A perfectly egalitarian society would eliminate all societal influence on decision-making, leaving people perfectly free to do whatever they want with their life, not pushed in any particular direction. What happens when you manage that? Well, the only thing that will be impacting decision-making becomes your innate characteristics. And what is arguably the biggest single variable you can change to guarantee large differences in innate characteristics? Sex. In terms of lived experience, an X man and a Y man (e.g. short and tall) will be closer together than an X man and an X woman. As such, your gender gaps will only get larger as you remove societal influence from the process, not smaller, because gender is the single biggest discriminator when comparing two people.
Are those people of really different income levels? Class trumps ethnicity, and gender self-segregate within the class.
Note that maybe gender segregate since a long time and this is indeed a genetic code. But this is impossible to test against. So it is not really interesting, and a more philosophical debate right now.
I'm curious who you think forced Chinese to become Chinese and Aborigines to become Aborigines, etc... You could define race away and say we are all human, but that is also not interesting.
You think the lived experience of a fat man and a skinny man is further apart than the lived experience of a fat woman and a fat man? Or a black man and a white man vs a black man and woman? Of course if you go to excessive extremes those will start to outshine others, e.g. if you have two 700lbs people who (due to their weight) are – not walking, not having sex, not showering, not able to see their feet, not doing much of anything but eat, then yes probably the man and woman will be closer in their 700lbs lived experience. But that's the exception that proves the rule.
The key of course is that something we typically pretend is one variable (man vs woman) is actually a collection of 100, where as any of the other things you mention are typically much smaller in scope.
Where you are born is literally only societal influence, that's not an innate property at all. In fact it is almost as far as you can get from an innate property.
You're also pointing out extreme outliers as some sort of gotcha when the entire point is talking about population-level discrepancies and averages. Indeed, you can cherry pick whatever you want in order to get desired results. The question is, when you select two people completely at random, and you only look at intrinsic characteristics, will sex be the biggest differentiator on average? You might disagree, but the vast majority of people will not. Said another way, which is more common throughout history – societies that segregate based on sex, or societies that segregate based on weight?
When I say "men are stronger than women", is your response really to say "well I bet I can cherry pick a woman and cherry pick a man and the woman will be stronger than the man"? You can do that of course, but that would clearly not be taking my argument in good faith.
This is the issue, you can't test against "no societal influence". And societal influence is that powerfull of a factor for comportments that any biological factor is negligible. Or maybe gender difference is only a small factor and not a negligible, one but how do you test for that? It is impossible.
FYI: kids don't differentiate themselves until at least 3, sometime it can last longer (a lot longer). Puberty hit betwwen 11 and 15. I have a sightly ethically challenged experiment i would like to run...
A boy from a poor neighborhood will have more in common with a girl from a poor neighborhood that another boy from a rich neighborhood.
How many kid from poor urban area love horses? Compare that to kids from rich urban area? What about sailing? Ask a kid from a poor neighborhood his dream job. Surely, it's the same as your no? something between astronaut, archelogist, scientist. Except it is not. Because cultural environment mold children more than any biological difference.
A man with a small penis and a man with a big penis will still have much more similar sexual experiences than either of them would with a woman. This in turn will influence the way they view the world, which snowballs onwards and onwards.
On average, the brain chemistry of two men will be more similar than the brain chemistry of two women, as hormones have a large impact on this and any two men will (on average) have more similar hormone levels than they would with a woman.
Is this really surprising? Men and women have fundamentally different chromosomes, always. Not so with two random men or two random women.
I totally agree, if there is one biological attribute that can have an impact, it is gender. The other differences are so small compared to gender they don't matter. What i was saying is that gender doesn't have that much of an impact, or at least less of an impact than what society expect from your gender.
I'm suggesting that the opposite is true, because when you remove societal influence you end up lending more and more weight to the intrinsic characteristics, of which I would argue sex/gender is the strongest.
This may be an unconventional take, but I think society would benefit greatly if people stopped seeing sex/gender as something you are, and rather saw it as something you have. I.e., you happen to have an X or Y chromosome which lead to a certain anatomy and hormonal profile. Seeing it as some fundamental component leads to "othering" of the opposite sex and its predictable consequences.
I'm personally hoping that radical advancements in sex reassignment technology, along with their acceptance, will eliminate most of the ideological battles concerning sex and gender.
I guess your anecdata makes me ask the question of whether the trans guys you know felt that way b/c of the change of hormone ratios or because they were impacted by the same social expectations of how guys are supposed to feel and act.
After we'd helped the poor guy into a taxi the news broke.
What he didn't know was that the bar had a policy of one beer per id card, so the guy how'd ended up buying for him had gotten alcohol-free beer for our underage mate in addition to the real beer for himself, not telling our classmate of course.
For the rest of that year he was known as Claus[1]...
So I don't think you can come to any conclusion about how it will affect one person based on how it affects another.
On testosterone I’m definitely more motivated. Hell, one time when my estrogen went too high I had an intense craving for chocolate.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d9KKqP9IHa5ZxU84a_Jf...
Of course hormones do have effects on the brain, but "chemical X affects our mood, therefore chemicals Y and Z must mean there are huge inherent differences between the genders" feels like a pretty weak argument to me.
Even if some of these are temporary and fluctuate, they'll still be part of "who you are".
But our general's health, socioeconomic context, influence of discrimination (or privilege), peer and society's pressures, etc, also impact our personalities in big ways, so it's pretty tough to separate one from the other. Heck, even what you eat can change it. If you google around, you'll find how people who eat a lot of trans fat were found to be generally more aggressive.