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I've written this before on this board but if you want to understand these gender differences, read accounts of women who have undergone sex changes to become m
by mattm 17y ago
I've written this before on this board but if you want to understand these gender differences, read accounts of women who have undergone sex changes to become men.
When undergoing testosterone treatment, many of these women say things like "I became more interested in making money and more career-driven" and "I understood math and science better."
Testosterone gives animals drive and aggression.
There are more entrepreneurs and inventors who are men because men have more testosterone. In fact, with hyenas where the females have more testosterone, the females are the more aggressive sex of the group and dominate the males. Women have some testosterone which is why there are still some women entrepreneurs and inventors but much less than men which is also why there are much less of them than men.
- tptacek 17y agoI see. Anecdotes about how female-to-male trangender people felt, plus a wild generalization about the role of a single hormone across almost all social situations. I'm sold.
- araneae 17y agoIt's more believable that a hormone would work across all social situations than a few specific ones. It's easier for a hormone to have a broad effect than a narrow one. A narrow effect requires a much finer tuning of the neural circuits' reaction to the presence of the hormone. But there's a massive scientific literature on the effect that testosterone has on both human and animal behavior, so you don't need an anecdote from people who take testosterone to come to a similar conclusion.
- anon58105 17y agoThat may be a part of it, but I think it's a lot more complex than that. There are a lot of trans women involved in computing, and while lots of them report losing their aggression, I've never heard of any of them losing their interest in startups/technology. http://grok-code.com/37/famous-programmers-from-adleman-to-zimmermann/ http://grok-code.com/37/famous-programmers-from-adleman-to-z...