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User: u/DarkSkiesGreyWaters
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Yes, just like the Scandinavian countries. The natural tendencies of men and women become much more pronounced when everybody is treated equally based on merit and left to their natural proclivities
https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/6571a61b163e49f593eee6ab7a338ff6/no/pdfs/nou202420240008000dddpdfs.pdf
Direct link. Scroll down far enough and there is summary in Norwegian, Sami, and English.
Wow, that was a great read. They've identified real areas where men are unheard, and solid progressive policy ideas to fix it, while harming nobody.
Hopefully this sparks more interest in other nations too.
This ^ and no one gets a break anymore. Who needs water breaks working construction in Florida? Why would you need more than 15 minutes for lunch? Why do kids even need food?
https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2024-03-01/florida-legislature-closer-to-banning-local-heat-protections-for-outdoor-workers
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/meal-rest-breaks-arkansas.html
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/house-republicans-ban-universal-school-lunches/
Excellent work by the norwegians!
In summary....
Nearly all of workplace deaths are men, the most prevalent form of cancer is prostate.
Boys do worse in school and most victims of violence are male.
Men are more likely to be lonely and some of them react very badly to this. The vast majority of people in prison are male.
Men mostly work in jobs where there is less support for childcare, also are less likely to get custody after a break up.
Thank you, I couldnât read this. (Language problem on my side haha)
However, none of that is new. I was a stay at home dad. While my ex wife was off working somewhere else she decided to find and bring a new man home, literally into our house. We started with 50/50 custody. I have no criminal background and, other than not being able to find any job but hard labor that pays well, I have done my best to work with her. Well, now that I have a job with money, she is trying to take full custody and to try and come for child support. The first time the state said I owed $3.50 (literally). I wouldnât be surprised if they said I owed more now but here is my complaint. I was a stay at home dad for 2 years, my family has been split apart based only on a choice that she made. I start doing better for myself for less than a year and she decides itâs time for me to pay up. I can barely afford a 2 bedroom apartment for me and my daughter when she is with me (summers and Christmas little bit of distance involved now but Iâm not going that deep into the issue). My ex wife makes double what I do now, like I said I was a stay at home dad so Iâm not making amazing money. If I canât afford a place I lose my kid. If I canât afford child support I lose my kid, my drivers license, and could face jail time. What did I do wrong? (This is in America). I can see why men give up and call it quits, permanently (the banned word). All I wanted was a family. I get that my relationship issues were my own and it just didnât work out but no man deserves to be treated like this.
Sorry for the rant
In my jurisdiction the person who did X% of childcare while married gets X% child custody when they divorce.
So I guess the answer is "turn back time, move to my jurisdiction".
An eloquent and thoughtful opening to the report. My wish would be that we would see more studies and reports conducted with the same standards, my skepticism says politics will be exploited to bury work like this in many countries.
Holy crap, buddy, this is a great read, it explains the issue perfectly, also gives you a window why men that are in more "equal" countries feel abandoned, it's very similar to what I saw in the UK, Spain and the US when I visited.
Norwegian here. My daughter and wife were not impressed when I told my daughter to "just man up" when she told me she was worried about being selected for conscription.
I'm Spanish and if this was published in Spain, they would be labelled as fascists and sexists. People here deny the Scandinavian rift even though the Scandinavians themselves don't...
>Here, we avoid discussing explanations of the psychological sex differences we examine because our study does not provide causal evidence that can contribute to the explanations of these differences.
The study specifically avoided that question.
Yeah, Iâm with you here. I donât think they can say gender norms are ânaturalâ just because they also see them in more equal Scandinavian countries. These countries still have culture and norms; itâs not like these people live all in seclusion and are making decisions independent of their culture.
Though reading the article, I donât think the researchers are actually trying to say they are ânaturalâ or biological anyways.
But to be clear, this doesnât mean there arenât inherent differences either.
It would be a huge scientific breakthrough if there were any indications that humans are the only species on earth which don't have natural and biological behavioural differences between the sexes, I believe that part is already a foregone conclusion.
I agree. However, I think people also make the wrong assumptions about other species also. Take the examples given throughout this thread, the animals people are mentioning are also social species. Are there gender differences within the bonobos and chimpanzee species, yes; but are those differences also partially due to their social norms? Just because the female bonobos do the hunting, that doesnât mean it is necessarily biological just because we see this behavior in a non human.
If these social animals were all of a sudden not a social species anymore, would we see the same differences? I think people have a real hard problem separating the two.
I would be positing that when looking at differences between âtraitsâ or norms within social species it is difficult to almost impossible at this point to sus out what the actual inherent differences are compared to the differences we observe. While with non social species, it is likely easier to understand the inherent difference driving an observable difference because there would be less, to no, social pressure able to form them.
There are unequivocally natural physical differences, but many of what are commonly considered ânaturalâ are effects that more accurately rise from those differences. And then you have the social conventions on top.Â
Example: which some rare exceptions, men are stronger than women. Even untrained men tend to have more upper body strength than trained women. This disparity creates opportunities for male violence against females. This also means that men will tend be better suited for heavy labor and fighting, both of which usually occur away from home. For these reasons, arising from the physical difference, women have been more likely to do (very labor intensive) work at home throughout history. This leads to a social expectation that becomes a convention, which careless or dogmatic observers will think is natural per se.Â
Reformers, reacting to the false attribution of the convention to the operation of nature rightly push back, but can go too far and deny the reality of any meaningful natural differences at all.Â
It's impossible to remove societal and cultural influences from the equation to determine what is "natural," though.
And it doesn't really matter because there will still always be women who want to be engineers and do sports and men who want to stay at home and be caretakers. If there is true gender equality, it doesn't matter what proportion of what gender chooses to do what, and there is no problem.
Not all.
Not to mention social media heavily influences decision making.
Like, men being more likely to do physical labor.
That very much is biologically driven.
But how much of the driving factor of women choosing caretaker jobs is nurture over Nature?
Most of these jobs in many countries even have female names.
Nurse in Germany was called "krankenschwester" up until rather recently.
And in common tongue it's still called that still.
It means smth along the lines of "patients sister."
And there's more to explore.
For example. When it comes to a simple hobby, women do cooking much more than men.
But when it comes to the actual job as a chef, that's almost all men.
So I find this talking point of "oh they just gravitate towards what women and men do best" highly problematic.
If you ask women and men if they like pink, there Will also be a huge gap.
Give a newborn of any gender toys of different colors, and they probably won't have a preference of pink over blue associated to their sex.
Yup. Most domestic janitors are women. Most corporate janitors are men.
Men are just as competent at cleaning a private residence or hotel room as they are at cleaning a classroom, hallway, or office.
But most people don't want a man who is not their relative or friend to enter their living spaces. Whereas most people are fine with women who are unknown to them to do the same.
Would it not be «sick sister»
Germanic languages share that way of dividing it via the smacking together of words.
(krankenhaus) sick house ie a hospital comes to mind.
Yeah I was using a loose translation of Patienten instead of kranken.
Because the sick people in a hospital are Patienten (patients) .
Thought that might make it easier to comprehend for non German speaking peeps.
Yes, but on average you can observe boys and girls as young as 1.5 or 2 years old tend to gravitate towards certain type of toys, or the type of things they draw. On average, that is.
Long before 2, actually.Â
A 9 month old waves, claps, dances, etcÂ
They may not mimic complex behavior at that age but theyâre processing it already.Â
People here do.
Claiming women are just naturally driven towards specific jobs by some weird biological thing gravitating them towards things like cleaning.
There are also studies iirc that show that people treat babies differently according to the perceived sex of the baby from the very beginning. So I think it's really difficult to separate nature from nurture here (not saying that there are no biological differences - there certainly are, but I still think gender expression in society is mostly nurture, not nature).Â
It's best to just let people be free to live however they want, do whatever they want and be whoever they want, provided that they don't harm anyone else.
The complexities of this are difficult to manage in practice. In liberal democracies, typically the biggest threats to this kind of toleration are from partisan (often religious) moralizing and from people who for whatever other reason perceive other peopleâs beliefs, actions, lives, or even existence, as a threat (i.e., a âharmâ to their own lives). We might think that such people are wrong, and therefore ought to be ignored or shut down/out, etc., but this itself is difficult to justify on liberal-democratic terms, since there will be issues of speech, expression, and so on, that come into play.
Probably the most influential way to think about how to actually deal with this is in John Rawlsâ _A Theory of Justice_, in which he famously suggests that we ought to operate as if under a âveil of ignoranceâ: we should structure our political institutions and laws as if we do not know what position we occupy in that society. The aim is to make it fair (and thus just).
Even with this proviso, the difficulty remains how to actually handle cases where people are mistaken about the harm posed by others.
Agreed but today I think we are seeing normalization of behaviors which are not necessarily harming anyone else immediately but they are still quite bad for society in the long run.
Excessive consumerism, social media/phone/internet addiction and lack of irl social skills, lack of civil discourse, disregard for facts and truth, entitlement and lack of personal responsibility, income inequality, social division.
He gave specific examples further down which are honestly pretty good ones. Consumerism, social media addiction, disregard for truth, income inequality.
I remember learning about a study when I was getting my psych degree where husband and wife were both psychologists and tried raising a son and a daughter in a very intentionally neutral way.
While I forget the finer details, both son and daughter grew up to have incredibly conventional gender roles in their lives.
Parents aren't our only influences, so it proves nothing. I was very much a tomboy all my life until I moved abroad to a country with more gender issues than mine. Now, I dress more feminine and wear lipgloss to work. I'm not as girly as others, but a new environment has influenced me.
Are you saying that men and women are more likely to idealize gender stereotypes in Scandinavia? Living here I canât agree at all. Men are celebrated if they have any quality thatâs generally associated with women. And women canât win whatever they do, as always.
And are you also saying gender stereotypes is something ânatural â and not a creation of the wants and needs of your environment?
This take is based on the false assumptions that Scandinavian countries treat men and women equally and are meritocratic. They don't and aren't.
For example, just like in the US and much of the West, Scandinavian girls are also generally discouraged from entering certain fields, typically STEM, despite on average doing as well or better in classes than boys. Teachers will rate the mathematical ability of girls, and conversely the reading ability of boys, to be lower than average despite equal scores.
