[Singletoned]

I'm quite suspicious about your statement that your side is supported by "such a huge body of evidence", whereas "the other side base their arguments on [...] a gut feeling".

I think from that we can safely assume that you (at best) massively overstate your position and massively understate your opponents.

[leereeves]

I agree, particularly when pron claims that history is part of the huge body of evidence against gender biases.

pron, what is the evidence from history against traditional gender biases?

[pron]

Why, that many of those biases disappeared completely after a social struggle. And I don't mean disappeared from the lawbooks, but from the minds of most individuals.

One notable example is the struggle for women's suffrage. For a long time it was a wide-held belief that women shouldn't vote because they lacked the mental state of mind for making decisions in matters of state. Then, after that idea slowly faded, other excuses were given from preserving tradition to encouraging women to stay at home because that's what's best for the children.

Other notable examples are women education, and especially allowing women to become doctors and lawyers (both medieval professions or earlier) only in the late 19th or early 20th century. It was obvious to everyone that women simply did not have the mental faculties required.

Yet, all of that has thankfully changed, society is better for it, and very few people still believe that women are unfit to vote or to be lawyers or physicians.

[leereeves]

And yet through all of that, some gender differences have remained.

History is open to interpretation. I actually see what you mentioned as evidence against your position.

It's clear that people were able to overcome pervasive biases far more extreme than our current biases.

And yet some argue that implicit biases are responsible for the remaining differences.

History shows that bias can be overcome even when overt and widespread. The intractability of the remaining differences in a nation where bias is widely opposed suggests a cause stronger than bias.

[pron]

> some gender differences have remained.

That just like saying that the fact there are a lot of things science has no answer for shows that those things can never be understood.

> some argue

Nobody who has studied the subject argues that, at least not regarding differences that greatly effect the change in the power distribution.

> The intractability of the remaining differences in a nation where bias is widely opposed suggests a cause stronger than bias.

No intractability. The struggle simply started with the big stuff, and now moves on. The pace of change hasn't slowed. History shows that anything that women or minorities struggled for, they eventually got and old entrenched biases dissipated.

[leereeves]

> History shows that anything that women or minorities struggled for, they eventually got and old entrenched biases dissipated.

Absolutely. The differences between genders have far more to do with preferences than with abilities.

Women can have anything they choose, and, in aggregate, they choose different things than men.

[pron]

The thing that really annoys me about a comment like this is that it completely ignores decades of research about why women choose what they choose. It also completely ignores decades of research about how anyone chooses anything.

It, like, lacks all hint of intellectual curiosity. It's like saying, "well, an electron behaves this way and a photon behaves that way because that's the way things are, and I'm done. Why is it behaving that way? I don't know and I don't care." And then I say, "but, you know, some smart people have actually studied this and have some interesting findings", and you say like, "meh, that's probably bad science because I've heard those stories about scientists fabricating data, so I'm not even going to look at this". Now, all of this would have been fine if people with no curiosity and no knowledge wouldn't have an opinion on the matter, but like I said, we have two sides where one has spent decades studying the subject in lots of disciplines, and the other is like "la la la, I don't want to hear, you're wrong".

The saddest part is that we even know why the other side behaves like this (it's the superposition of a bunch of well-known psychological phenomena), but are not allowed to say because that just makes them angrier.