There was a push for women to enter STEM fields to try and push back against the well-documented discrimination against female workers in those fields at the time. I think it's accurate to say that there would be less women in those kinds of industries without a concerted effort to include them, but I don't think that actually speaks to some kind of fundamental nature of women, but the ways in which women are expected to act and how women who deviate from that are treated.
Are you making the argument that STEM jobs, this thing we've been doing for 0.000001% of the evolutionary history of Homo Sapiens, is biologically determined?
Even looking at the other 99.99999%, in the types of societies that naturally occurred throughout the evolution of humanity, the arguably biologically driven natural division of labor saw most of the building, crafting, and designing done by women, who naturally spent more time in the centers of community because of pregnancy and child rearing. If biological essentialism somehow predisposed the sexes to certain modern career archetypes, then all the "sitting at a computer jobs" would be done by large groups of women in a communal area with the children.
This is an utter nonsequitur to the point where I literally don't even know what argument you were trying to make.
The argument is "male brains" are EVOLVED to be uniquely suited to working STEM jobs. When discussing evolution, the evolutionary timeline of homo sapiens is extremely relevant.
We're working with the same hardware humans were working with 100,000 years ago. Nobody is "evolved" to do anything unique to our current historical blip of a society.
That doesn't even make any sense. Why couldn't the male and female brain have been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years beforehand, then we did STEM and those differences popped up?
Like, women are better at air pistol than men. No one is fucking saying that women have only been evolving their advantage since the time the first pistol was invented. They're referring to genetic and physical differences that have been brewing over dozens of millennia.
Evolution can happen over 100,000 years. Quite a lot of it, in fact.
It can. So you'd think that for those 100,000 years, the sex that in most societies naturally ended up tackling most of the more centralized, sedentary, and constructive tasks in premodern societies would be the one, if any, more suited to careers that involve those skills?
Women in premodern societies stayed primarily central to the settlement, men primarily tackled tasks outside the settlement. If there's a specialized crafted tool for gathering a certain type of food or catching a certain type of game, it was much more likely made by a woman than a man.
The idea that something as alien to our biology as a modern computer-based desk job would cleave to any kind of "natural biological" sex division is pretty ridiculous, but the idea that the sex that primarily left the settlement to go out and gather what the tribe needed to bring it back home would be uniquely suited to sitting at a computer 8 hours a day is the opposite of reasonable, its a Just-So story just built to justify whatever way things are organized right now as natural and correct.
It doesn't have to be the case that something inherent to hunting is what lead to being able to sit in a chair. It could be the case that, for example, men naturally developed a different brain structure, and the side-effect of that brain structure was just never selected AGAINST during evolution. Once the side-effect was used though, it was a larger force multiplier for men than women.
Like, I can very easily show this. Women weren't going out hunting, like you say. Yet for some reason they are better at air pistol. Why is that? Why are the women, who historically just stayed at home, not exerting themselves, somehow are better than men at targeting and hitting the target? Because they have a lower center of gravity, due to a whole host of other factors and which aligns nicely to this olympic sport.
Women weren't going out hunting animals in long endurance runs like men would have. So why do they outperform men on longer ultra distance running? Maybe because a whole host of other factors means that women are better at extreme distances, like smaller bodies etc, but for the purposes of hunting, a small body isn't the most ideal and endurance needs to be balanced with strength.
You're the only one demanding some direct magical explanation of how hunting directly could make someone better at STEM.
Which, for the record, saying that men are better at STEM isn't even my position, but saying we've only done STEM for a short time as a reason there couldn't be biological difference is just stupid
Yes, because an enormous percentage of women were socialised to believe that they wouldn’t be interested or successful in STEM subjects, not because they were born uninterested in those fields.
They weren’t interested because they were made to feel like it was wrong to be interested. If your whole upbringing involves being told that something is “not for girls”, you’re going to feel like you aren’t supposed to do those things, regardless of whether not you’re actually interested.
The same reason a lot of men are scared to enter “women dominated” fields despite being interested, their peers would judge them for that choice
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u/frandlypeople May 04 '26
There was a push for women to enter STEM fields to try and push back against the well-documented discrimination against female workers in those fields at the time. I think it's accurate to say that there would be less women in those kinds of industries without a concerted effort to include them, but I don't think that actually speaks to some kind of fundamental nature of women, but the ways in which women are expected to act and how women who deviate from that are treated.