inhahe: Yes, but talking about such a truth is taboo in 2020. There are essential differences in energy, personality, preferences, etc. between guys and girls that run way too deep to be merely cultural. Most people aren't perceptive enough to see this though so they remain safe in their PC zone. That's not to say that girls are just too dumb to participate in STEM jobs, it's just that most of them wouldn't prefer that kind of subject. (Not all of them, obviously--there's a bell curve to anything like this.)
It makes sense that there'd be essential differences between the sexes per sexual selection, and probably natural selection outside of sexual selection too. Anyone who thinks that the physical differences between men and women have nothing to do with personality and emotional differences doesn't have a clue how things work in nature and are disconnected from their natural faculties of perception. Biological organisms are highly holistic creatures, and for the most part, what you see is what you get. A cat isn't cute solely because it happens to look a certain way; how it looks is cute to us because of what it implies about the cat's mental characteristics. It's no coincidence, for example, that a woman's skin is softer and also women are less aggressive and more emotional. (There's a lot of baggage in saying women are "emotional." I'm not implying that they're helpless to control their emotions, or that it's a disability of some sort, etc.) And we don't actually fall in love with each other based on looks for random, meaningless reasons as the academic way of thinking would have us believe; a person' s facial characteristics reflect certain key personality dispositions, in a language that only the intuition or emotional body understands. As within, so without.
The essential mental and emotional differences between the sexes is the spark of romance--opposites are attracted to and complete each other, and that's a very good thing. Nowadays there's a huge movement to bring both sexes together into some kind of single androgynous sex, and people don't know what they're out to destroy.
inhahe:
There's no reason, no reason at all, to assume that the genes determining physical characteristics would diverge for the two sexes but the genes determining
mental characteristics wouldn't. And yes, many of our mental and emotional characteristics are dependent on genes, it's not a blank slate. Otherwise a
hamster would have a lot more in common with a person mentally. And science has shown us just how deeply brain structure is involved with the various mental
faculties.
And yes, there is cultural bias that plays a role in keeping women out of STEM subjects, I'm just saying that's not the only factor. I don't even know if it's
the major factor
And the cultural bias itself didn't spring from a vacuum, it came about ultimately because of these intrinsic differences