On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation, which, I feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both genders must know - which is that women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
https://time.com/81355/girls-beat-boys-in-every-subject-and-...
Why? There are only two possible answers: Either there's some sort of genetic predisposition for women to care about fashion (quite a claim!), or that disposition is a product of the way we raise girls.
Given that we know our culture strongly associates fashion with women, and we don't have any evidence for some "fashion gene," historical bias in how we rear our children is simply the least presumptuous hypothesis available to us.
In reality we know that there are biological differences between men and women. We know these differences affect the brain in terms of size and structure. We know these differences affect the mind in terms of personality and emotional experience. Should we expect that men and women have identical biological predispositions towards areas of interest? I would say no. Given that we then expect to find differences of interest stemming from biology, and that we have found a difference in interest, and that there isn't a plausible alternative...
There is a more plausible alternative though. Our society demonstrably raises boys and girls differently, and we know for a fact that the way we raise children affects who they are. In fact, women were much more common in the field of computer science until a cultural shift around the '80s that saw computers portrayed as "boy toys" [1], so we know this affects things as complex as career aspirations too.
Contrast that plausible and well-supported hypothesis with the other one: "There are biological differences between men and women. They affect many things. Therefore it's plausible that there is some effect on personal interest. Therefore it's safe to assume that any given difference in personal interests between sexes can be attributed to biology." This isn't even logically sound; it's fallacious to say that, if X affects Y, any behaviour exhibited by Y is likely attributable to X.
And this is still all a-priori non-empirical reasoning; there's no evidence that sex is responsible for areas of interest at such a granular level as this, while we do have such evidence for culture (e.g. pink used to be a boys' colour [2]).
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-happened-all-... [2]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-gi...
Person 2: That's horrible! Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?
P1: None at all.
P2: But, society at large tacitly endorses the practice of underfeeding young girls?
P1: Not at all. In fact, it would be a horrible scandal and a severe and rare crime if anyone were found to be intentionally depriving an infant girl of nutrition.
P2: So... why do you think this is the explanation for height differences?
P1: Well, it would explain my results in a way that accords with my political beliefs.
Your argument seems similar to Person One's argument. There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain. As I've previously referenced girls outperform boys in science (as well as every other subject) and have for the last century. It would, in fact, be a huge scandal if some school system were found to be educating girls differently.
You are pointing at these really small things, like commercials targeting toys to boys versus girls. You assume that these small things cause major changes (as opposed to companies targeting their commercials where they find they get the best return). You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.
I provided evidence that our cultural ideas of what careers are and aren't masculine impacts women's interests in terms of career path. You provided no evidence that interests are a product of sexed brain chemistry. Your height analogy makes no sense and doesn't match up to our discussion.
> There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain.
I never argued that schools discriminate against women by offering them a worse education in those areas. I argued that our culture encourages certain interests above others in boys and girls by gendering those interests. Consider the example I linked, where the number of women pursuing careers in computer science fell precipitously after messing with computers became coded as a "boy hobby."
> You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.
Girls get higher marks than boys in every subject, and the discrepancy is actually less pronounced in STEM fields [1]. But this is really irrelevant to our discussion.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/girls-get-better-...
Differences in character are evident between children, and statistical differences between boys and girls are very visible.
Your argument has a flaw. It's right we don't have evidence for the fashion gene but it's also right we know the female and male brain are different and behaviors are different (even if we cannot pinpoint the cause of the difference we see different behavior). It is sufficient to consider the genetic explanation as possible.
So, this is actually quite a modern phenomenon. At some point in the early 19th century, high status menswear started evolving into a near-uniform (it's finally started to pull away again a bit in the last few decades), while women's clothes started going in the opposite direction, especially in the early 20th century. But before that, high fashion was very much a male-focused thing. If someone in 1750 in Europe was obsessed with different fabric types, they'd be likely to be a wealthy man.
(For an example of this, see Pepys' Diary; he goes on about fashion constantly.)
I read this and immediately assumed you were going to say its obvious that women are taught how to behave, and that they're taught things related to what they're supposed to know.
