And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this way. People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.
1) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal opportunity: Bad
2) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal societal expectations: Bad
3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities.
4) Gender-biased job preference due solely to genetically determined traits and inherent job qualities. Ok. (I don't think this exists much as most traits that impact job preference have a significant emergent/environmental components).
I think our "hyper-PC" society agrees with me on 1) and 2) and possibly 4).
I think most of the disagreement happens around 3). Is 3) ever OK? How do we tell if society if sufficiently equal for 3) to be Ok?
My personal stance is that it doesn't make sense to argue that 3) is ok until we have done a much better job of eliminating 1) and 2).
edit: layout/typo
Isn't expecting "gender-equal expectations and opportunities" strange if you agree with "Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits"?
Why would culture expect a tall thin person and a short muscular person to be equally good at basketball and weightlifting?
On the other hand - I also find it hard to believe that the only difference between the sexes is the body build. Based on my engineers' mindset it would quite surprise me if two bodies which look and work different were wired totally alike. Though this line of thought is quite out of fashion.
I often see a preference in particular young adults that pick summer jobs or education based on where they can find co-students/workers that has the same gender, age, color, economical status, and life experience as they. Is this Bad, and if so, how do we eliminate that feeling of familiarity and safety that such choice brings?
There is a yearly study in Sweden that polls peoples priority when looking for job. Highest on the list is often the social environment and co-workers, and the pay (ie, the rational argument for picking a job) is often far low on the list.
The validity of that statement is highly location dependent.
Why does everybody swallow the feminist narrative that it is a horrible chore to spend time with children? Note that feminism depends on that evaluation, otherwise a lot of their complaints evaporate.
As I said in another comment, if you don't like spending time with children, you could simply opt not to have one. How do feminists explain that people have kids who they then supposedly hate to take care of? (Of course, it has to be socialization, it never occurs to women that they have a choice because the patriarchy has brainwashed them...Sure thing)
FTFY.
I know just by staying at home you are not free of all worries. But for the time being, your responsibility is not worrying about earning a livelihood.
others perceive racism/sexism everywhere and only read that the 95 percentile and unweighted pays are different.
We can get off the political topic and start with other axioms as well. IE some believe more women need to be involved in tech, while others want less competition in their respective field (lower vs higher salary).
Yes, of course. Really, for all the talk about convoluted biases clouding people's decision-making, it's pretty telling that most of the time, they don't even manage to get past the basic challenge of actually letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion.
The answer to "is it society or biology" is both. And it will always be both, because you can't change biology and you can't "balance" society without being able to disentangle biology, and disentangling biology from society would violate both causality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Even measuring how much of each it is has the same problem.
People want to say we just need better evidence. We just need to measure it better or be more diligent or think about it more carefully. But it isn't that. It's that the problem is NP-complete and n is large. It may even be incomputable because some of the necessary information was lost to history and not knowable.
Which is why it's a political football. People choose their team and see how far they can run with the ball, because the score isn't based on science or math.
For your first question, I always think the key is choice and support for people who make choices that are counter to the norm. Sure, it might be that when given a choice free of social pressures, more women might still choose to be the primary caregiver for children than men will.
That is fine, and women and men who make that socially traditional choice should be supported and not judged. The key, however, is to make sure we also support and don't judge the people who choose other arrangements for child caregiving. We should not design laws and social conventions that punish those who choose to go against the norm.
I don't know... maybe this is all moot if we're still working through the "simpler" stuff like balancing laws and getting rid of stereotypes.
Nowadays, I see tens of young girls joining local raspberry jams for fun in the UK. My friend's daughters are playing with electrical circuits and installing switch&lamp circuit between beds to chat in Morse code. And none of this comes from pushing for forced equality-in-numbers. This is just kids getting excited about stuff, because nobody is stopping them.
I think the stereotypes played a big part for a long time and we'll see a slow rebalancing of candidates' genders. I think (and hope) the situation will be very much different in ~15 years when current kids finish universities. But I don't believe much active support can change anything for near-future graduates.
So.. either parent who care gives can get the same leave for that caregiving. Basically, do not write gender specific laws. Write laws based on parenting role, and it can apply to either gender who takes on that role.
I don't think we can try to fix the market demand for the various roles, but we can certainly fix the legal discrepancies.
The emotional support is impossible to legislate, but I think as a society we should not judge negatively men who decide to be the primary child care provider nor judge women who decide to be the breadwinner (although in most families, both parents need to be both... I am a big proponent of day care)
That's this part of your comment: "emotional support", "accepting of other's identity", "taxing some roles and subsidizing others", "undesirable roles". Those all come out of stereotypes.
