[gnull]

I don't know if it's really important to know for practice. Who care where it comes from if the effect is there and you have to live with it?

It's not that effect being caused by upbringing makes it somehow unimportant, or unworthy of being there.

[ahmetnoid]

because if it's biological then you have to live with it (till you get scalable affordable bioengineering) whereas if it's social imprinting then you don't "have to live with it", for that it's going against our biological encoding. Your comment suggest that we should not question upbringing which I disagree with.

[gnull]

Knowing a concrete cultural mechanism that is causing this could possibly open the way to engineering it (or close it completely, depending on what mechanism that is). But would just knowing "it's culture" help? I don't think (personal opinion) we're particularly good at predictably engineering culture.

Look at Sweden, it's been trying really hard and dumping lots of money into gender equality, but there's still very few women in tech. The fraction of women among Iran's CS graduates is greater than Sweden's. And, ironically, plenty of those Iranian women (I'm saying this offhand) go to do PhD in Sweden, to bring up the "gender balance" of CS departments that Sweden is so concerned about.

I'm really unsure whether society is easier to engineer than biology.