| It's very plausible that older generations are much more sexist in certain ways. For example, Feynman getting the nearest "girl" to fetch his soup. http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-mac... There is also the issue of having children. One article I read ascribed a great deal of disparity at the top simply to time: If you take time off from your career to raise children, you have thousands fewer hours to devote to your profession. Even if the male partner is willing and able to do the child-rearing, it doesn't follow that the female partner will therefore abdicate. Assuming reproductive opportunities as a major driver of behavior, professional success leading to increased social status is a far larger differentiator in males. People are lazy and if they don't have to try hard in a certain category, they generally won't. This says nothing about males being smarter; simply that they try harder because they have to in order to get laid. (Or think they do.) This is somewhat akin to an evolutionary arms race with predators and prey getting better each generation because their counterpart was better in a previous generation. If a guy is a gamer, so what; everyone knows guys who are gamers. If a guy is a scientist, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. If a guy makes $100k a year, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. You have to do even better in order to stand out. (Note the attention you'd get, however, if you were a female in any of these categories.) Likewise, nobody is surprised when Grandma can cook, to take a traditional gender example. But a guy who can cook like Grandma? Now that stands out. So to some extent it doesn't even matter which gender did which thing -- divvied up randomly, whichever category is overrepresented may start a self-feeding evolutionary cycle within that category. This could mean that something which was purely social ends up leading to a genetic difference. For example, male 3D spatial relation ability. By the same token, I would expect female lions to be better at this than male lions! By contrast, there is nothing about a female being predisposed to be a good scientist which would make you stand out as a good mate in, say, Saudi Arabia. And it could be downright dangerous in Afghanistan under the Taliban. If your abilities aren't recognized as a positive then they won't result in positive selection pressure. All it takes is selection pressure and you eventually get a noticeable genetic difference. Social differences are a huge selection pressure, so it would be astounding if there WEREN'T genetic gender differences in aptitude for certain subjects. Hmm, I think I just shot down the political correctness lobby by working from first principles. |