I would take it further and say the whole debate requires one to ignore the fundamental differences between male and female to even arrive at most of these discussions.

You say that as though there is some kind of settled scientific understanding of the "fundamental differences" between male and female personalities, or a certainty about whether such differences even exist outside the context of culture.

Of course one has to ignore the folk beliefs one's culture holds about gender if one is going to have any sort of a productive, scientific conversation - otherwise you are just rephrasing the same crap your parents learned from their grandparents, which is about as scientific as bloodletting or astrology.

No, I said that as if I'm capable of a dissenting opinion. When men grow boobs to nurse babies and men can naturally incubate babies, I'll start looking deeper into the issue.

Hell, I'm willing to even look past those two. You just let me know when everyone suddenly turns bi-sexual. Until then, the differences are right in front, naturally occurring.

You are describing differences of physical structure. We had been discussing features of temperament and cognition, attributes like "nurturing", "risk-averse", "emotionally expressive", "competitive", "risk-taking", "emotionally flat".

It is an entirely unsettled question as to what degree these mental characteristics are correlated with physical sexual differences, and to what degree any such correlation derives from cultural influences; that is the whole point of this thread.

I've yet to encounter a software house where birthing or nursing babies formed any part of anyone's job description...