Info from a recent Dalrock post actually found a pubmed article on Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance: a possible explanation for the feminist paradox.
As I noted in the previous digit ratio post, men and women exposed to higher prenatal testosterone develop tendencies for behavior based on how much they were exposed to.
Here is the study’s abstract:
The feminist movement purports to improve conditions for women, and yet only a minority of women in modern societies self-identify as feminists. This is known as the feminist paradox. It has been suggested that feminists exhibit both physiological and psychological characteristics associated with heightened masculinization, which may predispose women for heightened competitiveness, sex-atypical behaviors, and belief in the interchangeability of sex roles. If feminist activists, i.e., those that manufacture the public image of feminism, are indeed masculinized relative to women in general, this might explain why the views and preferences of these two groups are at variance with each other. We measured the 2D:4D digit ratios (collected from both hands) and a personality trait known as dominance (measured with the Directiveness scale) in a sample of women attending a feminist conference. The sample exhibited significantly more masculine 2D:4D and higher dominance ratings than comparison samples representative of women in general, and these variables were furthermore positively correlated for both hands. The feminist paradox might thus to some extent be explained by biological differences between women in general and the activist women who formulate the feminist agenda.
Interestingly, what the abstract doesn’t mention is that the sample women had a more masculinized digit ratio than even the sample men group!
A picture is worth a thousand words in this case:
As you can see, the mean digit ratio of feminist activist women is higher than both the female and male comparison groups, although there is some solid overlap.
If you find a woman who have very short index fingers compared to their rings, it’s worth being very careful around them until you know their tendencies and political views.
I had never heard much about this if anything, but I’m now on the alert for it. I’m acquainted with enough women to know which ones in my estimation already have displayed more masculine tendencies (kind of a lot) and which ones seem the more feminine (not as many as might be hoped for). No doubt my rigidly controlled experimental process of looking around at whoever shows up will yield new breakthroughs.
Okay. I thought we women are supposed to be the more risk averse sex?
@ elspeth
Women are the more risk averse sex on average.
In general, higher-T women do exhibit similar characteristics to men though especially competitiveness in sports and aggressiveness and risk taking in business, law, etc.