Despite social pressure, boys and girls still prefer gender-typical toys
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
What happened?
My daughter played with baby dolls - mothering them and taking care of them. My son? He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns. He also liked to use Barbie dolls as hammers.
My wife and I learned there’s some things girls like to do and some things boys like to do. It appears to be biological. We’ve known a few other couples who tried the same thing and had similar results. Leads me to believe the difference between the sexes is nature, not nurture, and probably goes back tens of thousands of years.
Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.
Given that this behaviour was learned by observation, society's existing gender norms - and specifically those around guns - would also have been observed and learned. We can't separate these, in this anecdote.
Would we not expect to observe the son to engage with more caring play if the stay-at-home parent (primary carer) had been the dad?
> Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.
Certainly part of it, but I'd bet if you gave the girl a stick to play with, she'd probably start doing something like pretending it was a baby. The specific behaviors are learned, but the preferences may not be.
I suspect that if you manged to raise some boys and girls a a completely gender neutral environment without those social influences, they'd spontaneously invent primitive and somewhat disorganized versions of the same behaviors (sort of like with language, e.g. a critical mass of deaf children will spontaneously invent a sign language together if they're not taught one).
Girls treat the outdoors generally the same as boys do, and iirc are recorded climbing trees in the same numbers.
IMHO, this ends the argument.
You're gonna therefore have to explain to me why you think this is natural behaviour. Since, as I understand, trucks were invented by humans.
Isn't it just that chimpanzees are social and have been cued by human expectations, their captors and immediate relatives?
In communist Romania of my youth, where toys were sparse.
In Egypt nowadays, in poor families who can't pay for toys.
Do you have children?
Just a fun question for you, have you raised children? At least one of each sex?
The conclusion made: that one gender likes to play with guns, the other likes to be nurturing, aren't necessarily binding, is why I brought up external factors.
At this age they have had very little social interaction/pressure and begin to behave in very gender specific ways. To ignore biology in this case seems short sighted especially in the context of evolution and every other mammalian species on the face of the earth. I can point out the boys and girls in a litter of puppies at 4 weeks. They just behave differently.
( Again, so I don't get flamed, this is not a 100% statement because biology is distinctly individual but the tendency significantly overwhelming ).
How does a baby of less than 12 months recognise its own gender in either of the parents?
Most of the behaviors I am discussing are not patterned by a parent in anyway.
Other than the physiology are you going to ask a kid "hey, do you feel like a boy or a girl?" Because it isn't clear to me what that question means exactly and whether a kid can answer that.
I agree with you about some stuff, but you're wrong about this. Transgender people aren't magically free of gendered societal influences. Some are shitty sexists who prefer strict gender roles. Speaking as a transgender person.
Find another post to comment on then
2 and 3 year olds can't. By 4 they can.
So I don't think social pressure affects choices of play - a toddler will happily play with cars or dolls while they don't even know they're boys/girls.
My children were not twins but both were decidedly birth gender centered.
There was a time my daughter asked for tools and matchbox cars which I promptly gave her when she returned from school. She played with them for a week and went back to polly pockets.
This is obviously not the case for everyone. However, from experience it is biologically driven.
He also loves playing cook, and playing "taking care of the baby" with a doll.
Luckily, he's allowed to.
I'm not sure I've heard of kids not being allowed to play with something (except for sex and dangerous or precious items). Also, if a child wants to play with a doll or a gun, any object will do, if needed.
Also, as I kid I was dissuaded and scolded for playing with many things- nothing really worked, I still had great fun with fire and live 220V cables :).
Even a funny look or surprise will be cues children pick up immediately. Not that social conditioning is a bad thing, but humans just don't survive in a bubble.
Nobody I know of, on any side of this debate, has argued against letting kids choose what they want to do. The problem is when "my child likes playing with dolls" suddenly becomes "time to cut off my child's penis".
We don't even have to get into the nature/nurture debate: It's possible that your daughter learned to play baby dolls by watching and imitating her mother. This counts as socialization according to these nature/nurture studies, but ...
To attempt to take away the human being from society, from parents, etc., and find out what this human being would do outside of human society is an act of extreme cruelty, because human beings cannot grow up and function in total isolation. This is why, although science can be applied to specific biological processes such as reflexes, it will never be able to describe a person or a person's behavior. This is why psychology and sociology are considered "soft sciences".
There could easily be a genetic basis for why girls and boys like different things. And that is interesting. And obviously other factors play a role (like TV and siblings). The mistake is to believe that this is somehow a restriction on free will. The amazing thing about humans is out ability to break out of our genetic mold. The robin can never make rock music, but we can.
