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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Gender roles are an immutable feature of the universe. Yes, men can learn and become good at some of these things that women have a natural inclination toward, just as women can learn and become good at some of the things that men have a natural inclination toward, and there is some play here in terms of the quantity of each trait that a specific individual gets, but it's hard to fully substitute a native intuition.

We need both genders -- neither can be discarded, and insisting that the two genders are so similar as to not have any unique properties or advantages is the same as discarding them.

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The hardcore downvotes on this comment, ostensibly given because it seems to run counter to today’s moral crisis of Women in Engineering, and it sounds so very regressive, despite the possibility it’s … not wrong, are a perfect illustration of http://paulgraham.com/say.html

I have a simple thought experiment for those who have a strong impulse to downvote the parent comment (and doubtless my own comment): Imagine the discussion here were, say, a study that illustrated men naturally resorted to forming factions and solving disagreements with violence, and someone commented, “No, it’s 100% society, not innate whatsoever” and then someone replied to that saying “no, while individual variation is of course very real, there is some evidence that the general trends that inform some of our stereotyped intuitions of gender are based in biological fact.” Would you be quite so quick to mash the down arrow? … Perhaps. It’s a discussion fraught with a lot of charged emotions, and we collectively are not so good at dealing with points of view contrary to whatever we want to believe.

The difference is that in your imaginary discussion, the person is proposing nuance informed by evidence. The comment you're replying to, on the other hand, pushes against nuance based only on personal opinion.

I don't know anybody who would argue that gender has absolutely no biological implications. But to suggest they tell us something about how society should be structured is the naturalistic fallacy, confusing is with ought.

As an example, illness and death are natural. But that doesn't mean that we should just shrug and say, "Oh well, tuberculosis is natural, so we should just accept it." The natural details of death should certainly inform how we fight it. But they can never tell us we shouldn't.

Individual variation swamps gender variation. Unless you're hiring at a demographic level (like the military), basing decisions on gender of the individual is largely pointless.

Yes, there are real differences between the genders, but I think they are much fewer and less pronounced than most people think. Many supposedly immutable gender differences have been found to be societally imposed upon closer inspection. (Citation needed, I'm posting this from a phone.)

Definitely. The notion that gender roles are an immutable part of the universe is basically a religious statement, not a factual one.

For those interested in how much this varies across species, I heartily recommend Dr Taiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00846X144

It's a great and funny book on the biology of gender and reproduction, written as an advice column.

Growing up in the midwest, I mistook a lot of what people got up to as essential facts of human biology. But after 15 years living in San Francisco, I've come to realize how much of that is purely socially constructed.

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