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Girls having better math grades could be explained by girls, on average, being higher in conscientiousness. I think generally grades in schools are more strongly correlated with diligence than natural talent.

Also, studies have shown that in more gender role laissez-faire societies there's actually a greater difference between genders, which your GDR study inadvertently corroborates.

> where gender equality was officially mandated and thus stronger than it is even now in Germany

How do you build that argument? If it was equality of outcome that was officially mandated, that is exact opposite of true freedom of opportunity.

Also I'm not sure why you are talking about math grades, when the discussion was specifically about interests, - ie, how many of those girls then proceed into careers in mathematical disciplines. Just because someone gets good grades in school in a subject, doesn't mean that the person is going to choose (ie, is intereste in) pursuing that subject as a life career path.

> If it was equality of outcome that was officially mandated, that is exact opposite of true freedom of opportunity.

I have said nothing about equality of outcome.

There is no freedom of opportunity without societal context. I am, as a man, legally free to wear a skirt in my country, yet I've never done and I've also met almost none who did - because of the socials costs this would incur. And skirt wearing is obviously 100% culture, 0% genes.

The surrounding society frames what opportunities are actually free to embrace.

Interests, BTW, are by their nature not really empirically measurable (you can give people questionnaires, but that's about it). You can't infer girl's interest in math from their chosen profession, that's why I gave an example of actual ability. This is also why serious psychologists usually research other concepts - and I suspect this is also why Peterson likes to talk about interests: they are essentially an unfalsifiable topic.

> legally free to wear a skirt in my country, yet I've never done and I've also met almost none who did - because of the socials costs this would incur.

I also have never weared skirt, but reasons are entirely personal - have no internal motivation to do so, have opinion that trousers are more practical and have no skirt in wardrobe. But i assume that if i ever wear a skirt, nobody would give a damn.

You can say that lack of my personal interest to wear a skirt is an effect of societal indoctrination and it may be true, but there is a clear difference between accepting/integrating that position and being forced to it by fear of societal costs. The second is oppression, the first is not.

> But i assume that if i ever wear a skirt, nobody would give a damn.

Really? Give it a try for a month.

I would be highly surprised if you don’t get called names, ridiculed, or worse, physically attacked.

And that is if your employer even allows you to wear a dress in the office.

> Really? Give it a try for a month.

Sounds like an interesting experiment. Perhaps i will try that after covid season.

Cool! If you do, I’d be curious to hear about your experience.

> There is no freedom of opportunity without societal context. I am, as a man, legally free to wear a skirt in my country, yet I've never done and I've also met almost none who did - because of the socials costs this would incur. And skirt wearing is obviously 100% culture, 0% genes.

I see...

You need some serious twisting of the objective reality and ignoring a lot of things to arrive at that "skirt wearing is 100% culture" conclusion. But if you do believe that then of course it's easy to see how the rest follows from it.

I do not see it at all the same way.

Skirt wearing, as well as other clothes, especially "beautiful/sexu" clothes, is very related to the sexuality of people and the differences of how that sexuality plays out different in males/females. It has physiological differences, visual differences, ideological differences, practical differences in sexual selection, etc. To say that all that is just societally constructed is basically the same as saying "gender is purely a social construct", which, IMO, is 100% military-grade bullshit. It is used by ideologs to split the society and promote certain political agendas, it does not come from science.

I can imagine a society where it would not be about skirts per se, but it would be about some other very similar piece of clothing, that would similarly demonstrate female features, and signal things like health, sexual proclivities, sexual availability, age, sexual preferences etc. Those clothing pieces would also talk to the same centres in our brain that understand beauty, symmetry, healthy body shapes, etc. Most of those things are rooted in biology or deeper, even if there is a thick societal layer of covering on top of that.

> For example in eastern Germany, the area of the former GDR, where gender equality was officially mandated and thus stronger than it is even now in Germany, girls had on average better math grades than boys in the 90s and early 2000s (see the national TIMSS data for these periods. This effect only disappeared in generations born after German reunification.

I don't think that has ever been in question, last I remember the evidence is girls generally perform better in the education system. That is weak evidence in favour of there being innate gender differences.

Pretty much every company I've worked for over 100 people has made it quite clear they'd hire a girl over me if one had applied. As far as I can tell I owe my employment path to the fact that, as a gender, girls appear to be refusing to compete for it. The formal structures I've seen were formally tilted in favour of women in education, hiring and salaries.

> That is weak evidence in favour of there being innate gender differences.

But my example showed that this isn't an innate gender difference. The effect disappeared after the kids grew up in another system.

> As far as I can tell I owe my employment path to the fact that, as a gender, girls appear to be refusing to compete for it.

It was the same for actual professions: The female share of engineers was significantly higher in Eastern Germany than in Western Germany, and is no sinking since the reunification: https://www.industrial-production.de/wirtschaft---unternehme... (German source, sorry)

(Edited with a better source)