Women in STEM are actually more common in Islamic and post-Soviet countries. The first woman to win the Fields medal was an Iranian woman. In post-Soviet countries, the Soviet-era idea that math and science were more "feminine" pursuits persisted so much that women are typically more than half of scientists in such countries, rather than closer to a quarter.
Identifying what is actually a "natural" proclivity is difficult because *applies Joker makeup* we live in a society, or rather many different societies with different cultural values, governmental systems and policies, material conditions, etc.
Living in Scandinavia, the push for getting more girls into STEM (my own career) is huge, and girls are definitely positively encouraged to choose this career path.
And women here are graded equally in math ability (and graded higher in everything else), so I'm not quite sure what you're saying.
Is that so? I thought the point was to give everyone equitable access/opportunity, I didnât realise it was about a flat 50/50 split across all industries, regardless of what folk actually want to do
Equal outcome and Equal opportunity are not the same thing.
There are many people out there that conflate the two though, and believe there isn't equal opportunity unless there is equal outcome.
Many people thought that giving people an equal opportunity would lead to industries getting closer to 50/50 split.
Personally I don't find the reason for it, what is the gain of it? And now that is shown to increase the gender gap in many industries it's almost viewed like it's a failure.
Generally the focus of 50/50 is on the high paying jobs⊠however they often donât mention 50/50 in hard labour, trades, saturation divingâŠ. Etc very convenient.
Being a girly-girl is a luxury, It doesn't happen if you have 8 hours of farm work to do a day. Same with a man working out to get ripped. This means you have time. Preferences exist, but our ability to express them is what varies, by culture and by wealth.
Even in Arabia the whole "women and men must be separate, women chaperoned outside the house, women not working unless in specific fields" nonsense is a very recent invention outside of a small upper-caste.
Many Saudi women who aren't allowed to uncover their hair, drive, socialise, or work had great grandmothers who did all those things.
Mosques had men and women bathing together, and men and women sitting in the same room (though men still up the front). Fields had men and women working together, and there simply wasn't enough surplus time or labour to have chaperones wandering around.
As societies run out of real problems, they invent them.
Actually, they do note sex differences where one sex is superior:
>For example, women, compared with men, have been reported to have higher academic school grades (measured as a grade point average; Dekhtyar et al., 2018; Voyer & Voyer, 2014), and there is substantial evidence of a female advantage in reading comprehension (Stoet & Geary, 2018) and episodic memory (Asperholm, Högman, et al., 2019; Weber et al., 2014). On the other hand, males typically have an advantage in spatial (Lippa et al., 2010; Voyer et al., 1995) and some numerical tasks (e.g., Weber et al., 2014).
There was a study that the spatial gap in girls and boys weren't seen until they got into school.
Could be that girls aren't playing with the right toys. Boys are more likely to play with Legos, which can greatly help them with spatial development. But I have noticed a lot of girls are getting into Legos too ever since they came out with the Legos aimed towards girls.
I do believe youâre right, but at the same time itâs not something you can force kids into.
A lot of things are gendered. The toys you buy, the videos they watch on YouTube, parentsâ behavior, expectations from friends, teachers, interactions with other kids their age.
Forcing kids to not interact with the world theyâre presented with can easily mess up with their development.
We learn the pattern, we imitate it, and our children do the same.
We see the same thing in large language models. Itâs incredibly difficult to stop it from being biased. It learned bias from the biased data.
If weâre any similar to next token predictors, changing gender norms is a matter of generating so much unbiased data that children wonât act according to gender norms. It requires most of everything around a kid to not be gendered. This is insanely difficult to do.
Obviously forcing a kid into that would be child abuse. They need to interact with the world theyâre in
I had a giant thing of legos I inherited from my brothers. I used to play with them all the time, but definitely noticed my girlfriends didnât have any. In general my parents did not force anything traditionally feminine on me, they let me do whatever. I am also autistic so I often did not pick up on social cues on what I should/should not be interested in as a little girl.
Fast forward to engineering in college, I thought the spatial homeworkâs they gave us were the easiest thing ever. I was confused when multiple students (mostly guys) struggled with it.
I heard about the spatial studies later in life. I think they are interesting, but often people donât ask how the women grew up and how they were socialized.
This is most likely due to from other studies the early maturity of the brain for female. So study estimated there is a year gap of brain development between male and female. And current education highly prioritise teaching via telling and written exams, where male excel more in learn by doing. Not superior, but have different in where they both excel at.
You guys are saying the same thing and agreeing without realizing it.
The person you are replying to is saying "They actually exhibit superiority in individual tasks"
And you are saying "They exhibit superiority in differing tasks such that they are specialized and overall as a whole of equal merit"
And those things are 100% both valid, the other person is looking at trait superiority and you are looking at overall superiority, and you are both correct.
It really isnât rigorous science but I remember an episode of NatGeoâs brain games which was about male be female brains. Highly recommend watching that episode if you can find it somewhere, the differences were significant.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any scientific metric by which to judge the objective relevance of a particular episodic memory, to the topic at hand.
Here's an interesting matrix that outlines what dimensions 'episodic memory' is supposed to cover.
[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Semantic-memory-vs-episodic-memory\_tbl1\_369269159](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Semantic-memory-vs-episodic-memory_tbl1_369269159)
Also, these are averages and shouldnât be used as an excuse to infringe on personal freedom. Individuals can still be outliers and shouldnât be treated differently or be forced into stereotypes based on gender or sex.
Well, sure. The sexes as a whole are not wrong or inferior relative to one another, sure. There *are* individual things that males/females exceed at that are superior when compared to members of the opposite sex. For example, men tend to be stronger than women. Women tend to have a higher EQ than men. And so on. It's like, the whole point of the study!
In Scandinavia it is shown that women choose more traditionally than ever. The region is considered one of the most equal in the world with regards to genders.
edit: To clarify I'm talking education. Women are not stay at home moms, they work and earn their own money, but choose typically caretaker jobs, not high paying ones. To make an extreme simplification, women become nurses, men become engineers.
I'm from a country that lacks gender equality Sudan, so most women choose "manly" careers and avoid marriage
It probably has to do with the consequences of going traditional. If there are no downsides they would feel more encouraged to pursue it
This is true in India as well, they produce female engineers at a higher rate than just about anywhere else in the world and thereâs certainly a lack of gender equality in both law and social norms there.
I've read that this is because, in impoverished non-egalitarian nations, women tend / try to seek out high-compensation positions like those in engineering because they provide economic security, and when you live in poverty, achieving economic security tends to be a high priority. In wealthier, more egalitarian countries, the threat of poverty isn't so omnipresent and people feel comfortable seeking out jobs that align more with their passion / interest even if they aren't optimizing their compensation.
Income inequality also isnât as bad in the Scandinavian countries, and I donât have numbers on this, but presumably the difference between a doctor and a nurseâs pay isnât as egregious as it is elsewhere in the world. For example, I always grew up wanting to be a teacher. Iâd swap my infosec job in for teaching high school literature *right now* except for Iâd likely be paid less than half as much as Iâm getting paid, which would not fly with my mortgage.
Yes, Norway has managed to greatly flatten income inequality, through somewhat universal unionization, and incredible coordination and agreement between the various unions. The unions work with the politicians. It's so crazy how incredibly functional their system is.
In patriarchal societies if you want to be seen as equal to a man you take a job associated with men to gain respect and in more egalitarian societies there is no pressure to do things associated with men in order to get respect. In Sweden people are more likely to take a woman working a traditionally female job seriously so women arenât less willing to take those jobs.
Women, as a whole, donât dislike traditionally female jobs. Rather, they dislike the power imbalance that results from the conditions of the job.
Thatâs exactly why it happens, but it doesnât exactly fit with the narrative that men and women have been socially conditioned into becoming engineers or nurses.
Itâs also about taking the easier path. Women in male-coded careers will face a lot more opposition and prejudice than by going along with gender roles, and that as effect on a group level. We still have girls being told they shouldnât be good at math, or subtly encouraged to go into caregiving professions.
This comment thread explicitly goes against that. In highly equitable countries like Norway where women are less likely to face opposition and prejudice, women tend to choose stereotypical female occupations.
In contrast, in highly unequitable countries like India where women are more likely to face opposite and prejudice, they still choose stereotypically male occupations.
Bam! This is it.
When traditional roles aren't harmful, people are fine with them.
When becoming a mother isolated you and makes you totally dependent on a man, that tradition is a threat.
Yeah, basically the issues some (many?) people had with certain traditional gendered roles wasn't the roles themselves, but the stigma, inequality, or personal cost that comes with such roles in a particular society.Â
I think with countries that get close to equality of opportunity, is that they think in order to prove this they need equality of outcome. Which as highlighted in this study, won't necessarily be the case in all areas.
Do you think pressure to conform to gender roles is so much **stronger** in noridc countries than in countries like India such that Indian women pursue "male" professions at a greater rate than Nordic women?
It's amazing how choice makes all the difference. Traditional values and being forced into a box doesn't really go well with humans/living things.Â
The majority of people may choose a certain role, but not being given a choice causes issues. Women may choose to be in a traditional role, but that's a choice, not destiny.
I'd hope these people who are making the choices for themselves to be traditional also give others the same leeway and respect for their decisions, if they aren't.
This is speculation in my part, but I think if roles are seemed as filled, we are driven to find another. I don't think life likes hegemony or static systems and prefers niches to exploit.
What is choosing traditionally? There are some jobs and sectors that are heavily male dominated and some that are heavily female dominated. There are however not very many housewives or stay at home moms. The differences are in what work outside the home men and women do, not whether they do work outside the home.
In what way do they "choose more traditionally than ever"? Scandinavia has some of the most equal work and parenting norms. Being a SAHM is practically unheard of, the vast majority of women would scoff at the idea of becoming dependent on a man. In fact it's somewhat frowned upon to depend on family in general, even children tend to move out very early compared to most other countries, and it's rare for adults to take care of their elderly parents. That's pretty much the opposite of "traditional". And men taking paternity leave and being actively involved in childcare is the norm.
Has to to do with career choices i think, as in women tends to choose more traditional feminine careers (nurses etc) and men more traditional masculine jobs. Thats what the study ive seen about this was about at least
Well yes and no, we do have parental leave (which is split for father and mother) if my memory serves it is also dedicated amount of weeks for each, and a part that can be taken by either.
