Mental/instinct differences between boys and girls - 100% cultural?

but the other kids parent thought that the tendancies were entirely from conditioning (nurture), ie there are so many influences in society about boys do x that even with strong parenting instinct, it’s impossible to keep them neutral

I'd agree with this. As for actual studies, can't help in afraid.

I do think that this thread will be the subject of much moderator focus however. Kettle's on...

My brother tried to condition his girls to be petrolheads like himself. Zero interest, fear of noisy engines.
Then his son came along. Before he could even walk he'd sit practically clawing at the garage door for the mini quad inside...
Ditto diggers, tractors etc.

Toddlers choices are more nature than nurture IMO.

My daughter loves dinosaurs but also playing with her kitchen and making food. My son also loves dinosaurs and the kitchen used to be his. We try and treat them the same where possible. They’ve got different personalities so need treating differently in some situations.

The thing is, the very notion of what is a 'boys thing' or a 'girls thing' is entirely cultural, and the same thing might be a boy thing in one culture and a girl thing in another. So boys or girls doing those things 'naturally', i.e. because they are boys/girls, cannot be true.

its nature not nurture IME. In general, boys like boy things, girls like girl things.

I;d tend to agree there ARE differences between boys and girls..

Boys like ’things’, and as such generally go into engineering/motors/building ‘things’..
Girls like ‘interactions’, and as such generally go into interacting roles..

I say GENERALLY…. And await the flames…

DrP

Sandy Tosvig tells a story about her son. In a family with two sisters two mums, this wee lad out of nowhere had made a pistol from Lego and was running around the house "shooting" the cat and dog. He's certainly not been told or shown and had no immediate male influence. where does that come from? [things like] TV presumably

On the other hand, my son loved to cook with his mum, and his best friend (at aged two and bit) was fond of a pink tutu.

I think if you want to look at what science currently thinks/argues about, start with studies of Epigenetics. Makes the debates on this site look tame

Tele and friends play a big part here. We didn't dress our girl up in overly pink, "girly" type things. Yet she loves everything pink, rainbows, jewellery and sparkly nails, unicorns, wants to be a princess, wants to do gymnastics and cart wheels all the time.

But she also loves riding her bike and doing climbing 🤘

Just go in Asda or Tesco and look how the kids clothes are divided up. Pink princesses and pugicorns on the girl side, blue dinosaurs and diggers and the boys side.

Nurture aiding nature I reckon. The hardwiring is in place from the start and we then assist this according to our culture.
I see no problems with that as it can be altered if the individual wishes.

In general, boys like boy things, girls like girl things

You mean boys things like football? Any idea what happened at the weekend?

Sex role segregation is universal but how that manifests itself is diverse (eg Chambri tribe). In the US pink used to be the boys' colour. People can also change sides as with the Balkan sworn virgins. It's complex, nothing is 100%. Much diversity exists within the sexes as well as between them.
A very switched-on lesbian I used to work with was telling me she and her partner had a boy for whom they refused to buy toy guns. He used to run around the house shooting people with a carrot.

There was an experiment on baby bonobos.
The boy ones largely liked wheeled toys, like toy cars and trains and the girl ones mostly developed attachment to dolls.
Unlikely to be social conditioning in captive bonobos.

We had boy/girl twins. Both had access to exactly the same toys, opportunities and experiences- in other words could choose what they did or played with. We didn’t exactly go down the social experiment rabbit hole, but both Mrs Scape and I were keen not to exert any gender stereotyping on either child.

By the time they were 18 months they had become a typical little boy and a typical little girl, if such a concept is describable. Both gravitated towards their own gender at nursery, and at home she played with her princess castle while he played with his ride-on tractor and farm stuff.

Both were sporty, and both were “pack-leaders” at uni…. Hard-playing, driving the social side of their chosen team games, and I put that down to the competitive nature of their sibling relationship rather than anything else. If anything she is hard as nails, yet the most compassionate person I know. She is a teacher in a special school for kids with complex needs and behavioural issues and faces challenges I can only wonder at.

