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You are constructed through society. Social pressure is enforced by you on yourself, society just being the source of the templates your own mind uses to shape you. It applies everywhere.

We are partly constructed through society.

This is the nature vs nurture debate all over again, many decades after psychologists moved on.

You are fighting a straw man: The article doesn't argue that men and women are identical. Obviously there are differences between the sexes.

It just makes the argument that no significant physiological difference between male and female brains has been found except for average size. So the different interests of men and women must stem from something other than the physical structure of the brain. The article compares this to the difference between hardware and software.

the article also makes the separate argument that individual variation is bigger than the variation between sexes, which is why it's a bad idea to separate students by gender, which most of the world agrees with nowadays.

Nowhere does it say that men and women are equal.

If it's biological, explain what possible evolutionary advantage being a reclusive puzzle-solving obsessive would have offered in a pre-technological culture - i.e. most of human history.

For most of human history and for most humans there was nothing to study, invent, or analyse. Certainly not anything that would take years of reclusive effort.

At the absolute really-pushing-it earliest, academics and abstraction only became a thing in the late Stone Age - which is hundreds of thousands of years after modern humans emerged.

> If it's biological, explain what possible evolutionary advantage being a reclusive puzzle-solving obsessive would have offered in a pre-technological culture - i.e. most of human history.

It would make a better hunter?

Before guns, working out a strategy to hunt big game would take an obsessive approach to details and A/B testing, with potential death on the line.

> To put it another way, please try to explain to me how societal pressure could prevent you from becoming an expert at, say, math in your free time if you were obsessed with it.

Ah that one is easy. As we grow up we are not left alone to explore what we like. Rather, people tell kids what jobs are appropriate for men and women all the time even before they ge their own interests. It's also exacerbated by role models that they see in TV and other social settings. As kids grow older a gap develops in their interests which makes it very difficult for them to transition to "the other side" at any point after that. So women tend to lean towards caring for other human beings, social sciences, etc and men become engineers, construction workers etc.

This also depends on the culture (thus proving it's just a social problem rather than a biological preference): e.g.: in India the ratio between female-male engineers is almost 1 (900 something per 1000 or something like that), which is unheard of in Europe. (whether these women stay in the workforce after other social events or not is a completely different topic but again kinda the same cause, e.g. the expectation that after marrying you are just there to have kids and take care of them)

> because the vast majority of the work done to become really strong is done alone

Again, assumes you have an interest in the topic in the first place... working hard at something you have no interest is not something easily done

> The left just seems to have some bizarre need for different things to be exactly equal when they have no reason to be.

lol...

>Rather, people tell kids what jobs are appropriate for men and women

Many of the earliest programmers were women, so this doesn't logically follow. There were examples for young women to go in that career from day one.

Yes, but it didn't change because of the reasons given by the commenter above

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-...

I have female programmer colleagues and I see no difference in intelligence, between them and their male peers. It's just the number of woman in workforce is low, not that they can't do it successfully

>how societal pressure/approval/disapproval/support/whatever can apply when we are talking about self-study essentially done in secret.

Through implicit or explicit social pressure to do something else other than play with the computer?

I mean, I'm not a girl but even I felt that. I reckon it would have been even stronger were I were a girl.

I doubt girls and boys would be left alone to pursue solitary activities in peace in equal measure.

This isnt "the left", this is just tacit recognition of reality.

The "biological" tendency is something very broad such as liking "things" over "people". It might still play out in countless ways, and that's pretty much always the outcome of social factors.