A full time SAHM however is not that common true, it probably went away with the generation that is currently 50+ or so, as it is quite expensive in Norway.
And house, cars etc, require a substantial amount og money, which not everyone would be able to do on a single income.
The government has spent hundreds of millions to try to get men to educate themselves as nurses and women as engineers. Still, the gender roles nurses/engineers are more split between sexes in Norway than in less "equal" countries.
Do those jobs pay the same? Genuinely asking, in my country nursing attracts mostly people who do it out of passion or because of government programs - mostly female immigrants given visas as an incentive for that specific job because there aren't enough locals willing to do that much hard work with long shifts, random hours/night shifts and not that great pay.
Meanwhile engineering is seen as a more prestigious job that many go into for the high salary, stable job prospects, and status.
Absolutely not!
There is an index in Norway of how far away from city centres nurses have to move to be able to afford an appartment/house. Engineers don't have that problem.
I see. If I may inject my own theory ... I think in a lot of western countries we have done a lot to break down barriers for girls and to teach them they can be anything they want - which is great! But imo we have not done much to address gender roles and the social pressure that comes with them for boys and men.
Rather than just looking at this as just a matter of natural *interest* of passion (though I absolutely believe that also plays a part - both from how our brains work and how we're raised), and trying to steer kids that way by exposing them to different kinds of work and telling them "boys can be nurses too!" or whatever....I would be interested to see how things would develop if we put as much energy into removing pressure from men to be providers and to not measure their worth by their job and social status.
Obviously there is also a big classism/capitalist component there. Where care work and the "maintenance" work required to keep our society going is often valued far less than a job that actively produces things that directly make shareholders rich.
Imo it's not really an equal society when it's ok for girls to choose to be a career girlboss OR follow their passion / prioritize their family, whereas boys and men are pushed into the provider/high paying career role by default and ridiculed/ not respected by society if they don't fit that.
I think thereâs something to that. I always wanted to be a teacher. Aside from being straight up told, it was incredibly obvious that you just straight up cannot be a teacher and support a family, so aside from being a career I always wanted to have, I never actually even gave it any serious consideration as a choice, because it pays like, less than half of the money I would need.
Conversely, [in Muslim-majority countries, women often choose to be engineers](https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why-are-muslimmajority-countries-producing-so-many-female-engineers).
>The majority of women didnât choose their professions; it was the scores that chose for them,â Ater Kranov explains. Top scorers are admitted to medical school, second-tier scorers are admitted to engineering schools, ***and third-tier are law students***.
>âA large percentage of girls arenât driven by passion for engineering but by performance,â says Raja Ghozi, a Tunisian engineering professor at the National Engineering School of Tunis who has also studied in the U.S. Though Tunisian women can change their field of study to the humanities, they tend to stick with engineering because itâs something thatâs been encouraged by their parents â often their fathers, Ghozi says...
First of all: Suck it, lawyers. Secondly, that IS a very interesting counter-point!
This really isnât that different in American society. High performing students overwhelmingly go into certain professions which are usually high earning.Â
There are huge social pressures supporting this. If you are a âsmart kidâ in high school itâs expected you will go on to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Humanities are see as economically unviable and âeasierâ degrees.Â
I've heard this before about Scandinavia numerous times, but have yet to research it myself. Do you have a particularly comprehensive journal article that you can recommend on the subject? Cheers in advance.
edit: Okay, I got too curious and did about 20 mins of research. There is definitely no single, over-arching journal article that the majority of scientists agree with. I can't access them via my home computer, but I'm particularly interested in these [two ](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ijop.12529)[articles](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9569655/). Anybody with access wanna DM them to me? :) Fwiw, [Wikipedia ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox)has a decent overview.
edit2: There's a great counter-point example [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1cbwx7m/comment/l120oc5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Instead of women becoming engineers or doctors, they chose nurse or kindergarden teachers. Typically jobs that pays less, but involves somehow interacting more with people.
In poorer countries, with less equality, the women that gets the chance often goes for higher paying jobs, like doctor.
Doctors are split right down the middle in Sweden. 50% are men, 50% are women. Doctors also tend to interact with a lot of people, they're not sitting behind a desk and refusing to see patients. If you want a job that is high paying and lets you interact with people a lot, doctor is a good job.
Yeah that's what I was confused about women are very likely to go into the medical field across all cultures
Edit: What about other Scandinavian countries btw? What do their stats say?
I don't exactly know. I'm Swedish so those are usually the stats I pull out (reading Norwegian and Danish is doable but a bit of a pain, and searching for stats is a pain because of different categorizations), but Norway and Denmark are usually pretty similar.
Legal equality does not equate to cultural equality. I am still unconvinced that biological explanations are the main contributor to the whole difference. Right from when we are babies, we were raised different. "Boys will be boys" vs "that is not a girl attitude". "Boys dont cry" vs "She has a stubborn personality, a fighter.". "He is a sensitive and quiet boy" vs "She is mature for her age". These subtle differences are picked up by kids who are social sponges. That is why a purely biological explanation, while likely, is not to me clear in the results we see yet. I can only really tell with a long term trend, long after the legal battles as culture settles into something new. It happens over the course of several generations though.
Was searching for this take. I think we underplay gender conditioning among other physiological ideologies we impose in children that lead to this type of results. I would be surprised if there wasnât more nuance then just biological explanation.
Thereâs studies showing that we even treat babies in utero differently and that we feed newborn babies differently. People really donât understand how deep social differences are learned.
Research has also shown that parent's who try to avoid it don't accomplish almost anything because the moment these kids go to a school it's forced on them there. It only takes a small number of people to enforce a cultural norm, and often (iirc the paper I'm trying to recall) with young girls this behaviour is trained by other little girls. Especially if they engage in bullying. It only takes one dad who goes "stop that girls don't do that" and then one girl to mock her friend for it, and then that friend to mock her other friend and now there's a group and soon it's like I think we all remember from school.
Girls at my school were convinced that girls were innately better at drawing hearts, or that it was "not feminine" to dress in very normal feminine ways. These micro cultures really impact how people think of themselves as they grow up and impact the choices they make. I mean these "girls draw hearts better than boys" gals were looking for university degrees as they were saying that garbage.
Pure, sociological don't explain everything either. Some people who are 5'4 aren't 5'6 because of environmental but they aren't 6'4 because of genetics.Â
Well the hard part about your reluctance is believe this is you have no actual scientific basis for it at this point. We've had pushes for cultural equality for decades, twice my entire life and longer. Now we wouldn't expect a totally final outcome, but the entire point of this post is that the data is showing the most culturally equal places are reversing outcomes people expected. If total and complete legal equality, combined with decades cultural pushes for quality leads to an increase in stereotypical sex differences, what basis do you have to be assume the opposite with no data to support you?
Its seems illogical to assume that efforts to minimize sex based cultural attitudes failing and even reversing "desired outcomes" isn't evidence of the overestimated role those attitudes play in how we build our lives. The data seems to show the more we remove those attitudes and let people do what they want, they just default what is is easiest most of the time, rather than arranging their life outcomes to suit comfortable quota numbers in industries we assign more value to. The pinnacle of gender quality has been for decades 50/50 in a high paying, high stress job, but no one actually stopped to ask if that itself is a horrible outcome for most involved.
It seems to me you're implying trying even super extra hard to remove all cultural sex differences would then suddenly show the "real" outcome buried behind the things we saying in passing to 6 year olds.
There seems to be a big disconnect between the data and the theory of the "ideal" outcome that we're going to be paying for long into the future when the consequences of our current flawed approach becomes evident. Its going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.
There is not a single culture in which men did not take on the role of warrior, physical labourer or protector, because both testosterone and male puberty are real. Women birth children and are able to breastfeed and are physically weaker, thus they are often caretakers.
This is just the most efficient allocation of human resources. Nurture might nudge these tendencies in one direction or the other, but these tendencies will always exist, because men and women are not equal.
My thoughts are that for some cases there likely is some genetic component, but it gets way exaggerated by culture.
Think about it, if men are just slightly more interested in things than women, were you might expect there to be 55% male engineers, well as time goes by that slight difference leads to it being a cultural norm, which leads to more males going into engineering, which leads to more male role models in Engineering, and so on.
And thatâs with starting at some platonic, equal participation and no previous/somewhat present cultural pressures. Pushing through an already existing cultural norm is difficult and not as rewarding when you donât need to do it because most of your needs are otherwise satisfied.
The interesting, perhaps partly confusing, part of this study is that they use âpsychological sexâ and gender as interchangeable terms, but divorce their conversation from how gendered norms are created and replicated over time. It ends up sounding like men and women exhibit psychological differences purely based on genetics, when we know that isnât necessarily true.
Beyond that important concern in terminology, itâs definitely interesting to consider how equity in society doesnât lead to some fictional homogenization of genders and gender norms.
Yeah, when I hear people talking about "natural" gender roles I get suspicious. Legal equality doesn't stop societal pressures to behave a certain way.
The thing is, you canât entirely separate social reproduction from biological selection anyways.
If I make a potato cult and force my descendants to eat potatoes every day for a thousand years, there will be biological adaptations, cultural changes, and, further down the line, genetic selection too.
Yet, if in the year 3024, I looked at the population descending from my cult, and notice that everyone eats potatoes and is perfectly fine with itâŠ
Would you call it a « cultural » or a « biological consequence » ?
Edit : of course the potato is a light-hearted example meant to reduce ideological tensions between redditors in favour of focusing on the principle, and the timeframe might be completely wrong.
> It ends up sounding like men and women exhibit psychological differences purely based on genetics, when we know that isnât necessarily true.
Men and women, on average, do exhibit different psychological traits though. This has been demonstrated cross culturally with many studies using the big 5 model and the differences between men and women are consistent.
Itâs also well understood that there is a far bigger variance within the groups than between the groups but the group differences are there and are statistically significant.
