[imanaccount247]

>Here's a recent article about parents to a girl who try to fight all those pressures placed on her so that she's free to choose what she wants to do in life:

No, that is an article about a couple who want to push their child away from what they consider "traditional gender roles" because they think they need to for some reason. There is nothing to indicate the girls was pressured to act like a girl. I may be old, but I can in fact still remember being a girl. I remember that girls could excel in school and be popular, but boys were "nerds" if they did well in school. I remember being selected as one of the "advanced students" to go learn about computers. I remember that there were only two boys selected. It is hard for me to ignore my experiences just because it is politically incorrect to be a woman who doesn't claim to be a victim.

>By their very definition, cultural pressures are invisible

That is not in the definition

>So, step one: learn to see those biases.

I've had that pushed on my many times. Imagine being a woman in university. I don't think you realize just how hard and how frequently it was pushed on me. But it was not about learning to see invisible biases. It was about learning to blame everything on biases that could not be seen, and you have to take it on faith that they exist.

>That's just not true at all.

What are you supposed to do when a woman tells you about her lived experiences again?

>It's sad that you think so, because those proven, blah blah look I know better than you just shut up and accept my gracious help because I am a man so I clearly know better than you and you are just blind to it because you've only spent the last four decades living it

Yes, please save me from the imaginary boogeymen. I need a big strong man to rescue me and assuage his misplaced guilt.

[pron]

> No, that is an article about a couple who want to push their child away from what they consider "traditional gender roles"

... which she is being pressured into right and left by the movies and toys made for her.

> It is hard for me to ignore my experiences just because it is politically incorrect to be a woman who doesn't claim to be a victim.

Victim? Popular? What in god's name are you talking about? Sexism is as real and as scientifically proven as gravity. It doesn't make women victim, but marginalized. That is a fact regardless whether or not you think it's in vogue.

> That is not in the definition

Well, it immediately follows from it. The most basic building bricks of our own culture are almost always invisible from us as our internal organs are. We can easily see how other cultures work, but not our own.

> I've had that pushed on my many times.

If you don't want to you don't have to. Just as you don't need to learn about the French Revolution or Newton's Laws. You can choose to learn about whatever parts of our world you want to. But if you don't, don't argue out of ignorance.

> and you have to take it on faith that they exist.

No. Just tons, and tons and tons and tons and tons of research. No more than you need to "take it on faith" that the French Revolution actually happened.

> What are you supposed to do when a woman tells you about her lived experiences again?

I don't understand. If no one in your family has never been murdered, does that mean murder isn't a problem? Are we supposed to discard vast amounts of research -- from psychology, sociology and anthropology based on particular anecdotes?

> Yes, please save me from the imaginary boogeymen.

Not imaginary and not a boogyman. I just don't understand your argument -- if you don't directly feel, say, economic forces, are they imaginary? (Well, it's theoretically possible that the moment you close your eyes the world ceases to exist, or that we all live in your imagination, but I think that's not your working assumption.)

> I need a big strong man to rescue me and assuage his misplaced guilt.

I see that you, too, confuse sexism with misogyny. Well, misogynists hardly ever feel guilt. Sexists don't need to because they're not to blame (most women are probably as sexist as men). Sexism is a description of society as it came to be. There is no necessary conspiracy or ill-intent for sexism to blame, just as gravity is not "guilty" of killing people falling off of buildings. It's just there, and it's just as real. Unlike gravity, though, sexism (and racism) can be fought. I don't need to rescue you. I don't even know you. I think that society is going to be more interesting and more fun and a lot richer if all groups were able to participate in those places where power resides.

[imanaccount247]

You are presupposing that toys make girls be girls. All evidence is to the contrary and suggests girls toys are made and sold because girls want them. Even in infancy, before any "social" effects can be a cause, sex based toy preferences exist. In fact, they even exist in other primates who clearly are not part of our society.

[pron]

Note that all relevant biological, or innate, differences have been found have much, much smaller effect sizes than differences found to be cultural (research showing cultural differences also tends to have better statistical significance). So whatever the effect in society is, it's probably like 5% biological (or less) and 95% cultural.