Either way, the net effect is a diminished supply of labor relative to the varied demand. By contrast, women seek jobs that often are chock full of other women, creating an increased supply of labor and lower relative wages.
Sometimes I think about how little teachers get paid and wonder why I know so many women going in to that knowing the poor pay in advance.
Men and women (on average) have different hormone levels, and those hormones do effect our emotions and our choices.
If not hormonal, how do you explain the emotional changes in post-partum depression, menopause, pregnancy, 'roid rage, sympathetic pregancy...?
If you take a number of people with different aggressiveness (or as most studies do, look at chimps with picking orders), and you find no correlation with hormone. Add 5% more hormone, and you don't get 5% behavior. Pump in larger amount of hormone, and you see exaggeration of existing behavior. Remove all hormone, and you see a decrease behavior, but the behavior doesn't go away. Its regulative.
post-partum depression, menopause, and pregnancy all cause major changes in a person. Hormone levels, since its regulative, also change with those changes. There were for example a study at women with abnormal amount of testosterone (but within the limit of naturally occurring in humans). The first studies from 1970 showed how there was increased crime, increase aggressiveness, changes in sexuality, emotions, and the ability to keep maintain a job. When people tried to reproduce those studies, everything was shown to be false.
To simplify, do you know of any scientific or medical sources that say "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion" as you claimed earlier?
"Normal estrogen levels vary widely. Large differences are typical in a woman on different days, or between two women on the same day of their cycles. The actual measured level of estrogen doesn't predict emotional disturbances.". (webmd article. not a authoritative but useful as a general summery)
"However, estrogen is not simply a natural "physiological protectant". Some have reported that estrogen administration does not improve mood and even causes fear and anxiety. Therefore, the impact of estrogen on emotion varies and may depend on the individual's current state and the situation. The authors believe that hormones do not exert an absolute and singular effect on the body." (Estrogen Impacts on Emotion: Psychological, Neuroscience and Endocrine Studies)
As an example estrogen effect, it regulated how easy memories of arousals are formed, which also adrenaline happens to do. Both do this for rather logical reasons, ie, to increase or decrease the chance of a similar event to happen again. This can then have an effect of the perception of fearful faces, although the study on mice from 2006 (Jasnow et al) doesn't really give a definitive number on how big impact that has on female mice total emotional state. It is also reported that this effect the perception of pain and the memory of having pain.
"The testosterone increment was associated with detectable but minor mood changes ... Future research should investigate the implications of these minor mood changes."(Effects of Testosterone on Mood, Aggression, and Sexual Behavior in Young Men: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Study)
I will stop here. People like to blame hormones and hormone levels to excuse someones behavior. The data I have seen is quite clear the effect is regulative and thus you don't get an cause-and-effect.
And those quotes are not quite "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion".
"the impact of estrogen on emotion varies"
And another quote from the study you quoted (Effects of testosterone on mood, aggression, and sexual behavior in young men: a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over study):
"Increased circulating T was associated with significant increases in anger-hostility from baseline (mean score = 7.48) to wk 2 (mean score = 10.71)"
7.48 to 10.71 doesn't seem like a very minimal change.
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Since you quoted WebMD (perhaps a useful summary) I will as well:
"It's clear that estrogen is closely linked with women's emotional well-being. Depression and anxiety affect women in their estrogen-producing years more often than men or postmenopausal women. Estrogen is also linked to mood disruptions that occur only in women -- premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and postpartum depression."
And from another article:
"Declining estrogen levels associated with menopause can cause more than those pesky hot flashes. They can also make a woman feel like she is in a constant state of PMS (premenstrual syndrome). Unfortunately, these emotional changes are a normal part of menopause."
"Some of the emotional changes experienced by women undergoing perimenopause or menopause can include: Irritability, Feelings of sadness, Lack of motivation, Anxiety, Aggressiveness, Difficulty concentrating, Fatigue, Mood changes, and Tension."
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Perhaps we can agree.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by regulative, but I agree that emotions are complicated and hormones are not the only influence, nor is the relationship a simple cause and effect.
On the other hand, there's significant evidence that hormones do effect emotion, including perhaps the most striking example which I somehow forgot earlier: puberty. And their prenatal effect on the structure of the brain.
Would you agree hormones do effect emotions, but aren't the only factor, and the relationship is complicated, unpredictable, and varies between individuals?
By regulative I mean that in order to see a major effect, you already need to have a major state. A person with no aggression is not going to get aggressive based on testosterone. A person that is already aggressive will have that aggression regulated if one artificially increasing the circulating testosterone, most often by exaggerating the aggression in a context aware way. For example, a person who has a tendency for road rage won't be more likely to shoot someone, but they might honk the horn more or yell more loudly. Regulative effects don't cause things to happen, but rather modulate what already exist.