No matter what our intentions, we tend not to realise just how influential society is as a whole. They will have been absorbing gender-biased info from day one, so unless you were to raise two kids in a total vacuum you’ll never really know.

Nature influences society, the nurture bit and visa versa it's impossible to untangle the two. What we should as a society is be more focussed on the people not in the middle of the normal distribution and make sure they have all the opportunities they want and need in whatever they want to do.

You mean boys things like football? Any idea what happened at the weekend?

No, I wouldnt class football as a boys thing, or a girls thing. Its just a thing.

When my son was very young, we tried not to buy him specifically boys toys, we bought him a proper mix of what would be classed as boys toy - things like toy cars, helicopters, toy guns, dinosours, and girls toys - toy kitchens, hoovers , doll houses , sylvanian family stuff etc. He played with them all, but the microwave in the toy kitchen became a garage for his cars, or a prison for the naughty dolls,sylvanian families for example. It was all explosions, adventure, right and wrong etc.

he just seemed to gravitate to what people would probably describe as typical boy toys and boy ways of playing with any given toy.

With regards to football - he hates football, cant stand it.

I can only go on my experience - and the OP asked what I thought. Obviously this in no way constitutes a scientific study before all the pedants on here jump on my comments.

edit to add : the sandy toksvig story and the other one about the boy using a carrot as a gun resonates - I think in general (and I keep using the word general as there will be lots of exceptions to this , before the STW right on brigade jump on my comments) regardless of what toys a boy has, they will play with them in a boy way.

also to add : before we had children my wife was a big proponent of nurture being a big influence on how boys behave versus girls , now shes not so much a proponent, she's pretty much switched her views and thinks that boys simply just work differently to girls.

There were some interesting experiments for a tv (possibly bbc) years back. Basically it's mostly nurture that determines things and it isn't just the parents that have access to a baby. Grandparents, nursery, later tv etc all have influences and they can be very very subtle. They dressed a baby up with the opposite stereotypical clothing and filmed how the person played with the baby with a selection of toys. Invariably the boy disguised as a girl was treated differently being given dolls and cuddled more and more gently. Different toys were chosen but also when boy babies fell or cried they were treated differently. There have been studies that show the different treatments of very young children does actually lead to the brain developing differently for example spacial awareness was more developed in boys due to the tyres of toys given.

Problem is unless you carried out an inhumane experiment cutting out all external influences how could you prove any of this? Parents might be 'right on' but then you have the mass media, peers, extended family role models, retailers, etc etc.

Societal conditioning is much deeper and more pervasive than many people think. However, I'd be surprised if it was the sole explanatory factor in this.

All (well, the bulk) of Jr’s baby and toddler toys were hand me downs from her male cousins. I was primary carer. With her one day playing with some matchbox cars. She made a bed from tissues, mummy car kissed daddy car, they both kissed baby car and then tucked baby car into bed. I’d thought it was nurture. I now reckon nature.

From an evolutionary perspective, maybe that’s expected? Women and men have very different necessary investment levels in creating a child - a few minutes for the man, nine months for the woman. And that’s just to be able to say ‘tah dah, baby!’. Different roles require different strategies require different developmental routes?

All the boys in our family has a fascination with hoovers as toddlers. Shame that didn't last long ! My son doesn't know what one is now !

No, I wouldnt class football as a boys thing, or a girls thing. Its just a thing.

But on any given school playground, it'll (generally) be the boys playing football, and that's pretty much the result of generations of people saying that football is a boy's thing, and that why girls don't play it.

Look, to be honest, I think most of us are saying the same thing, boys and girls (and even that's obviously not a binary thing) tend to have some differing, general, characteristics. That's the nature bit. But, the cultural/nurture bit has far, far more impact, and we also have to remember that we will have difficulty seeing that, because we've been brought up in that same culture.

My brother tried to condition his girls to be petrolheads like himself. Zero interest, fear of noisy engines.
Then his son came along. Before he could even walk he’d sit practically clawing at the garage door for the mini quad inside…
Ditto diggers, tractors etc.

Toddlers choices are more nature than nurture IMO.

