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Comment by serhatozgel | Hacker News Reader

Do you think if this a difference between the nature of genders or a difference emerging due to how parents and/or society treats boys and girls differently?

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There is no ethical way to ever know.

its brain structure, hormones, inherited traits, etc.

Brain structure is also shaped by environment

of course. but even if you fix environment, girls will usually interact and experience the world different than boys which obviously will cause their brains to form differently. even though environment is same.

lots of studies about that. especially twin studies with m/f twins.

> lots of studies about that. especially twin studies with m/f twins.

Twin studies with m/f twins outside of an environment shaped by external imposition of traditional (or otherwise differentiated) gender roles and gender-based expectations and treatments?

If so, how was that acheived?

If not, you haven't supported the conclusion of differences even if you fix environmental differences.

Yeah, that minor little detail of all of society generally treating boys and girls differently is slightly hard to really escape.

Right. I can't imagine what "fixed environment" could even possibly be construed to mean. The conscious pressures are unavoidably pervasive, let alone the unconscious ones. Doesn't much matter how the parents parent. Try counting how many times in fictional media women are written to respond to every conflict by collapsing in a puddle of tears, vs men.

One thing you can do is look at people of the same sex but with different levels of testosterone. That would effectively control for environment, unless you think that higher testosterone has subtly visible effects that cause others to (unconsciously?) treat them differently—which actually seems likely, if e.g. a high-T girl would tend to do more "rough" activities and consequently wear "tough", non-delicate clothing—but that in itself would be a useful takeaway.

Another thing you can do is compare countries, or families, or perhaps schools, that are "more gender-role-restrictive" or "less gender-role-restrictive". Surely if the environment has an impact, then varying the strength of that environment would vary the impact. (Obviously there would be other variables to control for.)

Well those behaviours haven't changed for hundreds of years. Grand and Great Grand parents share many of the same stories. Surely their environment are much different to what we have now.

Well our current environment is also very shaped by the past.

All of the above.

The genders clearly are quite different (on average with large individual variations). It also must matter a lot how society is structured to handle the young maturing. I don't think 2021 America is particularly good at this.

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