Butthurt white guys, an Asian virgin and an angry lesbian walk into a bar...

You keep throwing out engineers as if that's a statistically relevant percentage of the population. The vast majority of men are not engineers, drawing conclusions about engineers is not very useful.

Scientific observations of children modelling behaviors after same-sex role models are among the very first observations made in the field of modern psychology. It's not some random conjecture I'm throwing out there, it's one of the baseline theories in all of psychology. Nature vs nurture arguments for gender roles is the longest running argument in all of psychology, and there's LOTS of evidence on both sides but the nurture side has always come out on top.

But there's lots of other recent data from sociologists and economists that shows that a lot of the behaviors we thought were biological, are actually more a function of social structures than biology. For instance, we always thought that risk-taking was an inherently male behavior, but in the few matriarchal societies on the planet that have been studied, the women demonstrate more economic risk-taking and therefore risk-taking behavior is an expression of social power, not biology.

And you're right, fatherless boys end up lost and aimless in young adulthood, SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE THEY DONT 'DEFAULT' TO MODELLING FEMALE BEHAVIOR.

So yes it's biological in that there's a strong biological drive to model same-sex behavior, but those behaviors are not inherently gendered, they're societally defined. If you put boys in an environment where all the men were dancing in pink tutus, that's what the boys would start doing too.

Arbitrary_sl said:

Wait, what? If they did default to modeling female behavior than they would not end up lost and aimless in young adulthood? That's absolute gibberish. We learn different things from each parent and when one is absent and there are no substitutes the child suffers. Taking up the gender traits of the remaining parent isn't going to fill the holes.

Click to expand...

Right, that's what I'm saying. I'm countering the argument that they'd just mimic whatever they see in the absence of a male role model. They specifically seek to mimic behavior from same-sex role models. That's your biological component. Not the roles themselves.

Arbitrary_sl said:

It's a soft science that people like Mist have latched on to as a means with which to upend society. It's all fine and dandy to have a conversation on a message board but she would put base legislation on her opinions. She's dangerous and she doesn't care who would be hurt provided others changed their behavior to be more in line with what she wants.

Click to expand...

I didn't say that at all. You're just making shit up. I personally think that socialized gender roles are largely a positive for the bulk of society, societies need defined structures to work and gender is certainly a good one, I just don't see compelling evidence that they're biologically based, certainly not as biological as many people think they are, and there's vast amounts of evidence across many different fields and many different kinds of studies that go against the biological arguments.

What's really ironic is the number of people in this thread that were lamenting the lack of male teachers for pages and pages, when that's a prime example of society putting too much stock in it's assumptions of biologically based gender roles.

The lack of male teachers bothers me only slightly, and the lack of female engineers doesn't bother me at all. I just don't think it's because of biological forces.

As long a society has enough degrees of freedom that exceptional individuals are free to break out of socially enforced gender roles, then that's enough.

Modelling is just way more powerful of a force, and gets more and more powerful the more cognitively evolved the animal is.

I like how you guys show up 100 years late to the argument and think you're going over new territory. Many psychologists believed that when we finally developed the ability to peer into the human brain we'd see these vast differences between the genders, and now that we've peeled back the curtain those differences have shown to be so insignificant compared to the differences between any two given individuals regardless of gender.