I fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles.
My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far society's responsibilities extend.
What happens when a particular group innately prefers a certain type of work that the market values lowly? Are they irrational agents suffering by their own hands? Should society subsidize their job? Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? What about other people that have the same job for different reasons?
That argument ignores cultural evolution, which humans have long used to adapt to changing circumstances much more quickly than biological evolution. Just as we evolved culturally to accommodate the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, we will do the same to accommodate our modern post-physical labor society.
And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this way. People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.
I don't see how you think these questions ignore cultural evolution. I think the question can be rephrased as asking "What causes of gender-biased job funneling/preference are acceptable in our hyper-PC society?"
1) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal opportunity:
Bad
2) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal societal expectations:
Bad
3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities.
4) Gender-biased job preference due solely to genetically determined traits and inherent job qualities.
Ok. (I don't think this exists much as most traits that impact job preference have a significant emergent/environmental components).
I think our "hyper-PC" society agrees with me on 1) and 2) and possibly 4).
I think most of the disagreement happens around 3). Is 3) ever OK? How do we tell if society if sufficiently equal for 3) to be Ok?
My personal stance is that it doesn't make sense to argue that 3) is ok until we have done a much better job of eliminating 1) and 2).
> 3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities.
Isn't expecting "gender-equal expectations and opportunities" strange if you agree with "Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits"?
Why would culture expect a tall thin person and a short muscular person to be equally good at basketball and weightlifting?
Who knows... Maybe it's the same white/blue collar worker separation?
On the other hand - I also find it hard to believe that the only difference between the sexes is the body build. Based on my engineers' mindset it would quite surprise me if two bodies which look and work different were wired totally alike. Though this line of thought is quite out of fashion.
What about Gender-biased job preference cause by people choosing jobs based on finding people with similar life experience?
I often see a preference in particular young adults that pick summer jobs or education based on where they can find co-students/workers that has the same gender, age, color, economical status, and life experience as they. Is this Bad, and if so, how do we eliminate that feeling of familiarity and safety that such choice brings?
There is a yearly study in Sweden that polls peoples priority when looking for job. Highest on the list is often the social environment and co-workers, and the pay (ie, the rational argument for picking a job) is often far low on the list.
I don't see that presupposition. They don't mention any differentiation between 'genetic' vs 'cultural' explanations. I think you are reading that into the use of the terms 'innate' and 'natural'.
> People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.
The validity of that statement is highly location dependent.
Cultural evolution definitely does occur, but just like can happen with genetic evolution, and on a greater level because of the faster pace, its progress can have negative effects. A civilization can evolve culturally, and that might allow it to function more effectively than it did prior, but it could also be worse off in other ways. For example the rate of depression could increase.
My preference as a father would be to spend as much care-free time with my kids as possible (care-free as in not having to worry about earning money). But I fully accept that my wife has the greater claim to having that time. I was present when my kids were born.
Why does everybody swallow the feminist narrative that it is a horrible chore to spend time with children? Note that feminism depends on that evaluation, otherwise a lot of their complaints evaporate.
As I said in another comment, if you don't like spending time with children, you could simply opt not to have one. How do feminists explain that people have kids who they then supposedly hate to take care of? (Of course, it has to be socialization, it never occurs to women that they have a choice because the patriarchy has brainwashed them...Sure thing)
Sure, but there is a reason mothers get it and fathers don't. My post was in reply to the assumption that everybody wants to work instead of staying at home with the kids.
I know just by staying at home you are not free of all worries. But for the time being, your responsibility is not worrying about earning a livelihood.
I think that a lot of people approach these sort of issues by constraint propagation from their political axioms - so for instance if they hold that the total work done by all men must be equally valuable to the total work done by all women and there is a set of arguments that together imply this is not the case (such as, for a crude hypothetical setting, "the value of work is proportional to the amount of physical work exerted to perform it" + "men have greater physical strength than women on average" + "men and women exert the same percentage of their strength for the same amount of time while working on average"), they will exercise far greater skepticism than would be warranted by the evidence towards each of those propositions.
i agree. and this goes both ways. some people start from the axiom that racism/sexism don't exist and modify their interpretation of the data to match that. "There's no pay difference".
others perceive racism/sexism everywhere and only read that the 95 percentile and unweighted pays are different.
