[bhubert]

I know I'm a little lateto the party, but I want to make the point that I don't actually think that there being few women in leading roles is the problem. I think it is a symptom.

I think it is a symptom of a real underlying hidden problem that is the discourse of todays society is biasing the interests of our children differently based on gender.

A lot of places we're strongly associating the color blue with boys and the color pink with girls. We force these colors upon them while they're such a young age that they might grow the same associations. I think this also happens with attributes other than favorite color, attributes such as behavioral patterns. I'm bot saying there's not also a biological aspect to this, but noone I've read has any idea of how much is nurture and how much is nature, but it seems to me that when looking at our (as a society) practices with our small ones, there is certainly room for a great deal being nurture.

In short I don't think that the problem is that there are few women in leading roles, I think the problem is that we are raising our boys to want to be leaders and our girls to not.

[cutemonster]

> the problem is that we are raising our boys to want to be leaders and our girls to not.

What you think initially caused that behavior in the first place, some time long ago?

[RestlessMind]

I remember reading about this in "Sapiens". Suppose there were indeed women leaders many thousands of years back. Due to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, they would not have had any opportunity to both bear a child for a couple of years at least (9 months of pregnancy, breast feeding afterwards) and be a leader at the same time. Add to that the high rate of infant mortality and you have vastly diminishing chances of a leader-woman passing her genes to baby girls. Now compound this over thousands of generations and you will have the society of early-20th century, before infant mortality rates started going down and societies started becoming wealthier that a leader-woman has to invest only a few months at most for a child by outsourcing most of the "gatherer" duties.

[cutemonster]

I've been thinking a bit along the same lines

Sounds like an interesting book, thanks for mentioning