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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people care so much whether preferences are biological or cultural. (Well, I understand it if we assume they are being dishonest, so assuming that something is not biological allows them to claim that it can be changed to whatever they think is morally superior. The debate whether being gay is cultural is a good example.)

If I am given a true freedom to choose, to decide according to my preferences, what does it matter what is the reason for these preferences? What does it matter, how did I acquire my tastes? They are MY tastes.

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I don't understand why people care so much whether preferences are biological or cultural.

Basically because if it is cultural, it may be a form of brainwashing and the expressed preference may actually be something they loathe, but don't feel empowered to reject.

Whether or not you think this matters for purposes of making policy, it matters a whole lot for purposes of an individual figuring out how to create a good life for themselves.

"the expressed preference may actually be something they loathe, but don't feel empowered to reject"

But we can ask them, right? We can ask e.g. nurses and computer programmers whether or not they loathe the choice of their profession. If there is e.g. relatively more computer programmers loathing it than nurses then you have an evidence of culturally pushed preference (towards computer programming, in this case), regardless what the gender ratio in those fields is.

"it matters a whole lot for purposes of an individual figuring out how to create a good life for themselves"

I already responded to that, basically I don't think it matters for an individual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381148

"Learned helplessness" is a thing. If people have been told their entire lives from birth that X is strictly Verboten and they can only answer Y to that question, they may literally be unable to tell you that. They may not really understand it themselves. It may be literally unspeakable and even unthinkable.

It might well be a thing but I am not sure if I can truly (or should) help somebody who explicitly says that there is no problem and they don't need help. Assuming they are deemed to be legally competent.

I don't know what all else has been said to you here, but I am absolutely not asking you to help such people.

You said you don't understand why other people care so much about sorting out what is biological and what is cultural in origin. A few people (me included) engaged you in discussion to explain why other people might desire to get a better handle on this.

I have no idea why you jump from that to some idea that you personally are being expected to do anything for anyone other than let such research exist so that those who do care and need it can find such info.

I guess it's fine if you decide to help people who don't want the help according to their own preferences, but if you want to make the society at large to help (e.g. through some customs or laws), then I should have a say in it, as a society member.

Is it a thing, or is it something made up by psychologists and social activists with an agenda?

It would appear to be unfalsifiable. If someone is sure they don't want X, and you're telling them they really do want X it's just that they've learned to be pathetic their whole life and now their entire thought process is inferior to yours, that seems not only like pseudo-science but actually a dangerously extreme belief.

I'm not sure why you think that women saying they don't enjoy their careers in programming means they are being forced into programming. If you want to measure that, ask them that question directly. Most of the women I know who are dissatisfied with their programming careers have that opinion because (for example) they are constantly harassed and HR does nothing about it, or because people working with them regularly assume that they don't have the intellectual capacity for their jobs and treat them like children, not because they don't like the act of programming; with the way you are proposing to measure preferences, there would be no observable difference between those two things.

I don't think we really disagree here. I am all for asking the question about preferences directly, and respecting the individual preference, whatever it is.

With the wast majority of the population (using Swedish data) working in industries that is gender segregated, there is plenty of studies asking why student switch program, people switch job, and people switching profession. In that there is an interesting pattern found a rather long time ago, which is that those in minority position has a significant higher ratio of leaving a profession compared to the majority. Equally for both male and female dominated professions.

So I usually look for common explanation for gender segregation that work both for women and men. 87.4% gender segregation for men and 87.6% for women is rather extreme, but it is also quite obvious that either there is a common cause or a massive coincident that both men and women end up working in mostly single gender work places.

No, you cannot just ask. It's more complicated than that, as Amartya Sen laid out in many publications on his capability theory. People have "adaptive preferences".[1]

For example, if you ask a women in a very poor rural region of India whether she wants to become an engineer, she might value the possibility far less than she would if that career choice was a realistic, valuable option for her in her current situation. Other typical examples would be slaves who prefer to remain slaves because they are not in a position to really imagine life as a free man, women who state that they prefer to wear a Burka, because they have been raised that way, or a peasant in feudal times who would only have very modest aspirations because he could not possibly imagine living the life of a nobleman whose higher rights were given by God.