We can get off the political topic and start with other axioms as well. IE some believe more women need to be involved in tech, while others want less competition in their respective field (lower vs higher salary).
> i agree. and this goes both ways. some people start from the axiom that racism/sexism don't exist and modify their interpretation of the data to match that. "There's no pay difference".
Yes, of course. Really, for all the talk about convoluted biases clouding people's decision-making, it's pretty telling that most of the time, they don't even manage to get past the basic challenge of actually letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion.
A huge part of the problem is the "evidence" is terrible. There are so many degrees of freedom and so much entropy in what you're trying to measure that anyone can easily make the numbers say whatever they want.
The answer to "is it society or biology" is both. And it will always be both, because you can't change biology and you can't "balance" society without being able to disentangle biology, and disentangling biology from society would violate both causality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Even measuring how much of each it is has the same problem.
People want to say we just need better evidence. We just need to measure it better or be more diligent or think about it more carefully. But it isn't that. It's that the problem is NP-complete and n is large. It may even be incomputable because some of the necessary information was lost to history and not knowable.
Which is why it's a political football. People choose their team and see how far they can run with the ball, because the score isn't based on science or math.
Your second question is tricky to answer, so I am going to ignore it. :D
For your first question, I always think the key is choice and support for people who make choices that are counter to the norm. Sure, it might be that when given a choice free of social pressures, more women might still choose to be the primary caregiver for children than men will.
That is fine, and women and men who make that socially traditional choice should be supported and not judged. The key, however, is to make sure we also support and don't judge the people who choose other arrangements for child caregiving. We should not design laws and social conventions that punish those who choose to go against the norm.
Part of my comment was questioning the meaning of support. Are we talking emotional support, and simply being accepting of other's identity? Are we taxing some roles and subsidizing others to normalize economic freedom? What if the market also has inherent preferences that mirror natural preferences? Do we actively recruit youth and try to get them into under-represented roles? What about undesirable roles?
I don't know... maybe this is all moot if we're still working through the "simpler" stuff like balancing laws and getting rid of stereotypes.
This is anecdata, but I'll tell you something from my experience. All the way until my studies, I met one girl who was interested in programming (more in general tech, but let's limit this to programming). During 5 years of studies I met the next 4. That's compared to probably ~200 guys. That was only around a decade ago.
Nowadays, I see tens of young girls joining local raspberry jams for fun in the UK. My friend's daughters are playing with electrical circuits and installing switch&lamp circuit between beds to chat in Morse code. And none of this comes from pushing for forced equality-in-numbers. This is just kids getting excited about stuff, because nobody is stopping them.
I think the stereotypes played a big part for a long time and we'll see a slow rebalancing of candidates' genders. I think (and hope) the situation will be very much different in ~15 years when current kids finish universities. But I don't believe much active support can change anything for near-future graduates.
So.. either parent who care gives can get the same leave for that caregiving. Basically, do not write gender specific laws. Write laws based on parenting role, and it can apply to either gender who takes on that role.
I don't think we can try to fix the market demand for the various roles, but we can certainly fix the legal discrepancies.
The emotional support is impossible to legislate, but I think as a society we should not judge negatively men who decide to be the primary child care provider nor judge women who decide to be the breadwinner (although in most families, both parents need to be both... I am a big proponent of day care)
In the case of the software industry in the US, the companies themselves have a strong economic incentive to get school girls to choose engineering careers. It'd almost double the pool of hiring candidates. So it's something that the market eventually balances, only maybe not fast enough.
That's this part of your comment: "emotional support", "accepting of other's identity", "taxing some roles and subsidizing others", "undesirable roles". Those all come out of stereotypes.
