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There are also experiments (Simon Baron-Cohen) with infants at one day of age showing the differences in interests (human faces vs things).

In that vein we can also include personality changes displayed by transgender people who undergo hormone replacement therapy.

Also studies on the personalities of separated twins.

Everything points to a mix of biology and socialization. The idea of parity in division of labor as the ideal is purely dogmatic.



Simon Baron-Cohen has been pushing that idea for a long time but while they’ve gotten a lot of attention for his career, his conclusions are far from definitive. There are various papers contesting his conclusions and review articles have failed to support the bold claims – e.g. https://software.rc.fas.harvard.edu/lds/wp-content/uploads/2...

That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing here but I find it telling that the neuroscientists I used to support were far more skeptical than, say, the Damore fans here. This topic came up a bit and there was a strong consensus that the science was still too early to say anything — there are low level biological differences (e.g. percentages of white matter) but that hadn’t been linked to high-level skills, and the few low-level differences were still being studied to identify the cause. This is all complicated by the plasticity of the brain based on usage so answering even simple-sounding questions is usually a significant percentage of multiple people’s research careers.




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