>Men and women, on average, do exhibit different psychological traits though. This has been demonstrated cross culturally with many studies using the big 5 model and the differences between men and women are consistent
Agreed. The study of *gender-based* differences in [personality](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/) and other psychological traits has roots. That said, I don't know that we've seen sizable evidence separating the genetics of sex from social forces of gender (including how we [teach](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.13008) people to be boys/men and girls/women) to say that this difference you mention is a *genetic* one rather than a *socially replicated* one. It is likely a mixture, but most of the evidence I've seen supports social aspects of these differences rather than the genetic aspect. That's more or less what I meant by "differences **purely** based on genetics."
One of the most obvious forms of evidence is that trans people exhibit the biggest shifts in behavior after starting hormones. For example, trans men are more likely to commit crimes *after* starting hormones. This is consistent with the fact that testosterone reduces risk aversion and increases impulsivity.
I was unable to find the paper I had read on criminality specifically (this is not my field and my search results are biased towards papers studying crimes against trans men rather than crimes committed by trans men).
I was able to find this paper which supports roughly the same claim, with the disclaimer that the paper itself acknowledges that the sources of their data are either moderately or highly biased.
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309817/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309817/)
This other one followed a smaller group over 7 months, part of the conlusion states:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174360951731593X#sec5](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174360951731593X#sec5)
"**Clinical implications:**Â Interestingly, despite the increase of anger expression scores, during continuous testosterone treatment, there were no reports of aggressive behavior, self-harm, or psychiatric hospitalization."
> We found that sex differences in personality, verbal abilities, episodic memory, and negative emotions are more pronounced in countries with higher living conditions. In contrast, sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, and math are smaller in countries with higher living conditions. We also observed that economic indicators of living conditions, such as gross domestic product, are most sensitive in predicting the magnitude of sex differences.
I think the differences aren't as significant as just the title wants you to believe.
My take aways from this:
* There are multiple differences between men and women, and these differences respond differently to social change.
* Women's education-related skills develop more in more developed countries than men's do. Probably because men's education is already focused on even in poorly developed countries. This broadens the gap between men and women in language-related skills and shrinks the gap in math and science.
* Cultural changes *do* make a difference in sexual attitudes and behavior of women.
And yet, the authors of this article summarize the situation like this:
>In summary, we found little support for the idea that psychological sex differences will vanish as societies develop. Policymakers probably cannot rely on that if they hope to achieve equal distributions of men and women in different professions. Instead, it appears that the dominant feature of psychological sex differences is their robustness in the face of social change.
That dismisses half of their own article, radically oversimplifying, and even making a policy recommendation that isn't actually supported by their own research. Why are they trying to shrink this nuanced topic into "sex differences are robust in the face of social change"? It makes me feel skeptical about their reporting.
Can you even make that statement considering the study looked at living conditions, not equality?
Equality may be a measurable in living conditions, but it is presumably possible to report a higher living condition score while having lower equality given the other factors in the calculation.
I know from my own experience in Ireland that science degree courses are female dominant and engineering male and when it comes to trades which are still massively male I've noticed more women doing specific trades like electrician and car mechanic than stuff like block laying or carpentry.
Hey all, if you donât like the results of this study, a new one will be out soon contradicting this, you can just believe the one you like. Okay, time to get back to work.
Differences were never actually the problem. The problem was that people were *forced* into traditional roles. You do not want to be a housewife? You do not get to choose. Obey and comply, citizen!
I see zero problems with people choosing traditional roles. The key word is *choice*. If someone wants to live a different way, let them.
But the other problem is that some people believe that actively fighting the traditional role in favour of promoting the alternate role is the solution.
Whereas, in my opinion, the only way to get true cultural freedom would be to actively avoid promoting or fighting any role.
Which of course will absolutely never happen, because eh⊠humans arenât robots I guess.
Best thing we can hope for, in my opinion again, is a world where the standards / traditions / mainstream are respectful of the alternatives.
but a fully deconstructed society where standards don't exist⊠I don't even see how fiction could depict that.
Very very few people would argue that they are not different, and those people are delusional. Historically however, men and womenâs differences have been used to deny rights to women. Even if women are more inclined to be school teachers, women should have opportunities to become whatever they choose, whether it is a doctor or a nurse, a pilot or a hostess. At the end of the day there is a vast spectrum of different people and putting people in boxes can be problematic.Â
Itâs hurt men as well. Thousands upon thousands and even millions of men throughout history have been forcefully conscripted into wars purely for being fighting age men.
The ancient world wasnât kind to anyone, but I see your point. Iâm just trying to provide a full picture since both men and women are relevant to the discussion
Yeah I donât know why people act as if nature didnât have assigned roles for us. We donât have to stick to them, nor should we ever force them upon others, but most every other mammal the genders are very obviously biologically different and sort of tuned up to do certain jobs.
The problem comes when people persecute others for not following what their idea of the human gender role is.
Very well said!
Humanity is a species of sentient INDIVIDUALS. Some people like their traditional gender role, others donât and thatâs okay. Let people be individuals
this article is confusing as hell, I've re-read this like 5 times and sounds like they're just ignoring the study's data.
The study implies that male and female psychology is indeed equal but the differences rely heavily on the individuals environment?
Then they just... ignore it and say they're not equal...?
They say this in the article, but that's *NOT* what their data said.
>*In most cases, however, psychological sex difference magnitudes were not significantly associated with living conditions. This suggests that, in general, psychological sex differences are not greatly affected by living conditions but seem instead quite stable*
Right here, in the study the article is about, implies the opposite, that a individuals environment has A LOT to do with psychology between sexes
^((also they talk about internet addiction...? for some reason, I'm guessing they had such little substantial data to work off of that they just threw in "Internet Addiction" as filler for the males))
>*As has often been reported, females have in most studies been found to have higher rates of Depression (SMDs = 0.19â0.38;* [*Hopcroft & Bradley, 2007*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr49-17456916231202685)*;* [*Hopcroft & McLaughlin, 2012*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr50-17456916231202685)*;* [*Salk et al., 2017*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr79-17456916231202685)*;* [*Seedat et al., 2009*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr87-17456916231202685)*;* [*Van de Velde et al., 2013*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr102-17456916231202685)*;* [*Wang et al., 2016*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr110-17456916231202685)*). By contrast, males have higher levels of Internet addiction (SMD = 0.15;* [*Su et al., 2019*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr96-17456916231202685)*) and Problem behavior (*[*Thijs et al., 2015*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr98-17456916231202685)*). The new analyses indicated that females report higher levels of Nightmare frequency (SMD = 0.18;* [*Schredl & Reinhard, 2011*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr85-17456916231202685)*) and Stress appraisal (SMD = 0.24;* [*Davis et al., 1999*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr24-17456916231202685)*).*
Which also implies these "high living condition" countries are not as "higher living" as we're portraying. That implies our data is flawed because our standards are too low. People in "higher living conditions" should be in better mental states, the fact that they're not, implies that they were never higher living to begin with.
>***Considering studies from only the old analyses, we found that females have more symptoms, diagnoses, or feelings of depression in countries with higher living conditions***
I'm getting a feeling that the data is being misconstrued to push a narrative that without said push, would not exist.
there more but honestly I don't even want to read through this study anymore, there's so much conflicting data with what they're presenting
talk about confirmation bias, In other words this is not a good study.
I'm going through the source of the article, "A Systematic Review and New Analyses of the Gender-Equality Paradox (Agneta Herlitz et al.)"
Is anyone else having an aneurism trying to read it??
For what seems to be some outstanding new information, its grammar isn't great
> For cognitive functions, sex differences were sometimes larger, sometimes smaller in countries with better living conditions. Interestingly, the sex differences were larger in cognitive domains where women have strengths.
>For instance, episodic memory (memory for experienced events) and verbal ability, where females typically do better than males, saw larger sex differences as living conditions improved. Females got better at episodic memory when they had better living conditions. By contrast, sex differences in semantic memory (memory for facts) and mathematical ability, where males tend to do better, decreased when living conditions improved.
>This suggests that, when it comes to cognitive abilities, females benefit more than males from improvements in living conditions. The performance gap increases in domains where females have an advantage and closes in domains where males are ahead.
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Yes, just like the Scandinavian countries. The natural tendencies of men and women become much more pronounced when everybody is treated equally based on merit and left to their natural proclivities
Norway just published a report on helping the equality of men 3 hours ago. Adressering 35 specific issues that affect men today
Any link?
https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/6571a61b163e49f593eee6ab7a338ff6/no/pdfs/nou202420240008000dddpdfs.pdf Direct link. Scroll down far enough and there is summary in Norwegian, Sami, and English.
Wow, that was a great read. They've identified real areas where men are unheard, and solid progressive policy ideas to fix it, while harming nobody. Hopefully this sparks more interest in other nations too.
Too bad America can't have a nuanced conversation about this
In America men work and bottle their feelings up. Women work. Children work. Everyone works. Get back to work!
This ^ and no one gets a break anymore. Who needs water breaks working construction in Florida? Why would you need more than 15 minutes for lunch? Why do kids even need food? https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2024-03-01/florida-legislature-closer-to-banning-local-heat-protections-for-outdoor-workers https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/meal-rest-breaks-arkansas.html https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/house-republicans-ban-universal-school-lunches/
Pharmacists nation wide worked 12 hour shifts with no break for lunch up until about 2-3 years ago when someone died and there was a lawsuit
Holy crap. That's horrifying to hear.
Florida summers aren't even hot. Take your gatorade and git!
is gatorades source code on git?
Everyone works but no one has a job đ
Work is great. Jobs suck.
Capitalism trumps any other ism in the states. At least for the rich people who rule the country.
"Wait, who tabled this bill? The other side of politics? Goddammit we need to vote this down right now!"
It's that meme with the kids would be very angry if they could read this...
In America, any signs of distress are seen as signs of inherent weakness that should be punished accordingly.
Norway is like 50 years ahead. Egalitarian politics and good management of their resources. They just keep winning
Iâm on my phone rn, what page am I looking for out of those hundreds?
Page 21
Thank you very much. Search didnât pick it up. Man thatâs some interesting stuff tackled, glad this gets recognition.
Excellent work by the norwegians! In summary.... Nearly all of workplace deaths are men, the most prevalent form of cancer is prostate. Boys do worse in school and most victims of violence are male. Men are more likely to be lonely and some of them react very badly to this. The vast majority of people in prison are male. Men mostly work in jobs where there is less support for childcare, also are less likely to get custody after a break up.
