[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#...

[BurningFrog]

I've been on the net long enough to not fall for the "spend hours digging up raw science or I won't believe you" gambit. Those guys will never change their mind even if you do devote your weekend to doing research for them.

I gave you a Pinker book to read and a well footnoted Wikipedia article on the science. I've spent enough work trying to educate someone who gives all the signs of just not wanting to change their mind.

> Okay, what do personality tests have to do with cultural sex or race discrimination?

Nothing, and I never claimed it had.

> Personality tests are pseudoscientific

The big five is the established scientific fact of 2019. Denying science because it doesn't fit with your ideology doesn't put you in great company.

[dahart]

Why did you give me links to Big 5 then, what is your point? How does a personality test demonstrate intrinsic sex differences? It doesn’t, and your well documented source says so clearly and explicitly.

I’m sorry I made you angry, there’s some miscommunication going on here. I’m not convinced we’re talking about the same thing because you haven’t brought anything to this conversation that demonstrates there’s evidence of intrinsic sex differences when it comes to career choices, you’ve only pointed to known cultural differences.

I agree with you that there are cultural differences.