So, yes, there is evidence for biological differences, but there is stronger evidence for cultural differences with vastly bigger effects.

Also -- and this is an entirely orthogonal discussion -- it's also known that humans can overcome their instincts, often quite easily. So no matter what behavioral changes are due to biology, most of them can probably be easily overcome by humans. The question then becomes, should humans overcome their instincts to create a more fair society.

And just to clarify, the only subjective/moral issue in the previous paragraph has to do with "should we try it". That society is unfair towards women is objectively true: women are not just underrepresented in certain random fields, but they are underrepresented mostly in fields that bestow a lot of power. So objectively, men have a lot more power than women in society, so it's not just "unevenness" but "unfairness".

[imanaccount247]

>So whatever the effect in society is, it's probably like 5% biological (or less) and 95% cultural.

Making up random nonsense just reinforces the obvious fact that you are an ideologue pushing an agenda, not someone interested in reality or equality.

>it's also known that humans can overcome their instincts

Yes, parents should force their children to "overcome their instincts" in order to meet arbitrary quotas demanded by hyperliberal babies with guilt complexes. That sounds very reasonable.

>That society is unfair towards women is objectively true

No, it is quite literally not objectively true. You subjectively believe that. I understand you believe that. But it is not an objective fact any more than me enjoying pie makes "pie is good" objectively true.

>women are not just underrepresented in certain random fields, but they are underrepresented mostly in fields that bestow a lot of power

No, we are also underrepresented in the worst jobs. The apex fallacy does not get any less ridiculous through repetition.

>So objectively, men have a lot more power than women in society, so it's not just "unevenness" but "unfairness".

That would only be true if the tiny minority of people in power were using that power to manipulate things to the benefit of men. They are not. Simply having a penis does not grant one special powers because other people with penises have power. Notice how US politics is completely dominated by made up "women's" issues despite most politicians being men?

[pron]

I'm going to stop arguing with you because it seems you're either trolling or being intentionally ignorant. A couple of simple Google/Google Scholar searches would show you that I'm right and it is you who may have read something online and extrapolated from it, rather than studied this subject seriously.

Of course I'm an ideologue pushing an agenda! (Who isn't?) I think it's our moral obligation to push this agenda. But in order to actually make society better rather than just talk about it, research is crucial, and thankfully a lot of research into this has been done over the past three or four decades, and we now know a lot more about how sexism works. What some people are doing though is using the real fact that there are biological behavioral differences between the sexes to hide the equally true fact that cultural effects have been shown to dwarf them by orders of magnitude.

It has also been shown that humans -- like many other animals -- have instincts driving them to subjugate others. Still, we've abolished slavery to alleviate the painful conscience of hyperliberal babies, and I think society is better for it. Some (most famously Freud in the very unscientific but thoughtful and fascinating Civilization and its Discontents) believe that all of civilization is one big mechanism for exerting control over our instincts, a mechanism that's even been internalized by us (see Norbert Elias for a demonstration on the power of this internalization). Most recently, this view has been modified (mostly by conjectures made by evolutionary psychologists) to say that civilization is some instincts overruling others (many instincts clash with one another: our desire for sex sometimes overpowers our fear of strangers and is sometimes overpowered by it).

Power and influence in society is objective reality. That women possess less of it is as objective as the Sun fusing hydrogen into helium. Perhaps you think that's fair. The fact that men have more power does not imply that every man has more power than every woman.

Of course, if we're to be totally honest, we must admit that both research into biological differences between the sexes as well as cultural researches is not up to the highest theoretical standards in experiment design and statistical rigor, so whatever it is we know (i.e. that both are real, but the cultural difference is a lot more prominent) is suspect. But hey, this is HN and geeking out is the name of the game.

Anyway, it's been fun arguing over this. If you want to learn more about the subject, I suggest you look up Susan Fiske. Yes, she's a hyperliberal baby crying for her quotas, but a good researcher nonetheless.