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I think your questions at the end are super important ones, and it's frustrating that they are far less commonly discussed; presumably because it's very easy for a person to be called sexist by even bringing up the idea.

> How much of it is due to the professions each gender gravitates toward

I think it is even more interesting and complicated than that, too. Assuming that "women tend to more commonly take roles that pay less", you can ask the followup question of whether those roles pay less _because_ women traditionally fill them. Is cause and effect one way, the other way, or both ways?

Overall, it is a REALLY interesting topic. It is also, however, one where it's very easy to start out having an innocent conversation and accidentally turn out being considered "the bad guy". So it's a hard conversation to have widely.

> Assuming that "women tend to more commonly take roles that pay less", you can ask the followup question of whether those roles pay less _because_ women traditionally fill them. Is cause and effect one way, the other way, or both ways?

Men have been seen to be more sensitive to changes in wages and to generally leave professions faster when wages are dropping. Men tend to also rush to professions when wages are suddenly rising. Since wages can change to external factors, there does seem to indicate the order of the cause and effect.

It would be interesting to know if the same could be said about work hours. If you extend work hours (overtime), do women tend to leave the profession, and if you reduce it (like 4 day work week) do women rush to that profession?

A broader question is to ask if it is really optimal to favour super-competitive workaholics. It is possible that for many organisations people who are more cooperative and want a good work life balance actually make more effective managers.

What does favor mean here?

If a cat makes it into a den full of mice, those mice are going to die. There's no favoritism, it's just how reality works.

People who work harder have a strong tendency to be more successful at the thing they're working at. This is just as true for the high school athlete that puts in 4 extra hours on the weekend as it is for the person working 60-80 hours/week.

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And if I may, this is a major problem. Society has been built such that many people have been able to successfully exist without an innate acceptable of reality. They've been able to do this because they've never had to actually contend with what it means to poke a bear (hint: you'll get eaten) and over time its colored their view of everything as being negotiable (with little to no respect for reality).

But just as smoking crack for years on end has certain realities that you cannot get away with, people working harder than you also has certain realities (such as them giving up family time but making more money).

this ignores the fact that often (the majority of the time in my experience) the super workaholics are the cooperative ones lol.

Thanks for the excellent summary.

And very good point about the Overton window aspect of this issue. There's a large number of things in this world that might potentially be improved but people aren't allowed to discuss the problems or solutions freely.

> Those questions are all based on pretty well established observational data, but people find it very uncomfortable to acknowledge that gender roles exist and men and women continue to have very different preferences about how to live their lives, despite over a century of feminism. I think it's because one camp fundamentally believes that these preferences should be eradicated and the other believes they are natural and acceptable.

You are forgetting there's no experiment controlling for culture. Naturally, laws and cultural habits don't change in lock step, the latter not even equally over all in a particular cultural zone. It is therefore to be expected that ingrained habits disappear only slowly over the generations. This should not be seen as validation of the existence of gender roles. Nor is it even about that (I know politicians try to make it about identity, it's the easiest way to rile up a base). It is about enabling all sorts of habits. Those gender roles you refer to are not and were not shared by all, and those people are thankful for change.

> but people find it very uncomfortable to acknowledge that gender roles exist and men and women continue to have very different preferences about how to live their lives, despite over a century of feminism.

TBH I don't think anybody is uncomfortable acknowledging this as "a thing". The issues arise when there are people saying that it's biological and it is how it is because women and men are inherently different while others say it is due to society, beliefs and costumes.

There's absolutely a biological component and it's discussed openly and freely until politics are introduced, at which point mentioning it becomes taboo.

Without even getting into genetics, we have mountains of empirical evidence that sex hormones influence behavior. E.g. if you suppress or increase someone's testosterone, you'll tend to see their level of aggression change. If you administer cross-sex hormone therapy to a transgender person, their behavior will tend to change. Doctors are well aware of all this and tell their patients about it because doing so is important for the patient's well-being.

We've done brain scans of people who are exposed to changes in their sex hormone balance, and found that it physically changes the brain, some parts get bigger, some get smaller.

