even at nursery age, kids will be broken up into single gender groups for activities
Not in my experience, which is not to say it doesn't happen.
kids will be broken up into single gender groups for activities even if there’s no real reason to do so.
There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that girls do better academically in a single sex school, whereas there's there's some (but not really of great quality) to show that boys do better socially if they're in a mixed sex environment.
WHAT IF less women want to become engineers and builders.
Then the physical and digital world gets built mostly according to the needs of the other 50% of the population. See this a lot in how environments, digital, health and other services often poorly serve women or don't consider women specific requirements.
Examples: Lagging research and health advice around womens fertility & menopause. Health and sport apps that don't cater for periods, or fail to do it in a way that protects their privacy. Buildings and environments that don't provide safety for lone women. Not enough women's bogs.
It should be obvious to any parent of a girl that how the behaviour of their mum; other female friends and relatives; random women on TV, adverts, and youtube is massively a part of who they become. Same as for boys mimicking mens behaviour.
That's why it's the responsibility of men to teach boys how to treat women well. A boy might have a lovely mum that tells them to be nice to girls, but if they see their dad being aggressive and slimy around and about women, they'll just learn that you can get a nice wife by being aggressive and slimy.
So where did the cultural differences come from in the first place??
Well there are a whole bunch of things that may be part of it but should no longer be relevant, such as physical strength (or the lack thereof), repeated pregnancies, child-rearing responsibilty and so on.
I think an earlier poster pointed out the relevant statement:
"there are no such things as ""boy things and girl things"" as these are a social construct".
Our son (3) likes to help his mum with the cooking, plays with his doll house - which he wanted from playing with a friends, but also loves riding his bike.
The real problem is the societal construct mentioned above that inevitably steer girls towards "girl things" which will also eventually steer them towards "girl jobs" - for which remuneration has been kept artificially capped by societal expectation (it's a rewarding occupations etc.)
Let them be their own person by all means but don't think that there aren't societal pressures on them and that those pressures don't lead to eventual perpetuation of societal norms.
I listened to a segment on the radio about major and minor chords and our perception of them.
no-one ever teaches you that a minor chord is 'sad' and a major chord isn't 'happy' in western society, it is so ingrained by repeated exposure that it is an accepted fact. there was a study on some remote tribes with no concept of chords, and they perceived no emotional difference between them.
boys like boy things and girls like girl things isn't that different. In my experience particularly in the older generations. small things like my 75yr old neighbour commenting to my son that boys shouldn't have long hair sticks even though it shouldn't.
So where did the cultural differences come from in the first place??
This is outside of my area of expertise, but my guess is that a lot of it came from archaic beliefs. Back in pre-industrial days, babies literally needed their mothers because there was no baby formula so fathers couldn't feed an infant, plus families were much larger and people married younger back then. That meant that women were basically house bound taking care of babies for years and years. Labouring jobs back then were much, much more physical because there wasn't machinery to handle the physical stuff. The average man is stronger than the average woman so physical jobs really were better done by men. Now, most of it is mechanized and a woman can operate a machine equally as well as a man. I suspect that led to it seeming perfectly normal that there were men's jobs and women's jobs. Once that's established, it would be extremely difficult to change people's views because it would be handed down from generation to generation as the natural order of things.
On top of that, science was not very scientific and was quite mingled with religion. If you believed that God created the universe with some purpose in mind, then the differences between men and women and their roles easily becomes some divine intention about the appropriate roles. Once religion gets involved, it's almost impossible to change anyone's mind about gender roles, empirical evidence is never going to persuade a religious believer.
Growing up before the digital age makes me fearful that the role models are found on You Tube / Tik Tok and parents are less influential.
Would live for my daughter to like stuff I like, but that isn't going to happen.
Like pretty much verything when it comes to nature vs nurture
its always a combination of both & impossible to figure out because those 2 factors feedback on each other, especially when youll get so much variation between kids
Its also something that will change over time as hormone levels alter in kids bodies, likewise societal & cultural influences are dynamic
We've got 4 kids, 2 older boys, the last 2 were boy & girl twins , now 6, so its been very interetsing to watch how my daughter manages being a girl in a house full of boys- she loves unicorns and sparkly dresses, has ballet class, but is (a lot) better than her brother at football, loves lego, mariokart & minecraft & rough & tumble games & star wars, but also loves Frozen- bit so does her twin brother- he just wont admit it!
You cant underestimate the power of advertising on their brains- 3 minutes of shouty adverts and they are 100% certain they need whatever naff plastic piece of crap was squeezed in the ad break in scooby doo- and those ads defintely reinforce the sterotypes
There was an experiment on baby bonobos.
