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Comment by niceghost | Hacker News Reader

wtf

those “preferences” are a result of history

- societies raised women to take care (take care of their family and house chores) while men went out in the wild to play, study and work.

- women had to be “empathetic” because understanding one’s mood was vital to their survival throughout history: in times where it was “ok” and even expected that women were beaten up to make them more docile or whatever.

- women were “granted permission” to certain work roles based on the time that happened. assistant roles were the most common, like secretaries (they even had a “bad reputation” because of the affairs with their executives, but it was really common an executive, a man, have a secretary as a gift). and think about how childhood education usually have more female teachers and higher education is a land of men. or nurses vs medical doctors.

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I don't think anything you're saying contradicts the article? I don't see anything in the article claiming that the preferences aren't a result of history? So I don't see what merits the "wtf".

In any case, "a result of history" doesn't seem very useful or specific as an explanation. If we're talking about the history of our entire species, then perhaps a more specific explanation is "a result of our evolutionary history". For example, you say "societies raised women to take care" -- maybe as a result of this, women who liked to "take care" were the women who passed on their genes, and therefore modern women have genes that cause them to like "taking care", on average. That could explain this result.

If you're referring to recent history, you'd have to explain why the preference difference seems to hold all across the world, given that different countries have different recent histories. You'd also have to explain the mechanism by which recent history (e.g. past decades where being a secretary was a top female career) is exerting such a large influence on the present.

I have to disagree that it can all be explained by societal conditioning. They tried to sample every society they could in this study to see if societal factors could explain the preference but could not see a societal effect. While you might be able to claim that every society around the world is fundamentally sexist to explain the difference in preferences, I think in that case you would have to be able to explain why every distributed society came to be arranged in a similar way.

If cultures universally share a characteristic, that does not prove that the characteristic is a hard-wired drive. That thinking has been used to make several arguments.

Cultures all around the world have made pyramids, so pyramids must have a deep spiritual meaning that all humans are tuned into. Or all these cultures were working with heavy objects and gravity and they all independently discovered that a pyramid is the easiest large structure to build.

Seafaring cultures all around the world have myths about mermaids, so mermaids must be real. Or people spending lots of time at sea looking at sea-life are likely to start imagining them fusing with humans.

Cultures all around the world have sun gods, so a sun god must be real and we all sensed it. Or everyone around the world looked up at the sky and saw the same thing.

Cultures all around the world have gender stereotypes, so they must be hard-wired. Or women everywhere are getting pregnant while men aren't, so societies shaped themselves around that fact in similar ways.

You don't make any argument here? Your next line could have been:

Cultures all around the world treat women and men differently so what a woman and a man do must be caused by society. Or all those things are mostly hard wired and people make decisions because of this.

Just because people's observations for things have been wrong doesn't mean that all explanations are wrong. That's a bit ridiculous.

The reason can be even that blatantly simple as only females can be pregnant, and until 100 years ago, they were pregnant for 5-10 years in their life. This, obviously, doesn’t mean that it’s beneficial in any sense in the current world, or that this should be the case inherently.

Sure, for the millions of years that make up human history, men went out into the wild to play with their weapons, wars and animals while women had to stay and vacuum the cave just like the male finch condemns his female finch to stay with the eggs under threat of domestic violence, so he can go play with the owls and cats.

> those “preferences” are a result of history

Source ?

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