The nurturing roles theory is kind of sexist. I think a better theory is as follows. In almost all metrics men show higher variance than women (sometimes that is attributed to because men lack a moderating effect of an extra x chromosome). As a result the "male" skillet is more varied and men seek a wider range of jobs. Another possibility is that socially men are expected to be riskier, and so are more broadly seeking in their choice of occupation.
Either way, the net effect is a diminished supply of labor relative to the varied demand. By contrast, women seek jobs that often are chock full of other women, creating an increased supply of labor and lower relative wages.
Sometimes I think about how little teachers get paid and wonder why I know so many women going in to that knowing the poor pay in advance.
Every study on hormones from the last 40 years has shown conclusive evidence that hormone levels within natural occurring levels has very minimal effect on behavior, emotion and life choices. If you want to find differences between gender, look at chromosomes and their effect. The purpose of hormone is to primarily regulate the reproductive system.
natural occurring levels. A person who injects steroids to create hormone levels with order of magnitude above normal levels is not natural occurring.
If you take a number of people with different aggressiveness (or as most studies do, look at chimps with picking orders), and you find no correlation with hormone. Add 5% more hormone, and you don't get 5% behavior. Pump in larger amount of hormone, and you see exaggeration of existing behavior. Remove all hormone, and you see a decrease behavior, but the behavior doesn't go away. Its regulative.
post-partum depression, menopause, and pregnancy all cause major changes in a person. Hormone levels, since its regulative, also change with those changes. There were for example a study at women with abnormal amount of testosterone (but within the limit of naturally occurring in humans). The first studies from 1970 showed how there was increased crime, increase aggressiveness, changes in sexuality, emotions, and the ability to keep maintain a job. When people tried to reproduce those studies, everything was shown to be false.
To simplify, do you know of any scientific or medical sources that say "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion" as you claimed earlier?
lets me quote a few different text. The key word that I used was regulative effect.
"Normal estrogen levels vary widely. Large differences are typical in a woman on different days, or between two women on the same day of their cycles. The actual measured level of estrogen doesn't predict emotional disturbances.". (webmd article. not a authoritative but useful as a general summery)
"However, estrogen is not simply a natural "physiological protectant". Some have reported that estrogen administration does not improve mood and even causes fear and anxiety. Therefore, the impact of estrogen on emotion varies and may depend on the individual's current state and the situation. The authors believe that hormones do not exert an absolute and singular effect on the body." (Estrogen Impacts on Emotion: Psychological, Neuroscience and Endocrine Studies)
As an example estrogen effect, it regulated how easy memories of arousals are formed, which also adrenaline happens to do. Both do this for rather logical reasons, ie, to increase or decrease the chance of a similar event to happen again. This can then have an effect of the perception of fearful faces, although the study on mice from 2006 (Jasnow et al) doesn't really give a definitive number on how big impact that has on female mice total emotional state. It is also reported that this effect the perception of pain and the memory of having pain.
"The testosterone increment was associated with detectable but minor mood changes ... Future research should investigate the implications of these minor mood changes."(Effects of Testosterone on Mood, Aggression, and Sexual Behavior in Young Men: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Study)
I will stop here. People like to blame hormones and hormone levels to excuse someones behavior. The data I have seen is quite clear the effect is regulative and thus you don't get an cause-and-effect.
Administered hormones are not equivalent to natural hormones (which is a significant problem with HRT).
And those quotes are not quite "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion".
"the impact of estrogen on emotion varies"
And another quote from the study you quoted (Effects of testosterone on mood, aggression, and sexual behavior in young men: a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over study):
"Increased circulating T was associated with significant increases in anger-hostility from baseline (mean score = 7.48) to wk 2 (mean score = 10.71)"
7.48 to 10.71 doesn't seem like a very minimal change.
----
Since you quoted WebMD (perhaps a useful summary) I will as well:
"It's clear that estrogen is closely linked with women's emotional well-being. Depression and anxiety affect women in their estrogen-producing years more often than men or postmenopausal women. Estrogen is also linked to mood disruptions that occur only in women -- premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and postpartum depression."
