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I’m a father of fraternal twins who will be 25 this year. One boy, one girl. My wife wanted to raise them in a gender-neutral environment - provide “boy” toys and “girl” toys and let them play with whichever they wanted. My wife was a stay-at-home mom so the kids never went to daycare.

What happened?

My daughter played with baby dolls - mothering them and taking care of them. My son? He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns. He also liked to use Barbie dolls as hammers.

My wife and I learned there’s some things girls like to do and some things boys like to do. It appears to be biological. We’ve known a few other couples who tried the same thing and had similar results. Leads me to believe the difference between the sexes is nature, not nurture, and probably goes back tens of thousands of years.

Yep, the fact that this question is even being asked shows that flawed assumptions have been made.

We don't even have to get into the nature/nurture debate: It's possible that your daughter learned to play baby dolls by watching and imitating her mother. This counts as socialization according to these nature/nurture studies, but ...

To attempt to take away the human being from society, from parents, etc., and find out what this human being would do outside of human society is an act of extreme cruelty, because human beings cannot grow up and function in total isolation. This is why, although science can be applied to specific biological processes such as reflexes, it will never be able to describe a person or a person's behavior. This is why psychology and sociology are considered "soft sciences".

There absolutely is a genetic basis for behaviour though. A bird doesn't sing because it likes music. But because genes that exhibit that trait have a competitive advantage. And the same kind of thing can be seen in humans, and most keenly in babies and toddlers. Suddenly something happens in their brain and behaviours emerge by instinct.

There could easily be a genetic basis for why girls and boys like different things. And that is interesting. And obviously other factors play a role (like TV and siblings). The mistake is to believe that this is somehow a restriction on free will. The amazing thing about humans is out ability to break out of our genetic mold. The robin can never make rock music, but we can.

Also, no one is suggesting that we isolate some kids on a desert island to see what would happen. But there is nothing wrong with running that thought experiment! And maybe that understanding can help us break out of our genetic mold. We might be able to catch bad instinctive behaviours in ourselves and moderate them.

My sister had the exact same experience with fraternal twins. She was very vocal about providing gender neutral environment.

My children were not twins but both were decidedly birth gender centered.

There was a time my daughter asked for tools and matchbox cars which I promptly gave her when she returned from school. She played with them for a week and went back to polly pockets.

This is obviously not the case for everyone. However, from experience it is biologically driven.

It’s irritating that this is still a thing, even now.

Why is it so hard to acknowledge gender preferences?

While also acknowledging that it in no way implies competence in career and business?

The thing is it may also explain preferences in other areas, which may affect interest and competence. It is good to have some gender balance in most workplaces, and imbalance may worsen work conditions. Balance can make it more attractive for the opposite sex in general, not just for the outlier few.
>My wife and I learned there’s some things girls like to do and some things boys like to do.

I don't have twins but I agree with this statement to a point. My daughter loves her Playmobil fire truck to the point that she slept with it a few times when she first got it. Her favorite stuffy was a frog for a while, until she started daycare and then we noticed interest in dolls growing.

I guess what I'm saying is that from my experience, social cues are much more powerful than people often like to think.

That's informative. In fact I bet physiology plays a strong role in our preferences whether or not we consciously realize it.

I was watching a documentary lately where some group of fish spent days climbing up the rock behind a waterfall with very low rates of success to lay their eggs. It felt incredible some code in their genes affects them at a point in their life where their utmost goal becomes swimming upstream no matter the dangers and they prefer doing that to, well, enjoying life in the sea.

Just for a fun question: were the kids exposed to societal pressure in the form of, for example, other kids or YouTube or movies, that may have had an impact?
I am hoping this is a rhetorical question as no one lives in a vacuum. The point is what they take away from these experiences and that tends to be driven heavily by biology.

Just a fun question for you, have you raised children? At least one of each sex?

A young boy I know loves playing with toy weapons.

He also loves playing cook, and playing "taking care of the baby" with a doll.

Luckily, he's allowed to.

> Luckily, he's allowed to.

I'm not sure I've heard of kids not being allowed to play with something (except for sex and dangerous or precious items). Also, if a child wants to play with a doll or a gun, any object will do, if needed.

> Luckily, he's allowed to.

Nobody I know of, on any side of this debate, has argued against letting kids choose what they want to do. The problem is when "my child likes playing with dolls" suddenly becomes "time to cut off my child's penis".

I find it amazing people learn this parents?

Did your parents not tell you this? Did you not have friends who were parents?

Not trying to insult, but this reminds me of mothers I know who think boys are just girls with penises and are horrified when the boys pick up sticks and want to brain each other.

I have seen many examples where giving a boy a sword is “teaching him violence” but lecturing him over and over that swords are hurtful is someone “letting his natural gentleness come out”.

> He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns.

Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.

>> He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns.

> Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.