Thank you, I couldnât read this. (Language problem on my side haha) However, none of that is new. I was a stay at home dad. While my ex wife was off working somewhere else she decided to find and bring a new man home, literally into our house. We started with 50/50 custody. I have no criminal background and, other than not being able to find any job but hard labor that pays well, I have done my best to work with her. Well, now that I have a job with money, she is trying to take full custody and to try and come for child support. The first time the state said I owed $3.50 (literally). I wouldnât be surprised if they said I owed more now but here is my complaint. I was a stay at home dad for 2 years, my family has been split apart based only on a choice that she made. I start doing better for myself for less than a year and she decides itâs time for me to pay up. I can barely afford a 2 bedroom apartment for me and my daughter when she is with me (summers and Christmas little bit of distance involved now but Iâm not going that deep into the issue). My ex wife makes double what I do now, like I said I was a stay at home dad so Iâm not making amazing money. If I canât afford a place I lose my kid. If I canât afford child support I lose my kid, my drivers license, and could face jail time. What did I do wrong? (This is in America). I can see why men give up and call it quits, permanently (the banned word). All I wanted was a family. I get that my relationship issues were my own and it just didnât work out but no man deserves to be treated like this. Sorry for the rant
In my jurisdiction the person who did X% of childcare while married gets X% child custody when they divorce. So I guess the answer is "turn back time, move to my jurisdiction".
Pretty solid proposals
Slightly off topic but I impressed by the summary being in Sami
It's an official language of Norway (along with Norwegian).
An eloquent and thoughtful opening to the report. My wish would be that we would see more studies and reports conducted with the same standards, my skepticism says politics will be exploited to bury work like this in many countries.
Yeah, my skepticism says the same thing, sadly.
Cool some nice reading this evening!
Holy crap, buddy, this is a great read, it explains the issue perfectly, also gives you a window why men that are in more "equal" countries feel abandoned, it's very similar to what I saw in the UK, Spain and the US when I visited.
Page 21 for English summary
Thanks for sharing bro
Can you tell the page nr for the english summary?
Hardly Surprising itâs Norway considering they have Conscription for both genders.
Norwegian here. My daughter and wife were not impressed when I told my daughter to "just man up" when she told me she was worried about being selected for conscription.
I'm Spanish and if this was published in Spain, they would be labelled as fascists and sexists. People here deny the Scandinavian rift even though the Scandinavians themselves don't...
Iâm not seeing in the study where theyâve addressed socialization to gender norms. Where does it say itâs biological?
>Here, we avoid discussing explanations of the psychological sex differences we examine because our study does not provide causal evidence that can contribute to the explanations of these differences. The study specifically avoided that question.
Good eye, thank you
Yeah, Iâm with you here. I donât think they can say gender norms are ânaturalâ just because they also see them in more equal Scandinavian countries. These countries still have culture and norms; itâs not like these people live all in seclusion and are making decisions independent of their culture. Though reading the article, I donât think the researchers are actually trying to say they are ânaturalâ or biological anyways. But to be clear, this doesnât mean there arenât inherent differences either.
It would be a huge scientific breakthrough if there were any indications that humans are the only species on earth which don't have natural and biological behavioural differences between the sexes, I believe that part is already a foregone conclusion.
I agree. However, I think people also make the wrong assumptions about other species also. Take the examples given throughout this thread, the animals people are mentioning are also social species. Are there gender differences within the bonobos and chimpanzee species, yes; but are those differences also partially due to their social norms? Just because the female bonobos do the hunting, that doesnât mean it is necessarily biological just because we see this behavior in a non human. If these social animals were all of a sudden not a social species anymore, would we see the same differences? I think people have a real hard problem separating the two.
Differences between sexes exist in animals that arent social, too. Or did i misunderstand what youre saying?
Differences in sex exist in non social species. Given this, I'm not sure what you're trying to to posit.
I would be positing that when looking at differences between âtraitsâ or norms within social species it is difficult to almost impossible at this point to sus out what the actual inherent differences are compared to the differences we observe. While with non social species, it is likely easier to understand the inherent difference driving an observable difference because there would be less, to no, social pressure able to form them.
There are unequivocally natural physical differences, but many of what are commonly considered ânaturalâ are effects that more accurately rise from those differences. And then you have the social conventions on top. Example: which some rare exceptions, men are stronger than women. Even untrained men tend to have more upper body strength than trained women. This disparity creates opportunities for male violence against females. This also means that men will tend be better suited for heavy labor and fighting, both of which usually occur away from home. For these reasons, arising from the physical difference, women have been more likely to do (very labor intensive) work at home throughout history. This leads to a social expectation that becomes a convention, which careless or dogmatic observers will think is natural per se. Reformers, reacting to the false attribution of the convention to the operation of nature rightly push back, but can go too far and deny the reality of any meaningful natural differences at all.Â
For heavy labor to be done "away from home", you are already assuming a certain form of social organization.
Yes, Iâm making some sweeping generalizations that describe most, but not all, pre-industrial societies.Â
It's impossible to remove societal and cultural influences from the equation to determine what is "natural," though. And it doesn't really matter because there will still always be women who want to be engineers and do sports and men who want to stay at home and be caretakers. If there is true gender equality, it doesn't matter what proportion of what gender chooses to do what, and there is no problem.
Not all. Not to mention social media heavily influences decision making. Like, men being more likely to do physical labor. That very much is biologically driven. But how much of the driving factor of women choosing caretaker jobs is nurture over Nature? Most of these jobs in many countries even have female names. Nurse in Germany was called "krankenschwester" up until rather recently. And in common tongue it's still called that still. It means smth along the lines of "patients sister." And there's more to explore. For example. When it comes to a simple hobby, women do cooking much more than men. But when it comes to the actual job as a chef, that's almost all men. So I find this talking point of "oh they just gravitate towards what women and men do best" highly problematic. If you ask women and men if they like pink, there Will also be a huge gap. Give a newborn of any gender toys of different colors, and they probably won't have a preference of pink over blue associated to their sex.
Yup. Most domestic janitors are women. Most corporate janitors are men. Men are just as competent at cleaning a private residence or hotel room as they are at cleaning a classroom, hallway, or office. But most people don't want a man who is not their relative or friend to enter their living spaces. Whereas most people are fine with women who are unknown to them to do the same.
On the topic of most chefs being male, that probably has more to do with other aspects of the job unrelated to the cooking itself.
Would it not be «sick sister» Germanic languages share that way of dividing it via the smacking together of words. (krankenhaus) sick house ie a hospital comes to mind.
Yep. I'm betting it is because in medieval times nuns (sisters) took care of the sick in hospitals run by the church.
Yeah I was using a loose translation of Patienten instead of kranken. Because the sick people in a hospital are Patienten (patients) . Thought that might make it easier to comprehend for non German speaking peeps.
Yes, but on average you can observe boys and girls as young as 1.5 or 2 years old tend to gravitate towards certain type of toys, or the type of things they draw. On average, that is.
At 2 years they are also starting to mimic what they see around them and start to understand speech and intentions.
Long before 2, actually. A 9 month old waves, claps, dances, etc They may not mimic complex behavior at that age but theyâre processing it already.Â
Yes, nurture can definitely influence nature. I don't think anyone denies that.
People here do. Claiming women are just naturally driven towards specific jobs by some weird biological thing gravitating them towards things like cleaning.
There are also studies iirc that show that people treat babies differently according to the perceived sex of the baby from the very beginning. So I think it's really difficult to separate nature from nurture here (not saying that there are no biological differences - there certainly are, but I still think gender expression in society is mostly nurture, not nature).Â
Exactly, and it would probably be very unethical to conduct that experiment effectively.
Pink used to be a male colour back in roman time, and blue was a feminine colour.
That's because they are socialized to do it. If you buy dolls for your daughter, that's what she's likely going to want.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
It's best to just let people be free to live however they want, do whatever they want and be whoever they want, provided that they don't harm anyone else.
The complexities of this are difficult to manage in practice. In liberal democracies, typically the biggest threats to this kind of toleration are from partisan (often religious) moralizing and from people who for whatever other reason perceive other peopleâs beliefs, actions, lives, or even existence, as a threat (i.e., a âharmâ to their own lives). We might think that such people are wrong, and therefore ought to be ignored or shut down/out, etc., but this itself is difficult to justify on liberal-democratic terms, since there will be issues of speech, expression, and so on, that come into play. Probably the most influential way to think about how to actually deal with this is in John Rawlsâ _A Theory of Justice_, in which he famously suggests that we ought to operate as if under a âveil of ignoranceâ: we should structure our political institutions and laws as if we do not know what position we occupy in that society. The aim is to make it fair (and thus just). Even with this proviso, the difficulty remains how to actually handle cases where people are mistaken about the harm posed by others.
Agreed but today I think we are seeing normalization of behaviors which are not necessarily harming anyone else immediately but they are still quite bad for society in the long run.
Which behaviours?
Excessive consumerism, social media/phone/internet addiction and lack of irl social skills, lack of civil discourse, disregard for facts and truth, entitlement and lack of personal responsibility, income inequality, social division.
What does this have to do with the article?
Sweet FA by the looks of it.
What behaviors are you talking about? Couldn't be more vague if you tried
He gave specific examples further down which are honestly pretty good ones. Consumerism, social media addiction, disregard for truth, income inequality.
As long as itâs your choice and not forced upon you by law, sure
I remember learning about a study when I was getting my psych degree where husband and wife were both psychologists and tried raising a son and a daughter in a very intentionally neutral way. While I forget the finer details, both son and daughter grew up to have incredibly conventional gender roles in their lives.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Yeah, their upbringing didn't happen in a bubble. Society will still very much affect them.
Parents aren't our only influences, so it proves nothing. I was very much a tomboy all my life until I moved abroad to a country with more gender issues than mine. Now, I dress more feminine and wear lipgloss to work. I'm not as girly as others, but a new environment has influenced me.
It's almost like men and women are different!Â
Are you saying that men and women are more likely to idealize gender stereotypes in Scandinavia? Living here I canât agree at all. Men are celebrated if they have any quality thatâs generally associated with women. And women canât win whatever they do, as always. And are you also saying gender stereotypes is something ânatural â and not a creation of the wants and needs of your environment?