Also, no one is suggesting that we isolate some kids on a desert island to see what would happen. But there is nothing wrong with running that thought experiment! And maybe that understanding can help us break out of our genetic mold. We might be able to catch bad instinctive behaviours in ourselves and moderate them.
Funnily, this would make both "camps" correct!
A discussion of such would be less about identity, and more about who-we-shall-become, the evolving versions of ourselves, though also respecting heritage.
This is only possible with trust and common ground.
I was watching a documentary lately where some group of fish spent days climbing up the rock behind a waterfall with very low rates of success to lay their eggs. It felt incredible some code in their genes affects them at a point in their life where their utmost goal becomes swimming upstream no matter the dangers and they prefer doing that to, well, enjoying life in the sea.
I don't have twins but I agree with this statement to a point. My daughter loves her Playmobil fire truck to the point that she slept with it a few times when she first got it. Her favorite stuffy was a frog for a while, until she started daycare and then we noticed interest in dolls growing.
I guess what I'm saying is that from my experience, social cues are much more powerful than people often like to think.
Why is it so hard to acknowledge gender preferences?
While also acknowledging that it in no way implies competence in career and business?
Programming used to be done by women. At some point it flipped, but even in the 1980s there was clearly greatness https://www.fastcompany.com/90151279/the-woman-supercomputer...
Though note that the above designer went off to become an artist.
Rather than forcing the issue, the question that ought to be asked is what made/makes a former mostly-women dominated field appear so unappealing to women today?
I should also point out to that high paying and very physically demanding jobs such as nursing are dominated by women.
The issue can be as simple as a image problem. Kids, who wants to be lazy, mostly alone in front of a screen, and solving problems quietly, and get paid well for it?
Of course, no one will even ask this question if it’s career suicide to do so.
Alphamales tend to create and thrive in such workplace environment, to detriment of everyone else.
Even assuming "its biological", that means that every single boy in the country must be disposed to liking guns, and every single girl must like to mother baby dolls?
And you'd think that a community of "Hackers" would be a bit less concerned about what the bulk of the population does and a bit more interested in the outliers.
I’m not sure what u are trying to say tbh. Conceding there is something biological at play doesn’t mean no boy is ever allowed to play with a Barbie.
Did your parents not tell you this? Did you not have friends who were parents?
Not trying to insult, but this reminds me of mothers I know who think boys are just girls with penises and are horrified when the boys pick up sticks and want to brain each other.
I have seen many examples where giving a boy a sword is “teaching him violence” but lecturing him over and over that swords are hurtful is someone “letting his natural gentleness come out”.
I have a two year old. He was raised with gender neutral toys and due to the pandemic largely in isolation from the rest of society for the last year with a lot of time spent with both parents. Moreover as the father I don't show strong interest in “typical” male interests like cars or football.
The first time my son saw a digger, he was hooked. He is completely enthralled with construction vehicles- dumper trucks, cement mixers etc. His favourite colour of Play Dough is "mud". He has dolls but they hold limited interest over his toolbench.
Before having children I would have said it was largely societal. But I've watched my son show strong preference to "boy" hobbies since he was able to show interest in anything and it was really quite surprising how "boyish" he turned out to be considering we tried to give him equal opportunity for all activities. Of course you can never rule out external influences entirely but I remain convinced the difference is biological.
This is a really good book on the subject :) was both their favorite for quite a long time:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/228537/digger-dozer...
Edit: sorry for the rant. Both the article and majority of the comments are a reasonable discussion. "But you get where I'm coming from"
Less social pressure to play with gender-sterotypical toys != social pressure to play with opposite gender toys.
> A 2017 survey from Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans considered it a "somewhat or very good thing" to steer kids toward toys and activities traditionally associated with the opposite gender (though respondents were less enthusiastic about doing so for boys than girls).
Yes, not only was parents doing that recognized as common-but-not-dominant thing 50 years ago (as a near-50 GenXer, I was aware of it existing and being perceived by adult society that way as a kid), it was even before that a popular media cliche leveraging a social trope that it was a real if eccentric recurring pattern (especially by fathers without sons toward girls) even earlier.
I think you're off by several orders of magnitude, but yea it goes back a long way lol
We have dolls, lego, duplo, mechas and a big "kitchen".
We live far from family and none of my friends here has kids, so my daughter plays with me a good chunk of the time (I work from home) and with mom. Mom doesn't like dolls, but she puts an effort into showing her. I get just bored with those, so we play with boy toys.
She get a little bit of interest in dolls to pretend she is cleaning her little brother, but most of the time she plays with duplo, although she does put to bed the characters in there.
There is no one saying "princess princess", so her favourite character in Frozen is Frozen Marshmallow (the big snow monster), she likes singing though.