More generally speaking, the underlying problem is that the so-called "preference satisfaction view" is false.[2: p. 4] That's the idea of classical welfare economics that people prefer what's best for them. As Broome puts it, nobody really believes it, but it forms the basis of many arguments and theorizing.

So you cannot just ask, although surveys can be used as (potentially fallible) indicators.

[1] https://www.iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/#SH1b [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ethics-out-of-economics...

Maybe people don't always prefer what's best for them, but I believe that even when they don't, they are the best arbiter of that. In other words, maybe they don't know what's best for them but then neither does anybody else.

I mean, when I talk about asking, you can make education part of the asking the question. I am certainly not against more education, like showing what is it like to be engineer.

I might disagree with women who decide willingly to wear burka, or decide to be slaves, even if they have a different choice, but as long as they make it freely, I have to respect that choice.

If I understand you correctly there is a short reply to your kind of critique in Section 5 of the first link I gave, under the subsection titled "Illiberalism". It's a viable critique that has been (and still is) discussed extensively, of course.

Interesting. I will have to think about it more, but I can't say I completely agree with Rawls either. I don't agree that economic value of things is completely subjective, either.

It seems to me that these problems should be addressed with education first, rather than by imposing someone else's preference on people (which is my main worry here). Therefore, that some rural Indian women might decide differently is not really transferable to decisions made by well-educated women in western postindustrial societies.

Go ahead and respect it! But the question was whether we can look at those expressed preferences and declare that our job is done and employment opportunities are fair. And the answer is absolutely not.

Because if it is purely cultural then aiming for 50/50 gender parity across all industries is a reasonable goal.

If it is not, it is a 'terrible', 'terrible' idea to approach gender equality from that angle.

Why would 50/50 gender parity across all industries ever be a desirable goal? Coal mining is male dominated -- should we push more women into becoming coal miners?

Coal mining is a historic industry; we should not be pushing anybody into coal mining (Looking at you, Australia)

I’m assuming you picked coal mining because it’s an example of a dirty, dangerous position in an industry that’s rightfully stigmatised by most modern countries.

If you’re suggesting that we shouldn’t push women into dangerous jobs but it’s okay to push men into them, then I would counter that we should make dangerous jobs safer for everybody and no, there’s no fundamental reason that women should not have the opportunity to work in these industries.

> If you’re suggesting that we shouldn’t push women into dangerous jobs but it’s okay to push men into them

No I didn't suggest this.

My question was not about energy policies. Let's substitute coal miners for waste collectors (colloquially referred to as garbage men, because 99% of them are male), and ask the question again.

Garbage collection is male dominated -- should we push more women into becoming garbage collectors?

We shouldn't push anyone into anything. Why is it ok for a man to be a garbage collector and not a woman? That sounds like gender inequality to me. You can't have it both ways.

I don't think anyone is saying that's it's "not OK" for a woman to be a garbage collector. Some are saying that the fact that women are generally not garbage collectors is a problem.

I honestly don't know where I stand on that. While I absolutely believe that much of the disparity in preference is cultural, I'm apt to believe that some of it is biological. Further, I'm not sure eradicating that cultural bias is beneficial.

If I'm reading https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm correctly, ~82% of waste collectors are male.

On the other hand, ~42% of meat processors are women; that is certainly a dirty, dangerous unfun job.

The real male-dominated industries are lawn care, sewage treatment, and repair and maintenance. Coal mining is too small an industry to report demographics, but mining as a whole is "only" ~88% male.

Its also highly paid at least in the west even more so when you get to supervisory roles eg £2k for a single 10 hour weekend shift for a pit deputy.

> Why would 50/50 gender parity across all industries ever be a desirable goal?

If women and men "are indeed biologically identical in their job preferences" you could argue a good measure for real equality of opportunity would be 50/50 parity across industries. Because given a fair shake everyone would be evenly distributed across all industries (since we have the same preferences).

You could, but I don't think it's fair. Shouldn't it be: If women and men (or any other classification) are indeed biologically identical in job preference, willingness to work in the first place, and aptitude, the quota in each job should reflect the basis distribution?

