[mrbuzer]

> American women are not told that they must do anything but being a housewife. They are actively encouraged to pursue careers that at one time women were basically forbidden to pursue. Most of those careers are compatible with motherhood as much as they are compatible with fatherhood.

Especially black American women who have to look forward to being a bitch, a mother, and a low wage worker. Liberation for the win. This rhetoric is about reducing people to workers and saying that because people can't serve a corporation they are not being themselves because the desire that corporations create for women to be something in the public sphere competes with similar jobs which they held in the private sphere.

Liberation is freedom from work to do whatever you choose. Liberation has not held up to this ideal as it's a lie. The whole point of women's lib was to increase the work force so that the capitalists can have more people in the economy and the government can tax those people and get richer and so on.

[vacri]

The whole point of women's lib was to...

You have a particularly twisted idea of what women's lib was about, and also what 'liberation' means. Women in the workplace surged after WWII not because the capitalists went "awesome!", but because it became increasingly apparent that it was not true that women couldn't do 'work'.

Besides, women's liberation in the West stretches at least as far back as the suffragette movements, which is hardly something pushed by capitalists.

[yareally]

The US Women's Suffrage Movement actually grew out of two things in the 19th century. Unfortuently, neither gets much recognition since historical media, reporting and education is a bit slanted to focusing on the last 60-70 years in America with bits of info mixed in about the Civil and Revolutionary Wars.

- Women had to take over many of the jobs and responsibilities of the men that went off to fight during the American Civil War. Unfortuently, it does not get recognized as having the same impact as WW2 did on women and freedom to choose one's own path in life, but it was the "catalyst" while WW2 was more of the "coup de grâce" in holding onto the outdated ideas.

- The Temperance Movement in America. Although there's much to dislike about the Temperance Movement, it was initially started by women that were fed up with alcohol tearing apart their families. Women realized that when they organized and stood up for what they believed in, that others would listen and rally behind them with many counties and states putting restrictions on alcohol long before the 18th Amendment. Many of the women, including Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would go onto start the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States.

[jamesaguilar]

Agreed. This is why men overwhelmingly choose to stay home and take care of the kids when given the option. /s

[mrbuzer]

Yes because men and women find child rearing to be equally fulfilling socially and psychologically... because evolution obviously made them that way. /s Why be a wife and a mother women you can be a scientist busting their ass for making your university or corporation the next 1 billion dollars. Or why not be a model or a booth babe? Or better yet why not flip burgers and answer phone calls at a call center. These give meaning to lives!

[newnewnew]

There is some interesting research on personality differences between the sexes[1]. Also, there is solid biological reasons for believing a species like ours with modest amounts of sexual dimorphism will have substantial behavioral differences between sexes. I have severe doubts about the perfect equality hypothesis, which seems to be the default assumption of liberals. Roughly, women are evolved to care and men are evolved to kill.

Of course, we are talking about distributions of traits and there are outliers in both sexes[2], and everyone ought to be judged individually on their own characteristics. But we need to recognize that the average woman and the average man are substantially different, and we should expect their behavior to diverge.

[1] http://bsb-lab.org/site/wp-content/uploads/DelGiudice_etal_2...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristiane_Santos

[jamesaguilar]

I can think of two major objections to this. First, this does absolutely nothing to control for the social context in which the subjects were raised. That is, it is impossible to draw any conclusions from this study about what the breakdown would look like of men and women were raised in an equal society, where there are just as many knightesses rescuing dons in distress as vice versa, and all the other similar inequities had been cleaned away.

Second, the perfect equality hypothesis does not describe my beliefs. I guess it my describe some non-scientifically-minded liberals' beliefs, maybe even most, but that does not matter very much. What I believe is that perfectly equal opportunity ought to be available to both sexes, and that women should control their own reproductive choices. I believe that we should work to minimize any effects that would tend to accentuate the differences between the sexes. And I believe this independent of the magnitude of those differences. Fundamentally, it does not matter to me if a paper did demonstrate differences, even in a perfectly equal society. It would still be optimal under my value function to no further accentuate them.

But, to wrap it up, I think it's really far fetched to suggest that conservative social policy towards women is the way it is because it's good for women. I mean, just look at what and who women vote for. (Then again, perhaps this is a bad argument because poor people vote for conservatives all the time.)

[oblique63]

> Fundamentally, it does not matter to me if a paper did demonstrate differences, even in a perfectly equal society. It would still be optimal under my value function to no further accentuate them.

Isn't the use of "optimal" here a contradiction, if in fact, we don't nurture certain innate differentiating factors in people to their full potential? For example, lets say we find evidence that developing perfect pitch is indeed something you have to be born with, and that you have a son/daughter born with it. Would you not want a bit more musical exposure for them than usual? Not 'pushing' them necessarily, but certainly emphasizing the difference enough to maybe intrigue them about the possibility of developing their full potential in that area?

We already know that people are born with certain 'limitations' (for the lack of a better word) in terms of IQ, so the idea of dealing with biological differences is nothing new in the realm of cognitive science, and sex/gender is but one of many variables that could affect personality/cognitive performance in an array of areas. So really, it would almost seem like denying this probability is the more conservative viewpoint, no?

Either way, this whole area is much too complicated to be simplifying it in such terms, and neuroscience is still much too young to help guide us thoroughly, but dismissing it outright seems like a mistake to me. After all, culture[1] is an emergent property of our individual personalities coming together, which are themselves emergent properties of our brains/genetics...

[1] As an interesting side-note, there have apparently been some attempts at converging neurology with anthropology recently, so hopefully this will help more research come along about any links between biological and cultural differences: https://brainsciencepodcast.squarespace.com/bsp/2013/neuroan...

[jamesaguilar]

> Isn't the use of "optimal" here a contradiction

No, because I specified that it was under a given value function (mine). You seem to be assuming that I'm optimizing economic production or something like that, which is where differentiating factors tend to come in. That is of course not what I think is most important.

Simple counter example: let's say there were some means of doubling half the population's output, assuming we only had to keep them miserable by telling them they are worth less for the duration of their childhood. I would not make that trade. Whether there are differentiating factors doesn't factor into the question for me.

> Either way, this whole area is much too complicated to be simplifying it in such terms

That will never fail to be the case in almost any complex subject you want to talk about, but it doesn't mean you can't say useful things. For example, "I value that women be as free to choose their way as I, and not be systematically diverted to choices that are convenient to males via their representation in the media, via social policies, etc. I value this more highly than whatever minor benefits I believe are likely to stem out of the socially regressive way of doing things."