h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Certainly boys & girls can enjoy playing with the same toys, but the way they play will probably be different. Girls tend to make up more stories using the toys as participants, where boys tend to build & destroy or use toys as props/tools.

>>"There arent boys and girls until we decide to label them and we as parents and workers do it very early on. Take a look at the behviour of our closest relatives the great apes apart fromt he difference that are dictated by biology,eg childbirth and agreesion which are hormonal there isnt much separation in behaviour."

So you're saying "*Apart* from the innate biological differences, male and female apes are basically the same", in an attempt to support your argument that there aren't really *any* significant innate differences between boys and girls?

>>"In some species of Hyena the female is more agressive than the male and have so much testosterone in their system that they actualy grow what are basically penises."

Hyenas are hardly close relatives. In any case, all you're doing there is choosing a particular known extreme example which still only ends up pointing out a correlation between testosterone and agression, which we don't really need to know anything about hyenas in order to appreciate.

OK I worded that very badly perhaps behviour isnt the best word to describe it but it was the best I could think of.

A lot of what appears natural is not and only looks that way because it is so prevalent and we are unable to tell the wood from the trees. Lots of people wear spectacles and although poo eyesight might be natural glasses arent. Being different is natural but in an organised society we end to frown on people on the edges of normality. Stereotypes are only true for us some of the time. You each should know that from your own experiences and knowing people who just like you dont do everything their gender stereotype would suggest.

one love

I reckon it's as daft to consider all children as unisex blank slates as to assume everyone is rigidly acting out a stereotype.

The idea of all people being equal (in a strong sense of 'equal') does seem to have largely ideological roots, and it is an idea people may cling to rather firmly for that reason. It's not hard to rationalise any differences away on principle as being the aberrant outcomes of social conditioning without troubling to find out if that is actually the case, because one believes that it should be the case.

I can certainly see why people may take an extreme position on equality, but sometimes it can end up counterproductive if it ends up with people drawing inaccurate conclusions.
If someone assumed group differences were all down to society (ie nurture), they could, in a particular area, look at outcomes and end up wasting a huge amount of effort (and maybe taxpayer's money) trying harder and harder to provide equal opportunities where they essentially already exist, and where it happens to be a situation where given equal opportunities, outcomes don't end up equal across groups.
Unequal outcomes may well often be caused by unequal opportunity, but it may not be the only cause, or even a necessary one, in all cases. Just because outcomes may be the easiest thing to measure doesn't make them an infallible guide to inputs.

Trust me on this - as a married man with 5 daughters I can state definatively that women are different to men - personally I'm not even sure they're the same species.

On the face of it, it seems to make sense that boys and girls (and men and women) are interested in different things. One of the things that the past century shows us is that when it becomes more socially acceptable for women to do "men's things", like playing football and joining the army, more and more of them want to do it.

Well, for a start, even if there are average differences between groups, there's undeniably variation within groups.

If absolute social group boundaries are relaxed, all that one could really deduce from some people from group A starting to do activities 'typical' of group B is that the groups aren't entirely distinct, there's some kind of overlap, but it doesn't necessarily say how much. It could be the overlap is effectively total, it could be that it's partial, but there might not be enough information to make a relaible judgement from evidence.

There can be all kinds of confounding factors as well, not least the difference between ability and motivation.
If group A is just generally less motivated to do an activity than group B, given effort (nurture), some of that demotivation may be countered, but that wouldn't mean the difference was necessarily all down to a previous inequality of nurture.

Indeed, you are right. The only thing that can be said for sure is that the difference in interests is less 'built in' than "common sense" looking at number of participants might suggest it is.

I'd suggest it might be more accurate to say that looking at outcomes with 'common sense' could be misleading in either direction.
It may be that currently some people may be more likely to be misled towards an assumption of differences in nature, but it can work the other way too.

For example, you could enforce military conscription for both sexes, and put a great deal of effort into encouraging aggression in women, but if you did achieve parity, that wouldn't necessarily mean there wasn't any average innate difference between the sexes in the willingness to fight people.

You could have equal quotas for male and female nurses or slaughterhouse workers or whatever, but you couldn't use a resulting balanced workforce as definitely meaning anything more than showing it wasn't impossible to achieve a balanced workforce.

You might well consider that having equal numbers of male and female politicians is a Good Thing in itself, but if you achieved that outcome by continual use of quotas, it wouldn't prove anything beyond the fact that it could be achieved by quotas.

I think that's putting the same point from a mirror image point of view - namely that so long as social circumstances favour a given outcome, it's foolish to assume the outcome is natural (and impossible to know to what extent it is or isn't).

>>"I think that's putting the same point from a mirror image point of view - namely that so long as social circumstances favour a given outcome, it's foolish to assume the outcome is natural (and impossible to know to what extent it is or isn't)."

But then *some* people might come to the conclusion that social circumstances *are* favouring a particular outcome due to a prior conviction in innate equality of ability and motivation and the fact that outcomes aren't precisely equal.
If the assumption of innate equality in a given situation isn't correct, the conclusion that there are social inequalities might potentially be wrong.

In the end, due to the deep complexities of interaction between an individual's nature and their life experiences, there may be grey areas where we have to honestly admit that we don't know whether social circumstances *are* favouring particular outcomes.

That doesn't mean that there aren't areas where we can have a pretty good idea that there are inequalities, and areas where it's pretty obvious that there are, just that we may sometimes have to say 'we don't know', even if that answer isn't acceptable to people who think there's a simple reason for everything.