Just assuming that all of these are the equal might hide the actual problem we want to fix. Or might point to asymmetries we might not want to fix.

Of course, the 50/50 gender parity has also a different motivation, trying to address the culturally influenced preference. The argument goes like this: Because of historical reasons, some professions are male dominated. Girls are not interested in these professions because female role models are missing. So if we force the promotion of female role models, this historically created bias will vanish.

"job preferences" is not the same as job aptitude.

In a free market system people are going to be pushed into the jobs for which they have the most aptitude (or out of the workforce if their aptitude is too low/lower than machines) regardless of their preferences.

I think the question "why is parity a desirable goal" is valid and important. I don't think we need any examples to support the question, it stands on its own.

It's worth noting that the "Why don't feminists try and push for gender parity in coal mining?" is a very tired question (and rather silly meme) and it's got without a variety of answers from casual feminists. A cursory Google search for this question on Reddit has thrown up a variety of answers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/3bjr41/why_ha...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/2rpbil/why_ar...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/3inzi0/lookin...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/97f59k/are_fe...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/63lydf/why_do...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/5z79oe/are_fe...

Most of those answers boil down to 'because they are more desirable', is there any specific one you think nails the answer?

Not any specific one, but I'll try and summarize the points:

* Feminists really do fight for representation in these jobs[0][1][3] to the point where one of the largest sexual discrimination lawsuits was brought up by women trying to get into the coal mining industry.

* Women already have significant representation in such jobs and especially in other low wage jobs, such as textile manufacturing (in sweatshops, for instance[2]), nursing, fast food work, oil drilling, childbirthing (and other thankless reproductive labour), janitors/sanitation etc.

* These jobs are generally seen as undesirable anyway, and there isn't a social push for men to enter them. It's expected that with less push for dirty (and trade) jobs in general, there would be less of a liberal feminist push for them too. This is consistent with the fact that second wave feminists argued for any involvement of women in the workplace, even blue collar jobs, but now such activity is less prominent.

* It's a class issue too, and the perceptions, biases and elitist attitudes which prevent entry to such jobs for both men and women have been challened by intersectional and Marxist feminists.[4]

* Part of feminism is challenging essentialist and elitist narratives about women and their capabilities, which managers in such industries cite in arguments against hiring women

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/your-money/sweet-smell-of...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/3am8ri/if_the...

[2] http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html

[3] http://the-exercist.tumblr.com/post/105284613217/is-that-so-...

[4] Sean Sayers, "Marxism and Human Nature" discusses this elitism at length as both a gender issue and a class issue

Your two comments don't really answer the question I posed. The first one denigrates it and attempts to outsource the task of answering it to Reddit. The second one is, I guess, mostly a recitation of various things feminists have done or not done in relation to this question, among other issues. But nowhere do you make a clear statement about whether you would advocate for pushing women into these jobs, and why or why not.

I didn't know the question applied to me personally. I'm not entirely sure myself, which is why I gave various reasons (some conflicting) for what other feminists think. I'm not even sure I'd advocate 'pushing' women anywhere, I think that we should try and counter bias that may set in from society or parents from a young age, and also make clear that various opportunities are available to all, including opportunities in jobs which are unfashionable nowadays.

That's a fair response, thanks.

I used the word 'push' because I was responding to a comment which identified 50/50 representation in all occupations as potentially a reasonable goal. It would surely take a big push to achieve gender parity in garbage collection, which is 99% male in the US!

> Because if it is purely cultural then aiming for 50/50 gender parity across all industries is a reasonable goal.

If that's the case, then I see how it could be an attainable goal, but what is the basis of asserting that differing are something undesirable?

It honestly changes the way we work with something.

Biological differences aren't things we can easily change right now. Skin color or the shape of one's fingernails or the length of one's legs. Some biological things have real world things that go with it. Skin color, for example, could put you at greater risk of skin cancer or a greater risk of low vitamin D. One simply accepts and lives with these things and works with them.

