4 ms·

"Most evidence points to socialized factors, not biological ones." I'm loathe to post in discussions like this because it's so useless, but points like this ma

by roel_v 9y ago

"Most evidence points to socialized factors, not biological ones." I'm loathe to post in discussions like this because it's so useless, but points like this make me wonder if I'm just living on a different planet. Do you have children? Of different genders? Because literally every parent I know who has both boys and girls has the simple, non-ideologically-biased experience that boys and girls are vastly different, even if you treat them just the same. My youngest is a boy who was surrounded by pink fairy castles and butterfly coloring books until he was 2 or 2,5. And yet the moment he got his hands on a stick, he'd use it as a play weapon. And from that observation that boys and girls are different, I wouldn't call it a stretch to assume that men and women might not be exactly the same, either. Why is this not blindingly obvious? I mean, how is saying otherwise not the very essence of "post truthiness"?

shaftoe 9y ago
I have a similar experience with my children. From an extremely early age, my daughter has "tucked in" toys to bed, rocked them to sleep, etc. She was NOT taught to do this, but just did this as play. My sons can't seem to find a toy that cannot be used as a sword or a gun, to my wife's constant annoyance. Even with the SAME toys, they are used very differently. For example, all of my kids play minecraft. My daughter loves to build houses with kitchens and bathrooms, bake, and invite people into her house for dinners and parties. My sons fight the monsters, build elaborate towers and castles, and play with explosives. This image summarizes my experience: http://imgur.com/AT2Ak http://imgur.com/AT2Ak
- 3xnis 9y ago
  The question is: Who has tucked in your children? You or your wife? Children know which parent has the same sex and they like to play grown up. Regarding the shooting and the building, are you sure that you have encouraged your daughter the same way as your sons? Have you looked your daughter into the eyes and smiled when she first tried to fight with you? And even if you were all supportive in that development, it's still not a fair experiment. As long as your children have friends with traditional values and your children watch TV with advertisements that present pink female princesses and male worriers and builders, children are locked down into their roles.
  - roel_v 9y ago
    Well this one is easy to answer, because there have been (over the last 6 years) less than say 50 occasions where we didn't put them to bed together; apart from those 50 occasions, my wife travels a few months out of the year, in which periods I put them to bed. So overall, there is no doubt (no matter how subconsciously biased my 'accounting' might be) that I did the majority of the putting to bed. (to bed putting?) And well of course there's always the no true scottsman argument - no matter what, one can always put the 'true' equal treatment to question. If you're asking whether I ran a double blind experiment in my home, no I didn't. But we're nit talking about a tiny difference in one observation here. We're talking massive differences in dozens of families (from my observations). And this is for a social context where the ratio if dads and mums and the school gate is roughly 50% (yes I count sometimes), and where the lowest level of education is a bachelor's degree and the median is a PhD. Meaning, we're not talking about representative sample of the population, which you would expect to show the same properties as the population overall; we're talking about a population here that shows high levels of gender equally along many metrics. And despite that, the children show (very) unequal behaviour.
    - 3xnis 9y ago
      Well, that's a convincing setup. I still think that peers and media consumption could explain the development but I don't have any data to back that up.
    - unityByFreedom 9y ago
      "Equal treatment" is not enough to remove socialization factors. Kids learn from what their parents do. If a boy's dad is a truck driver, he may prefer playing with trucks, even if given a choice of truck vs. doll. The boy could similarly pick up non-verbal gestures from the dad or mom handling a doll vs. a truck. Research is often inconclusive or difficult to replicate for these reasons. Putting forth a theory that gender, on its own, impacts career choices is pretty useless. It probably does, but not in a way that we can adequately quantify. It depends on too many things.
      - 9y ago
unityByFreedom 9y ago
> Do you have children? Do you teach your children everything, or send them to school / daycare? > And from that observation that boys and girls are different, I wouldn't call it a stretch to assume that men and women might not be exactly the same, either It is a giant leap in logic to conclude that a slight difference in average personality must undermine women's professional abilities in software engineering. There is no scientific consensus that toy preferences are linked to prenatal testosterone or career choice. Those who say they are linked, such as Damore, are pushing scientism– using undercooked research to back up the status quo.
- roel_v 9y ago
  For me personally, my children went to daycare since they were 3 months old, but for people I know who stayed at home until the children were 2.5 or 3, it's the same. So from observation, I don't find your argument convincing. I mean, let's be clear here - are you saying that if boys and girls would be kept in isolation, well at least not exposed to the outside world which would fill them with tradtional gender role behaviours, until they are say 3 years old, you're claiming that boys and girls would end up both playing with dolls and playing dressup, and play fight with sticks and climb trees, in equal amounts? Or at least that the ratio of boys/girls having a preference for one thing or another would be the same? Because to me that sound just as preposterous as denying climate change, and it requires a similar level of fact distortion to believe. As to the second point, I'm not going to argue here what this google guy did or did nit say, I didn't read the thing and frankly I don't care much either. But if one would assume (humour me here) that men and women and not the same (as in, have different preferences - not morally or so), how would that not logically lead to some professions being more preferred by one gender? It would be an extraordinary claim that despite differences, the outcome would be that every profession had people to a ratio matching society in general, along many axises - gender, skin color, etc. I realize that it's easy to spin my argument as saying that some people are good managers and others can run very fast and that's just the natural order of thing, but that's not what I'm saying at all, so let's all spare ourselves the effort of going there. And then finally, if some people with certain traits prefer one thing over another, is it then not perfectly obvious and even inevitable that there will be more people of that group doing that thing, and just as inevitable that that does not mean that those who are not like that, aren't automatically unqualified? If you combine two normal distributions, with different modes, isn't the outcome then a mathematical certainty? Including an explanation for the statistically expected properties of each individual? I'm not saying anything here about software engineering, just trying to establish a baseline to understand your argument. Because you seem to be saying that there can be no differences ever, which is so obviously non-intuitive and irrational that I can't believe this would actually be your standpoint.

