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Comment by Brusco_RF | Hacker News Reader

This is the central debate in the gender war, the question of nature vs. nurture in relation to gender roles. We will probably be debating this until the end of time because it is somewhat unethical to raise a baby in a padded cell and see if they prefer dolls or legos.

I must admit I used to be on team nurture before I had my daughter. But seeing the way that she personified the lego figures and takes care of them (cooks them "food", drives them to school, etc) changed my mind. You can give dolls to boys too, but they're more likely to hit each other with them than nurture them. That drove home that most of this is really built into the firmware.

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Children learn and play by mimetism. Me and my brother cooked a lot, as children, because my father was cooking most of the time (my sister still picked it up, but way latter).

I have been a summer camp counselor (and for 2 years a counselor year round at a non-profit, making physic and chemical experiments with kids, that's what brought me to CS) and I'd say role models are a big chunk of a kid outward character (at least before 12). Social group is another chunk, and obviously hormones is the last one dictated by first gender, but also food, and physical activity. Which to me is underrated. You aren't born as an adrenalin junkie, you become one. I've always been very meek and passive. Then I started windsurfing in hard/dangerous weather, and that totally changed my character. The 'surfer boy' cliché is real, but it's something you become, not something you are.

Ironically, it is our boy that personifies figures and plays with them. Does do some fighting, but no more than our daughters did.

He is also the one that gravitated towards cars and trucks. So, it isn't like he is against all stereotypes.

I doubt that. Children learn by observing. And there are still more women than men in nurturing positions.

There's a few problems:

1) obviously, the initial, first, nurturing position will be a woman (womb + immediately after. It can't even be a transgender). And we can change a lot with medicine, but we can't change this. We're not 1-2 years, or even 10-20 years away from changing it. It'll be centuries.

2) When we try to use law to fix this, the big example are the Nordic countries. They were among the first to loosen up professions and have very flexible laws. But the proportion of women in nurturing positions actually went up instead of down. Now this may be local cultural attitudes asserting themselves of course, but if this doesn't work ... what will?

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