If they are cultural or from nurture, it means that as a society, we can change things. It isn't that your tastes are an issue (mostly), but that society notices that, perhaps, men don't spend as much time with children or that women are doing things differently. In these cases, we can do things like start treating boys and girls more similarly. We can teach them similar things in school. In short, we can change how we nurture and change society (albeit slowly in some cases).

I understand, of course, that it makes the difference when you want to change things. But my main question is, why do you want to change things, even in case where everybody is free to choose?

I am not really sure I buy into "treating boys and girls the same" either. I think what's more important is to give them options (perhaps against their will, to get them outside the comfort zone).

It seems to me that schools already largely do treat everybody the same, even to the point where it is being truly annoying to open-minded individuals. I am not sure it's ideal to treat all kids the same, but rather recognize their individual differences.

For example, my parents sent me to summer camps to learn some outdoor skills. I wasn't very good at it and I didn't enjoyed it as much as I probably should as a stereotypical male. But on the other hand, I think it was right thing to do.

So, if despite these attempts to make me into an expert in wilderness survival, I didn't become one, and rather became computer geek, which was certainly out of fashion at the time, I have serious doubts about the theories that cultural ideas are so influential to the actual behavior of children.

> I think what's more important is to give them options (perhaps against their will, to get them outside the comfort zone)

How do you justify the against their will part with your earlier sentiment that you don't understand why people care if its biology or cultural.

If its biological, forcing them outside of their biological comfort zone seems particularly cruel.

Being outside your comfort zone is good, even if only for a time. (I'd rather not live outside my comfort zone, but my best experiences have come from being outside it).

First of all, we shouldn't treat adults and children the same. Children (and teens) should be sometimes pushed out of their comfort zone, at least for short periods of time. Because sometimes they find it is actually something they will enjoy.

In adults, it's different. They should be offered the option and decide for themselves. It is still good thing to do from time to time.

In any case, you need to be sensible as a parent. You shouldn't push children out of their "biological" comfort zone. For example, if a kid is afraid of spiders it is not sensible to push him to have one as a pet. It might be sensible to go to a zoo to see one (among other interesting animals), though.

> If its biological, forcing them outside of their biological comfort zone seems particularly cruel.

Gender-based biological differences are subtle enough to not really matter in a summer camp scenario.

But, in some other cases where something is most likely a biological difference, but changing the culture could meaningfully change the outcome for a sub-population, we do tend to choose to resolve the biology part. For example, we medicate for ADHD and back pain, when we could presumably build a society where people don't have to work as information traders while sitting at a desk all day if they want good money.

Regardless of whether the differences are biological or not, the real question is are the outcomes they lead to meaningfully bad or debilitating; are women more vulnerable as a result of them (I think they are but I suppose it's debatable). And if they are, should we change the value society assigns these choices so that people who make them have better outcomes, or should we change the people who make the choices (either through force or education or medication). If we are choosing to change the people (I guess we are), then if we find out or even guess that the root cause may be biological, our responsibility is not to shrug and go "well, guess 50% of the population can keep being depressed and poor, it's their choice", it's to find a biological solution people could choose to take to make themselves more suited to society's reward system. Isn't it?

(Obviously the women who already do like programming don't need anything special except for their work environment to stop being more terrible than men's through e.g. harassment by their VPs.)

Because in one case, things "must" be this way and there is no reason for introspection--given exactly equal opportunities, both groups would choose the same thing they are already choosing. In the other, that's not the case at all, and it may be necessary to (for example) pass legal reforms in an effort to make sure that both groups actually are free to choose.

I am not really sure what you're trying to say. Can you give an example, perhaps? In particular, can you give an illustrative example which explains the difference between "free to choose" and "actually free to choose"?

I have an anecdote which I found quite interesting:

Last week I got to meet my cousin’s daughter for the first time. It was a family dinner and after everyone had eaten she pulled out her barbie dolls to play with. Since I‘ve been on HN for a few years now and this is not the first time I came across this topic I asked my cousin: Why does your daughter play with barbies? Did she choose the barbie doll or where they given to her?

My cousin, confused at first (because remember people: Most people don‘t really care that much about this stuff), answered: I think she chose herself, or maybe grandma gave one to her first.