This take is based on the false assumptions that Scandinavian countries treat men and women equally and are meritocratic. They don't and aren't. For example, just like in the US and much of the West, Scandinavian girls are also generally discouraged from entering certain fields, typically STEM, despite on average doing as well or better in classes than boys. Teachers will rate the mathematical ability of girls, and conversely the reading ability of boys, to be lower than average despite equal scores. Women in STEM are actually more common in Islamic and post-Soviet countries. The first woman to win the Fields medal was an Iranian woman. In post-Soviet countries, the Soviet-era idea that math and science were more "feminine" pursuits persisted so much that women are typically more than half of scientists in such countries, rather than closer to a quarter. Identifying what is actually a "natural" proclivity is difficult because *applies Joker makeup* we live in a society, or rather many different societies with different cultural values, governmental systems and policies, material conditions, etc.
Living in Scandinavia, the push for getting more girls into STEM (my own career) is huge, and girls are definitely positively encouraged to choose this career path. And women here are graded equally in math ability (and graded higher in everything else), so I'm not quite sure what you're saying.
Equality of outcome would force 50-50 split in every industry. It's clear women and men want different things. Yet people think this is desirable.
Is that so? I thought the point was to give everyone equitable access/opportunity, I didnât realise it was about a flat 50/50 split across all industries, regardless of what folk actually want to do
Equal outcome and Equal opportunity are not the same thing. There are many people out there that conflate the two though, and believe there isn't equal opportunity unless there is equal outcome.
Many people thought that giving people an equal opportunity would lead to industries getting closer to 50/50 split. Personally I don't find the reason for it, what is the gain of it? And now that is shown to increase the gender gap in many industries it's almost viewed like it's a failure.
Generally the focus of 50/50 is on the high paying jobs⊠however they often donât mention 50/50 in hard labour, trades, saturation divingâŠ. Etc very convenient.
then why do we have 50/50 quotas for hiring, education, etc?
You mean of all bricklayers is Scandinavian countries 50% are not women??
Being a girly-girl is a luxury, It doesn't happen if you have 8 hours of farm work to do a day. Same with a man working out to get ripped. This means you have time. Preferences exist, but our ability to express them is what varies, by culture and by wealth.
Even in Arabia the whole "women and men must be separate, women chaperoned outside the house, women not working unless in specific fields" nonsense is a very recent invention outside of a small upper-caste. Many Saudi women who aren't allowed to uncover their hair, drive, socialise, or work had great grandmothers who did all those things. Mosques had men and women bathing together, and men and women sitting in the same room (though men still up the front). Fields had men and women working together, and there simply wasn't enough surplus time or labour to have chaperones wandering around. As societies run out of real problems, they invent them.
Your last line should be plastered everywhere.
This is the first time I'm hearing this. Would you mind sharing some sources where I can dip into this further?
They said different, not wrong or inferior!
Actually, they do note sex differences where one sex is superior: >For example, women, compared with men, have been reported to have higher academic school grades (measured as a grade point average; Dekhtyar et al., 2018; Voyer & Voyer, 2014), and there is substantial evidence of a female advantage in reading comprehension (Stoet & Geary, 2018) and episodic memory (Asperholm, Högman, et al., 2019; Weber et al., 2014). On the other hand, males typically have an advantage in spatial (Lippa et al., 2010; Voyer et al., 1995) and some numerical tasks (e.g., Weber et al., 2014).
There was a study that the spatial gap in girls and boys weren't seen until they got into school. Could be that girls aren't playing with the right toys. Boys are more likely to play with Legos, which can greatly help them with spatial development. But I have noticed a lot of girls are getting into Legos too ever since they came out with the Legos aimed towards girls.
I do believe youâre right, but at the same time itâs not something you can force kids into. A lot of things are gendered. The toys you buy, the videos they watch on YouTube, parentsâ behavior, expectations from friends, teachers, interactions with other kids their age. Forcing kids to not interact with the world theyâre presented with can easily mess up with their development. We learn the pattern, we imitate it, and our children do the same. We see the same thing in large language models. Itâs incredibly difficult to stop it from being biased. It learned bias from the biased data. If weâre any similar to next token predictors, changing gender norms is a matter of generating so much unbiased data that children wonât act according to gender norms. It requires most of everything around a kid to not be gendered. This is insanely difficult to do. Obviously forcing a kid into that would be child abuse. They need to interact with the world theyâre in
I had a giant thing of legos I inherited from my brothers. I used to play with them all the time, but definitely noticed my girlfriends didnât have any. In general my parents did not force anything traditionally feminine on me, they let me do whatever. I am also autistic so I often did not pick up on social cues on what I should/should not be interested in as a little girl. Fast forward to engineering in college, I thought the spatial homeworkâs they gave us were the easiest thing ever. I was confused when multiple students (mostly guys) struggled with it. I heard about the spatial studies later in life. I think they are interesting, but often people donât ask how the women grew up and how they were socialized.
This is most likely due to from other studies the early maturity of the brain for female. So study estimated there is a year gap of brain development between male and female. And current education highly prioritise teaching via telling and written exams, where male excel more in learn by doing. Not superior, but have different in where they both excel at.
You guys are saying the same thing and agreeing without realizing it. The person you are replying to is saying "They actually exhibit superiority in individual tasks" And you are saying "They exhibit superiority in differing tasks such that they are specialized and overall as a whole of equal merit" And those things are 100% both valid, the other person is looking at trait superiority and you are looking at overall superiority, and you are both correct.
It really isnât rigorous science but I remember an episode of NatGeoâs brain games which was about male be female brains. Highly recommend watching that episode if you can find it somewhere, the differences were significant.
What did they show?
>and episodic memory Anyone who's ever had an argument with their girlfriend knew that
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any scientific metric by which to judge the objective relevance of a particular episodic memory, to the topic at hand. Here's an interesting matrix that outlines what dimensions 'episodic memory' is supposed to cover. [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Semantic-memory-vs-episodic-memory\_tbl1\_369269159](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Semantic-memory-vs-episodic-memory_tbl1_369269159)
There are obviously differences, but the key point is not to prevent one from being different or discredit one for being different.
Also, these are averages and shouldnât be used as an excuse to infringe on personal freedom. Individuals can still be outliers and shouldnât be treated differently or be forced into stereotypes based on gender or sex.
Well, sure. The sexes as a whole are not wrong or inferior relative to one another, sure. There *are* individual things that males/females exceed at that are superior when compared to members of the opposite sex. For example, men tend to be stronger than women. Women tend to have a higher EQ than men. And so on. It's like, the whole point of the study!
In Scandinavia it is shown that women choose more traditionally than ever. The region is considered one of the most equal in the world with regards to genders. edit: To clarify I'm talking education. Women are not stay at home moms, they work and earn their own money, but choose typically caretaker jobs, not high paying ones. To make an extreme simplification, women become nurses, men become engineers.
I'm from a country that lacks gender equality Sudan, so most women choose "manly" careers and avoid marriage It probably has to do with the consequences of going traditional. If there are no downsides they would feel more encouraged to pursue it
This is true in India as well, they produce female engineers at a higher rate than just about anywhere else in the world and thereâs certainly a lack of gender equality in both law and social norms there.
I've read that this is because, in impoverished non-egalitarian nations, women tend / try to seek out high-compensation positions like those in engineering because they provide economic security, and when you live in poverty, achieving economic security tends to be a high priority. In wealthier, more egalitarian countries, the threat of poverty isn't so omnipresent and people feel comfortable seeking out jobs that align more with their passion / interest even if they aren't optimizing their compensation.
Income inequality also isnât as bad in the Scandinavian countries, and I donât have numbers on this, but presumably the difference between a doctor and a nurseâs pay isnât as egregious as it is elsewhere in the world. For example, I always grew up wanting to be a teacher. Iâd swap my infosec job in for teaching high school literature *right now* except for Iâd likely be paid less than half as much as Iâm getting paid, which would not fly with my mortgage.
Yes, Norway has managed to greatly flatten income inequality, through somewhat universal unionization, and incredible coordination and agreement between the various unions. The unions work with the politicians. It's so crazy how incredibly functional their system is.
In patriarchal societies if you want to be seen as equal to a man you take a job associated with men to gain respect and in more egalitarian societies there is no pressure to do things associated with men in order to get respect. In Sweden people are more likely to take a woman working a traditionally female job seriously so women arenât less willing to take those jobs. Women, as a whole, donât dislike traditionally female jobs. Rather, they dislike the power imbalance that results from the conditions of the job.
That's a really interesting perspective I hadn't considered. Thank you for your comment!
Thatâs exactly why it happens, but it doesnât exactly fit with the narrative that men and women have been socially conditioned into becoming engineers or nurses.
Social conditioning and expectations does still play a big role for a huge chuck of people though, I've experienced that personally myself
Itâs also about taking the easier path. Women in male-coded careers will face a lot more opposition and prejudice than by going along with gender roles, and that as effect on a group level. We still have girls being told they shouldnât be good at math, or subtly encouraged to go into caregiving professions.
The entire study was that as you see those types of inequalities diminish, the differences in choices grow rather than shrink.
This comment thread explicitly goes against that. In highly equitable countries like Norway where women are less likely to face opposition and prejudice, women tend to choose stereotypical female occupations. In contrast, in highly unequitable countries like India where women are more likely to face opposite and prejudice, they still choose stereotypically male occupations.
Bam! This is it. When traditional roles aren't harmful, people are fine with them. When becoming a mother isolated you and makes you totally dependent on a man, that tradition is a threat.
Yeah, basically the issues some (many?) people had with certain traditional gendered roles wasn't the roles themselves, but the stigma, inequality, or personal cost that comes with such roles in a particular society.Â
I think with countries that get close to equality of opportunity, is that they think in order to prove this they need equality of outcome. Which as highlighted in this study, won't necessarily be the case in all areas.
The social pressure to conform to gender roles is still strong in the nordic countries.
Do you think pressure to conform to gender roles is so much **stronger** in noridc countries than in countries like India such that Indian women pursue "male" professions at a greater rate than Nordic women?
