As much as we may deny it, most of us are in our back foot and can’t move easily into opposite sex dominated arenas, and often feel incompetent, isolated, and under judgment. And if women won’t admit to it, then I as a man will. I’ve definitely felt that way, felt quite intimidated and out of my element, frankly. And I’m not a man who generally feels confident around other men. But as much as I prefer the social company of women, when they’re in a group working together, in their element, I don’t feel welcome or like I fit in.

It’s a perfectly understandable feeling. Men’s and women’s work spheres used to be much more separate, and our competitive and dominance structures were separate. We competed with our sex, and we competed for the other sex, but we didn’t compete with the other sex very much. And it’s still something we haven’t quite figure out how to manage. We’re really playing separate games, with differing rules, and while it’s structurally very easy to lay them on top of one another and make them share the same space as if they were the same thing, there is a host of attendant interpersonal complexities that crop up.

Women seem to be a bit more flexible and able to adapt to different social structures and situations, and that seems to be reflected in their neurological structures. Men, however, often seem completely mystified by female-dominated structures, completely out of their depth, unsure of how to act, and become like frightened animals, aggressive and dangerous. They lack the skills to feel secure or to understand the territory they’ve entered. And they’re generally less adaptable. Or they may make a play at male bravado, the sort of displays they would use when competing for women, not with them, and confuse the dynamic in a whole other way.

The way men deal with the adaptation problem seems to be based around taking different strategies to their extremes, then watch the less successful ones perish or be selected out. High risk, high reward. You figure out what works and what doesn’t, but at a higher cost. And you also need someone to pick the winners and the losers, and that’s where the shift competition within a sex to competition for sex occurs. The price is high, but men have generally been willing to pay it.

For women, there is a natural prejudice on the part of nature to preserve their lives and maintain stability, in part by making them more flexible and adaptable within their range. And with men there is a prejudice toward instability and extremism to heighten the strength of the possible adaptations, at the cost of flexibility and stability, and with a less concern for preserving their lives. As a result, humanity can have its cake and eat it too, being both stable and unstable, slow and fast to adapt, conserving and risking, by investing them into different sexes.

Humans are more than just their sex, of course, and vary individually quite a bit. And at certain levels and in certain jobs and areas of life those differences emerge less. But in others they emerge quite a bit, particularly as people have the freedom to self select into the areas in which they differ. At the moment, society has swung from putting too much emphasis on sex differences to acknowledging them far too little, and seeking to eradicate rather than reinforce them. Neither extreme is particularly sensible, but while trying to push all men and all women to be just the same sort of men and women will particularly hurt those at the extremes of the curve, attempting to push men and women not to be men and women will hurt a the whole middle quite a bit and deprive many of a fundamental pillar of their

Biology has chosen to make men more chancey, more experimental, more committed to single approaches and investments, more willing to go all the way with something, more extremist. And as a result they gather up and when rate a disproportionate amount of all extreme outcomes, both positive and negative. Women make up the bulk of all college degrees these days, but men make up the larger portion at the highest extremes of very advanced degrees and advancement. They also make up the bulk of the lower end of education and society, with far more dropouts, learning and behavior problems, and of course make up 90% of the criminal population.

Even within shared professions, men and women don’t behave the same, particularly when you approach the extremes of those professions, the least common and most demanding positions. Because at that point you’re not dealing with average men or average women. It takes something of a crazy person to reach certain levels within highly competitive fields. There are far more male suicide bombers, as well as CEOs. And women, given the choice, have a smaller proportion of truly crazy, obsessive, single-minded extremists. Their bell curve has a very large middle with shorter tails. And men have a narrower middle with longer tails.

It’s not at all the case that no women are willing to sacrifice everything to reach the top. And it’s not the case that all men are. But there are more women than men who will attempt to maintain a more balanced and nuanced approach to their lives, and there are, at the extremes, more men who will go completely all in and invest everything into one strategy or field. And both sexes do this, largely, because of personal voluntary choice, because that’s who they are. And the more freedom they have, the more exaggerated the differences become, not the less.

Which is it really better to be? Well, if you only see value in being the top, the elite, then I guess it’s better to be like men. On the other hand, it’s not all tea and crumpets. Let’s not forget that long tail at the other end of men’s bell curve. That’s part of the price. Males live 20% shorter lives than females across the entirety of the animal kingdom, because nature has made all males more fundamentally chancey. So there is a price to be paid. And there is a price being paid for being at those extreme ends, even the “good” end.

It’s not clear that being an extremist is a great overall life strategy. It can be helpful for the species as a whole, but often burns out and makes insecure and unstable the life of that particular individual. Male suicide (as well as male victims of homicide) is catastrophically higher than women. And suicide, or some kind of involuntary suicide, is a very common end for extreme figures, at both extremes of life. Being an extremist, even a successful one, is a dangerous strategy, because life in general (and the needs and dimensions of human life) is pretty complex, not unidimensional.

Nature seems to think males in general are a little disposable, worth risking on the chance of a few good outcomes. It’s ok if a lot of them burn out and die or fail, so long as a few make it through. You don’t need near as many men to keep a species going as women. So you can invest in maxing out some traits, even juicing up some physical traits at a long term cost to survival rates, and it will be fine.

Women seem to be built (neurologically and physically) for the long game. Their brains are wired in a more flexible and distributed architecture. Their body arranges their hormone and muscle and fat distribution in ways that are more sustainable for the long term and less likely to cause damage and burnout. And as a result their overall mortality is much lower. So once you get to 85 there are roughly double the amount of women than there are men, despite nature having juiced the male pool by producing, on average, 105 boys for every 100 girls. In America, men start out outnumbering women, but by age 40 women have already caught up and passed the men. And every five years you go further down the line the proportions shift more and more, until men pretty much fall off a cliff in the 70s.

So there are some real costs to being extremists, and there are some real benefits to being more balanced. On the whole, I think we, as a species, can be thankful for those crazy extremists, since we’ve benefited a lot from their contributions, men and women, without feeling the need to all be extremists.

As I said, the way that men (or rather some extreme men, of which there are more of) are might seem better if all you value or care about is the few people who reach the extremes of a field, the celebrities and history makers, a group that includes people like Albert Einstein and Ghandi, but also, let’s not forget, also includes people like Hitler and Stalin and Ted Bundy.