So this could be it: The little girl might be free to choose as far as her mom is concerned, but is she _actually_ free to choose because she got influenced by her grandma first? Who‘s to say?

I think you're underestimating ability of children to make their preferences known. If she really had a different preference, she would either complain that she wants something else, not play with the doll and play with something else instead, or make most of the circumstance and play with it in a different way.

I think what is important here is to give children different options. I personally got a lot of toys from my family that I didn't use that much as a kid, most notably sports equipment. Meccano and (later, as it was expensive) Lego on the other hand.. Not to mention computers, that was love on the first sight.

>, but is she _actually_ free to choose because she got influenced by her grandma first? Who‘s to say?

To add to your rhetorical question of the inability to trace the source of gender preferences, some research on non-human primates was done.[1]

In 2002, a study of vervet monkeys in the UK found male/female preferences for boy/girl toys.[2]

That behavior was independently replicated in 2008 with rhesus monkeys in the USA displaying the same gender preferences.[3]

There were also other studies of human infants[4] displaying gender preferences, and studies showing similar preferences across different cultures and countries.[5]

Those results will probably not change minds on either side because -- the belief that it's mostly nature or belief that it's mostly nurture -- is too ingrained for any evidence to modify.

If one leans towards innate differences, the studies confirm the beliefs.

If one leans toward cultural influences, then the studies are rejected with "monkeys are not humans!" or "who's to say the lab monkeys didn't learn boy/girl toy preferences from the researchers?"

The meta question then becomes: is it even possible to construct a nature/nurture science experiment that can actually convince one side or the other?

(The answer seems to be "no" based on several hundred years of debate on "nature vs nurture" with no final resolution.)

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda...

[2] 2002 paper: https://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(02)00107-1/abst...

[3] 2008 paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

[4] https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/06/03/infants-show-a-preferen...

[5] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/icd.2064

There are obviously gender difference between what girls and boys like to play with in general even from a VERY early age. Its extensively documented.

Of course radical feminists reject all this evidence en masse and pretend its all a social construct, which is absolute nonsense.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/slms/slms-news/slms/girls-toys-ve...

Every year on my birthday or on Christmas, my aunt would gift me one of those stupid DIY sets for girls. Basically boxes of cheap play makeup, or glitter and some other crap for making bracelets or barrettes, or tie-dye for dyeing your clothing.

I hated them. They were obnoxious, lacked creativity, and smelled weird. I was a very willful child and loud about it, so I obviously refused to use these gifts in any capacity, but I think my refusal to play with toys I didn't like holds true for most children. If your cousin's girl didn't like the Barbie, she probably wouldn't play with it.

The whole point of childhood is having an idea of "I" without having a strong idea of identity so that we have a solid reference point for learning about the world without experiencing the blind spots that ego identities often impose. Consequently, we demand what we want and refuse what we don't want without thought. We rarely make compromises and our needs and wants cannot really be reasoned away by others (because our needs and wants in childhood are more instinctual/subconscious/impulsive than they are logical and experience-based).

I think we are most free to choose in childhood. By adulthood we have developed functioning identities and feel obligated to stay consistent with our idea of self. Many people take portions of their identification from a society's expectation of them, which is when freedom of choice becomes heavily blurred.

Do you think there is something innate that changed genetically about women that led to them being much less likely to be computer programmers now than they were in the 1970s, but much more likely to be biologists? If not, there is probably some other factor at work leading to these changing "preferences," even though as far as I know women have had no legal barriers to working in either field throughout that period.

Or, to bring up a very timely example: currently there are no legal barriers to coming out as transgender (in the U.S., anyway). I still think it's reasonable to say that people are not "free to choose" to transition, because in many cases they will be ostracized or (legally) discriminated against for it. This is similar to the status of homosexuality (though it is a less direct analogy since there were many more laws explicitly prohibiting homosexuality).

I think the programmer example is a much better example than the transgender example. If you are ostacized and disciminated for your choice, you are not "free to choose". It's "free to choose" in the same sense that everyone is "free to choose" to commit crime, with the risk of being put into prison for your choice.