No, I wouldnt class football as a boys thing, or a girls thing. Its just a thing.

really? Don’t know if it’s different now, but at school the boys played football, the girls didn’t (netball?). Maybe that was just my school, was it the other way around at yours?

its different now - or at least it is at my sons school - girls can (and do) play football, the 'A' football team is mixed boys and girls

The primary school that both my son and daughter attended had a mixed team for football, and so did most of the schools locally. And this would have been the early noughties

its different now – or at least it is at my sons school – girls can (and do) play football, the ‘A’ football team is mixed boys and girls

Well here is a perspective from a lay but interested person.

Following up on @myti's post, there is a body of research on toy choices in very young humans and (now) monkeys loosely summarised here (I have no idea if this is a good summary or not, but it appears to be the result of at least some kind or literature survey).
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gender-toys-children-toy-preferences-hormones_n_1827727
The argument can be made (Jordan Peterson somewhat notoriously made it) that this justifies accepting differences in various outcomes (eg career success etc.) between men and women as being innate, not due to socio-cultural stuff. The counter-argument to that, which to my mind pulls the rug out from under it pretty much completely, is that you simply cannot extrapolate from research in the very young (where you might think socio-cultural forces have not kicked in much) to grown-up humans (or indeed monkeys) who have grown up within a social structure that assigns roles and expectations to boys and girls differently. Until you can correct for the socio-cultural influences, it is difficult to say much about this beyond "my, that is interesting". And to conduct research that did take them out of the equation would (at least in humans) be unethical. Which may be the reason for looking at how monkeys respond.

I have a friend who made the conscious decision to bring their child into the world with as little as possible gender bias. They called them a name that is gender neutral and dressed them in non gender stereotypical clothes. They referred to them in gender neutral terms and the number of people who knew their child's biological sex was limited. 4 years on that child very much acts and behaves to their birth sex stereotype, she drags a doll around and likes to arrange tea parties for her toys. Somehow, through nature or societal norms that slipped through the net she is very much the archetypal little girl.

BTW - my friend (her mum) is more than cool with how it's turned out - she just didn't want to 'force' an identity on them and wanted whichever way things went to be a more natural process.

It's very difficult to exclude influence from TV and media. If you look at anything that has a lot of tv coverage, like the womens euro football, many girls will want to emulate the people they have seen on the TV. It also works for adults.

I think there is absolutely an element of nature in this, what that element is I don't know.

What is important to me is that the nurture is not exactly removed, but not pushed either.

(forgive clear stereotyping to make the point - not my actual belief of gender roles but keeping it simple)

If the girl wants to play with dolls and kitchens, then let her. If she wants to play with cars and footballs, absolutely let her too. I think we live in an age where that is pretty much acceptable now although it may still not sit easily with some. Why may be cultural, religious, maybe even a class thing (trying not to be overly woke, just an observation)

The other way round - boys that reject cars and footballs and instead want to dress up dolls and run the hoover round are still not treated properly far more than the former case - they're from experience of others in my peer group, at school, etc., far more likely to have them taken off them and be told 'they're girls toys, here have this Fisher Price workbench instead'

(Whether anyone should be allowed to have a gun, or even a carrot as a gun, is a whole new can of worms)

(Whether anyone should be allowed to have a gun, or even a carrot as a gun, is a whole new can of worms)

My kid's mum and I had a pretty strict set of rules about toys and that included no "real looking" guns for our son. He made them out of Lego and whatever anyway. Anecdote: he made a pretty amazingly accurate replica of a Colt 9mm copied form a book, which had one of those exploded diagrams in it. the parent in me was pretty horrified, the man in me was pretty impressed how well he'd done it #conflicted

As others have said, it's complex. The difference between the means of populations, however we scientists choose to categorise or define them, is always far smaller than the range within the populations. So even categorising male and female (1) has difficulties (people born with no or more than one sexes' sexual organs) and (2) doesn't actually tell you definitively some other physical trait like how tall or how strong they are. And similarly it doesn't tell you very much - or indeed anything at all - about any individual in terms of their character and behaviours and likes and dislikes.