by roel_v 9y ago

shaftoe 9y ago

I have a similar experience with my children. From an extremely early age, my daughter has "tucked in" toys to bed, rocked them to sleep, etc. She was NOT taught to do this, but just did this as play. My sons can't seem to find a toy that cannot be used as a sword or a gun, to my wife's constant annoyance. Even with the SAME toys, they are used very differently. For example, all of my kids play minecraft. My daughter loves to build houses with kitchens and bathrooms, bake, and invite people into her house for dinners and parties. My sons fight the monsters, build elaborate towers and castles, and play with explosives. This image summarizes my experience: http://imgur.com/AT2Ak http://imgur.com/AT2Ak

3xnis 9y ago
The question is: Who has tucked in your children? You or your wife? Children know which parent has the same sex and they like to play grown up. Regarding the shooting and the building, are you sure that you have encouraged your daughter the same way as your sons? Have you looked your daughter into the eyes and smiled when she first tried to fight with you? And even if you were all supportive in that development, it's still not a fair experiment. As long as your children have friends with traditional values and your children watch TV with advertisements that present pink female princesses and male worriers and builders, children are locked down into their roles.
- roel_v 9y ago
  Well this one is easy to answer, because there have been (over the last 6 years) less than say 50 occasions where we didn't put them to bed together; apart from those 50 occasions, my wife travels a few months out of the year, in which periods I put them to bed. So overall, there is no doubt (no matter how subconsciously biased my 'accounting' might be) that I did the majority of the putting to bed. (to bed putting?) And well of course there's always the no true scottsman argument - no matter what, one can always put the 'true' equal treatment to question. If you're asking whether I ran a double blind experiment in my home, no I didn't. But we're nit talking about a tiny difference in one observation here. We're talking massive differences in dozens of families (from my observations). And this is for a social context where the ratio if dads and mums and the school gate is roughly 50% (yes I count sometimes), and where the lowest level of education is a bachelor's degree and the median is a PhD. Meaning, we're not talking about representative sample of the population, which you would expect to show the same properties as the population overall; we're talking about a population here that shows high levels of gender equally along many metrics. And despite that, the children show (very) unequal behaviour.
  - 3xnis 9y ago
    Well, that's a convincing setup. I still think that peers and media consumption could explain the development but I don't have any data to back that up.
  - unityByFreedom 9y ago
    "Equal treatment" is not enough to remove socialization factors. Kids learn from what their parents do. If a boy's dad is a truck driver, he may prefer playing with trucks, even if given a choice of truck vs. doll. The boy could similarly pick up non-verbal gestures from the dad or mom handling a doll vs. a truck. Research is often inconclusive or difficult to replicate for these reasons. Putting forth a theory that gender, on its own, impacts career choices is pretty useless. It probably does, but not in a way that we can adequately quantify. It depends on too many things.
    - 9y ago

unityByFreedom 9y ago

> Do you have children? Do you teach your children everything, or send them to school / daycare? > And from that observation that boys and girls are different, I wouldn't call it a stretch to assume that men and women might not be exactly the same, either It is a giant leap in logic to conclude that a slight difference in average personality must undermine women's professional abilities in software engineering. There is no scientific consensus that toy preferences are linked to prenatal testosterone or career choice. Those who say they are linked, such as Damore, are pushing scientism– using undercooked research to back up the status quo.

roel_v 9y ago
For me personally, my children went to daycare since they were 3 months old, but for people I know who stayed at home until the children were 2.5 or 3, it's the same. So from observation, I don't find your argument convincing. I mean, let's be clear here - are you saying that if boys and girls would be kept in isolation, well at least not exposed to the outside world which would fill them with tradtional gender role behaviours, until they are say 3 years old, you're claiming that boys and girls would end up both playing with dolls and playing dressup, and play fight with sticks and climb trees, in equal amounts? Or at least that the ratio of boys/girls having a preference for one thing or another would be the same? Because to me that sound just as preposterous as denying climate change, and it requires a similar level of fact distortion to believe. As to the second point, I'm not going to argue here what this google guy did or did nit say, I didn't read the thing and frankly I don't care much either. But if one would assume (humour me here) that men and women and not the same (as in, have different preferences - not morally or so), how would that not logically lead to some professions being more preferred by one gender? It would be an extraordinary claim that despite differences, the outcome would be that every profession had people to a ratio matching society in general, along many axises - gender, skin color, etc. I realize that it's easy to spin my argument as saying that some people are good managers and others can run very fast and that's just the natural order of thing, but that's not what I'm saying at all, so let's all spare ourselves the effort of going there. And then finally, if some people with certain traits prefer one thing over another, is it then not perfectly obvious and even inevitable that there will be more people of that group doing that thing, and just as inevitable that that does not mean that those who are not like that, aren't automatically unqualified? If you combine two normal distributions, with different modes, isn't the outcome then a mathematical certainty? Including an explanation for the statistically expected properties of each individual? I'm not saying anything here about software engineering, just trying to establish a baseline to understand your argument. Because you seem to be saying that there can be no differences ever, which is so obviously non-intuitive and irrational that I can't believe this would actually be your standpoint.