These aren't trucks and dolls though. It's a pretty big leap from "female monkey babies prefer anthropomorphic toys" to "adult women are biologically predisposed to a deeper understanding of textiles." A cultural explanation is much more parsimonious.
I think the point is that a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology and nearly all is at least influenced by biology.
The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where women are in charge of the engineering/construction and to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that there's something deep within our psyche which drives these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them though.
If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying.
> a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology
That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that.
Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.
I'd settle for any society where women built the huts. Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes to mind.
Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.
> I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way.
So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.
But you have to ask why men step up to take the dangerous jobs? We didn't sit down and have a Socratic discussion about who takes which job. I posit that it's more than merely logic, that the motivations are rooted in our intuition.
It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women.
Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do.
Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often.
There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.
There are significant behavioural differences between the sexes in basically every animal. Even among mice the males are more inquisitive and take more risks than the females, so you find many more males than females in traps etc. Female animals tend to care much more about children. There is no reason to believe that humans evolved past this and all our differences are just us planning it out rationally.
> If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine.
I think this is motivated reasoning. From what I can tell, the "grilling is manly" thing started in the '50s (well after cooking stopped being dangerous) and is mostly limited to the United States (instead of being universal, as we would expect with something biologically-motivated). And what's the difference between frying, roasting, and grilling? All involve using a gas-operated cooking device to cook meat (assuming you own a gas stove); they're all equally safe.
Not only does this strike me as being cultural, this strikes me as obviously cultural. And yet you dismiss that out of hand and go looking for a biological explanation ("grilling is extra dangerous") that doesn't really line up with the facts of the example. So it seems to me that you're engaging in motivated reasoning — assuming that masculinity can't be a product of culture, reaching for biological explanations even when they don't really make sense.
FWIW, as an amateur historian I did a high-level talk on the history of barbecue, especially as it relates to the grilling styles found in California (popularized as "Santa Maria BBQ"). Long story short, men were running the pits not only in the 1950s, but also the 1850s, 1750s, 1650s, etc. Why? It might have been because meat was the product of the hunt. It might have been because running a barbecue could mean many hours of hot, smoky, dirty work that often involved physically strenuous activity. For quite a lot of American history, barbecues were often conducted for large numbers of guests and may have started the day before with transporting fuel, digging a trench, pre-heating the trench overnight, processing one's pigs, mutton, poultry, beef, or what have you, making your coals and keeping the supply up throughout the cook, etc. Also, the cuts of meat used were often far larger/heavier than we're used to — the original Santa Maria Barbecue cooks used top blocks of beef and similarly large cuts, not itty bitty tri-tips.
Famed barbecue "masters" were universally men, though if everyone is being honest much of the hard work at many large barbecues (with hundreds of guests) was actually performed by black men (or Californios, or what have you depending upon the location). Large barbecues were generally tied to political efforts or organizations, festivals, and the like. During the Depression there were large government-subsidized barbecues so everyone could get some meat in their bellies and enjoy one another's company during those tough times, and there again we see men and women typically taking on disparate roles in the cooking process.
Contemporary accounts of the barbecues of years past generally have women inside doing not easier work, but different work. Making pies, side dishes, baking, etc. Even the pre-Columbian/Spanish Chumash tended to split their work pretty strictly, with women doing things like grinding acorn flour in bedrock mortars with the kids, while the men fished, hunted, gathered shellfish, etc. Contemporary drawings of various indigenous peoples show them smoking/grilling fish and iguana, but again everyone in the images are male. I confess I don't firmly know what kind of sex differences existed in the roles played in the cooking American slaves did for one another, something I really should remedy, but when it came to big gatherings the differences were apparent and as I wrote above.
I can't really speak to causality, but in terms of time scale the M-F patterns seem to substantially pre-date the 1950s.
Oh, and fun fact: the offset smoker was invented in Texas in the 1970s. That little factoid seems to blow people's minds...
