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Comment by shaftoe | Hacker News Reader

I have a similar experience with my children. From an extremely early age, my daughter has "tucked in" toys to bed, rocked them to sleep, etc. She was NOT taught to do this, but just did this as play. My sons can't seem to find a toy that cannot be used as a sword or a gun, to my wife's constant annoyance.

Even with the SAME toys, they are used very differently. For example, all of my kids play minecraft. My daughter loves to build houses with kitchens and bathrooms, bake, and invite people into her house for dinners and parties. My sons fight the monsters, build elaborate towers and castles, and play with explosives.

This image summarizes my experience: http://imgur.com/AT2Ak

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The question is: Who has tucked in your children? You or your wife? Children know which parent has the same sex and they like to play grown up.

Regarding the shooting and the building, are you sure that you have encouraged your daughter the same way as your sons? Have you looked your daughter into the eyes and smiled when she first tried to fight with you?

And even if you were all supportive in that development, it's still not a fair experiment. As long as your children have friends with traditional values and your children watch TV with advertisements that present pink female princesses and male worriers and builders, children are locked down into their roles.

Well this one is easy to answer, because there have been (over the last 6 years) less than say 50 occasions where we didn't put them to bed together; apart from those 50 occasions, my wife travels a few months out of the year, in which periods I put them to bed. So overall, there is no doubt (no matter how subconsciously biased my 'accounting' might be) that I did the majority of the putting to bed. (to bed putting?)

And well of course there's always the no true scottsman argument - no matter what, one can always put the 'true' equal treatment to question. If you're asking whether I ran a double blind experiment in my home, no I didn't. But we're nit talking about a tiny difference in one observation here. We're talking massive differences in dozens of families (from my observations). And this is for a social context where the ratio if dads and mums and the school gate is roughly 50% (yes I count sometimes), and where the lowest level of education is a bachelor's degree and the median is a PhD. Meaning, we're not talking about representative sample of the population, which you would expect to show the same properties as the population overall; we're talking about a population here that shows high levels of gender equally along many metrics. And despite that, the children show (very) unequal behaviour.

Well, that's a convincing setup.

I still think that peers and media consumption could explain the development but I don't have any data to back that up.

"Equal treatment" is not enough to remove socialization factors.

Kids learn from what their parents do. If a boy's dad is a truck driver, he may prefer playing with trucks, even if given a choice of truck vs. doll. The boy could similarly pick up non-verbal gestures from the dad or mom handling a doll vs. a truck.

Research is often inconclusive or difficult to replicate for these reasons.

Putting forth a theory that gender, on its own, impacts career choices is pretty useless. It probably does, but not in a way that we can adequately quantify. It depends on too many things.

"Putting forth a theory that gender, on its own, impacts career choices is pretty useless. It probably does, but not in a way that we can adequately quantify. It depends on too many things."

head explodes

So you're saying it probably exists, but then conclude it doesn't because it can't be quantified how much? I'm not even saying biological differences explain everything, or even a substantial part; just some part, but you deny that any aspect of difference between preferences in men and women is due to biology? I mean I cannot interpret what you're saying in any other way no matter how hard I try - you're saying that if we can't measure something exactly, it doesn't exist?

> you deny that any aspect of difference between preferences in men and women is due to biology?

head explodes

I don't know how you can read what I wrote and come away with that interpretation. I said it probably does.

I said links between biology and occupation are extremely difficult to measure and there isn't research that does so. This is why a lot of research focuses on babies.

The question has been answered. The dimorphism in gender preferences has been demonstrated (a decade ago) in a very similar fashion in primates who are really not inculcated with "traditional values" or "cultural role models":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

Is that a "fair" experiment?

I don't think that the study directly answers the question. Choosing role models is different from choosing toys.

If anything, the study suggests that women are equally capable of becoming engineers:

>Unlike male monkeys and like girls, female monkeys did not show any reliable preference for either toy type.

If you follow the pattern of the study, then men would reject 'female' jobs but women are interested in both 'male' and 'female' options. Women not only tuck in toys but also like playing with guns.

However, according to that article, male monkeys like to play more. You could argue that IT is all play and thus it's a better environment for men.

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