler male who typed themselves as a feeler at first and similarly I see thinker females typed as feelers disproportionately often online when a thinker typing would be much more readily accepted if they were male.
I agree, especially about the bias in self-reporting. You might enjoy the book I referenced above. Men and women are much more alike than they are different.
Because the statistics are wrong.
They certainly do reflect unconscious bias, the influence of which it is near impossible to eliminate. Yes, we know that hormonal distributions in males and females are different in a statistically significant way, but we cannot draw meaningful conclusions about actual behavior because of this bias.
Because they are (generally) not given shit or told to change for crying or caring.
Basically, yes. Even cited examples where parents have taken heroic measures to raise children without any gender bias are doing so within a society where such biases are still rampant. The only way to determine with any certainty what truly is hard-wired is to observe behavior and preference in an environment free of any biases or external constraint/coercion. We might be able to arrange such a scenario, but raising a statistically significant sample of children within it for the purposes of scientific study would probably not pass muster before modern research ethics panels, however instructive it would be.
