Humans and Birds: Gender Sanity following Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation
Coverage strongly suggests that it was her attempts to push through legislation allowing Trans people to change their legal gender without a medical diagnosis that propelled this, especially after a double rapist, and self-assigned transgender woman, was remanded in a female prison.
Early that morning, a neighbour invited me for an early coffee. As we sipped her wondrous brew, the fluttering of wings filled the time as birds swooped down to the feeding tray hanging from the lustrous evergreen.
We counted twenty species and I returned home, heavy with a book I never imagined would excite my imagination. Karel Stastny’s classic, Birds of Britain and Europe (1990).
How wrong I was. Concealed amongst a plethora of was an extraordinary fact: the business of nest-building was left primarily to the female bird, with fifteen of the twenty species, so 75 percent, leaving it to the female. Only five of the species shared the task between males and females and just one left it entirely to the male.
The female bird: shedding light on gender and biology Why does this matter?
The facts show a consistent division of labour within the bird kingdom with no suggestion that male and female genders, are inter-changeable.
Now, it just so happens that the female birds’ responsibility for nest building parallel the responsibility that women had for creating dwellings in ancient cultures. I wrote about this in my
book Why Men Like Straight Lines and Women like Polka Dots, showing how the homes in many cultures (the nomads of central Asia, of the Omaha native Americans, the Seri of California and the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands) were designed and constructed by women.
I wrote then that the female-designed buildings across many ancient peoples were characterised by ‘shapes that are round and materials that are soft and natural’, features that mirror the characteristics of nests constructed by female rather than nests in which male birds have a part.
The parallels do not step there. According to Karol Stastny, the female goldfinch ensures that the nest blends perfectly with its surroundings and this matches a feature of the human female known to psychologists as ‘field dependency’.
This is the extent to which a stimulus is or is not perceived independently of its surroundings with girls/women less likely to detach stimuli from their surroundings than boys/ men. This may be hardwired from women’s involvement in creating human dwellings that blend in with their surroundings, leaving men with greater ‘field independence’ and a liking for constructions like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco that reveals a strident contrast between the red of the bridge and the blue of the waters below.
Significantly, it was built by an all-male team. And then there is space and colour. Men in hunter/gatherer times, in common with male birds, were traditionally hunters and their eyes evolved to sit 5mm further apart than women’s eyes, assisting with targeting accuracy.
What is more, a significantly higher proportion of men (eight percent) than women (one percent) are colour blind, a feature that allows them see past camouflage and helps distinguish prey from their surroundings.
Colour
Remarkably, there is also the issue of colour. In the human kingdom, up to 50 percent of women may have a fourth colour pigment which allows them to see hundreds of millions more colours than men, and this female penchant for colour may be mirrored in the bird kingdom too.
For, colour differences in birds’ plumage, a phenomenon known as ‘sexual dichromatism’, is very possibly a consequence of the female bird’s preference for bright colours. Just think of the dazzling plumage of the peacock as against the drab look of the peahen.
Some say that the colourful male plumage is a display of male courage (since the peacock is not concealing his presence) but an additional explanation is that the colours and the amount of detail in the plumage are designed to have maximum appeal to the colour-savvy peahen. It is extraordinary to see girls/women’s interest in colour, a major focus in my own research mirrored in the preferences of the peahen.
Restoring sanity
It seems that we must abandon the notion that males and females are inter-changeable, whether we our focus is birds or humans. Indeed, female mimicry, in which male birds look like females throughout life, is extraordinarily rare and there is only one case that has been studied, that of the ruff (Philomachus pugnax), a shorebird in which some males engage in female behaviour in order to sneakily obtain sexual favours.
The phenomenon has always been rare in the human kingdom too, with statistics showing it to be as low as 0.3 – 0.5 percent of the population. Yes, society must tolerate the diversity in its midst but Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation suggests that her attempts to facilitate changes in people’s legal gender proved a step too far.
Ironically, it was concern that a Trans woman in a female prison might lead to rape, the kind of behaviour associated with Philomachus pugnax, that led to her to offer her resignation as First Minister of Scotland.
Taking this one step further
Once we appreciate the unique features that characterise men and women’s way of seeing, paralleled as we have seen, by the visual propensities of male and female birds, then we can attempt to ensure that products and the marketing of those products are constructed around the specific preferences of men and women.
Is this currently happening? If you’re searching for a sofa, then you’ll find that most have seating that assumes that the person using it has a very long leg above the knee (have other women like myself found themselves piling the cushions behind their back in order to avoid lying supine?).
So, yes, most furniture is designed by men and is big and bulky. Now for the extraordinary parallel with the bird world. For, the wren, the shortest of all garden birds, is the only bird from our twenty species where the male is has exclusive responsibility for building the nest.
And build he does with a vengeance since he builds several nests from which his female mate will choose her preferred one (he’s a bit like the TaylorWimpy of the bird world), lining it then with feathers and hair.
Here’s the extraordinary thing. The nests of the wren, the only bird species in our twenty where the male has sole responsibility for building the nest, are disproportionately large compared to the size of the bird, just like the sofas designed by men! What is more, it is the female wren who adds the soft feathers and hair that line the nest, softening the structure otherwise extensively constructed with twigs.
For I found over a span of twenty years of research not only that women prefer designs created by women (the statistics are off the wall) but that men prefer designs created by men.
So, let us now celebrate the unique talents of each gender and ensure that purchasers get the products that match the aesthetic and visual preferences associated with their gender.
So, if a man chooses to design for women, let him take a leaf out of the wren’s book, and allow the female to have the last word in modifying the design.
Let us profit then from the lessons that seem to have been learned in Scotland as we edge forward towards the spring.
About the author: Professor Gloria Moss PhD FCIPD has written and researched extensively on the topic of gender, both gender and design and also male and female leadership. She is the author of eighty peer review journal articles and her books include Gender, Design and Marketing (2016), Routledge and Why men like straight lines and women like polka dots (2013), Psyche Press and also Inclusive Leadership (2019), Routledge. Her latest book, written with Katherine Armitage, is Light Bulb Moments and the Power of Critical Thinking’ (2023) and can be obtained via [email protected] or from Amazon.
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Howdy
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“nest-building was left primarily to the female bird,”
Have you watched a Robin when trying to attract a mate? He serenades her, and brings her food to eat if successfull.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Howdy,
Have you observed that all birds and humans are not the same?
Have a good day
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Jerry Krause
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My previous comment is confirmed by the observed fact that both humans and birds have two sexes: male and female.
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Howdy
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Despite appearances and traits, Jerry, and apart from gender, every person is unique, and likely every bird too.
Reply
Citizen Quasar
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Did someone pay you to write this blather?
Reply