The problem is about how we humans aren't very good as understanding populations, "in general" or "in the mean" against any individual person. The thread is full of anecdotal examples, which is what humans do a lot of, place our lived experiences in the centre of our opinions and decision making. It's not our fault, it's the way (the majority) of our brains work. But it means we pigeon-hole people and some people feel the need to judge or coerce others to match their own opinions on how to be / behave in society. That's where the damage is done.

I agree with what greyspoke says, scientifically we cannot disentangle and hence we cannot independently study (at least not ethically) any human or monkey's behaviour because they have already grown-up in a world where there environment influences how their brain develops. Human brains are taking in information all the time in all forms - sights, sounds, interactions, facial recognition / recognition of emotions - and particularly how an individuals brain works and develops is mostly set in the first few years. For my age group (maybe 30 and older) there is a massive under-diagnosis of women with autism. It is believed to be entirely due to the societal-environmental affect that women when they were children (unconsciously) had learned to mask. It's not fully understood but the difference in behaviours is environmental-societal.

Anecdotes about individual children aren't much use in understanding stuff like this. You really need to gather large-scale data on home environments. Ideally you would have identical twins who were adopted separately in order to determine the effect of home environment.

Male and female babies have different hormone levels, males typically have much higher testosterone, as I understand it. On average, males grow up to be bigger, stronger, and much more aggressive. However, individual males and females differ massively so top female athletes will demolish average males, for example.

As an anecdote, my wife pointed out that when we were both present, my daughter (aged about 2 at the time) would run to me if she felt scared but would run to mum if she wanted comfort. That was her preference when we were both there. If only I was there, she would run to me and demand a hug when she wanted comfort. Point is, she perceived some difference between the two parents despite my wife often working late and me doing nearly all of the cooking and a lot of the diaper changing, etc.

I think its a bit of both, but probably mainly nurture. With our 2, we tried to bring them up with too much bias towards supposed boy or girls things. But my son (14) like cars and my daughter (12) likes baking. Both of those things have come from nowhere.

My daughter just doesn't want to get into MTBing or most other sports really, even though she's very good at athletics and a hell of a batter in cricket. It's just not her thing. She is really individual though in her styling and is very arty, where as my son loves sport and is also quite acedemic.

Nurture definitely has a part to play, but I really think there are some natural predispositions.

Ideally you would have identical twins who were adopted separately in order to determine the effect of home environment.

Didn't they try that in America?....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Identical_Strangers

Didn’t they try that in America?

Yes, finding identical twins who have been adopted separately is the dream of any social science researcher.

There were some interesting experiments for a tv (possibly bbc) years back.

I'm glad you mentioned this, I saw it at the time and it was fascinating. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was now. They recorded kids and adults interacting, there was tons of really subtle - and some not-so-subtle - conditioning going on. The toddlers would go to whatever toy they could grasp, the adults would then take toys away and give them more "appropriate" ones.

For my age group (maybe 30 and older) there is a massive under-diagnosis of women with autism. It is believed to be entirely due to the societal-environmental affect that women when they were children (unconsciously) had learned to mask.

Also, the vast majority of studies have been around autism in boys. It's believed now to present differently in girls - perhaps at least in part because as you say they're better at masking - and this is very poorly understood in comparison.

Both of those things have come from nowhere.

Unfortunately (or maybe not) you don't control all of the influences on them, interests always come from somewhere. I suppose there's some sort of unique neuro-chemical response for every individual (not sure if Gender related hormones would factor?) that makes certain things just click and other things not.

As a counter point to the OP neither of my Girls could give two shits about cookery or baking, my missus tries her hand from time to time (bake off being on the telly is occasionally an obvious influence).
The eldest has active distain for "Girly" clothing and doesn't seem to own a dress/skirt aside from school uniform, Her mother loves dresses with unusual print designs.

TBH I'd rather they were just their own people, if pink stuff, dollies and baking made my Girls happy I'd be fine with it but they don't, and they seem to know what they like and don't.
I'm not sure if that was influence from us, friends, TV or the interweb, but they seem happy...