And from another article:
"Declining estrogen levels associated with menopause can cause more than those pesky hot flashes. They can also make a woman feel like she is in a constant state of PMS (premenstrual syndrome). Unfortunately, these emotional changes are a normal part of menopause."
"Some of the emotional changes experienced by women undergoing perimenopause or menopause can include: Irritability, Feelings of sadness, Lack of motivation, Anxiety, Aggressiveness, Difficulty concentrating, Fatigue, Mood changes, and Tension."
----
Perhaps we can agree.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by regulative, but I agree that emotions are complicated and hormones are not the only influence, nor is the relationship a simple cause and effect.
On the other hand, there's significant evidence that hormones do effect emotion, including perhaps the most striking example which I somehow forgot earlier: puberty. And their prenatal effect on the structure of the brain.
Would you agree hormones do effect emotions, but aren't the only factor, and the relationship is complicated, unpredictable, and varies between individuals?
I would use the wording of the article, in that hormone is closely linked and associated with certain behavior. There is very little studies (but feel free to provide them) that shows that artificial reduced estrogen will cause a person to get emotional upset.
By regulative I mean that in order to see a major effect, you already need to have a major state. A person with no aggression is not going to get aggressive based on testosterone. A person that is already aggressive will have that aggression regulated if one artificially increasing the circulating testosterone, most often by exaggerating the aggression in a context aware way. For example, a person who has a tendency for road rage won't be more likely to shoot someone, but they might honk the horn more or yell more loudly. Regulative effects don't cause things to happen, but rather modulate what already exist.
Puberty and pregnancy has an other thing in common, in that it both cause changes in the persons neurons. Its speculated the reason that a womans body during pregnancy do this is in order to make it easier form memories and bond with the newborn baby. Its been suggested that some typical pregnancy behaviors is thus a result of those changes to the neurons. I would strongly suspect that hormone levels have a regulative role in facilitating the rate of the changes, but I doubt if measuring the hormone level would be a predictor for how much of a change actually happened.
To bring out an analogy, taxes has an regulative effect on wealth, but its a not a predictor for it. If I selected random individuals over the world and only looked at where they live and how much percent that they pay in taxes, it will tell me nothing about who is rich and who is poor. I have a better time looking at living expensive and food prices, but even that is a poor method to predict how much wealth someone has. I would thus not describe taxes as having a significant effect on wealth, and that wealth per adult is the result of a complex system.
I think you may mean (and if this is the case I generally agree) that when hormones trigger behaviors such as road rage, those behaviors have already been learned. Likewise, testosterone is unlikely to cause someone to shoot another driver because significant inhibitions against that behavior have been learned.
But hormones have an effect even in early childhood and before birth, when no behaviors have been learned yet. Prenatal hormones affect brain structure, and studies have found a link between hormones in children as young as 3 months and their choice of toys.[1]
Actually, chromosomes are a worse target for predicting behaviors in terms of sex-linked traits since genes during conception can and will be exchanged between the X and Y chromosomes in humans. This is why sometimes the SRY gene is found in women (XX) despite clearly having an operative uterus and ovaries. Nature loves to pick on us humans when it comes to assuming fixed traits.
I picked chromosomes and genes mostly because they are at least involved in the creation of the human brain, which was a bit hastily written. I agree that it makes for a poor prediction to determine who is going to have a tendency for mood swings.
Gender, to the degree that gender is not about culture, is quite far down the list of predictors, and even further down on the list would be hormones.
The literature I've read says hormones are "involved in the creation of the brain".
"Steroid hormones are a dominant and pervasive source of sex differences by mediating developmental processes that are enduring and establish adult physiological and behavioural responses relevant to the reproductive constraints of each sex."
From Multifaceted origins of sex differences in the brain, 1 February 2016, an open access article.
"Animal models have also allowed us to move beyond hormones and to an appreciation of the important role of sex chromosomes. Study of these mice has revealed important roles for chromosome complement on body weight and feeding, aggression and habit formation, to name a few."
