It could be the case that in societies where women aren’t arbitrarily discriminated against they seek greater engagement with the careers gender socialisation attract them to ie “women are better actualised as women in societies where female success isn’t artificially stifled by glass ceilings”.
A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their potential.
My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that “Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.
>“Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.
There is widespread scientific (note: among _scientists_) consensus that this is not correct. Talk to an endocrinologist or a behavioral geneticist, or an economist, or a psychologist...
As it turns out, sex differences in psychology are the biggest effects we measure. We also see concomitant differences in other species, both closely related and not. And there is every reason to expect evolution has designed us to have innate differences by sex. The tablua rasa stuff is wrong.
Ideas like the one your innner feminist wants to believe were popularized by non-scientists (don't confuse scientists with "academics"), and they were easy to make popular because they're what cliques around those academics wanted to believe. But all the evidence is against it, that's just no how nature works.
I’m prepared to believe that those differences exist wrt reproductive role ie that humans have some sexed instincts around mating and child care, but, as per what right-thinking people believe about about race and intelligence / personality / emotionality (viz ‘races’ don’t actually have different characters or abilities) I don’t think the sexes are fundamentally different mentally.
It used to be the case until fairly recently (my lifetime) that “women are suited to be nurses, and men to be doctors” but no-one believes that kind of thing now. It should be possible to culturally evolve past expectations of significant psychological differences between men and women, just as we have between white and other races.
(There’s a discussion to be had about the value of preserving cultural differences between groups, particularly at the expense of individuals within those groups, but it’s a massive can of worms)
Lots of it boils down to risk. For sexual/reproductive reasons, men are more prone to risk - both behaviourally and generically. Evolution doesn't tend to favour risk-taking in the sex that carries and rears offspring. The number of women (not men) in a group is also the bottleneck to the group's ability to reproduce/recover population. Males are more fundamentally disposable, and have developed traits to fit into this niche. We have just about all of this in common with our closest ape relatives. I'm no researcher, but I've found the work of Frans de Waal and other primatologists enlightening.
A couple hairs to split: I wouldn't say more "prone to risk", I'd say they have different risk preferences. It's not like one or the other attitude towards risk is better or worse, they're just more or less adaptive given a certain environment.
I also wouldn't say men are disposable, as the story you tell at the group level is weak selection compared to at the individual level, but the gist is correct. Another way to look at it is: it's possible for males to win the genetic lottery, but impossible for females. The most reproductively successful men have had thousands of children, but women are limited to ~13 max. The upshot is that men have evolved to prefer risk more than women because the ceiling on payoffs is very high (i.e., you could get really rich, have lots of kids, multiple wives, tons of cattle), but for women the benefits of those huge lottery-winnings payoffs are much smaller in comparison to the costs (because you can only have 13 kids, and only slowly).
In my head, this is the explanation for ~80% of the differences in behavior by sex.
A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their potential.
My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that “Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.