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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

    Throughout the world, women tend to be more nurturing,
    risk averse and emotionally expressive, while men are
    usually more competitive, risk taking, and emotionally
    flat.

The article seems to imply that since the world has a persistent bias toward men in terms of competition and risk, that this is the normal state of affairs.

Would these results hold in a matriarchal society? Is the causation genetic (unlikely in my estimation) or just cultural?

If the causation lies in cultural norms, wouldn't a "Lean-In" type push shift the line over time?

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It seems to me that these very qualities of a woman being nurturing, risk-averse and emotionally expressive harken back to the earliest times. In hunter-gatherer communities the woman normally didn't partake in the risky, competitive sport of hunting, she was the gatherer and the childrearer.

I have two young nieces that I look after quite a lot, one's almost 2 years old and the other's 3. They have a variety of toys at their disposal: little cars/trucks, barbie dolls, puzzle games, cooking playsets, action superheros, etc. I have myself tried in some capacity to steer them towards playing with the traditionally boys' toys: I display extra excitement when we're working the little car, I walk them through programming basics like for loops in goofy and fun voices, I try to spice up games involving superheros (hey, they can do more tricks than the barbie dolls, so that's easy!). But yet, they do have some sort of natural preference for girl toys. They love the cooking playset and the dolls. The cooking playset is the go-to-toy when they're mad and crying -- it's the thing that works, can't explain how.

I understand that this anecdote is worth only 2 cents. I'm not going to make any conclusive statements because I'm not a female. I just want to tentatively say that in my observations girls and boys are wired a little differently -- and maybe it just so happens that the woman's propensity to seek stability over excitement, security over competition lowers the chance of success in the current capitalistic system. But mind you I don't like the current capitalistic system, precisely because the winning players are so often very risk-prone, resulting in the system being very unstable and unsafe for society at large. If we step away from a capitalistic system and step toward something more communal -- a society in which values are emphasized, I think woman (along with the rest of society) would probably do exceedingly well (or at least that's my pet theory anyway).

I saw in a norwegian documentary about gender roles (the name is "Brainwashed") where he finds a scientist that want to test if toys are related to culture or not.

What he do is get newborn babies as soon as he can, and give them human-looking toys, and mechanical-looking toys (ie: human looking are dolls of all sorts, and animals, mechanical toys range from simple geometrical shapes, like boxes and cylinders, to vehicles, machines, etc...)

And the reaction from the babies to the toy is so precise, that you can predict what baby is male or female by toy preference alone. (ie: female babies always drift toward liking animal/human looking toys, while male babies go for the non-alive stuff)

I used to like my cooking playset too, and I am not a woman :)

And the question is whether "woman's propensity to seek stability over excitement, security over competition" is socially driven, perhaps exactly because it lowers their chances of success.

Are you actually saying that the males of a species being more competitive and risk-taking, and the females being more nurturing and risk-averse is "unlikely" to be genetic?

I would say it's a basic genetic trait that the males of a species are more risk-accepting.

I would take it further and say the whole debate requires one to ignore the fundamental differences between male and female to even arrive at most of these discussions.

You say that as though there is some kind of settled scientific understanding of the "fundamental differences" between male and female personalities, or a certainty about whether such differences even exist outside the context of culture.

Of course one has to ignore the folk beliefs one's culture holds about gender if one is going to have any sort of a productive, scientific conversation - otherwise you are just rephrasing the same crap your parents learned from their grandparents, which is about as scientific as bloodletting or astrology.

No, I said that as if I'm capable of a dissenting opinion. When men grow boobs to nurse babies and men can naturally incubate babies, I'll start looking deeper into the issue.

Hell, I'm willing to even look past those two. You just let me know when everyone suddenly turns bi-sexual. Until then, the differences are right in front, naturally occurring.

You are describing differences of physical structure. We had been discussing features of temperament and cognition, attributes like "nurturing", "risk-averse", "emotionally expressive", "competitive", "risk-taking", "emotionally flat".

It is an entirely unsettled question as to what degree these mental characteristics are correlated with physical sexual differences, and to what degree any such correlation derives from cultural influences; that is the whole point of this thread.

I've yet to encounter a software house where birthing or nursing babies formed any part of anyone's job description...

Actually the few matriarchal societies that existed, women were more nurturing and risk averse, and this is why they "existed", patriarchal enemies could easily wipe the floor with them.

Also I remember seeing in the opening of a openly feminist franchise, a women describing a certain matriarchal society that exists in modern day (I forgot their name though :( but it is somewhere in backwater asian Russia), and I got curious and went to research and...

Actually, only the commoners of that society are matriarchal, nobles follow a more or less patriarchal system (men inherit form men, and women from women, most political power of the nobles are with the men though, but there is no formal rule against women having it too), and the nobles enforce matriarchy on the commoners (people do not remember anymore why they do it, but research suggests that the reason was to keep commoners tame and keep them from rebelling)

Oh, come on. If you are going to say things which back up such a potentially sexist and gender role supporting argument, you need to do better than one anecdote you read once.

Read some real anthropological texts, research Sumerians and Ancient Celts. Read Sex at Dawn, there is a lot more to this discussion about gender roles in historical societies than you are touching on.