And section 8:
"Some argue it is pure folly to study neuroanatomical sex differences with the hope of understanding sex differences in behaviour as the connection between anatomy and behaviour is often weak or even non-existent [50]. Indeed, the most celebrated sex difference in the brain, the SDN, has not been clearly tied to any specific behavioural or physiological endpoint, although see above discussion regarding sexual orientation. While it is true that anatomical or physiological differences in the brain often do not map onto clear differences in behaviour, does this mean they are not important or even, not real? Many studies of sex differences in brain anatomy or neural functioning are perfectly sound, meaning they are fully powered and technically executed using well vetted and accepted approaches, yet a strong correlation between variance in anatomy and variance in behaviour is about the best one can hope for in establishing a causal relationship."
I never said that hormones were the only influence, in fact I agree that genetics is also important.
Regarding behavior, and specifically the SDN, consider, for example:
The volume of a sexually dimorphic nucleus in the ovine medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus varies with sexual partner preference. Endocrinology. 2004
"In addition to a sex difference, we found that the volume of the oSDN was two times greater in female-oriented rams than in male-oriented rams."
Wired on steroids: sexual differentiation of the brain and its role in the expression of sexual partner preferences. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2011
"Development of female-directed partner preference in the male is dependent on exposure of the developing brain to gonadal steroids synthesized during critical periods of sexual differentiation of the central nervous system"
The development of male-oriented behavior in rams. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2011
"Although our understanding of the biological determinants and underlying neural substrates of sexual attraction and mate selection are far from complete, compelling evidence is discussed that supports the idea that neural substrates regulating sexual partner preferences are organized during prenatal development"
I've been reading up on an embryologist that has been digging into the question of what defines sex in humans. She's concluding sex can be as varied as eye color and the like. So, sex isn't much a static category but rather a clustering of characteristics. It's something that may seem counter intuitive, but Nature doesn't have to obey our intentions.
How interesting. So using a statistically significant population sample, there will be no phenotypic differences between carriers of X versus Y chromosomes?
If so, science has progressed quite far in the last few years that I've been away.
There won't be much difference beyond reproductive roles and other physical traits, but the brain doesn't seem to be affected all that much, no.
Basically, there's no gene for being a programmer just as there's no gene for being a (good/bad) parent. Why would Nature bother to pre-compute/compile all possible states/outcomes? Better to compute/compile the essentials for a living species then let the rest be handled by history.
Evolution stops specializing when said specialization offers no beneficial adaptation sufficient for the metabolic cost. It's why the vast majority of living organisms have much simpler brains, body plans, and even reproductive strategies. Humans and other similar animals are rare little things in the vast ocean of simpler, more elegant mutations.
But to use those factual physical differences as a way to explain (read: justify) archaic, false beliefs about other differences between men and women? Yeah, that's pretty sexist.
Which raises a question very similar to the one losteric asked earlier: is the idea that women are more nuturing and more attached to children an archaic, false belief, or a biological fact?
I don't know the answer, but merely asking the question as
losteric did is not sexist.
In addition to what leereves mentions, preferences could be different because of biology also in a different way. Knowing that their child-bearing period is quite limited, women rationally overweight "having children" and underweight "having a great career" in their youth, compared to men, who can work their ass off for 20 years, and still easily have kids afterwards. On other words, it's easier for men to "have it all" than for women (I don't agree with the values expressed by this saying, but I'm guessing many people do).
Ultimately, over the exceptionally long term, as automation removes the need to work, the solution is to move to a leisure-based society in which everyone is given equal stipends and allow optionally working up to, say, 10 hours per week to earn more, thus removing the problem entirely.
Although that solution may be roughly on the scale of "ultimately, the great heat death of the universe will make the problem moot."
My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far society's responsibilities extend.
What happens when a particular group innately prefers a certain type of work that the market values lowly? Are they irrational agents suffering by their own hands? Should society subsidize their job? Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? What about other people that have the same job for different reasons?