Sex differences

I just read an article in the paper which describes a couple of cross-cultural studies (personality surveys actually) which show that the magnitude of personality differences between the sexes differs greatly from culture to culture.

Many people believe that gender differences are not a genetic/biological phenomena but a cultural one, and the findings of these cross-cultural surveys might support that. However, the survey also finds that in countries where the gender roles are much stricter (where, for example, women aren't allowed to work and men do very little child raising) the gender differences are much smaller than in countries where both the men and women seem to share the same kinds of work.

I always believed that gender differences arose from a combination of culture and biology (though, biology is the root of the difference since these differences appear in the natural world as well). But the findings that the cultural explanation is not that simple is really exciting.