Your comment alone is enough proof that society is telling women they aren't supposed to like science. Any young engineer reading HN may start/continue to subconsciously question their affinity to the field.
Women ARE taught that they don't belong in stem fields, and that science is not for them. I was picking out books for a 5yo girl and boy twins for christmas recently, and the nice lady at the bookstore told me to get a glittery princess book for the girl and a scientist book for the boy. It was not a malicious act meant to keep women out out science, but just something we take for granted in society. Fromm a young age we tell girls what is and isn't for them, subconsciously.
IEEE has studied the affects of engineering graduation and job retention, and its correlated to a womens self-identity as an engineer and their perception that they belong. Starting from a young age, society is damaging that perception. I'll link one study, but they've done a number of studies, including tracking workplace treatment of coworkers, and women are consistently treated worse and are questioned more and trusted less.
All of this stuff seems like obvious post hoc rationalization. You know girls aren't taught to be engineers because relatively few engineers are women. Are we socializing young girls to be accountants, claims adjusters, or advertising specialists? If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants? (Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender)
The survey you cite is pretty meaningless. They survey some engineering freshman and then find a few questions where the results are statistically different between men and women.
"We conducted t-tests to determine gender differences in survey responses. We found that women tended to have lower self-efficacy perceptions: they reported less confidence in their ability to complete the physics requirements (5.75 vs. 6.13, p < .05), less confidence that they could do well in an engineering major during the current academic year (5.75 vs. 6.07, p < .05), and less confidence that they could complete any engineering degree at this institution (5.08 vs. 5.41, p < .05). In contrast, women reported higher outcome expectations than men: they reported greater agreement with the statement that engineering will allow them to find a well-paying job (6.48 vs. 6.33, p < .05), and that doing well at math would increase their sense of self-worth (5.66 vs. 5.46, p < .05). "
So - women tended to have less confidence but higher expectations for their career and that's supposed to be evidence that society teaches women they can't be engineers?
No its clearly that there are few engineers who are women because we teach them they shouldn't be. You got it backwards. There is ample evidence of this.
> Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender
Thank you for this example, by the way. I've never seen a single children's book on accounting, and its pretty even. I've seen lots on science, doctors, construction, nursing, etc. And they're pretty non-even careers.
> If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants?
Because sparkly princess is not a job and most people need a job. We're not teaching anyone to be an accountant from a young age and people do it because it interests them. But when we teach only men to be engineers... we get a gender imbalance.
> Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed?
This is a really weak argument. 1. There are plenty of matriarchal societies throughout history. 2. The identity of science as we see it in western society today is a relatively western idea that doesn't translate well historically. Euro-mediterranian history dominates our cultures idea of science, and that cultural history is male-leader dominated. Plenty of societies across the world had women do things, but we just learn about what happened in Europe (from men).
As you said in another comment, women outperform men at school, so why do they have lower confidence? That seems like a discrepancy that has a logical social explanation (they're told they don't belong, so they aren't confident in their work). Studies have proven this. Unless you think women are unconfident as a matter of biology? (studies have not proven this)
Aside, have you ever talked to a female engineer? MANY will tell you they were not pushed to be an engineer, and that they face sexism and were constantly told they're not supposed to be there. Many experience higher levels of criticism and mistrust over their work compared to male coworkers.
Regarding your response to my quick question - which matriarchal societies are you thinking of? The "identity of science" (whatever that means) is not really at issue. We are discussing the reason behind why women know more fashion related vocabulary and men know more science and technical terms. If the "identity" of science changes over the years, that wouldn't seem to change whether or not men have greater interests in what we now call science.
Your theory, that career differences are caused by acculturation is first, absurd. The theme of children's books, kids TV shows, or whatever you posit is part of this, is minuscule compared to spending 8 hours a day in a classroom. Yet, you think the minuscule effects outweigh the massive effects, and nevermind the widespread effort to get girls into STEM.
Second, your theory is soundly rejected by evidence. Girls choose not to go to engineering because of those kids books, but they perform better in math and science throughout school? Where is the effect of these books in K-12 education?
