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Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

It is well known that men favor working with things and women favor working with other people. So in a society that provides complete equality you will find that some professions are dominated by a particular sex. Nursing is dominated by women because far more women enjoying working closely with people than men do. That is not going to flip.

The feminist idea that all professions should end up with about 50% participation if there is true equality is patent nonsense.

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"It is well known that men favor working with things and women favor working with other people." The problem is that you use the status quo as an argument for why things cannot change. There have been a lot of things in history that were "well known" until they stopped being that way. I'm not ignoring the fact here that certain gender-specific evolutionary hardwiring exists. But that does not rule out that there could be ways to get more men to work closely with other people. Such as, as suggested by a commentator above, renaming professions. By the way, doctors work with people, and doctors are often male. It's likely more about status than the degree of work with people.

So you'd expect most managers and CEOs to be women right, because that's a job about working with people?

Be careful of statements about human nature whose only evidence is "it's well known that". You can easily ascribe cultural attitudes to something more fundamental without realizing it.

I'd argue that most managerial positions are working with systems and processes. People happen to be a part of those systems and processes. Which is why managers call their underlings "resources" - screws and bolts that can be moved around to make the system more efficient.

Whilst I have sympathy with your cynicism 1) that's not true of _good_ managers and 2) processes are the raison d'etre of HR, which is hardly a male-majority profession.

I would argue that HR is much more about dealing with people, and managers are responsible for providing systems for the people to work effectively in. Especially if you are upper management, you aren't going to be working with people most of the time, you are going to be finding ways to make them work more effectively in a systemic way.

It's funny, everyone thinks HR is about dealing with people, whereas it's actually about processing them. Processing entitlements, processing grievances, processing legal documentation, processing disciplinary procedures. Your line manager's the one with a personal relationship with you.

Mind you, quite a few people think an HR officer is the right person to go to with a problem. This is a _very_ bad idea. HR's job is to protect the firm, not the employees (sometimes this involves pushing out someone senior, but that's unicorn-level rare). If you want someone to represent your interests at work, it's time to unionize. :)

Being that we're hairless apes who rely on clothing, fire to break down our food, and a host of other technologies just for basic survival, I'd say our natural biology is pretty damned unimportant when it comes to such high level behavior such as preferred profession in the Western world.

Your culture and your language are by far much more responsible for your desires and actions. Just look how easily mankind is swayed by mere words to go to war!

I have thought about this a lot, and yet when you observe little kids, little boys want to play with trucks and cars, and little girls like playing with dolls. Nobody has to tell boys to play with cars or toy guns. They just like them. Obviously everybody's an individual. But by and large I think there are trends at such a young age it's apparent that the gender differences in occupational choices aren't just due to culture.

Your big assumption here is that kids are ignorant of culture and pay no attention to non-explicit signals. This is demonstrably and wholly false.

"In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on the matter."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/22677-girls...

This suggests there may be something deeper than expectation from culture and society.

Monkeys don't have language and culture.

This study suggests nothing about the impact of culture and society on human individuals.

Isn't that the point? Monkeys don't have language and culture, but males and females still prefer different types of things, giving evidence to the argument that it is not simply culture influencing children's toy preferences

This is a study about monkeys. How does this and why should this apply to humans?

Because we both evolved from a distant ancestor, any behavior we share is very likely to be an evolutionary trait.

I think that boys just plain will prefer the cars over the doll if you give them the choice, regardless of culture. The story of David Reimer is instructive. The boy at 22 months had a botched circumcision. So the doctors just chopped off his balls and made a vagina for him. He had a horrible time becoming a "girl" and as soon as he was told he was a boy as a teen immediately reverted and lived the rest of his life as a boy as much as he could. The reason his parents told him anyways was because he threatened to take his own life, hating to see the therapist who was trying to make him act like a girl.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

And what about biological males who would rather dress and act like the women in their society?

How does this anecdote prove that it was biology and not the same kind of transgendered cultural preferences?

Born an uncultured male, raised an American boy, prefers life as an American woman.

Born an uncultured male, raised an American girl, prefers life as an American man.

As far as I can tell this only shows that adult gender expressions have very little to do with biology or childhood.

Are babies born gay? You might as well be asking if babies are born doctors or poets!

Little boys and girls also don't want to eat their vegetables or pick up their toys.

What do babies have to do with socialized adult behavior?

I'm not saying that biology has no impact on behavior, I'm saying that it barely has any impact when compared to the influence of language and culture.

Well the research says you are wrong. This is not exactly exiting bed time reading but shows my point.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

Actually, you've shown nothing. No-one's denying these differences exist. The question's whether they're mutable. And gender expression is clearly mutable, you just need to visit an old art gallery to see that.

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