Of the lot of us I think I'm the one who enjoys cooking the most and is perhaps a bit more 'creative' with it (not always successfully), but I do find "Traditional gender roles" seem to operate on my missus and she often feels she "Has to" be the one to prepare family meals for some reason.

So where did the cultural differences come from in the first place??

Unfortunately (or maybe not) you don’t control all of the influences on them, interests always come from somewhere. I suppose there’s some sort of unique neuro-chemical response for every individual (not sure if Gender related hormones would factor?) that makes certain things just click and other things not.

Oh definitely, I just mean we haven't pushed thinkgs onto them. They'll definitely get inffluenced from other places though, friends, family, tv...

TBH I’d rather they were just their own people, if pink stuff, dollies and baking made my Girls happy I’d be fine with it

This though in 1000%

Also, I guess a bigger question to be asked is:
"why is it a BAD thing if male and female traits are different"??

I appreciate we want equality (pay, responsibility etc etc), but also the sexes ARE different.
Correct me if i'm completely wrong here, but sometimes it feels like 'the world' has to insist all humans should have the same likes/dislikes/jobs roles etc...
I'm not talking about opportunity - we should all have that. But WHAT IF less women want to become engineers and builders. And what if less men want to become waiters and flight attendants etc??

DrP

 And what if less men want to become waiters and flight attendants etc??

Fewer...

Probs time to change it, and make my post look really weird.

Nah... I'll leave my crappy grammar up for the annals of time!!!

DrP

The bad thing is to treat any individual as anything other than a unique individual. And I am sure that most people don't consciously do that, it's just that we are all part of our society and so our own unconscious behaviours perpetuate the social norm to some extent (like the TV show myti discusses).

Opportunity is intrinsically linked to sex (gender, race, class) because of institutionalised biases. The example that girls and boys in most UK schools do not get offered the same sports in PE, which has meant that girls with the potential to be world-class footballers have never even tried the sport, and similarly boys with the potential to be world-class netballers, and people not from wealthy backgrounds in sailing or rowing or cycling or whatever. And that extends to opportunities and in particular the 'way the brain develops' with spatial skills and taking things apart and putting them back together again for things like engineering and sciences. Or visa versa the perceived 'softer' skills and desire to 'look after' that make great nurses or caring staff. The problem is people missing out on finding things they are great at and enjoy because society as a whole and particularly certain power structures and institutions don't enable everyone.

I think there are some differences that occur naturally. However, almost every characteristic will be on a bell curve and the curve might be slightly shifted for boys and girls but there will be a huge amount of overlap. I reckon 90% of boys and 90% of girls could easily fall within the normal distribution of the opposite gender for any characteristic you care to mention (if that makes any sense).

However, these differences are going to be massively amplified and reinforced as soon as kids start socialising with each other. There's very little effort put into getting genders to mix and often, even at nursery age, kids will be broken up into single gender groups for activities even if there's no real reason to do so.

It's funny. If you imagine you had a multi-cultural nursery school and the kids started grouping themselves according to racial lines then I would imagine the nursery might start getting worried and start trying to encourage the groups to mix more. They certainly wouldn't structure activities that reinforced these dividing lines but that's exactly what we see with boys and girls.

Once you have single gender groups the pressure to conform is very strong so people are going to change their preferences to fit in better with the group.

In short, nature plays a very small role but then the environment massively amplifies any differences.

even at nursery age, kids will be broken up into single gender groups for activities

Not in my experience, which is not to say it doesn't happen.

kids will be broken up into single gender groups for activities even if there’s no real reason to do so.

There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that girls do better academically in a single sex school, whereas there's there's some (but not really of great quality)  to show that boys do better socially if they're in a mixed sex environment.

WHAT IF less women want to become engineers and builders.

Then the physical and digital world gets built mostly according to the needs of the other 50% of the population. See this a lot in how environments, digital, health and other services often poorly serve women or don't consider women specific requirements.

Examples: Lagging research and health advice around womens fertility & menopause. Health and sport apps that don't cater for periods, or fail to do it in a way that protects their privacy. Buildings and environments that don't provide safety for lone women. Not enough women's bogs.