Third, your theory predicts everything and therefore nothing. When a survey shows that girls have lower confidence and higher expectations, well, that's because their confidence is undermined by our patriarchal society! If the results were reversed, and girls were more confident but had lower expectations, why, that would be because despite their abilities they knew they wouldn't be treated fairly by our evil patriarchy!
Conversely, I would say that if you survey a thousand people, divided them into two groups, on dozens of questions, you will probably find some that have significantly different results. I would think the results were meaningless unless they confirmed some prior prediction or were all aligned in some surprising way. That is, actually, what I think about that survey.
The cultural affect of childrens books, tv shows etc doesn't stop in a classroom. Teachers are often complicit in furthering stereotypes and tropes throughout someones academic career. But again, someones home environment, even when smaller in time than a classroom will be more impactful.
Women do better in the classroom, but despite their performance, report that they feel less confident in their abilities than their male peers. At the same time, they say that a stem career would have a great improvement on their life. Then they choose to pursue another field, and you're interpretation is that they must like fashion more as a nature of human biology? THAT is absurd.
Again, if you ever talk to women in stem (or those who left stem), you'll quickly find tons of people who directly tell you why they act and think the way they do. And it is what i've been saying - they're being made to feel like they don't belong explicitly and implicity. I can confidently say you've never had a serious conversation with a woman about this topic based on how you discuss this.
Iran, oddly enough; about 70% of STEM graduates are women.
More generally, though, the trend in the west has been, for any given subject, it's all male, then there are one or two women, then a few more, and suddenly a tipping point is hit and it's 50/50 within a few years. This happened to medicine and later biology and then chemistry in most places. I'd expect the pattern to continue.
> women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
So why are there women in stem if they really want to learn about fabrics?
Or, do you really mean that women only enter jobs when men leave openings?
I assume though that Iran has a smaller portion of the population in college and that men are preferentially pursuing political or theological power over STEM education. Of course, these are assumptions which is why I'm asking questions to understand better.
Do you think that in Iran their children's books more prominently feature female scientists?
I think you’re missing the obvious explanation; the gender biases in STEM may be basically arbitrary; go to a very different society and you’d expect them to be different.
We see this in the west, too. From the 40s through 70s, women were far better represented in programming than today in western countries. Part of this was a legacy of the war, but that can’t explain the whole thing. And in the other direction, practically all chemists in the west were men until the 80s or so; this fairly rapidly flipped and now most new chemists are women in many countries (similar tipping point shifts happened earlier for medicine and biology).
It's also difficult to see a correlation between weaker gender roles and more interest in STEM among women. If anything, the correlation is reversed: more equal countries see less women interested in science and technology [1]. Different preferences of toys among infants are observed even before they're able to talk [2][3].
It seems to me that these claims of societal influence or bias is rooted in the assumption that everything is going to be perfect 50/50 distribution, and thus anything that doesn't conform to an equal distribution is evidence of some sort of pressure or bias. On what grounds do we claim that 50/50 interest in science and technology is the default? This is almost never answered, people just postulate it as fact.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.h...
3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7
Even baby male monkeys prefer to play with trucks while baby female monkeys prefer to play with dolls.
A possible control they did not employ during the study would be to have a series of toys that were identical in all ways except color, for example.
Also *very* worth noting:
As shown in their Fig. 1, when play time with toys is examined in human children (Berenbaum and Hines,1992) and rhesus macaques of all ages, males spend significantly more of their play time with the “male” toy(s) than with the female toy(s), while females spend about equal times with “male” and “female” toys. This is true both for frequency of interactions and in time spent playing (Hassett et al., 2008). **Therefore, one key difference between males and females in these studies is that males actually show a toy preference while females do not!**
The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where women are in charge of the engineering/construction and to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that there's something deep within our psyche which drives these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them though.
If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying.
That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that.
Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.
The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes.
Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.
I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way.
So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.
It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-fatal-...
Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do.
Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kil...
There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.
I think this is motivated reasoning. From what I can tell, the "grilling is manly" thing started in the '50s (well after cooking stopped being dangerous) and is mostly limited to the United States (instead of being universal, as we would expect with something biologically-motivated). And what's the difference between frying, roasting, and grilling? All involve using a gas-operated cooking device to cook meat (assuming you own a gas stove); they're all equally safe.