The "woman in programming" example is much better. Woman in programming started declining basically the moment computer games entered the market, since computer games are marketed primarily to males (outside of mobile, but that influence is fairly new). If we just simplify the whole problem to this one influence, woman are not programmers because of the marketing of "children toys". Is that bad, something we have to change? Nobody is really prevented from choosing to do certain freetime activities, to get exerience and motivation. They are just notpushed towards it. Still it leads to an unequal outcome.

Firstly, I think you are implicitly assuming that there's nothing dissuading women from being programmers--that if they join the industry, things go perfectly smoothly for them. That's far from the case, in my experience.

Secondly, nowadays, men and women both play games at roughly the same rate (with women playing a little more by some metrics), but that doesn't seem to have improved the chances of women entering the programming industry. What is the explanation for that (besides that it's "new", which isn't really the case anymore)? Like many people, I got into programming as a result of video games--but I find it hard to believe that that alone is responsible for the entirety of the observed difference in behavior.

Finally, what is your explanation for the huge increase in the proportion of women in biology?

Playing games is different from programming, and marketing games to boys is different from marketing computer science to girls.

I don't know why less girls choose computer science than do boys, but I don't think it can be so heavily linked to gaming. The gaming community is actually sometimes far harsher on girls than the comp sci community, yet girls continue to choose gaming. In the gaming community, a girl is either a "thot" or she beats out every male who plays against her. If you're neither of these things the community still believes you're one of them and will react to you/attack you accordingly, usually defaulting to calling you a "thot".

In comp sci, the barrier is more about socializing. It may be a stereotype but I have noticed that many males in comp sci are the less socially-gifted ones. It is often not possible for a female to join such a group of males because they are scared of her. Other than that, the comp sci world in academia is far less disgusting than the gaming world and far less hostile. It's about avoidance instead of outright attack.

It could just be that girls enjoy programming less than boys do. I'm not saying that's definitely the case, I'm saying it seems more likely than not.

I don't think that computer games explain the entire phenomenon, they are just one major factor that I chose to focus on.

It is true that the gender imbalance in gaming has mostly smoothed out, but until that happened the software industry already turned mostly male. And even if nobody intends to erect barriers, in a group that's heavily skewed towards one demographic everything starts to cater towards that demographic, pushing everyone else away. So unsettling the balance once for long enough may be enough to explain where we are today.

>Finally, what is your explanation for the huge increase in the proportion of women in biology?

I honestly have no idea.

> Do you think there is something innate that changed genetically about women that led to them being much less likely to be computer programmers now than they were in the 1970s [...]

Wait – I thought back then (1950s/60s/maybe 70s), "programming" refered to something more akin to data input, i.e., someone designed a program, and the "programmer" entered that program into the computer's memory, using punch cards or whatever [1]. Later, this activity and the designing of a program was merged and done by a single person, as it is known today.

If this is true, then the mystery is not why women's preferences changed since the 1970s, but why their preferences seem to be different from men's, back then and today.

[1] You can still find this terminology in the hardware world. For example, storing the bitstream into an FPGA's SRAM or flash cells is called "programming the FPGA", and the little box which is sometimes necessary to do this, is called a "programmer" – which is kind of funny if you think about it.

> Wait – I thought back then (1950s/60s/maybe 70s), "programming" refered to something more akin to data input, i.e., someone designed a program, and the "programmer" entered that program into the computer's memory, using punch cards or whatever

That's exactly right, "programming" was considered secretarial work, and guess what, pretty much all secretaries were women.

Male engagement in programming exploded with the advent of personal computers in the 80s, and female engagement chugged along at the same growth rate as before.

Not my experience. I was in college when PCs exploded, and programming was already a mostly-male field

I never claimed STEM had gender parity in terms of numbers, but if you look at the gender ratios you can pretty clearly see that female CS degrees peaked in 1984 and then fell quite rapidly:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

The "programming as secretarial work" happened in the 50s and 60s which predates this data, so I haven't found a canonical source for that.

I didn't really live through that era, but my suspicion is that more well-paid roles (especially in management and health care) opened for women during that era, and so they decided to work in different fields more in accordance with their own preferences. Hence the decline from women in computing. Basically, I believe it is in line with the gender-equality paradox.