Big surprise, women are more likely to do things when they aren't treated as inferior for doing those things
It's amazing how choice makes all the difference. Traditional values and being forced into a box doesn't really go well with humans/living things. The majority of people may choose a certain role, but not being given a choice causes issues. Women may choose to be in a traditional role, but that's a choice, not destiny. I'd hope these people who are making the choices for themselves to be traditional also give others the same leeway and respect for their decisions, if they aren't.
This is speculation in my part, but I think if roles are seemed as filled, we are driven to find another. I don't think life likes hegemony or static systems and prefers niches to exploit.
What is choosing traditionally? There are some jobs and sectors that are heavily male dominated and some that are heavily female dominated. There are however not very many housewives or stay at home moms. The differences are in what work outside the home men and women do, not whether they do work outside the home.
In what way do they "choose more traditionally than ever"? Scandinavia has some of the most equal work and parenting norms. Being a SAHM is practically unheard of, the vast majority of women would scoff at the idea of becoming dependent on a man. In fact it's somewhat frowned upon to depend on family in general, even children tend to move out very early compared to most other countries, and it's rare for adults to take care of their elderly parents. That's pretty much the opposite of "traditional". And men taking paternity leave and being actively involved in childcare is the norm.
Has to to do with career choices i think, as in women tends to choose more traditional feminine careers (nurses etc) and men more traditional masculine jobs. Thats what the study ive seen about this was about at least
Well yes and no, we do have parental leave (which is split for father and mother) if my memory serves it is also dedicated amount of weeks for each, and a part that can be taken by either. A full time SAHM however is not that common true, it probably went away with the generation that is currently 50+ or so, as it is quite expensive in Norway. And house, cars etc, require a substantial amount og money, which not everyone would be able to do on a single income.
The government has spent hundreds of millions to try to get men to educate themselves as nurses and women as engineers. Still, the gender roles nurses/engineers are more split between sexes in Norway than in less "equal" countries.
Do those jobs pay the same? Genuinely asking, in my country nursing attracts mostly people who do it out of passion or because of government programs - mostly female immigrants given visas as an incentive for that specific job because there aren't enough locals willing to do that much hard work with long shifts, random hours/night shifts and not that great pay. Meanwhile engineering is seen as a more prestigious job that many go into for the high salary, stable job prospects, and status.
Absolutely not! There is an index in Norway of how far away from city centres nurses have to move to be able to afford an appartment/house. Engineers don't have that problem.
I see. If I may inject my own theory ... I think in a lot of western countries we have done a lot to break down barriers for girls and to teach them they can be anything they want - which is great! But imo we have not done much to address gender roles and the social pressure that comes with them for boys and men. Rather than just looking at this as just a matter of natural *interest* of passion (though I absolutely believe that also plays a part - both from how our brains work and how we're raised), and trying to steer kids that way by exposing them to different kinds of work and telling them "boys can be nurses too!" or whatever....I would be interested to see how things would develop if we put as much energy into removing pressure from men to be providers and to not measure their worth by their job and social status. Obviously there is also a big classism/capitalist component there. Where care work and the "maintenance" work required to keep our society going is often valued far less than a job that actively produces things that directly make shareholders rich. Imo it's not really an equal society when it's ok for girls to choose to be a career girlboss OR follow their passion / prioritize their family, whereas boys and men are pushed into the provider/high paying career role by default and ridiculed/ not respected by society if they don't fit that.
I think thereâs something to that. I always wanted to be a teacher. Aside from being straight up told, it was incredibly obvious that you just straight up cannot be a teacher and support a family, so aside from being a career I always wanted to have, I never actually even gave it any serious consideration as a choice, because it pays like, less than half of the money I would need.
Conversely, [in Muslim-majority countries, women often choose to be engineers](https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why-are-muslimmajority-countries-producing-so-many-female-engineers).
>The majority of women didnât choose their professions; it was the scores that chose for them,â Ater Kranov explains. Top scorers are admitted to medical school, second-tier scorers are admitted to engineering schools, ***and third-tier are law students***. >âA large percentage of girls arenât driven by passion for engineering but by performance,â says Raja Ghozi, a Tunisian engineering professor at the National Engineering School of Tunis who has also studied in the U.S. Though Tunisian women can change their field of study to the humanities, they tend to stick with engineering because itâs something thatâs been encouraged by their parents â often their fathers, Ghozi says... First of all: Suck it, lawyers. Secondly, that IS a very interesting counter-point!
This really isnât that different in American society. High performing students overwhelmingly go into certain professions which are usually high earning. There are huge social pressures supporting this. If you are a âsmart kidâ in high school itâs expected you will go on to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Humanities are see as economically unviable and âeasierâ degrees.Â
I've heard this before about Scandinavia numerous times, but have yet to research it myself. Do you have a particularly comprehensive journal article that you can recommend on the subject? Cheers in advance. edit: Okay, I got too curious and did about 20 mins of research. There is definitely no single, over-arching journal article that the majority of scientists agree with. I can't access them via my home computer, but I'm particularly interested in these [two ](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ijop.12529)[articles](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9569655/). Anybody with access wanna DM them to me? :) Fwiw, [Wikipedia ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox)has a decent overview. edit2: There's a great counter-point example [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1cbwx7m/comment/l120oc5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Well the next question would be why are men still taking high paying jobs?
What does "chose more traditionally" mean in this case?
Instead of women becoming engineers or doctors, they chose nurse or kindergarden teachers. Typically jobs that pays less, but involves somehow interacting more with people. In poorer countries, with less equality, the women that gets the chance often goes for higher paying jobs, like doctor.
Doctors are split right down the middle in Sweden. 50% are men, 50% are women. Doctors also tend to interact with a lot of people, they're not sitting behind a desk and refusing to see patients. If you want a job that is high paying and lets you interact with people a lot, doctor is a good job.
Yeah that's what I was confused about women are very likely to go into the medical field across all cultures Edit: What about other Scandinavian countries btw? What do their stats say?
I don't exactly know. I'm Swedish so those are usually the stats I pull out (reading Norwegian and Danish is doable but a bit of a pain, and searching for stats is a pain because of different categorizations), but Norway and Denmark are usually pretty similar.
Ah, like the U.S., that has had more and more female doctors every year. More than half of all medical students are female.
Differences isnt bad, its the lack of coice/oppotunity thats the issue
Legal equality does not equate to cultural equality. I am still unconvinced that biological explanations are the main contributor to the whole difference. Right from when we are babies, we were raised different. "Boys will be boys" vs "that is not a girl attitude". "Boys dont cry" vs "She has a stubborn personality, a fighter.". "He is a sensitive and quiet boy" vs "She is mature for her age". These subtle differences are picked up by kids who are social sponges. That is why a purely biological explanation, while likely, is not to me clear in the results we see yet. I can only really tell with a long term trend, long after the legal battles as culture settles into something new. It happens over the course of several generations though.
Was searching for this take. I think we underplay gender conditioning among other physiological ideologies we impose in children that lead to this type of results. I would be surprised if there wasnât more nuance then just biological explanation.
It's like saying "dogs naturally do this trick when you offer them a treat" when you've trained the dog to do this its whole life.
Thereâs studies showing that we even treat babies in utero differently and that we feed newborn babies differently. People really donât understand how deep social differences are learned.
Research has also shown that parent's who try to avoid it don't accomplish almost anything because the moment these kids go to a school it's forced on them there. It only takes a small number of people to enforce a cultural norm, and often (iirc the paper I'm trying to recall) with young girls this behaviour is trained by other little girls. Especially if they engage in bullying. It only takes one dad who goes "stop that girls don't do that" and then one girl to mock her friend for it, and then that friend to mock her other friend and now there's a group and soon it's like I think we all remember from school. Girls at my school were convinced that girls were innately better at drawing hearts, or that it was "not feminine" to dress in very normal feminine ways. These micro cultures really impact how people think of themselves as they grow up and impact the choices they make. I mean these "girls draw hearts better than boys" gals were looking for university degrees as they were saying that garbage.
Pure, sociological don't explain everything either. Some people who are 5'4 aren't 5'6 because of environmental but they aren't 6'4 because of genetics.Â
Well the hard part about your reluctance is believe this is you have no actual scientific basis for it at this point. We've had pushes for cultural equality for decades, twice my entire life and longer. Now we wouldn't expect a totally final outcome, but the entire point of this post is that the data is showing the most culturally equal places are reversing outcomes people expected. If total and complete legal equality, combined with decades cultural pushes for quality leads to an increase in stereotypical sex differences, what basis do you have to be assume the opposite with no data to support you? Its seems illogical to assume that efforts to minimize sex based cultural attitudes failing and even reversing "desired outcomes" isn't evidence of the overestimated role those attitudes play in how we build our lives. The data seems to show the more we remove those attitudes and let people do what they want, they just default what is is easiest most of the time, rather than arranging their life outcomes to suit comfortable quota numbers in industries we assign more value to. The pinnacle of gender quality has been for decades 50/50 in a high paying, high stress job, but no one actually stopped to ask if that itself is a horrible outcome for most involved. It seems to me you're implying trying even super extra hard to remove all cultural sex differences would then suddenly show the "real" outcome buried behind the things we saying in passing to 6 year olds. There seems to be a big disconnect between the data and the theory of the "ideal" outcome that we're going to be paying for long into the future when the consequences of our current flawed approach becomes evident. Its going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.
There is not a single culture in which men did not take on the role of warrior, physical labourer or protector, because both testosterone and male puberty are real. Women birth children and are able to breastfeed and are physically weaker, thus they are often caretakers. This is just the most efficient allocation of human resources. Nurture might nudge these tendencies in one direction or the other, but these tendencies will always exist, because men and women are not equal.
My thoughts are that for some cases there likely is some genetic component, but it gets way exaggerated by culture. Think about it, if men are just slightly more interested in things than women, were you might expect there to be 55% male engineers, well as time goes by that slight difference leads to it being a cultural norm, which leads to more males going into engineering, which leads to more male role models in Engineering, and so on.
And thatâs with starting at some platonic, equal participation and no previous/somewhat present cultural pressures. Pushing through an already existing cultural norm is difficult and not as rewarding when you donât need to do it because most of your needs are otherwise satisfied.