None of this is to suggest that you should be locked into a certain role in life because of your sex. But it's equally damaging to deny that biology has any role in your personality, because if you do, you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of internal conflict.

This polarity of masculine vs feminine behavior is real and biological. That doesn't mean there isn't a great deal of overlap - some women are predisposed to act more masculine, and some men are predisposed to act more feminine. Which is all fine, as a society we should never deny people access to opportunities because of their biological makeup.

But the poles are absolutely real and at least partially rooted in biology. The recent trend of trying to deny their existence, or claim that they're fabricated by patriarchal power structures or whatever, is anti-science.

The trouble with science around sex hormones is that people both in the past and present tend run with a conclusion even when science has proven the conclusion to be false. Sex hormones in generally do not do what people think it does.

People have done studies where they have increase someone's testosterone (within human levels) and observed if there was any changes in aggressive behavior. It was proven repeatably to not cause any change. This caused a bit of surprise among researchers and resulted in a new theory called challenge hypothesis, but popular opinion still believe the old theory that testosterone increase aggression. An even older theory thought estrogen to cause emotional hysteria, and a mountain of research illustrated how wrong that was.

To make a car comparison, how much oil is being pumped in a car has a direct relation to how fast it is going. If it has zero oil the speed of the car is likely to go to zero. Oil is required to reach high speeds (or rather high rpm), and oil has a correlation to speed. Oil has a direct effect on most part of the engine. Oil doesn't however cause high speed, and increasing the oil does not make the car go faster.

The challenge hypothesis still describes a relationship between testosterone and aggression that is exclusive to males; it just turned out to be a little more complex than "more T always equals more aggression."

It still proves my point. This is a biological feature exclusive to males which influences their behavior. Biological sex influences behavior.

It is not exclusive to males. It work just as effective on females. Since females start out with significant lower (but not zero) levels of testosterone, changes in levels actually have larger impact on females.

I don't disagree that biological sex influences behavior. What is important however is that what people think it does is generally not what it actually do. To take estrogen as an example, too much or too little do have a link to mental instability. It is very hard however to defined exactly what estrogen do as a biological influencer. As with testosterone and aggression, estrogen does not cause women to go crazy. When people believe that hormones has that kind of effect the outcome tend to be bad, as well as being anti-science.

Testosterone levels in males rises after gaining social status. High testosterone levels in turn increase calorie usages that goes towards behavior which correlated to maintaining and defending existing levels of social status. In some cultures there is a correlation between both gaining social status and maintaining social status with aggression. How should one then describe the biological relation between testosterone and aggression?

One could simplify and say that testosterone has a bias in our culture towards aggression and estrogen has a bias towards mental illness, but even that would likely not be helpful in explaining difference in behavior between men and women.

Wikipedia actually does a decent job:

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

In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79% of the average man's salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.

Those aren’t the only two possible perspectives.

I believe systems should be dismantled that reward being competitive and do not reward care work.

The word "reward" here is doing some heavy lifting, especially since the above comment don't include it.

Who is doing the rewarding and what is the reward? Is getting higher wages for doing longer hours at work a reward? Are vacation days rewards? Is it a reward to get higher paid if you do a night shift compared to a day shift?

What about competitive care work?

You forgot “how much is it due to women in many households are forced to take more than their fair share of household work for which they do not get paid, which prevents them from having the ability to work as intensely or as long at their paid job”

Edit: Oof looks really bad on users of a predominantly male site that that factual observation is downvoted.

No, you're being down voted for posting irrelevant information sarcastically.

Okay, that confirms that the downvotes are out of denial because it’s undeniably and clearly relevant as a reply to the quoted major portion of the parent comment shown below

> “ What it doesn't dare to touch (I don't blame them) are gender roles and proclivities. Questions like: how much of this is due to men being on average more competitive, and valuing career/financial success more than women do? How much of it is due to women prioritizing family over work? How much of it is due to the professions each gender gravitates toward?”