Puberty and pregnancy has an other thing in common, in that it both cause changes in the persons neurons. Its speculated the reason that a womans body during pregnancy do this is in order to make it easier form memories and bond with the newborn baby. Its been suggested that some typical pregnancy behaviors is thus a result of those changes to the neurons. I would strongly suspect that hormone levels have a regulative role in facilitating the rate of the changes, but I doubt if measuring the hormone level would be a predictor for how much of a change actually happened.
To bring out an analogy, taxes has an regulative effect on wealth, but its a not a predictor for it. If I selected random individuals over the world and only looked at where they live and how much percent that they pay in taxes, it will tell me nothing about who is rich and who is poor. I have a better time looking at living expensive and food prices, but even that is a poor method to predict how much wealth someone has. I would thus not describe taxes as having a significant effect on wealth, and that wealth per adult is the result of a complex system.
I think you may mean (and if this is the case I generally agree) that when hormones trigger behaviors such as road rage, those behaviors have already been learned. Likewise, testosterone is unlikely to cause someone to shoot another driver because significant inhibitions against that behavior have been learned.
But hormones have an effect even in early childhood and before birth, when no behaviors have been learned yet. Prenatal hormones affect brain structure, and studies have found a link between hormones in children as young as 3 months and their choice of toys.[1]
[1] http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks...
Gender, to the degree that gender is not about culture, is quite far down the list of predictors, and even further down on the list would be hormones.
"Steroid hormones are a dominant and pervasive source of sex differences by mediating developmental processes that are enduring and establish adult physiological and behavioural responses relevant to the reproductive constraints of each sex."
From Multifaceted origins of sex differences in the brain, 1 February 2016, an open access article.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1688/2015...
"Animal models have also allowed us to move beyond hormones and to an appreciation of the important role of sex chromosomes. Study of these mice has revealed important roles for chromosome complement on body weight and feeding, aggression and habit formation, to name a few."
And section 8: "Some argue it is pure folly to study neuroanatomical sex differences with the hope of understanding sex differences in behaviour as the connection between anatomy and behaviour is often weak or even non-existent [50]. Indeed, the most celebrated sex difference in the brain, the SDN, has not been clearly tied to any specific behavioural or physiological endpoint, although see above discussion regarding sexual orientation. While it is true that anatomical or physiological differences in the brain often do not map onto clear differences in behaviour, does this mean they are not important or even, not real? Many studies of sex differences in brain anatomy or neural functioning are perfectly sound, meaning they are fully powered and technically executed using well vetted and accepted approaches, yet a strong correlation between variance in anatomy and variance in behaviour is about the best one can hope for in establishing a causal relationship."
Regarding behavior, and specifically the SDN, consider, for example:
The volume of a sexually dimorphic nucleus in the ovine medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus varies with sexual partner preference. Endocrinology. 2004
"In addition to a sex difference, we found that the volume of the oSDN was two times greater in female-oriented rams than in male-oriented rams."
Wired on steroids: sexual differentiation of the brain and its role in the expression of sexual partner preferences. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2011
"Development of female-directed partner preference in the male is dependent on exposure of the developing brain to gonadal steroids synthesized during critical periods of sexual differentiation of the central nervous system"
The development of male-oriented behavior in rams. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2011
"Although our understanding of the biological determinants and underlying neural substrates of sexual attraction and mate selection are far from complete, compelling evidence is discussed that supports the idea that neural substrates regulating sexual partner preferences are organized during prenatal development"
If so, science has progressed quite far in the last few years that I've been away.
Basically, there's no gene for being a programmer just as there's no gene for being a (good/bad) parent. Why would Nature bother to pre-compute/compile all possible states/outcomes? Better to compute/compile the essentials for a living species then let the rest be handled by history.
Ah so evolution stops at the neck! Genius!
The more you know...
I don't know the answer, but merely asking the question as losteric did is not sexist.
For that, you would need to hire teachers, who would have to re-educate themselves out of being teachers, first. ;)
Although that solution may be roughly on the scale of "ultimately, the great heat death of the universe will make the problem moot."
What if we see basket weaving dominated by women and ham baking dominated by men? Is it free choice? Genetics? Physiological? Cultural?
What about the indirect imbalances resulting from the choice of work, like one role creating a reusable tool and one creating a consumable resource?
My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far society's responsibilities extend.
What happens when a particular group innately prefers a certain type of work that the market values lowly? Are they irrational agents suffering by their own hands? Should society subsidize their job? Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? What about other people that have the same job for different reasons?