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[Samarkand]

The physical stress factors are less important than you make them out to be in determining attraction. See rubenesque paintings. Stable time, in the ways you're referencing, but thin want of prime importance. And young is as much related to the desire to dominate as any economic factor.

As for educating girls to be boys, the truth is it's not fundamentally different from what we're doing right now, educating them to be girls. Any child's understanding of their own gender is deeply informed by the way adults talk to and about them. Females aren't born liking pink princesses. "One is not born, but becomes, a woman."

[Reelya]

The physical stress factors are less important than you make them out to be in determining attraction. See rubenesque paintings. Stable time, in the ways you're referencing, but thin want of prime importance. And young is as much related to the desire to dominate as any economic factor.

idk if I'd call the 17th century "stable, in the way I'm referencing". There was plenty of social instability going on. Influxes of loot from the New World led to a massive sustained inflation spike, and you had stuff like The General Crisis going on.

What I'm really getting at is the idea that in times of high infant mortality, shorter life span, strong competition for resources or disease, this is going to affect both conscious and subconscious decisions about mate selection. There are studies which show these effects in individuals by altering stress, hunger etc, and the effects are noted to be small: but if you take a small difference, then magnify that by social interactions, you can get a big difference in overall social preferences. So it's not saying this is 100% biological or 100% social, it's the interplay between the factors, on both the individual and group level.

As an interesting note, there's also evidence that women can biologically skew the gender of their offspring, based on a number of environmental and genetic factors. These mechanisms seem to be multi-generational, that is, they exist to produce offspring with a greater reproductive success.

Attractive people have more daughters.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201101/beautiful-people-have-more-daughters
"Being physically attractive at age 7 increases the odds of having a daughter by 23% or decreases the odds of having a son by 19%...being physically unattractive at age 7 decreases the odds of having a daughter by 20% or increases the odds of having a son by 25%". From the UK's long-running "National Child Development Study", this tracked 17000 individuals born in 1958 over their lifetime.

Economically well-off mothers have more sons. a study of 50 million people. They've also studied this bias in many animal populations including "insects, birds, pigs, sheep, dogs, mink and deer", plus there was another study of zoo animals (not referenced here), which found the same thing. This is not infanticide or anything: it happens in all cultures, and across the animal kingdom, is biological and replicable.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3302799/Rich-mothers-have-more-sons.html
Basically, boys are a bad biological investment if you're resource-poor, you get a weak male who still has to go out and compete for mates. Whereas girls have lower infant mortality than boys and girls are the limiting factor for reproduction, so they're a better bet  for gene survival, if you lack resources. If you have good resource stability though, a boy is a better investment as a strong male can potential produce more offspring than a strong female (by having multiple mates).

[Jelle]

Females aren't born liking pink princesses. "One is not born, but becomes, a woman."

I disagree. Gender roles are not determined soly and entirely by nurture or soly and entirely by nature. It's perfectly possible for both to come into the equation, though in what relative proportions is another question.
Hormones influence our disposition and behavior significantly. If I were to throw some numbers at it, I'd say for us humans nurture makes up 4/5 of the equation and nature 1/5, but that's just my rough estimate.

[Rolepgeek]

And hormones dictate that little girls like princesses? Before a certain point, there is no real distinction between genders in the minds of small children; they don't need to differentiate. So, while, yes, women are more likely to be nurturing because of hormones and the like, it has nothing to do with gender roles. Besides which, natural does not equal good. Sexism is natural, and if one looks at chimpanzees you can see it. That doesn't make it okay. Dying to plagues is also natural. Our strength as sentient beings is the ability to overcome that.

Speaking of which, why should we educate our children to be masculine or feminine? Why not just plain educate them and let them come to their own decisions regarding their gender and role?

[Samarkand]

Hormones may effect attitude, and consequently behavior, but that is all variation within the culturally defined behavior. Because culture has taught us how to express those emotions in action. Here's a dirty secret: men and women both get sad. Women cry more often, men retreat into themselves. Men and women both get angry. Men more often to take it out on others, women keep that too themselves. There's no chemical to make you do that, estrogen won't change your default reaction to an emotion. Only years of cultural conditioning lets us know when we should cry, when we should fight.