The boy ones largely liked wheeled toys, like toy cars and trains and the girl ones mostly developed attachment to dolls.
I think it was a bit more than that - "Wallen’s team looked at 11 male and 23 female rhesus monkeys. In general the males preferred to play with wheeled toys, such as dumper trucks, over plush dolls, while female monkeys played with both kinds of toys." (my emphasis - https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/)
Environmental bias is also picked up really early as well - this article talks about a famous experiment using dolls of different colours :" I placed four racially diverse dolls (white, Latina, Black with lighter skin, and Black with medium skin) in a diverse preschool classroom and observed Black preschool girls as they played for one semester. My work was published in Early Childhood Education, a peer-reviewed journal."
Whils this is about race sterotypes not gender ones I suspect the process is the same. The findings included "girls rarely chose the Black dolls during play. On the rare occasions that the girls chose the Black dolls, they mistreated them. One time a Black girl put the doll in a pot and pretended to cook the doll. That’s not something the girls did with the dolls that weren’t Black.
When it came time to do either of the Black dolls’ hair, the girls would pretend to be hairstylists and say, “I can’t do that doll’s hair. It’s too big,” or, “It’s too curly.” But they did the hair for the dolls of other ethnicities. While they preferred to style the Latina doll’s straight hair, they were also happy to style the slightly crimped hair of the white doll as well.
The children were more likely to step over or even step on the Black dolls to get to other toys. But that didn’t happen with the other dolls."
Bear in mind this is about pre school age kids, so the main exposure to societal norms will have been via parents and home life.
Nah… I’ll leave my crappy grammar up for the annals of time!!!
*anals
I've got two girls aged 3 and 5.
The gender influences are EVERYWHERE. TV programs, shops, books, magazines, clothes, other parents, interactions at nursery / school. It's very difficult (and probably counter productive) to isolate from all this and make any meaningful conclusions IMO.
They are also very easily influenced at that age, so pick up on so much that we might miss.
With my two, there's a mix of intersts, some of it traditionally male, some female. They like pink stuff, hate playing with baby dolls, like constructing things (lego, marble runs), youngest likes football, eldest likes ballet etc.
I think it's 90% nurture.
My uneducated personal view is that the influence of nature and nurture is interlinked, complex and evolutionary. On an individual level sometimes nature (genetic) and sometimes nurture (societal/ family/ life experience influences) wins out on the different aspects that make up our personalities.
I think there are genetically hardwired evolutionary female or male characteristics that persist from previous generations, and possibly some of the genetics that we would now call 'nature' evolved due to the 'nurture' influences of previous generations.
Have gender norms and roles evolved (and will continue to do so) due to societal change (nurture) I would say yes.
I also think if you try too hard to change the nature, or control the nurture of a child, it will often come back to bite you!
Key thing that seems to be overlooked:
Also, I guess a bigger question to be asked is:
“why is it a BAD thing if male and female traits are different”??
It's not, but even if they are you absolutely MUST NOT ASSUME that someone's gender will predict their behaviour or their preferences!
It's one thing doing a hypothetical unethical experiment and finding boys really do like gun toys better on average; but it's wrong to then use that information for anything other than scientific knowledge. Because all kids then get stereotyped by gender, and as we have seen many will leave less fulfilled lives by being channelled into certain subjects, opportunities, pastimes and roles that they don't like. Even if were 70% of boys who innately like "boy stuff", that'd still be 30% of boys being denied opportunities to flourish and play the way they want.
I used to watch my dad fixing things and working on the car all the time as a kid. I always asked for explanations of what he was doing and why, and he was happy to give them. I've spent a long time working on my own cars (haha) on the drive, and of all the neighbourhood kids only one was interested in what I was doing - a girl. I asked if she knew how cars worked and she said no, but was happy to listen when I explained. None of the other kids give a crap (but they will all help if I ask just as they did with gardening, because they want to help). This girl's dad is a mechanic, but he hasn't apparently seen fit to explain cars to her. So it seems that she has inherited a degree of mechanical curiosity but it hasn't been nurtured. She's also constantly scooting or riding up and down the hill, and is always active. The other kids sit around chatting and watching Tik Tok, including the boys.
My wife has an excellent analytical mind and is interested in lots of technical things. Her dad also was an engineer. But she was not brought up to explore these ideas in a way that seemed accessible. She wasn't explicitly denied, of course, but everything engineering related was always presented as boyish, everything was full of boys, and boy culture being what it is in the USA she was always put off by that. So she was circumstantially denied the opportunity to shine in a career that would have paid very well. Instead the 'girl appropriate' things, even done to a high level, led straight into low paying jobs.