It can also be the case that the whole thing is a dynamical system (for example driven by desire to work in a field which already has majority in the same gender), and it somewhat chaotically "oscillates" around the equilibrium. So there really is not an causal explanation as such.

Only really in mainframe shops - though I did in my first job enter a lot of code for a female engineer.

I think the idea is that your culture can enslave you in an idea of who you want to be, which isn't really yours, but rather your culture's. The idea seems to be that this identity has been forced on you, and isn't really yours.

This brings up all kinds of nature-vs-nurture questions. It also has a nice recursive issue: Those who hold this view (that you should be free to choose your identity, without your culture imprinting one on you): Did their culture imprint that view on them? (Before you say "no", remember that "their culture" may be the university rather than the town they grew up in.)

yeah, for example 100+ years ago (or today in conservative environment) there were/are probably a lot of gay people who genuinely believe they are not and suffer their whole live, not even cause they are afraid to "come out" but cause they don't even accept themselves.

If you suffer, and think that under different circumstances you could make different choices, with which you would be more comfortable, then you don't really have the free choice.

But that's not what I am talking about. I am talking about society where people do have the free choice, and they are happy with it (or at least in correct proportions). Then these are their genuine preferences, and it shouldn't matter whether they come from the culture or biology.

I understand you and agree to a point. But people are not such simple machines. Having a society with toxic (to our perspective) mores can have really subtle and strange (but still negative) effects.

A gay man in Saudi Arabia who is deeply religious and conform to fundamentalist Islam cultural mores can genuinely believe he is not gay and that god is testing him, or that he is not attracted to his wife, or just not that sexual, while being unhappy and not thinking "if only I could I would have lived as a gay man!".

Culture goes really deep.

"I think the idea is that your culture can enslave you in an idea of who you want to be, which isn't really yours, but rather your culture's. The idea seems to be that this identity has been forced on you, and isn't really yours."

Yeah, I agree, but I disagree with this notion. I mean, if you, even after hearing this argument, still think you made a free choice, then it seems to me that any attempt to subvert that is making you less free. Who should know better whether some decision is yours than you? It seems to me that this idea really rejects agency in other people, and that's why I find it disingenuous.

As a side note. The current idea of having 50/50 split in ratio of preferences between men and women as correct culturally bears some similarity to old idea that all left-handed people should be taught to be right-handed. Eventually, it was abandoned in favor of personal choice and the question whether it is cultural or biological is no longer relevant.

I agree with you. The "If you really were free, then you would decide the way we think you should" people need to think a bit more about what freedom actually means...

I think the idea is that your culture can enslave you in an idea of who you want to be, which isn't really yours, but rather your culture's. The idea seems to be that this identity has been forced on you, and isn't really yours.

But isn't this basically what much of life itself is about? To really figure out who you are? Because you are not born into a vacuum but into a number of overlapping human subcultures. And one of the main tasks in life is to figure out who the hell you really are and what you really want, and also how you change over the years. Only then you can find your vision of where you want to continue your life journey onwards.

For you, they now are your tastes, but if those tastes were acquired by nurture, they don't have to be your children's tastes.

Given some tastes lead to less power and riches in our current societal environment. If they are nurtured, it is logical for parents to want to nurture them to more lucrative alternatives.

If they are innate though, it's a waste of time to try and change them. So I feel it is definitly somewhat relevant to know.

That's a fair argument. As long as it's you who is interested in your preferences, and not preferences of others, then it's a valid question.

My personal suggestion is to assume that biology plays no role and attempt to change yourself to whatever you feel you want to be. I don't think there is any downside really, because it's ultimately the journey not the goal that counts.

We have control over cultural things and if theses things bring a life that we can define as inferior, then I believe we should change that culture.

The culture make women an object of desire, which increase sexual misconduct toward them. We can change that culture, shouldn't we?

Look at women in the middle east, that's purely cultural. Is it alright?

Culture bring racism, is it alright?

>what does it matter what is the reason for these preferences?