Again, it's all a matter of exposure and it comes heavily from who she plays with the most. In our case, me and my wife are the people she sees the most (and COVID obviously pushed that even further).
Oh and yes of course we want a gender neutral environment. Now that I think of it, she also sees me changing diapers, so maybe she is pretending to be me.
But the video game mania of every nephew of mine was on a completely different level. With them it always became an issue for their parents to intervene and moderate.
Different angle, but former & new CEO of TSMC Morris Chang, in a 2014 interview, talks about how he came to semiconductors: he looked around at what other asian businessmen were doing, switched from Harvard to MIT because no opportunities, examples open to him, & saw "no chinese American politicans, no chinese-american even businessman" (1949)[1]. Obviously this is no longer 1949, equal rights is literally the rule of the land in a fair part of the world. But it's a strong story of role models mattering, of doing what you see. And there are definitely still gender-roles prevalent within society, roles taken by masculine figures, roles taken by feminine figures, and people looking in the mirror are like to understand, to see themselves forward on paths where they can already see people who resemble themselves succeeding. Disrupt this, please, but to me, the pressures towards non-normativity are greatly outranked by the evidences & pressures of what we already see in the world.
Last, I'll throw in a shout out to Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota[2] series. It's a wonderful story from a Renaissance history professor, of a post-geo-governmental sci-fi world, of politics & great events. One of the interesting flourishes of the book is that the world has largely decided to make gender taboo. To adopt a willful genderblindness, to try to treat everyone equally, to regard to everyone with non-gendered pro-nouns. The world has worked to undo the pre-dispositions set up, actively, rather than merely requiring a legal treatment. It's an interesting detail of the world, & causes no end of tension & complications for the characters of course, which is just one part of this wonderful interesting highly interwoven saga. It speaks to the difficulty of the social science happening in this article, to the impossibility to build a control group that could ever test out how sex shapes us, because so much of society is suffused with it. Even in the Terra Ignota world, where a agendered Puritanism has taken over, the old roles still have root, even though they are illegal, & must hide. When people talk about their anecdotes of boys & girls having different behaviors, I think they must just be so blind to how much influence, how many opportunities for messaging, how much of a status quo the world has, how much they are up against to provide that equal chance.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrogen
Do you think these maybe have more to do with causing those differences in the first place?
after that, I think the expression of these hormones is again confined to societal patterns, that keep us from understanding the real impact of these chemicals in any objective sense. it's convenient cheap & easy to convince yourself you know the impact of these chemicals, that it leads to this behavior or that, and while yes there are differences for sure, I place far more emphasis on the straightjacket of society & the limited roles it's even willing to consider than I do the impact of the hormones. I think there's many potentials for how these could be expressed that are simply denied, excluded.
that parents are so confident their kids have such strong gender biases well before the significant bio-chemical differences start to emerge, that's a huge red flag on this all. we have nearly no ability to grapple with the real impacts.
Some discussion in this paper: https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/508329
(and, yes, it's skeptical that hormones significantly influence behavioral differences between boys and girls - but it's clear that boys and girls have gone through different hormonal trajectories even early in life).
But I think everybody should have the opportunity to live their life and choose the toys they wish as I pointed out. As long as it fixes inequalities and leads to true equity, I'm all for it.
For it to be geared towards both boys and girls, it would need to be bright pink with equal imagery of boys and girls, and equal amounts of toys played with boys as well as girls.
Come on, it’s like saying barbie dolls aren’t girls toys. I mean, sure, boys aren’t usually incapable of playing with them, but that’s also irrelevant.
For example, ,my daughter loves dressing like a princess and using make-up, despite the mother hating both. On the other side, she really loves playing with trucks, scrapers etc. Shall I nudge her towards one topic or the other so that she will be "gender neutral" ? No, who cares. Whatever she likes is fine.
The ones having social pressure are not the kids, but the parents. "oh my God if I am going to give a doll to my daughter I will be a sexist bad parent". no, really, give her what she likes more,does she likes dolls ? Give her that. Does she prefer being an and engineer ? Good, give her the tools that she asks for, as long as it is what SHE wants, not you want.
If this means confirming some stereotypes.... well too bad, you're supposed to make your daughter happy, not some statician.
(disclaimer: I have a single daughter and probably I won't have any more kid so I guess I'm project on her also what I would like to have from a male kid... still as long as she is happy I am fine, regardless of whatever she wants to do of her life)
I like to also point this out whenever someone mentions that only "X" percent of women are <insert male-dominated field here>. 97% of loggers are men, at least they were the last time I looked at that statistic. Grossly unfair to women. We must achieve gender parity in logging. Women have just as much right to be crushed to death by giant multi-ton trees and mutilate their limbs with horrible chainsaw accidents.