[Reelya]

There is a chemical heavily associated with crying: oxytocin

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-moral-molecule/200902/why-we-cry-movies

In research that will soon appear in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, those who saw the highly emotional part of the video had a 47% increase in oxytocin as measured in blood...women released more oxytocin and were more empathic than men.

http://www.serenedoulas.com/5-awesome-things-about-oxytocin-you-probably-dont-know/
"Have a good cry. Did you know oxytocin is one of the hormones that regulates emotional crying? If you are feeling stressed, let yourself have a nice long cry and you can give yourself an oxytocin boost."

Well, it's back to a chicken-and-egg thing here. Do women produce more oxytocin because they've been conditioned to express their emotions, and men inherently suppress oxytocin production because they've been trained not to? Or is the oxytocin system geared for differing levels of production. Could be either one, and selecting either scenario is down to ideology right now, not science.

[Jelle]

And hormones dictate that little girls like princesses?

Gender roles are not determined soly and entirely by nurture or soly and entirely by nature.
Hormones influence our disposition and behavior significantly

Hm, a rather stranger conclusion to take from that. Let's not go down the road of hyperbole, shall we.

[Neonivek]

And hormones dictate that little girls like princesses? Before a certain point, there is no real distinction between genders in the minds of small children; they don't need to differentiate. So, while, yes, women are more likely to be nurturing because of hormones and the like, it has nothing to do with gender roles. Besides which, natural does not equal good. Sexism is natural, and if one looks at chimpanzees you can see it. That doesn't make it okay. Dying to plagues is also natural. Our strength as sentient beings is the ability to overcome that.

Speaking of which, why should we educate our children to be masculine or feminine? Why not just plain educate them and let them come to their own decisions regarding their gender and role?

I thought both genders like pink princesses.

And one of the main reasons children, especially young girls, pick up on them is because they are introduced to them around the same time it matches their worldview and panders to them. (Honestly look at Princesses... they fit young children quite well.). So who are these Pink Princesses? They are women. Who are these children? Girls. Who are the only two Disney princess of any real importance? Aladdin and Simba... MAYBE Eric if you want to stretch things.

As well as the female maternal instinct seems to hit girls at incredibly young ages, I've yet to hear contradictory evidence towards this but I am open to it existing. It is why I say that baby dolls, for example, are a toy that is enforced by biology. At least as far as I know... A lot of this psychological gender studies go back and forth or are misleading. I still remember the study that tried to prove videogames make children violent, but showing them violence and giving them a punching toy...

[Telgin]

Hope this hasn't been mentioned yet since I don't have time to read the whole thread, but...

For what it's worth, studies have been performed on chimps that show that their children seem to have gender specific preferences on what toys they like to play with.  You could probably find any number of arguments against the study or its conclusions, or even claim that chimps have culture of a sort, but it leads me to believe that there probably are some small innate differences between the genders well before puberty ever kicks in.  Hormones aren't the only thing that affects behavior.

Wish I had the link to a better overview of that study.  It's probably not hard to track it down though, so if I find time I might look for it.

[LordBucket]

I thought both genders like pink princesses.

Nobody likes pink princesses

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"But I love it when you brush my hair!"

[GavJ]

I disagree. Gender roles are not determined soly and entirely by nurture or soly and entirely by nature. It's perfectly possible for both to come into the equation, though in what relative proportions is another question.
Hormones influence our disposition and behavior significantly. If I were to throw some numbers at it, I'd say for us humans nurture makes up 4/5 of the equation and nature 1/5, but that's just my rough estimate.

Pink was a masculine color in Europe for quite some time.
It was believed to be a slightly less aggressive version of red, which was blood and war, this even the diminuitive was masculine.
Pink was also associated with healthiness (like nice rosy pink skin versus sallow sickly yellow skin) which was a gender neutral aspect.

Some (actually many, likely most) things are indeed entirely learned. No combination of proteins contributes anything whatsoever to the concept of what the word "carburetor" means, for example. it is biologically laughable even to suggest they might.