Certainly part of it, but I'd bet if you gave the girl a stick to play with, she'd probably start doing something like pretending it was a baby. The specific behaviors are learned, but the preferences may not be.

I suspect that if you manged to raise some boys and girls a a completely gender neutral environment without those social influences, they'd spontaneously invent primitive and somewhat disorganized versions of the same behaviors (sort of like with language, e.g. a critical mass of deaf children will spontaneously invent a sign language together if they're not taught one).

Two genders can observe the same thing, but attach different levels of importance to the observation, and have different preferences for imaginative play based on what they’ve observed.
> It appears to be biological.

Even assuming "its biological", that means that every single boy in the country must be disposed to liking guns, and every single girl must like to mother baby dolls?

And you'd think that a community of "Hackers" would be a bit less concerned about what the bulk of the population does and a bit more interested in the outliers.

A biological effect on character doesn’t rule out outliers.

I’m not sure what u are trying to say tbh. Conceding there is something biological at play doesn’t mean no boy is ever allowed to play with a Barbie.

Honestly, I'm quite surprised by how much people here seem to think it's biological. It seems to me there is no way society's slight move toward encouraging gender-neutral playing isn't still strongly offset by the pervasive culture of machismo and femininity. The second your boy steps foot into school, if he's wearing something pink or playing with a doll, other boys will make fun of him. A single incident like that is a plenty strong incentive to stick with same-gendered toys.
I notice the commenters who agree that it seems to be biological are the ones who actually have children.

I have a two year old. He was raised with gender neutral toys and due to the pandemic largely in isolation from the rest of society for the last year with a lot of time spent with both parents. Moreover as the father I don't show strong interest in “typical” male interests like cars or football.

The first time my son saw a digger, he was hooked. He is completely enthralled with construction vehicles- dumper trucks, cement mixers etc. His favourite colour of Play Dough is "mud". He has dolls but they hold limited interest over his toolbench.

Before having children I would have said it was largely societal. But I've watched my son show strong preference to "boy" hobbies since he was able to show interest in anything and it was really quite surprising how "boyish" he turned out to be considering we tried to give him equal opportunity for all activities. Of course you can never rule out external influences entirely but I remain convinced the difference is biological.

Great insight. I'm blown away by the amount of nonsense I hear about child rearing from people who had minimal contact with young children. A lot of theories quickly get destroyed when you get schooled by your own child!
My 4yo and 2yo girls are also enthralled with diggers. I think there's just something about big equipment that's impressive.

This is a really good book on the subject :) was both their favorite for quite a long time:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/228537/digger-dozer...

Why is it suddenly so hard to accept that there exist psychological differences between genders as well as undebatably there are physical? The need for discussion about this is really mind boggling to me, considering that the crowd here is supposed to be intelligent and reasonable and not either-wingly and emotionally loaden. The discussion doesn't seem to be about equality of rights and importance anymore. What the hell is happening?

Edit: sorry for the rant. Both the article and majority of the comments are a reasonable discussion. "But you get where I'm coming from"

Because some people have decided to take an all-or-nothing approach to "all people are equal". Imagine if during the social justice movement of the mid 20th century, we saw people saying "actually, there's no such thing as black and white, everybody has the same skin color", in an attempt to show that the races are valued equally as humans. That would be absurd. And yet that's what is now happening with gender.
I agree with the sentiment. I think the issue is that society is finally trying to fix some longstanding inequities but in many areas we have overshot the response and are due for recalibration.
I hardly think we're in a society where people make fun of girls for playing with dolls, and boys for playing with trucks, which seems to be what this article is implying.

Less social pressure to play with gender-sterotypical toys != social pressure to play with opposite gender toys.

The article doesn't suggest social pressure in the form of making fun. On the contrary, it suggests social pressure in encouraging girls to play with boys's toys and vice versa, although the former more than the latter:

> A 2017 survey from Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans considered it a "somewhat or very good thing" to steer kids toward toys and activities traditionally associated with the opposite gender (though respondents were less enthusiastic about doing so for boys than girls).

>probably goes back tens of thousands of years

I think you're off by several orders of magnitude, but yea it goes back a long way lol

I have to disagree, it's not a matter of preference, it's a matter of what they are exposed to.

We have dolls, lego, duplo, mechas and a big "kitchen".

We live far from family and none of my friends here has kids, so my daughter plays with me a good chunk of the time (I work from home) and with mom. Mom doesn't like dolls, but she puts an effort into showing her. I get just bored with those, so we play with boy toys.

She get a little bit of interest in dolls to pretend she is cleaning her little brother, but most of the time she plays with duplo, although she does put to bed the characters in there.

There is no one saying "princess princess", so her favourite character in Frozen is Frozen Marshmallow (the big snow monster), she likes singing though.

Again, it's all a matter of exposure and it comes heavily from who she plays with the most. In our case, me and my wife are the people she sees the most (and COVID obviously pushed that even further).

Oh and yes of course we want a gender neutral environment. Now that I think of it, she also sees me changing diapers, so maybe she is pretending to be me.

