[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.