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by rrose
1710 days ago
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I think the problem is that there isn't really any compelling evidence to suggest that men are more drawn to engineering because of biology. I would actually invert your last paragraph: there are so many plausible extrinsic reasons that men are more likely to go into STEM than women that it doesn't make sense to try to explain away these gender gaps as being due to some intrinsic difference. I think it's fair to say that you can believe that the difference is biological without it being sexist. But it is also true that many people who hold this belief are sexist (in fact most misogynists probably do believe this), so people being hesitant to give a platform to people taking this angle is understandable. |
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That's completely false. There's lots of published research on this subject. The existence of said evidence is routinely being denied, but there have been numerous studies. One of the most famous studies established that female infants tend to be more interested in looking at human faces than boy infants, and boys generally more interested in looking at things.
This is generally referred to as a "things vs people" preference. With women generally being more people oriented, and men being more "thing" oriented. Again, there is no relationship to performance here. Nobody is claiming that either of these is better than the other. It's just a very consistent finding across many many studies, and the fact that this is still controversial boggles the mind. Politics are preventing us, as a species, from properly understanding ourselves.
This is a meta-analysis of infant sex vs toy preference: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7
If you think this preference for things vs people is due to culture, consider that this kind of toy preference exists in monkeys as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9xXyw2f7g