by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-30 17:36:06+00:00
> This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).

It's certainly possible that particular study had limitations or was otherwise bad. This is a hard thing to study rigorously. My understanding wasn't that the primates were choosing toys based on gender association in (some) human societies, it's that they were playing with the same physical objects in gendered ways. And this is consistent with the anecdotal observation about human children I've heard from many parents that girls like to play with any toy as if it is a doll whereas boys like to play with any toy as if it is a tool or a gun; girls being given toy cars and then tucking them into a toy bed as if they were a doll, etc.

> What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.

I don't think I would claim that women are innately worse at engineering (and I think that "engineering" is a broad enough field with enough subspecializations that it's difficult to judge engineering skill in a way that is both objective and useful). I'd claim that women are systematically less interested in the kinds of highly technical systems-focused work we associate with fields like software engineering. In other words, I think that both men and women can be taught to program a computer and do software engineering, but that men (really AMAB people, I think transwomen pattern like cis men in this respect) are much more likely to be deeply interested in programming computers and voluntarily spend a lot of time doing it to the exclusion of other things, which eventually caches out in programming as a whole being a very male-skewed field.

I think the lower gender gap in the Soviet Union and other mid-20th-century Communist states is explained by exactly what you said, explicit social and political pressure for gender equality. I also suspect that even in the Soviet system, there might have been more equal numbers of men and women doing STEM work or programming work specifically, but (at least as far as computer programming goes), males were systematically more intrinsically interested in and energized by the actual programming, whereas the women were more likely to just be doing their jobs and feeling like they would rather be spending their time doing something else. The Soviet system was in any case characterized by a large amount of state control over how people worked, in ways we generally find authoritarian today, and it's not a model I would like to see modern US employment policy follow.

> When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.

I agree that these are interesting and complex questions that cognitive scientists should attempt to study to the best of their ability. I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.