Are men and women equal in every way?

Throughout history men and women have been seen as complete opposites and women being inferior to men. Unfortunately many cultures still view women as inferior to men. Fortunately, in the "western world" this conception dramatically changed in the beginning of World War I. Since then we have had many feminist movements demanding that women have equal rights as men, trying to change hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of tradition of mankind. In the process of this huge change, some extreme feminists argued that men and women are equal in every way. Science today tells us that statement is false. Males and females are different in too many ways to count and these are some of their differences:

Women are generally:
- better at picking up non-verbal cues easier
- more skilled in maintaining quality interactions with others
- use more emotion to solve problems (expressive traits)
- relation oriented

Men are generally:
- more aggressive
- more spatially oriented
- use more logic to solve problems (instrumental traits)
- value independence more

Along with these social/psychological differences, there are biological differences as well. It has been found that men and women's brains actually develop differently in the womb. We can see the distinct differences at as early as 26 weeks into the pregnancy. In an Israeli study, they found that the corpus collosum, the bridge of nervous tissue between the left and right side of the brain, is thicker in females than in males. As many other tests have shown, this has resulted in women using both the left and the right hemispheres in connection with language while men generally use more of the left hemisphere in the brain. This is why women are generally better at communication with others as well as why they are more keen to picking up nonverbal cues from those around them. Where women are much better at language and fine motor skills from a young age, men are generally better at math and geometry. The reason why women are so much better at language skills is because the female brain has 9.5 times as much white matter, which connects various things in the brain, in their brains than males do. Also the frontal area of the cortex and the temporal area of the cortex are more developed and larger in females. Now where females are more developed in these skills, men are better at spacial tasks. The men use the left hippocampus to solve problems and the women use their cerebral cortex. This can also attribute to the fact that women have an easier time recognizing and dealing with certain emotions. (webmd.com)

You can clearly see in the paragraph above that there are biological reasons why men and women act a certain way, even as children. These differences play a huge role in families. Women are seen as better nurturers than men because they can pick up those non-verbal cues from their babies and children where the men are seen more as the masculine, disciplinary figure of the house. The reason why marriages and relationships between men and women are generally better than homosexual (men with men or women with women) relationships is because the differences in men and women complete each other's "gaps". The Family Proclamation to the World states that a mother and a father have the combined responsibility to "rear children in love and righteousness, provide for their physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve one another, observe the commandments of God, and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live." This major role in not only a singular family unit, but in a societal unit, it is healthier to have those major differences in parents to give the child that sense of completeness.

Extreme feminists in the past as well as in today's society try to argue that men and women are the same in every aspect, we are not. We develop in very different ways. Where I do believe that if someone sets their mind to something, they can do it, that does not mean that they are naturally inclined to do the task. For example, women can be just as good at certain sports as men if that is what they love and men can be just as good at communicating with others, they just sometimes have to work harder at it due to the biological differences. For example, I love shooting, camping, hiking, etc (activities associated with males), but I also love nurturing children, cooking, talking a lot with others (activities associated with females), I just have to work harder at some of the physically demanding activities than the males around me. Individuality is so important and I do believe that our individual differences are more important than our gender differences. Now, to answer the question asked in heading, I do believe that men and women are equal in the sense that we do have the same opportunities, but we are just not identical in what we do or what we like. If we were all identical, it would be detrimental to our society as a whole.

Sources:
http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/how-male-female-brains-differ?page=1
https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation