[dahart]

> If the difference is mainly caused by the genders having different statistical distributions of interests, you're actually using discrimination to fight peoples career choices.

Conversely, if genders don't have a different intrinsic, permanent distributions of interests, then not using some affirmative action to correct the situation amounts to preserving the status quo of known cultural discrimination.

The problem with what you said is that we already have data, the distributions of interest have changed dramatically over time recently, and they are currently different from country to country.

That's pretty clear, hard evidence that the gender differences in occupation choice we have today in the US (for example) are not intrinsic to the genders. So, what does that leave as possible causes?

[BurningFrog]

At most, it's evidence that intrinsic interest is not the only factor in career choice.

The most fascinating fact here is that the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!

It's easy to interpret that as when you're rich enough to pick the career that actually interests you, rather than the career most likely to keep starvation at bay, people follow their interests more.

[dahart]

What evidence is there that there is any intrinsic difference in interest?

> the more rich and gender equal societies become, career choices end up more "gender stereotypical"!

What if gender stereotypical career choices is an indicator that our society is not gender equal, and that we're patting ourselves on the back prematurely?

BTW, not really true that there's a correlation between gender equality metrics and stereotypical career choices. To come to that conclusion, you have to ignore some periods of time and ignore some countries in the world.

[BurningFrog]

There is a huge amount of evidence that women and men are different statistically. That is, anyone can have any interest or personality trait, but on average the genders have separate distributions.

This is very controversial among political activists, but established fact in the relevant sciences.

Pinker's "The Blank Slate" is a good introduction.

[dahart]

I think that response is dodging the question and being very hand-wavy.

I didn't ask if the distributions are different. They are different, that's a fact we know, and what many people believe is the problem.

The question is, what evidence is there that the differences are intrinsic? For that, there's very little evidence in favor and strong evidence against. Specifically, the differences in the distributions of preferences among women over time and country by country are larger than today's differences between men and women in the US. That's pretty solid evidence that the distributions are cultural and not intrinsic to gender.

If those distribution differences were constant over a long time, say a thousand years, and constant globally, then your argument might have a leg to stand on.

[BurningFrog]

Those are quite obvious things to control for, and it's not a good bet that the collective of world scientists never thought of them.

The established way to classify people's personality traits is the "Big Five"/OCEAN model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Systematic gender differences show up across all cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...

[dahart]

If they’ve been controlled for, then point me to some data demonstrating it. If they have been controlled for, doesn’t the fact that some places in the world have greater than 50/50 female participation in STEM mean that the controlled data is nearly certain to show there is negligible or no intrinsic sex difference? It seems like you’re ignoring some of the data we actually do have in favor of belief.

Your second non-answer to my question is to point at the updated version of the Myers-Briggs test, right after saying ‘but, science’? Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?

This only repeats your previous argument, it shows that cultural differences currently exist. Again, we already know that. It does not show that intrinsic sex differences exist. I recommend reading all of that article carefully before assuming it’s helping your argument in any way. The conclusion of the section you shared on gender differences says:

“It is important to recognize that individual differences in traits are relevant in a specific cultural context, and that the traits do not have their effects outside of that context.”

And Big Five is “established” as a personality test. Personality tests are pseudoscientific, even if Big 5 is ‘more scientific’ than Myers-Briggs.

“Like the Big 5 model, any personality or behavior assessment can’t know things you haven’t explicitly answered in the questionnaire, Stein says. Sometimes commercial personality tests ask odd questions—like, Do you identify with snakes? or How do you react to a certain color?—and try to draw inferences from your answers. Those kinds of conclusions venture into the pseudoscientific, Stein says.“

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-accurate-are-...

https://qz.com/1201773/we-took-the-worlds-most-scientific-pe...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#...