Not only does this strike me as being cultural, this strikes me as obviously cultural. And yet you dismiss that out of hand and go looking for a biological explanation ("grilling is extra dangerous") that doesn't really line up with the facts of the example. So it seems to me that you're engaging in motivated reasoning — assuming that masculinity can't be a product of culture, reaching for biological explanations even when they don't really make sense.
Also interesting to me that grilling is manly started in the 50's. That seems to be about the time that household appliances like microwave were getting popular, no? Maybe men who liked to cook needed to find a manly outlet.
Famed barbecue "masters" were universally men, though if everyone is being honest much of the hard work at many large barbecues (with hundreds of guests) was actually performed by black men (or Californios, or what have you depending upon the location). Large barbecues were generally tied to political efforts or organizations, festivals, and the like. During the Depression there were large government-subsidized barbecues so everyone could get some meat in their bellies and enjoy one another's company during those tough times, and there again we see men and women typically taking on disparate roles in the cooking process.
Contemporary accounts of the barbecues of years past generally have women inside doing not easier work, but different work. Making pies, side dishes, baking, etc. Even the pre-Columbian/Spanish Chumash tended to split their work pretty strictly, with women doing things like grinding acorn flour in bedrock mortars with the kids, while the men fished, hunted, gathered shellfish, etc. Contemporary drawings of various indigenous peoples show them smoking/grilling fish and iguana, but again everyone in the images are male. I confess I don't firmly know what kind of sex differences existed in the roles played in the cooking American slaves did for one another, something I really should remedy, but when it came to big gatherings the differences were apparent and as I wrote above.
I can't really speak to causality, but in terms of time scale the M-F patterns seem to substantially pre-date the 1950s.
Oh, and fun fact: the offset smoker was invented in Texas in the 1970s. That little factoid seems to blow people's minds...
maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof
Note that the number of women entering the field didn't decrease, it was just the number of men increasing so much.
It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and research on the topic. Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12 education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes about how different gender assignments cope with adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).
2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can change that. Only after understanding what it would take should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having more diversity in perspectives - just like every species benefits from having diversity in traits.
That doesn't explain why countries where women are more free to pursue what they want have fewer women in STEM. For example, in Iran and Saudi Arabia more women earn science degrees than men.
[1]: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why...
It is not our job to disprove your half-baked suppositions.
Small clarification: the feminine-analogous toys used in the original (Hasset, 2008 [1]) study were plush rather than the more common plastic dolls sold to children. Although the difference may or may not be minor, it does remind me of the famous Harlow monkey experiment where monkeys showed a preference for the soft “mother” figure over the biologically sustenance “mother” figure.
Edit: Another commenter has already perpetuated this very misunderstanding it seems. Out of the Hasset female-coded toys, only one (a Raggedy Ann doll) was “anthropomorphic.” All six others were animals.
How historical are you going back here? I'm almost 50 years old and as far back as I can remember, everybody with any authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls and crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from science classes.
That's a good point - I wonder if the question was "do you recognize this word?" or "can you correctly define this word?" (followed by a quick check)
I also wonder if there's any gender differential between male and female respondents in willingness to say they "know" a word that sounds vaguely familiar... and if the sound of a word also affects people's willingness to take a leap. The study doesn't seem to have included fake words or anything like that to catch guessers out (and I don't think that was relevant to what they were trying to determine, anyway).
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male respondents are more likely to take a leap for "piezoelectricity" or "thermistor" than they would be for "peplum" and "chignon".
It absolutely wasn't this way when I did my schooling and I'm younger than you, growing up in Canada.
Another point to consider, aiming at a target doesn't mean hitting it. It's why you haven't seen the outcry about boys in stem until the past half decade or so. General public opinion and culturally ingrained sexism are very difficult boats to steer.
everybody with any authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from science classes.Do you have a source for this?
"Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath#Earliest_surv...
Edit: But even then, I didn't know e.g. what they looked like, or anything about them specifically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Package_o...