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I think the point is that a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology and nearly all is at least influenced by biology. The ultimat

I think the point is that a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology and nearly all is at least influenced by biology. The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where women are in charge of the engineering/construction and to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that there's something deep within our psyche which drives these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them though. If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying.

bccdee 5y ago
> a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that. Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.
- caeril 5y ago
  > Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes. Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
- quocanh 5y ago
  I'd settle for any society where women built the huts. Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes to mind. Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it. To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    > I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it. I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way. So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.
    - quocanh 5y ago
      But you have to ask why men step up to take the dangerous jobs? We didn't sit down and have a Socratic discussion about who takes which job. I posit that it's more than merely logic, that the motivations are rooted in our intuition. It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women. https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-fatal-crashes-in-us-road-traffic-by-gender-since-1992/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-fatal-... Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do. Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kill-themselves-than-women https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kil... There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.
convolvatron 5y ago
computing used to literally be womens work.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
- superdisk 5y ago
  Computing back then was more like typing numbers into machines rather than writing software. It's akin to typewriting jobs which were also dominated by women. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
- quocanh 5y ago
  I don't know much about computing as a profession, but wasn't it just algorithmic arithmetic?
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    yes. but perhaps more apropos I am old enough to have met some of the women programmers (not calculators) from the earlier generation when I started in the 80s. its completely anecdotal, and you may attribute this to many factors, but the likelihood that someone I met was more competent, informed, and/or more clever than I was greater for females than males.
    - quocanh 5y ago
      Well it's not about who is more clever. I think the research shows that its pretty even between men and women after all is said and done. It's about what naturally interests us and there are differences there.
      - convolvatron 5y ago
        maybe. I just have seen a time when it wasn't unusual to see a highly-regarded and competent woman in software. not that they were the majority. so I'm alot less inclined to just accept that there are important genetic differences that inherently make women less suitable for that kind of work. maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof
Kye 5y ago
>> "If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying." It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and research on the topic. Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12 education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes about how different gender assignments cope with adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).
- quocanh 5y ago
  1) I think it's worth removing all gender-based forms of adversity from every field. These do exist in STEM fields in the forms of biases and microaggressions. It's not evil - it's human. It's just what naturally happens when a field is dominated by one group and our minds forms patterns. We must always take a conscious effort to combat it. 2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can change that. Only after understanding what it would take should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having more diversity in perspectives - just like every species benefits from having diversity in traits.
- xdennis 5y ago
  > Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. That doesn't explain why countries where women are more free to pursue what they want have fewer women in STEM. For example, in Iran and Saudi Arabia more women earn science degrees than men. [1]: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why-are-muslimmajority-countries-producing-so-many-female-engineers https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why...

bccdee 5y ago

> a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that. Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.

caeril 5y ago
> Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes. Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
quocanh 5y ago
I'd settle for any society where women built the huts. Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes to mind. Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it. To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it. I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way. So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.
  - quocanh 5y ago
    But you have to ask why men step up to take the dangerous jobs? We didn't sit down and have a Socratic discussion about who takes which job. I posit that it's more than merely logic, that the motivations are rooted in our intuition. It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women. https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-fatal-crashes-in-us-road-traffic-by-gender-since-1992/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-fatal-... Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do. Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kill-themselves-than-women https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kil... There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.

convolvatron 5y ago

computing used to literally be womens work.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
superdisk 5y ago
Computing back then was more like typing numbers into machines rather than writing software. It's akin to typewriting jobs which were also dominated by women. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
quocanh 5y ago
I don't know much about computing as a profession, but wasn't it just algorithmic arithmetic?
- convolvatron 5y ago
  yes. but perhaps more apropos I am old enough to have met some of the women programmers (not calculators) from the earlier generation when I started in the 80s. its completely anecdotal, and you may attribute this to many factors, but the likelihood that someone I met was more competent, informed, and/or more clever than I was greater for females than males.
  - quocanh 5y ago
    Well it's not about who is more clever. I think the research shows that its pretty even between men and women after all is said and done. It's about what naturally interests us and there are differences there.
    - convolvatron 5y ago
      maybe. I just have seen a time when it wasn't unusual to see a highly-regarded and competent woman in software. not that they were the majority. so I'm alot less inclined to just accept that there are important genetic differences that inherently make women less suitable for that kind of work. maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof

Kye 5y ago

>> "If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying." It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and research on the topic. Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12 education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes about how different gender assignments cope with adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).

quocanh 5y ago
1) I think it's worth removing all gender-based forms of adversity from every field. These do exist in STEM fields in the forms of biases and microaggressions. It's not evil - it's human. It's just what naturally happens when a field is dominated by one group and our minds forms patterns. We must always take a conscious effort to combat it. 2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can change that. Only after understanding what it would take should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having more diversity in perspectives - just like every species benefits from having diversity in traits.
xdennis 5y ago
> Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. That doesn't explain why countries where women are more free to pursue what they want have fewer women in STEM. For example, in Iran and Saudi Arabia more women earn science degrees than men. [1]: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why-are-muslimmajority-countries-producing-so-many-female-engineers https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why...