In the case of wolverines, their lifestyles and behavioral regimens are not greatly-divergent except insofar as females dig nesting burrows and other behaviors directly relevant to giving birth. Otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart; low sexual dimorphism, low behavioral dimorphism by sex; the only really obvious thing is that wolverines try to avoid overlapping their ranges with members of the same sex.
Fireflies, similarly, don’t seem to be very distinct by sex until it’s time for a mating display; then they have ways of signalling it, but their lifestyles and behavioral cues, let alone anatomy, don’t differ much.
Basically, how much of a difference sex and gender make seems to be variable. Are there differences in size? Decoration? Behavior? Lifestyle? Energy expenditure on various aspects of those things? You can’t predict the answers to those questions from the commonly-held idea of “males have cheap, plentiful gametes; females have few, expensive gametes” (which doesn’t even reliably hold for all species, in addition to neglecting other salient factors like birthing method, social structure and other things that shape this without being directly determined by how they accomplish sex).
Incidentally, humans in our ancestral state (including modern subsistence foragers) tend to have very low body fat, which is the single biggest contributor to secondary-sexual dimorphism being so prominent in much of humanity today (nutrition and fat stores are probably why menarche occurs so early these days for many, and one factor contributing to comparatively high fertility). The popular perceptions of human sexual dimorphism may be distorted by this relatively recent context shift.
In the case of wolverines, their lifestyles and behavioral regimens are not greatly-divergent except insofar as females dig nesting burrows and other behaviors directly relevant to giving birth. Otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart; low sexual dimorphism, low behavioral dimorphism by sex; the only really obvious thing is that wolverines try to avoid overlapping their ranges with members of the same sex.
Fireflies, similarly, don’t seem to be very distinct by sex until it’s time for a mating display; then they have ways of signalling it, but their lifestyles and behavioral cues, let alone anatomy, don’t differ much.
Basically, how much of a difference sex and gender make seems to be variable. Are there differences in size? Decoration? Behavior? Lifestyle? Energy expenditure on various aspects of those things? You can’t predict the answers to those questions from the commonly-held idea of “males have cheap, plentiful gametes; females have few, expensive gametes” (which doesn’t even reliably hold for all species, in addition to neglecting other salient factors like birthing method, social structure and other things that shape this without being directly determined by how they accomplish sex).
Incidentally, humans in our ancestral state (including modern subsistence foragers) tend to have very low body fat, which is the single biggest contributor to secondary-sexual dimorphism being so prominent in much of humanity today (nutrition and fat stores are probably why menarche occurs so early these days for many, and one factor contributing to comparatively high fertility). The popular perceptions of human sexual dimorphism may be distorted by this relatively recent context shift.