Endocannabinoids Sculpt Sex Differences in Juvenile Rat Social Play

To be fair, throughout most of history (and even on most legal documents), Gender = Sex. But that is a whole different debate.

No, I'm not making the argument that there aren't coercive social forces. Peer pressure is a real thing, and I've had to endure it, just like everyone else. In my opinion, what social pressure tends to do is exaggerate existing biological differences, enforce conformity (pressure you into behaving more like others). I'm not arguing that this is a good thing either. I didn't like that kind of social pressure growing up.

The argument I'm making is that pretending that typical male/female behavior is exclusively a product of our culture is wrong. It doesn't have to be all social, or all biological. It most probably is a mixture of both (just like in every other nature vs nurture debate). If we understand the biological root well, then we have a more solid basis for understanding the social forces that operate on top of that.

> The issue people take with biological essentialism is that it uses the plausibility of genetic/developmental differences driving sex differences to dismiss or outright deny the very obvious reality of coercive social forces that also definitely drive sex differences.

This is a huge strawman, and fallacies seem to be part of a lack of intellectual rigor from people who object to discussing biological differences.

Why not flip your point on its head: can you show me a model of discrimination that focuses purely on the social component, and shows that the results we see with, eg, the wage gap result purely from social components — or have a social component at all?

Because what I see is frequent dishonesty — discussing the “wage gap” but not “hours gap” or “risk gap”, for instance — and the denial of inherent biological differences has become dogma to people pushing false social statistics, because an analysis of those differences would show them to be liars.

It’s just gaslighting to demand a rigor from people advocating biological differences that’s never been shown by the cultural differences crowd — we have massive evidence of biological differences in evevery system of the body, including the brain; we have no quantitative models for how culture impacts outcomes. (Actually, we have a bit: it seems to be that more liberal countries express greater gender variation between jobs, because there’s less social pressure to accrue power, eg, fewer women go into programming in better off countries. This is what you’d expect, if there’s an underlying difference in biological preference.)

The objection to your position is that it’s an anti-scientific, anti-intellectual one that drives you to public dishonesty, such as the fallacies and double-standards made here.

It’s entirely political people don’t want to talk about this — sex based differences might imply the ratio of, eg, CEOs is skewed for the same reasons the ratios of top athletes are.

Wait a second. You’re not holding social and biological explanations of observed sex differences to the same standard. You say that coercive social forces are realities that “definitely” drive observed sex differences, but you’re not willing to allow that physiological differences are also clearly realities and must obviously also drive observed sex differences, to a greater or lesser extent? The unstated assumption seems to be that since coercive social forces and observed sex differences are both social phenomena, much less rigor is required when attempting to extablish causal links between them.

I think it’s just as easy for “social constructivists” to pass “just so” stories off as proof as it is for “biological essentialists” to cling to what you call a “gender of the gaps”. My question is, “The gaps between what?” Certainly not the kind of experimentally verified, quantifiable casual links that you expect them to provide for their own explanations.

In order to avoid getting lost in abstraction, here’s a concrete example. A social constructivist might present a study of differences in the types of toys that parents buy for boys and girls as evidence that a coercive social force definitely drives the different levels of interest that men and women show in STEM fields. (This isn’t actually the best example, because studies of very young infants have shown that males and females display clearly different levels of interest in different types of toys long before social conditioning can possibly have had any effect, but that’s beside the point.) A reasonable biological essentialist would counter that the constructivist has taken two observed social phenomena and asserted a definite causal link between them without doing a fraction of the legwork that would be demanded if an essentialist tried to tie the differing levels of interest to a physiological phenomenon, no matter how well quantified. Have longitudinal studies been done? How was differential parental encouragement measured? What makes the attempt to link these two social phenomena less of a “just so” story than those leaned on by evolutionary biologists?

In the absence of rigorously tested links between coercive social forces and observed sex differences, the null hypothesis can’t be that the latter are primarily caused by the former. It has to be, “Observed sex differences are caused by some mixture of social and physiological factors, and we haven’t done enough research to determine their relative contributions.” What you’re trying to say is that social phenomena have social causes until proven otherwise, and that’s an assertion that I see no reason to accept uncritically. Take something like differential rates of incarceration for violent behavior. Given that male mammals are almost universally much more aggressive than female mammals, are you willing to accept the argument that we must assume this observed sex difference to have a social cause until the link between physiology and human male violence has been rigorously worked out in detail? That strikes me as unreasonable.