https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/711705
"Of the various behavioral differences between males and females, physical aggression is one of the largest. Regardless of gender, children’s physical aggressiveness peaks between two and four years of age but then starts diverging, as girls learn more quickly than boys to suppress such overt behaviors.
Like all individual differences, the gender difference in physical violence is not rigidly preprogrammed but can be amplified or buffered depending on social structure and cultural learning. So while evolved factors likely bias the emergence of greater physical aggression in males, the ultimate magnitude and social impact of this gender difference is shaped by development and learning within a given society.
Across all cultures, men are more physically aggressive than women. Although some forms of aggression are more common in females (e.g., infanticide; relational aggression), males are more likely to commit a physical or armed assault against another person, especially other males.
Importantly, the experience of anger does not differ between boys and girls; if anything, female infants may exhibit anger more readily than boys (Malatesta et al. 1986). Nonetheless, parents tend to be more accepting of anger in sons than daughters, a difference that likely influences boys’ and girls’ differential success at repressing aggression as they grow. Both mothers and fathers participate in this training: mothers accept anger and tantrums more from their sons than their daughters, while fathers are likelier to soothe their daughters and upbraid their sons when they express fear or sadness (Potegal and Archer 2004).The fact that young boys and girls have similar experiences of frustration and anger means they are equally motivated to aggress if they feel another person is blocking their aims. This is reflected in the similar prevalence of physical aggression between boys and girls in the first few years of life.
Taken together, all of these factors likely interact to explain the gender divergence in physical aggression over childhood and with it the tendency of girls to convert from physical to relational aggression over this period (Lansford et al. 2012). Thus, acts of bullying are equally committed by girls and boys, although girls are less likely to admit it (Loeber and Hay 1997). A key point is that physical bullying is not “male typical” behavior but, rather, is typical of a small subset of highly aggressive boys. When such boys grow up in adverse, stressful, and perhaps violent conditions themselves, the combination of greater male vulnerability plus gender segregation and male role expectations can end up fostering, as opposed to dissipating, these initial aggressive impulses, as more favorable rearing would tend to do. According to this model, such early incubation of physical aggression then cultivates the neural circuitry and habits that lead to a violent adulthood."
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