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Comment by Sniffnoy | Hacker News Reader

> This is part of the nature vs nurture debate that has been argued for millennia. People try to decide which is more critical.

If you read the article, though, it isn't. The article claims that sex differences are large; it explicitly makes no claim as to what causes them.

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Maybe not directly. However, the article does cite the Gender Equality Paradox:

"Contrary to what one might expect, for all of these personality effects the sex differences tend to be larger-- not smaller-- in more individualistic, gender-egalitarian countries. "

This finding, which apparently surprised and puzzled everyone, is very difficult to square with the idea that it is the societies/cultures that are creating these effects, because then you would expect the correlation to be the other way around. So not a magnitude difference, but a sign difference. Again, that observation, which has been replicated repeatedly with ever larger sample sizes and larger effect sizes, just isn't compatible with a cultural source.

Honestly, it kind of makes sense. If you have the option to be anyone you want to be, you take advantage of that option. There's no reason it would (or should) apply only to jobs, dress, and outward interactions.

Let's take a non-gendered example of someone (we'll call them Kris) who loves creating art, but is also capable of being a computer programmer.

If Kris lives in a country where being an artist means being poor and mocked, Kris would be smarter to chose the path of a computer programmer.

However, if Kris lives in a place where an artist can live a good, and perhaps even a great life, and be encouraged while pursuing that path, why would they go into computer programming?

Coming back to the topic at hand, if Kris has the capability of expressing compassion and will not be punished for doing so, why wouldn't Kris do that? A more individualistic and gender-egalitarian country is less likely to punish such expressions of compassion.

It makes sense if you believe that men and women generally have different interests. If you believe that the men and women don't generally have different interests it's a paradox.

I believe this is the case, based on personal observation. Exceptions are everywhere, but:

- I know more women who knit than men

- I know more men who follow football and basketball than women

- I know more women who write novels than men

- I know more women who enjoy romance novels than men

- I know more men who enjoy horror films than women

- I know more women with an interest in fashion than men

- I know more men who play computer games than women

- I know more women who play cellphone based games than men

EDIT: To underscore how exceptions matter: I know how to knit, but I find it interminably boring. I don't follow football; my mom does. I enjoy romance novels and hate horror films. I'm an oft-maligned cis-het male.

Knitting is weird, TBH. It seems like the sort of thing you would only enjoy if you managed to enter some 'flow'/'trance'/'hyperfocus' state while doing it, and that seems like something males would experience, far more than females. It's also a highly solitary pursuit that doesn't engage the 'social' brain at all. So what's up with it, how can the average female like it so much?

I just toured Alcatraz recently, and during the audio tour I learned that one of the male inmates there taught other male inmates how to knit, and knitting became a very popular pastime among the all-male prison population of Alcatraz.

There are likely lots of historical, social, and cultural reasons why knitting happens to be more popular among women than men -- reasons that might go back to our hunter-gatherer days, when the stronger, more physically capable men were the ones going out to hunt while women stayed home and took care of, among other things, the creation of clothing.

I'm a self-taught knitter and I also code (though I'm a dude so I can't speak for the female experience).

I wouldn't describe knitting as a flow state in the same way. I frequently listen to podcasts, watch movies, listen to music, etc, when I knit. Knitting is... I dunno... rhythmic?

Now granted that depends. If I'm working cables or some sort of motif or whatever, it can require a bit of focus. But it's definitely not the same as coding. And if the fabric is simple stockinette or something, I don't even need to look at my hands.

It's also not at all solitary unless you want it to be. Knitting circles are a very common thing and I personally love hanging out with my other friends while we each work on projects.

In short: my guess is your confusion is mainly borne of a misunderstanding of the hobby.

My suggestion? Give it a shot! YouTube has made it easier than ever to learn, and a pair of sticks and a ball of yarn will cost you less than ten bucks. You never know, you might love it!

Self-taught here as well, though I haven't done any knitting for nearly a decade now. It was always something for my hands to do while watching TV.

It’s like any other creative hobby — woodworking, metalworking (computer programming?) etc. There’s joy in using your hands and brain to make something enjoyable out of low-value materials. There’s joy in being able to show people “Look what I made!”

Creative hobbies do tend to be a bit male-coded or female-coded for various reasons. For some hobbies I suspect that the very single-sexiness of the hobby is part of the appeal — women join knitting circles as an excuse to hang out with other women, men go golfing as a way to hang out with other men.

Not disagreeing, but the data invalidates even the much weaker hypothesis that "the differences are a combination of cultural and inherent causes", at least in the usual reading of both components contributing to the differences.

The data, however, indicate that, at least in sum, culture contributes negatively to differences, that is it makes men and women less different than they would otherwise be.

That apparently was expected by no-one.

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