It should be obvious to any parent of a girl that how the behaviour of their mum; other female friends and relatives; random women on TV, adverts, and youtube is massively a part of who they become. Same as for boys mimicking mens behaviour.

That's why it's the responsibility of men to teach boys how to treat women well. A boy might have a lovely mum that tells them to be nice to girls, but if they see their dad being aggressive and slimy around and about women, they'll just learn that you can get a nice wife by being aggressive and slimy.

So where did the cultural differences come from in the first place??

Well there are a whole bunch of things that may be part of it but should no longer be relevant, such as physical strength (or the lack thereof), repeated pregnancies, child-rearing responsibilty and so on.

I think an earlier poster pointed out the relevant statement:

"there are no such things as ""boy things and girl things"" as these are a social construct".

Our son (3) likes to help his mum with the cooking, plays with his doll house - which he wanted from playing with a friends, but also loves riding his bike.

The real problem is the societal construct mentioned above that inevitably steer girls towards "girl things" which will also eventually steer them towards "girl jobs" - for which remuneration has been kept artificially capped by societal expectation (it's a rewarding occupations etc.)

Let them be their own person by all means but don't think that there aren't societal pressures on them and that those pressures don't lead to eventual perpetuation of societal norms.

I listened to a segment on the radio about major and minor chords and our perception of them.

no-one ever teaches you that a minor chord is 'sad' and a major chord isn't 'happy' in western society, it is so ingrained by repeated exposure that it is an accepted fact. there was a study on some remote tribes with no concept of chords, and they perceived no emotional difference between them.

boys like boy things and girls like girl things isn't that different. In my experience particularly in the older generations. small things like my 75yr old neighbour commenting to my son that boys shouldn't have long hair sticks even though it shouldn't.

So where did the cultural differences come from in the first place??

This is outside of my area of expertise, but my guess is that a lot of it came from archaic beliefs. Back in pre-industrial days, babies literally needed their mothers because there was no baby formula so fathers couldn't feed an infant, plus families were much larger and people married younger back then. That meant that women were basically house bound taking care of babies for years and years. Labouring jobs back then were much, much more physical because there wasn't machinery to handle the physical stuff. The average man is stronger than the average woman so physical jobs really were better done by men. Now, most of it is mechanized and a woman can operate a machine equally as well as a man. I suspect that led to it seeming perfectly normal that there were men's jobs and women's jobs. Once that's established, it would be extremely difficult to change people's views because it would be handed down from generation to generation as the natural order of things.

On top of that, science was not very scientific and was quite mingled with religion. If you believed that God created the universe with some purpose in mind, then the differences between men and women and their roles easily becomes some divine intention about the appropriate roles. Once religion gets involved, it's almost impossible to change anyone's mind about gender roles, empirical evidence is never going to persuade a religious believer.

Growing up before the digital age makes me fearful that the role models are found on You Tube / Tik Tok and parents are less influential.

Would live for my daughter to like stuff I like, but that isn't going to happen.

Like pretty much verything when it comes to nature vs nurture

its always a combination of both & impossible to figure out because those 2 factors feedback on each other, especially when youll get so much variation between kids

Its also something that will change over time as hormone levels alter in kids bodies, likewise societal & cultural influences are dynamic

We've got 4 kids, 2 older boys, the last 2 were boy & girl twins , now 6, so its been very interetsing to watch how my daughter manages being a girl in a house full of boys- she loves unicorns and sparkly dresses, has ballet class, but is (a lot) better than her brother at football, loves lego, mariokart & minecraft & rough & tumble games & star wars, but also loves Frozen- bit so does her twin brother- he just wont admit it!

You cant underestimate the power of advertising on their brains- 3 minutes of shouty adverts and they are 100% certain they need whatever naff plastic piece of crap was squeezed in the ad break in scooby doo- and those ads defintely reinforce the sterotypes

There was an experiment on baby bonobos.
The boy ones largely liked wheeled toys, like toy cars and trains and the girl ones mostly developed attachment to dolls.

