I\'m looking at this Ted talk about a Saudi Arabia woman who dared to drive a ca

Question

I'm looking at this Ted talk about a Saudi Arabia woman who dared to drive a car in the last few years. This reminds me that until the last century or so, women (all over the world?) enjoyed less rights and might've been pigeonholed into roles predetermined by society. Those roles might've encouraged certain traits, and discouraged others. Those who did not conform might've been punished, like the woman in the talk above received death threats and was jailed.

This sounds to me like selective pressure, did it really exist, and did it have any effect on the genetics/traits of modern women?

This makes me interested in the question - compared to other species, are men and women more genetically different because of selective pressure put on women to conform to male-dominated world for thousands of years before 19th century?

Explanation / Answer

I'm not sure I buy your premise: firstly, the degree and form of male-female differentiation in social roles has varied widely across time and culture in human history so I doubt it forms a uniform evolutionary driver such as you describe. Secondly, the degree of male-female differentiation appears to me to be much greater in species such as gorillas, lions and peacocks than it does in humans so I'm not convinced that humans would stand out on this front as a species we'd expect to have greater genetic differences.

Even so, the only genetic difference between male and female humans is the Y-chromosome. The X appears in both males and females and doesn't have exclusively female lineage so it can't acquire separate genes for male and female. The Y chromosome contains very few genes so its not capable of manifesting a major genetic gap and because there is no recombination in the Y chromosome it is not a fertile ground for new genes anyway.

So males and females have essentially the same genes. However, this isn't the whole story because how, when and whether genes are expressed is about as important as what genes are encoded anyway. It is these differences that enable big differences between the sexes not actual coding differences.

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