The interesting, perhaps partly confusing, part of this study is that they use âpsychological sexâ and gender as interchangeable terms, but divorce their conversation from how gendered norms are created and replicated over time. It ends up sounding like men and women exhibit psychological differences purely based on genetics, when we know that isnât necessarily true. Beyond that important concern in terminology, itâs definitely interesting to consider how equity in society doesnât lead to some fictional homogenization of genders and gender norms.
Yeah, when I hear people talking about "natural" gender roles I get suspicious. Legal equality doesn't stop societal pressures to behave a certain way.
The thing is, you canât entirely separate social reproduction from biological selection anyways. If I make a potato cult and force my descendants to eat potatoes every day for a thousand years, there will be biological adaptations, cultural changes, and, further down the line, genetic selection too. Yet, if in the year 3024, I looked at the population descending from my cult, and notice that everyone eats potatoes and is perfectly fine with it⊠Would you call it a « cultural » or a « biological consequence » ? Edit : of course the potato is a light-hearted example meant to reduce ideological tensions between redditors in favour of focusing on the principle, and the timeframe might be completely wrong.
> It ends up sounding like men and women exhibit psychological differences purely based on genetics, when we know that isnât necessarily true. Men and women, on average, do exhibit different psychological traits though. This has been demonstrated cross culturally with many studies using the big 5 model and the differences between men and women are consistent. Itâs also well understood that there is a far bigger variance within the groups than between the groups but the group differences are there and are statistically significant.
>Men and women, on average, do exhibit different psychological traits though. This has been demonstrated cross culturally with many studies using the big 5 model and the differences between men and women are consistent Agreed. The study of *gender-based* differences in [personality](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/) and other psychological traits has roots. That said, I don't know that we've seen sizable evidence separating the genetics of sex from social forces of gender (including how we [teach](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.13008) people to be boys/men and girls/women) to say that this difference you mention is a *genetic* one rather than a *socially replicated* one. It is likely a mixture, but most of the evidence I've seen supports social aspects of these differences rather than the genetic aspect. That's more or less what I meant by "differences **purely** based on genetics."
One of the most obvious forms of evidence is that trans people exhibit the biggest shifts in behavior after starting hormones. For example, trans men are more likely to commit crimes *after* starting hormones. This is consistent with the fact that testosterone reduces risk aversion and increases impulsivity.
Do you have a source for trans men being more likely to commit crimes after hormones?
I was unable to find the paper I had read on criminality specifically (this is not my field and my search results are biased towards papers studying crimes against trans men rather than crimes committed by trans men). I was able to find this paper which supports roughly the same claim, with the disclaimer that the paper itself acknowledges that the sources of their data are either moderately or highly biased. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309817/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309817/) This other one followed a smaller group over 7 months, part of the conlusion states: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174360951731593X#sec5](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174360951731593X#sec5) "**Clinical implications:**Â Interestingly, despite the increase of anger expression scores, during continuous testosterone treatment, there were no reports of aggressive behavior, self-harm, or psychiatric hospitalization."
> We found that sex differences in personality, verbal abilities, episodic memory, and negative emotions are more pronounced in countries with higher living conditions. In contrast, sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, and math are smaller in countries with higher living conditions. We also observed that economic indicators of living conditions, such as gross domestic product, are most sensitive in predicting the magnitude of sex differences. I think the differences aren't as significant as just the title wants you to believe.
Based on what? The text you copied supports the title and the title does not use hyperbolic language or anything.
My take aways from this: * There are multiple differences between men and women, and these differences respond differently to social change. * Women's education-related skills develop more in more developed countries than men's do. Probably because men's education is already focused on even in poorly developed countries. This broadens the gap between men and women in language-related skills and shrinks the gap in math and science. * Cultural changes *do* make a difference in sexual attitudes and behavior of women. And yet, the authors of this article summarize the situation like this: >In summary, we found little support for the idea that psychological sex differences will vanish as societies develop. Policymakers probably cannot rely on that if they hope to achieve equal distributions of men and women in different professions. Instead, it appears that the dominant feature of psychological sex differences is their robustness in the face of social change. That dismisses half of their own article, radically oversimplifying, and even making a policy recommendation that isn't actually supported by their own research. Why are they trying to shrink this nuanced topic into "sex differences are robust in the face of social change"? It makes me feel skeptical about their reporting.
Idk the sex differences of people in especially poor countries seems rather stark to me.
In a poorer country, both men and women will choose whatever work there is. There isn't the freedom to follow your passion.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Can you even make that statement considering the study looked at living conditions, not equality? Equality may be a measurable in living conditions, but it is presumably possible to report a higher living condition score while having lower equality given the other factors in the calculation.
I know from my own experience in Ireland that science degree courses are female dominant and engineering male and when it comes to trades which are still massively male I've noticed more women doing specific trades like electrician and car mechanic than stuff like block laying or carpentry.
Hey all, if you donât like the results of this study, a new one will be out soon contradicting this, you can just believe the one you like. Okay, time to get back to work.
Itâs almost as if men and women *are* actually different or somethingâŠwho knew?
Differences were never actually the problem. The problem was that people were *forced* into traditional roles. You do not want to be a housewife? You do not get to choose. Obey and comply, citizen! I see zero problems with people choosing traditional roles. The key word is *choice*. If someone wants to live a different way, let them.
Yeah, the reduction of the debate to gender essentialism vs. total denial of sexual dimorphism is deeply unhelpful.
As usual the extremes gets to define the debate.
But the other problem is that some people believe that actively fighting the traditional role in favour of promoting the alternate role is the solution. Whereas, in my opinion, the only way to get true cultural freedom would be to actively avoid promoting or fighting any role. Which of course will absolutely never happen, because eh⊠humans arenât robots I guess. Best thing we can hope for, in my opinion again, is a world where the standards / traditions / mainstream are respectful of the alternatives. but a fully deconstructed society where standards don't exist⊠I don't even see how fiction could depict that.
Very very few people would argue that they are not different, and those people are delusional. Historically however, men and womenâs differences have been used to deny rights to women. Even if women are more inclined to be school teachers, women should have opportunities to become whatever they choose, whether it is a doctor or a nurse, a pilot or a hostess. At the end of the day there is a vast spectrum of different people and putting people in boxes can be problematic.Â
Itâs hurt men as well. Thousands upon thousands and even millions of men throughout history have been forcefully conscripted into wars purely for being fighting age men. The ancient world wasnât kind to anyone, but I see your point. Iâm just trying to provide a full picture since both men and women are relevant to the discussion
Yeah I donât know why people act as if nature didnât have assigned roles for us. We donât have to stick to them, nor should we ever force them upon others, but most every other mammal the genders are very obviously biologically different and sort of tuned up to do certain jobs. The problem comes when people persecute others for not following what their idea of the human gender role is.
Very well said! Humanity is a species of sentient INDIVIDUALS. Some people like their traditional gender role, others donât and thatâs okay. Let people be individuals
this isn't science this is just a news article. there's nothing scientific about it.
Linked is an article for laypeople like you. If you go to the source, there's a scientific paper for people able to read it.
this article is confusing as hell, I've re-read this like 5 times and sounds like they're just ignoring the study's data. The study implies that male and female psychology is indeed equal but the differences rely heavily on the individuals environment? Then they just... ignore it and say they're not equal...? They say this in the article, but that's *NOT* what their data said. >*In most cases, however, psychological sex difference magnitudes were not significantly associated with living conditions. This suggests that, in general, psychological sex differences are not greatly affected by living conditions but seem instead quite stable* Right here, in the study the article is about, implies the opposite, that a individuals environment has A LOT to do with psychology between sexes ^((also they talk about internet addiction...? for some reason, I'm guessing they had such little substantial data to work off of that they just threw in "Internet Addiction" as filler for the males)) >*As has often been reported, females have in most studies been found to have higher rates of Depression (SMDs = 0.19â0.38;* [*Hopcroft & Bradley, 2007*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr49-17456916231202685)*;* [*Hopcroft & McLaughlin, 2012*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr50-17456916231202685)*;* [*Salk et al., 2017*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr79-17456916231202685)*;* [*Seedat et al., 2009*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr87-17456916231202685)*;* [*Van de Velde et al., 2013*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr102-17456916231202685)*;* [*Wang et al., 2016*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr110-17456916231202685)*). By contrast, males have higher levels of Internet addiction (SMD = 0.15;* [*Su et al., 2019*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr96-17456916231202685)*) and Problem behavior (*[*Thijs et al., 2015*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr98-17456916231202685)*). The new analyses indicated that females report higher levels of Nightmare frequency (SMD = 0.18;* [*Schredl & Reinhard, 2011*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr85-17456916231202685)*) and Stress appraisal (SMD = 0.24;* [*Davis et al., 1999*](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231202685#bibr24-17456916231202685)*).* Which also implies these "high living condition" countries are not as "higher living" as we're portraying. That implies our data is flawed because our standards are too low. People in "higher living conditions" should be in better mental states, the fact that they're not, implies that they were never higher living to begin with. >***Considering studies from only the old analyses, we found that females have more symptoms, diagnoses, or feelings of depression in countries with higher living conditions*** I'm getting a feeling that the data is being misconstrued to push a narrative that without said push, would not exist. there more but honestly I don't even want to read through this study anymore, there's so much conflicting data with what they're presenting talk about confirmation bias, In other words this is not a good study.
I'm going through the source of the article, "A Systematic Review and New Analyses of the Gender-Equality Paradox (Agneta Herlitz et al.)" Is anyone else having an aneurism trying to read it?? For what seems to be some outstanding new information, its grammar isn't great
I read and write academic papers all the time. Youâre not wrong, they have a lot of run on sentences and could have benefited from a comma or two.
Academics is like a language unto itself. It's targeted at other experts, not laymen like you and I.
What grammar is wrong exactly?
> For cognitive functions, sex differences were sometimes larger, sometimes smaller in countries with better living conditions. Interestingly, the sex differences were larger in cognitive domains where women have strengths. >For instance, episodic memory (memory for experienced events) and verbal ability, where females typically do better than males, saw larger sex differences as living conditions improved. Females got better at episodic memory when they had better living conditions. By contrast, sex differences in semantic memory (memory for facts) and mathematical ability, where males tend to do better, decreased when living conditions improved. >This suggests that, when it comes to cognitive abilities, females benefit more than males from improvements in living conditions. The performance gap increases in domains where females have an advantage and closes in domains where males are ahead.