In fact, she is completely misrepresenting the study, it's easy to check the link for yourself. The traits studied were "neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness", the differences were quite small, and the differences between cultures were primarily due to differences between men, not women.

There was an episode of Freakonomics Radio not too long ago that discussed risk in different types of societies.

A study did show that a matriarchal society had men who were more risk averse, and women who were less risk averse which implied that it is cultural.

Ahem. China was matriarcal a very long time ago, kids got their mother's family name, but it was because women were keeping homes while men were working in the fields far away.

The simple fact that mothers have to breast feed could well explain that a risk seeking behavior from them was more harmful to the community than from men.

So I question the idea that gender difference was different in matriarcal societies.

> Would these results hold in a matriarchal society?

I wrote up the following response and then realized that I was answering a different question than the one you asked. The following is an investigation of whether the tendency for child-raising to be "womens' work" is caused by genetic or cultural factors. This isn't directly related to the question of whether the personality traits are caused by genetic or cultural factors. I'm posting it anyway because I spent an hour writing it up and don't want to throw it away.

I did some quick research and found that even in "matriarchical" societies, women are usually more involved in infant care than men. I started with this article: <http://metro.co.uk/2013/03/05/where-women-rule-the-world-mat... and went down the list:

* Regarding the Mosuo, this Wikipedia article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo> writes that "Children of such relationships are raised by their mothers and the mothers' families." However, men are involved in raising their nieces and nephews.

* While men are heavily involved in child-raising in Aka societies, this source: <http://books.google.com/books?id=21z2hbOuTcEC> writes that "The Aka are exceptional in comparison to other societies in that fathers are actively involved with infants and are second only to mothers in the amount of direct care to their infants." (pg. 5)

* Despite the existence of sworn virgins, Albania is patriarchical, according to this article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_sworn_virgins>

* I wasn't able to find sources regarding childcare in Iceland or Meghalaya.

In addition, the fact that there are so few matriarchical societies in the world is notable in and of itself.

My hunch is that the reason why women are more involved in childcare than men is due to cultural factors which are caused by genetic factors. One could certainly imagine a culture in which as soon as a woman gives birth, she hands the infant off to the father, and then has no further involvement in its care. So there is no immediate reason why women must be the caregivers. But that hypothetical society would require that babies be bottle-fed, which is a recent invention; historically, children had to be breast-fed, and genetic factors are certainly responsible for the fact that women are much better than men at producing milk. So the women would have had to be involved in caring for their children at least at the beginning. This could lead to a cultural norm for women to remain involved in childcare even after it is no longer necessary to breast-feed.

Of course, that's not to say that childcare should be "womens' work". Even if women do turn out to have a genetic propensity towards childcare, that doesn't mean that we as a society have to let that dictate our gender roles.

Several elements persist throughout history before we can blame any sort of global culture or religion:

1) Incapacitation during late pregnancy and feeding infants

2) Differences in musculature and stature after puberty - two or three SD's sexual dimorphism

3) Differences in neurological activity of hormones - testosterone vs estrogens

4) Differences in how memetic evolution favors different ways tribes assign the highly limited egg+womb vessels versus the vessels for relatively unlimited sperm. A tribe that has the risky roles played by the egg+womb vessels will tend to reproduce less, particularly in tough times, than a tribe which assigns them to the sperm vessels. Matriarchal-warrior societies are fragile because a war which depletes 3/4 of the warriors also depletes 3/4 of the wombs, while a patriarchal-warrior society which depletes 3/4 of the warriors only ends up polyamorous for a generation or two.

These four elements conspire throughout prehistory to make 'traditional female roles' the supermajority of scenarios, without any need whatsoever for a modern cultural warfare.

Feminism, the notion that men and women can and should be similarly endowed with professional achievement, respect, and choices about their lives, is possible only because of a combination of a bunch of very recent changes in human society. They tend to be the ones associated with vastly lowered infant mortality, vastly lower pregnancy rate, vastly lowered rate of risky adult behavior like war & hunting, and the demographic transition: Baby formula is icing on the cake, ruminant domestication and lactose tolerance came long, long before (but still recently on evolutionary timespans).

Feminism attacks the natural order of things - and that's great in the same way that antibiotics attacks the natural order of things - we get to do things we couldn't do before.

It is a unique achievement to be celebrated that we have come so far beyond our "traditional"-ly limiting roots, when a woman can be a CEO and a single father can raise an infant.

I am highly skeptical, however, of anyone who tries to retcon history, ignoring the above factors, to suggest that this hasn't been the natural order of things to some degree.

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The Patriarchy, on the other hand, is a real aspect of modern culture, in some societies much more than others. I believe David Graeber's explanation deserves some attention: Patriarchal urges to restrict and protect women beyond the scope of merely risky occupations, and the rise of heroic male chauvinism, is linked to the rise of fungible currency and its tendency to focus lendor-debtor relations into formal contractual relations between strangers - the only guarantee of which is slavery. Eventually the only type of slavery that was commoditized with standard value tended to be female sexual slavery.

http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years

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