Hacker News Reader

Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male.

I think this is partly caused by the fact that men and women have a different natural tendency to enjoy nursing. (Honest question – is this belief politically incorrect?) If you completely filter out cultural effects, the tendency to incline to a specific profession will differ between genders, at least very slightly (that's just statistics). Of course, the very hard question is how big is this difference.

View on HN

I'm not sure it's exactly politically incorrect -- lots of people probably believe it -- but I do think it's wrong. Similar to saying girls naturally prefer to play with baby dolls and wear dresses, when in reality every person they meet has been subtly (or not) pushing them that way their whole lives. "Oh, you're so pretty! Want to try this bow on?" Etc.

You may think it's wrong, but a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the former president of the American Psychology Association would disagree with you. There is a chapter in his book (http://www.amazon.com/What-You-Change-Cant-Self-Improvement/...) where he talks about gender identification as nature or nurture.

He argues, quite convincingly, that girls raised as boys still like dolls and boys raised as girls still like firetrucks and bulldozers.

I would recommend the book.

I think that each gender has a different natural tendency to various professions but these tendencies are amplified by the culture.

To suggest that men are some how different to women is incredibly sexist, check your privilege.

Men are obviously biologically different than women in a large number of ways; the exact degree to which those biological differences affect behavior and attitudes is unclear, but we know that differences in, e.g., hormone levels within a gender have behavioral and attitude impacts, so its at least likely that there is some degree of such impact from that and other biological differences between genders.

If you define sexism broadly enough, that may be "sexist", but it doesn't stop it from being well supported by the facts we know about the world.

Well, men and women are different. As hopefullly everyone knows, they have different bodies, including the brain (there are obvious psychological and behavioral differences).

Just to be sure (one can never know nowdays) – that's sarcasm right?

If it isnt clear then there is a problem.

You'd be surprised how many incredibly weird posts are on HN that are actually not sarcastic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com