The discussion here is: what parts of culture are motivated by biology? It's obviously cultural. But what is motivating the culture?
Also interesting to me that grilling is manly started in the 50's. That seems to be about the time that household appliances like microwave were getting popular, no? Maybe men who liked to cook needed to find a manly outlet.
> Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields
The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes.
Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
>> "If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying."
It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and research on the topic. Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12 education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes about how different gender assignments cope with adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).
1) I think it's worth removing all gender-based forms of adversity from every field. These do exist in STEM fields in the forms of biases and microaggressions. It's not evil - it's human. It's just what naturally happens when a field is dominated by one group and our minds forms patterns. We must always take a conscious effort to combat it.
2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can change that. Only after understanding what it would take should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having more diversity in perspectives - just like every species benefits from having diversity in traits.
> Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted.
That doesn't explain why countries where women are more free to pursue what they want have fewer women in STEM. For example, in Iran and Saudi Arabia more women earn science degrees than men.
Computing back then was more like typing numbers into machines rather than writing software. It's akin to typewriting jobs which were also dominated by women.
yes. but perhaps more apropos I am old enough to have met some of the women programmers (not calculators) from the earlier generation when I started in the 80s. its completely anecdotal, and you may attribute this to many factors, but the likelihood that someone I met was more competent, informed, and/or more clever than I was greater for females than males.
Well it's not about who is more clever. I think the research shows that its pretty even between men and women after all is said and done. It's about what naturally interests us and there are differences there.
maybe. I just have seen a time when it wasn't unusual to see a highly-regarded and competent woman in software. not that they were the majority. so I'm alot less inclined to just accept that there are important genetic differences that inherently make women less suitable for that kind of work.
maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof
My grandmother was a programmer working at a university, so I know. Nobody here said women aren't suited for that type of work. It is just that when video games became mainstream in the 80's you saw an avalanche of boys wanting to learn to program, and ever since then the field has skewed heavily male, like most other engineering fields where you build things that moves. My grandmother might have been a programmer, but she was never interested in computers as a hobby, it was just work to her.
Note that the number of women entering the field didn't decrease, it was just the number of men increasing so much.
Interesting. Maybe it's video games. This was true for me. If that's the case, we might see a surge of female programmers since more women become gamers than before.
There are other differentiating factors there that could lead to the preference choice that are not related to whether something is mechanical in nature. Things like color, texture, etc. have been shown to have strong biases between the sexes.
A possible control they did not employ during the study would be to have a series of toys that were identical in all ways except color, for example.
Also *very* worth noting:
As shown in their Fig. 1, when play time with toys is examined in human children (Berenbaum and Hines,1992) and rhesus macaques of all ages, males spend significantly more of their play time with the “male” toy(s) than with the female toy(s), while females spend about equal times with “male” and “female” toys. This is true both for frequency of interactions and in time spent playing (Hassett et al., 2008). **Therefore, one key difference between males and females in these studies is that males actually show a toy preference while females do not!**
Small clarification: the feminine-analogous toys used in the original (Hasset, 2008 [1]) study were plush rather than the more common plastic dolls sold to children. Although the difference may or may not be minor, it does remind me of the famous Harlow monkey experiment where monkeys showed a preference for the soft “mother” figure over the biologically sustenance “mother” figure.
Edit: Another commenter has already perpetuated this very misunderstanding it seems. Out of the Hasset female-coded toys, only one (a Raggedy Ann doll) was “anthropomorphic.” All six others were animals.
Its HN so you never know with things like this, but i think it was a joke meant to emphasize the ridiculousness of the argument that women are genetically predisposed to liking fabric craft.
GP is obviously not saying that. He's saying that sex chromosomes cause differences between men and women which also manifest in different preferences which cause a small gap in knowledge between the sexes.
Even baby male monkeys prefer to play with trucks while baby female monkeys prefer to play with dolls.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755553/