I think it was a bit more than that - "Wallen’s team looked at 11 male and 23 female rhesus monkeys. In general the males preferred to play with wheeled toys, such as dumper trucks, over plush dolls, while female monkeys played with both kinds of toys." (my emphasis - https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/)

Environmental bias is also picked up really early as well - this article talks about a famous experiment using dolls of different colours :" I placed four racially diverse dolls (white, Latina, Black with lighter skin, and Black with medium skin) in a diverse preschool classroom and observed Black preschool girls as they played for one semester. My work was published in Early Childhood Education, a peer-reviewed journal."

Whils this is about race sterotypes not gender ones I suspect the process is the same. The findings included "girls rarely chose the Black dolls during play. On the rare occasions that the girls chose the Black dolls, they mistreated them. One time a Black girl put the doll in a pot and pretended to cook the doll. That’s not something the girls did with the dolls that weren’t Black.

The children were more likely to step over or even step on the Black dolls to get to other toys. But that didn’t happen with the other dolls."

Bear in mind this is about pre school age kids, so the main exposure to societal norms will have been via parents and home life.

Nah… I’ll leave my crappy grammar up for the annals of time!!!

*anals

I've got two girls aged 3 and 5.

The gender influences are EVERYWHERE. TV programs, shops, books, magazines, clothes, other parents, interactions at nursery / school. It's very difficult (and probably counter productive) to isolate from all this and make any meaningful conclusions IMO.

They are also very easily influenced at that age, so pick up on so much that we might miss.

With my two, there's a mix of intersts, some of it traditionally male, some female. They like pink stuff, hate playing with baby dolls, like constructing things (lego, marble runs), youngest likes football, eldest likes ballet etc.

I think it's 90% nurture.

My uneducated personal view is that the influence of nature and nurture is interlinked, complex and evolutionary.  On an individual level sometimes nature (genetic) and sometimes nurture (societal/ family/ life experience influences) wins out on the different aspects that make up our personalities.

 I think there are genetically hardwired evolutionary female or male characteristics that persist from previous generations, and possibly some of the genetics that we would now call 'nature' evolved due to the 'nurture' influences of previous generations.

Have gender norms and roles evolved (and will continue to do so) due to societal change (nurture) I would say yes.

I also think if you try too hard to change the nature, or control the nurture of a child, it will often come back to bite you!

Key thing that seems to be overlooked:

Also, I guess a bigger question to be asked is:
“why is it a BAD thing if male and female traits are different”??

It's not, but even if they are you absolutely MUST NOT ASSUME that someone's gender will predict their behaviour or their preferences!

It's one thing doing a hypothetical unethical experiment and finding boys really do like gun toys better on average; but it's wrong to then use that information for anything other than scientific knowledge. Because all kids then get stereotyped by gender, and as we have seen many will leave less fulfilled lives by being channelled into certain subjects, opportunities, pastimes and roles that they don't like. Even if were 70% of boys who innately like "boy stuff", that'd still be 30% of boys being denied opportunities to flourish and play the way they want.

I used to watch my dad fixing things and working on the car all the time as a kid. I always asked for explanations of what he was doing and why, and he was happy to give them. I've spent a long time working on my own cars (haha) on the drive, and of all the neighbourhood kids only one was interested in what I was doing - a girl. I asked if she knew how cars worked and she said no, but was happy to listen when I explained. None of the other kids give a crap (but they will all help if I ask just as they did with gardening, because they want to help). This girl's dad is a mechanic, but he hasn't apparently seen fit to explain cars to her. So it seems that she has inherited a degree of mechanical curiosity but it hasn't been nurtured. She's also constantly scooting or riding up and down the hill, and is always active. The other kids sit around chatting and watching Tik Tok, including the boys.

My wife has an excellent analytical mind and is interested in lots of technical things. Her dad also was an engineer. But she was not brought up to explore these ideas in a way that seemed accessible. She wasn't explicitly denied, of course, but everything engineering related was always presented as boyish, everything was full of boys, and boy culture being what it is in the USA she was always put off by that. So she was circumstantially denied the opportunity to shine in a career that would have paid very well. Instead the 'girl appropriate' things, even done to a high level, led straight into low paying jobs.