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My recent reading assignments for my Cultural Anthropology class have been dealing with gender. Topics have ranged from gender as a cultural construction, to the intersexed hijra population in India. In one of my readings on language and gender, the following line caught my attention: Women's corpus callosum, the link between the two brain hemispheres, is relatively larger than men's... Men's smaller corpus callosum is supposed to result in greater lateralization, while women's larger one is supposed to yield greater integration between the two hemispheres... Despite the fact that I was doing an assignment for a different class, I immediately began thinking about the passage less like an anthropologist and more like an evolutionist, not that I'm saying you can't be both at the same time. Anyway, it got me thinking about how a difference like this between men and women would have come to be favored by evolution. Was it always this way - with women having larger corpus callosums than men - or had something in our past necessitated a change in the structures of each sex's brain? I don't know the answer, but I want to say that at some point in man's development it became important for men to be able to take full advantage of the capabilities of only one of the hemispheres of their brain, and important for women to be able to use both hemispheres of their brain.

This in turn got me to thinking about other differences between the sexes. As a self-proclaimed feminist I tend to avoid thinking about differences in a positive way, preferring to think that the sexes are not equal. But when you get down to it, men and women are different from one another for a reason. Back when we were hunter-gatherers in primitive societies, men needed to be stronger and faster than women in order to be able to provide their families with food. And women had to be able to juggle multiple tasks - cooking, taking care of children, gathering/harvesting crops, etc - in order to keep their communities functioning. These differences, I have to admit, aren't necessarily bad things. And they don't make one sex better than the other. Wow, I just said that out loud.

So as a feminist-anthropologist-evolutionist, I've come to appreciate our differences. There's an evolutionary reason for why we are different, and it's why we are all here. Our differences have allowed our species to continue to develop and exist for all these thousands of years. And that is most definitely a good thing.