The same way we can fix a bug in a software, we can fix our culture to remove theses faults. Equal opportunities means that there's no fault. We are equals, thus there's no reason for culture to make us different. It's alright for a men to want to raise his family, he shouldn't have to bear the weight of the culture that tell him that it's his wife job to do it.

It matters when you want to evaluate whether a group has gotten a bad deal in society.

For example, if girls tend to prefer playing with dolls instead of toy cars, is it nature or nurture? If nature, then maybe there's a biological basis for why less women go into stem. If nurture, then maybe it's society's norms and expectations that explains why women more often go into people-oriented jobs like teaching and nursing.

When you look at it this way, you can see why the difference has political implications.

"It matters when you want to evaluate whether a group has gotten a bad deal in society."

I am not sure why would I want to do that.

As a leftist (being pro-equality), I don't really want there to be anybody who got a bad deal in society. But why should it matter which group are they part of? It seems chauvinistic to me.

> "It matters when you want to evaluate whether a group has gotten a bad deal in society."

> I am not sure why would I want to do that.

> As a leftist (being pro-equality), I don't really want there to be anybody who got a bad deal in society.

I think the issue is that there are very large numbers of people who have gotten a bad deal in society. Investigating every individual, individually, is probably time and cost prohibitive. So investigating by common features across groups of individuals helps to try to maximise that return.

While I think we'd all like to live in that utopia where nobody gets a bad deal in society, it's not the world we inhabit today, not even close.

I disagree. We should look at people who got the bad deal directly (for example, are poor), not put them into some group. The latter is indirect and just more misleading. It is buying into a chauvinist narrative and strengthening it.

"I think we'd all like to live in that utopia where nobody gets a bad deal in society"

This is objectively not true. Many people don't care about other people getting bad deal.

If you don't want there to be anybody who got a bad deal in society, first you need to understand whether or not where they are now is where they want to be or somewhere they ended because other options were closed to them.

If you don't know if they got a bad deal, you don't even know if there's anything to fix, much less how.

But you can't just ask people that, because people make a whole lot of choices based on what is seen as achievable for them not just by themselves but by society around them irrespective of their personal traits.

I believe people are grown up enough to tell me if they think something is wrong. So I don't see why simply asking is not enough. (I understand that some people don't want to complain directly in oppressive regime, so assuming that's not the case.)

And in my opinion, society doesn't ask people enough what they want. I am a big fan of direct democracy, which is pretty much that - asking people what their preferences (about how the society should operate) are.

> believe people are grown up enough to tell me if they think something is wrong

Unfortunately this belief is not very scientific. The very manner in which you frame the question, even if it is asking the same thing, can get a differing response from the same person.

Also, people are terrible at self assessment. Unsupervised vs supervised dieters are one of the best examples. Even worse are what people think they want. Most people have a very small pool they can think of at any given time on what they want. Most of the time it is being manipulated by outside benefactors, such as advertisers.

They are grown up enough to tell you, but that does not mean that they're quantifiable as doing as well as others.

I'm on the right and the sad news that you must digest is there isn't enough resources for all 7 billion people. That is a fact that will only get worse as we continue to add more. Most will suffer and there really isn't anything a leftist government can do about that other than bring everyone down to the same level of suffering.

"there really isn't anything a leftist government can do about that other than bring everyone down to the same level of suffering"

So be it. It seems more fair to me than some ad hoc chauvinism.

In any case, I don't think the suffering is really required. What is, in your opinion, the lifestyle that is possible to be supported by resources we have for 7 billion people?

> I'm on the right and the sad news that you must digest is there isn't enough resources for all 7 billion people.

Well this is simply not true.

I'm no fan of ballooning populations myself because I'm kind of a misanthrope but resource quanity is not the problem. There is more than enough to feed, clothe and house up to 15 billion people, just not at the same standard as the resource-guzzling United States.

The problem is logistics and political will. That's what we don't have to provide for 10+ billion people.

> I don't understand why people care so much whether preferences are biological or cultural.

Because the individual can't claim oppression as the cause for something like average pay differences when the individual chooses to go into a field that pays less on average.

From a personal / everyday perspective it's probably not that interesting. But uncovering the inherent nature of something, regardless of what it is, is always going to be interesting to large numbers of people.

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