Color categories I wouldn't call laughable at all, but they definitely have little biological evidence.Different cultures around the world have dramatically different color category divisions (Russians can compare blues faster and more accurately than us, consistent with their language categories), and there is significant inconsistency of color meanings or associations over time. There's an excellent Radio Lab podcast about color where they discuss a man who decided to never tell his daughter that the sky was blue, and instead just asked her what color it was occasionally (only asking when the sky was blue to him). She refused to answer for 2 months, then eventually said "white." (again, on a day when he say it as brilliantly blue)

They also discuss that in the Odyssey, Homer never refers to anything as blue, and that Greek authors in general all say weird stuff like violet sheep and hair and ox blood oceans. Another guy found the same thing in ancient Chinese, Icelandic, the bible in original Hebrew. No blue. Weird other colors (red is used most normally to modern tastes). Tribal people alive today with no blue color look at a screen with 11 green squares and 1 blue one (very obvious to us) just stare blankly. And that this has nothing to do with their vision / being colorblind, or anything like that.

The hypotheses put forth have everything to do with blue things being rare in nature, bright reds being common. And blue dyes being very advanced, red dyes being easiest, etc. I.e. not eye pigments at all. Total overwhelmingl experience driven behavior.



Gender roles as a high level behavior also make little obvious sense to postulate as a product of genes. Far more complicated than color labeling as a behavior, even less reasonable to ascribe to specific proteins. Which proteins, exactly make you like trucks or unicorns? Or can you point to any scientific evidence that genes code for gender roles?

studies have been performed on chimps that show that their children seem to have gender specific preferences on what toys they like to play with.

Chimps interact hugely with their children. That's irrevocably contaminated with learning. It is still definitely interesting as a chimpanzee cultural observation study, but really tells you nothing about genetic gender roles.

[Samarkand]

There is done evidence to support the idea that parts of roles may be defined by hormones, but when you look at this you lose the first through the trees. Culture is forcing far more on both genders than biology can be blamed for.

[GavJ]

Also by the way, hormones are not necessarily "innate" or "nature"
Only genes are clearly "innate."

Hormones are very significantly influenced, triggered, and regulated by events in your environment. Everything from birth control (or potentially any other drugs) to your diet to the crazy chemical storm of your mother's body during pregnancy and her actions and diet and diseases and whatever influencing it, and your level of activity, and blah blah. So even if you showed hormones led to gender roles, that doesn't necessarily prove the desired conclusion. You really need straight up genes to make such a claim (and ones that cannot be influenced meaningfully by epigenetic influences, at that)

[Neonivek]

Also by the way, hormones are not necessarily "innate" or "nature"
Only genes are clearly "innate."

Hormones are very significantly influenced, triggered, and regulated by events in your environment. Everything from birth control (or potentially any other drugs) to your diet to the crazy chemical storm of your mother's body during pregnancy and her actions and diet and diseases and whatever influencing it, and your level of activity, and blah blah. So even if you showed hormones led to gender roles, that doesn't necessarily prove the desired conclusion. You really need straight up genes to make such a claim (and ones that cannot be influenced meaningfully by epigenetic influences, at that)

And you know... your body parts. >_>

I mean I know TECHNICALLY males are fully biologically capable of breast feeding and we have the psychological capacity for giving birth. Yet I think we still have a stronger testosterone producer.

Though to admit I don't know if after hormone therapy if your body produces elevated levels equal to that of the gender you got (or of your gender, as is the case of some people who need a hormone pick me up)

[Reelya]

Hope this hasn't been mentioned yet since I don't have time to read the whole thread, but...

For what it's worth, studies have been performed on chimps that show that their children seem to have gender specific preferences on what toys they like to play with.  You could probably find any number of arguments against the study or its conclusions, or even claim that chimps have culture of a sort, but it leads me to believe that there probably are some small innate differences between the genders well before puberty ever kicks in.  Hormones aren't the only thing that affects behavior.

Wish I had the link to a better overview of that study.  It's probably not hard to track it down though, so if I find time I might look for it.

In humans, similar things. But not "gender specific". This study measures testosterone from the amniotic fluid of 212 prenatal babies, and correlates that with measures of "male typical" play-style in infancy. In both boys and girls there is a positive correlation between the prenatal testosterone and the play-style measure.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778233/

Note: this stuff is WAY beyond those old "boys like things, girls like faces" type studies from before, now, we can actually link that to a chemical rather than something subjective like biological gender, it's much harder to brush it off as inadvertent experimenter bias or something.