I give my daughter ample opportunities to use hand tools to work on R/C trucks, and generally play with any stereotypical "boy stuff" (I have a lot of stuff like that since I'm just a 40 year old 12 year old) with me from birth, way before any external influences of TV or outside influences. Guess what, she still prefers to take care of her toys in a sterotypical maternal way - animals, dolls, etc. Both options have always been there. The article rings true to me.
Another is the difference in interest in video games. The thinking has been that video games just haven’t been tailored to girls’ interests. Which actually is admitting a gender distinction. Anyway I tried my best to find games my daughters would enjoy, with some success.

But the video game mania of every nephew of mine was on a completely different level. With them it always became an issue for their parents to intervene and moderate.

It doesn't matter how many game genres I expose my son to - RPGs, puzzle, space, adventure, sports, visual novel... No matter what, he goes back to blowing zombies away in Call of Duty Multiplayer. He could do that for 12 hours a day if I let him. Interestingly, he otherwise enjoys intellectual and artistic pursuits, but I feel there is some deep instinct showing its face in his game preferences.
Obviously. Children are pure and not spoiled with current agenda.
Whatever modern non-normativity pressures might possibly exist, the status quo is that male and female role models in society embody different characteristics. Looking out at the world & seeing what people who look like you do, what roles they embody matter.

Different angle, but former & new CEO of TSMC Morris Chang, in a 2014 interview, talks about how he came to semiconductors: he looked around at what other asian businessmen were doing, switched from Harvard to MIT because no opportunities, examples open to him, & saw "no chinese American politicans, no chinese-american even businessman" (1949)[1]. Obviously this is no longer 1949, equal rights is literally the rule of the land in a fair part of the world. But it's a strong story of role models mattering, of doing what you see. And there are definitely still gender-roles prevalent within society, roles taken by masculine figures, roles taken by feminine figures, and people looking in the mirror are like to understand, to see themselves forward on paths where they can already see people who resemble themselves succeeding. Disrupt this, please, but to me, the pressures towards non-normativity are greatly outranked by the evidences & pressures of what we already see in the world.

Last, I'll throw in a shout out to Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota[2] series. It's a wonderful story from a Renaissance history professor, of a post-geo-governmental sci-fi world, of politics & great events. One of the interesting flourishes of the book is that the world has largely decided to make gender taboo. To adopt a willful genderblindness, to try to treat everyone equally, to regard to everyone with non-gendered pro-nouns. The world has worked to undo the pre-dispositions set up, actively, rather than merely requiring a legal treatment. It's an interesting detail of the world, & causes no end of tension & complications for the characters of course, which is just one part of this wonderful interesting highly interwoven saga. It speaks to the difficulty of the social science happening in this article, to the impossibility to build a control group that could ever test out how sex shapes us, because so much of society is suffused with it. Even in the Terra Ignota world, where a agendered Puritanism has taken over, the old roles still have root, even though they are illegal, & must hide. When people talk about their anecdotes of boys & girls having different behaviors, I think they must just be so blind to how much influence, how many opportunities for messaging, how much of a status quo the world has, how much they are up against to provide that equal chance.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Ignota

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

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

Do you think these maybe have more to do with causing those differences in the first place?

What social pressure are you feeling or observing?
I observe pressure to pay attention to such stuff.
It is unconscionable in 2021 that stereotypes can still exist. Why are certain aisles in toy stores bright pink and geared towards one group? Why are certain aisles in toy stores geared with toys revolving around shooting things? Everybody should have the choice. We should all do our part. I'm trying to do my part to help achieve TRUE EQUITY in all communities. Did you know that just 2.3% of United States plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters are women? Why is nobody talking about this gross inequality? How many young girls have been discouraged and had their dreams of helping their communities in this way denied? I intend to start local and give my daughter a choice. She will have every right to play with pneumatic and hand drills, impact wrenches, band saws, hand clamps, air compressors, as well as G.I. Joe Action Figures and Polly Pocket Playhouse if she chooses. Lean in and help everybody achieve their true ambitions and calling.
It is unconscionable in 2021 that gender stereotypical examples to point out gender stereotypes can still exist. Did you know that just 2.3% of United States preschool and kindergarten teachers are men? Why is nobody talking about this gross inequality? Right from the start, when our little humans are the most vulnerable and influenceable, they are denied gender balanced care, examples and behaviours. How many young boys have been discouraged and had their dreams of helping their communities in this way denied?
Not sure if the people below just did not read your entire comment, or if their sarcasm detector is broken.

I like to also point this out whenever someone mentions that only "X" percent of women are <insert male-dominated field here>. 97% of loggers are men, at least they were the last time I looked at that statistic. Grossly unfair to women. We must achieve gender parity in logging. Women have just as much right to be crushed to death by giant multi-ton trees and mutilate their limbs with horrible chainsaw accidents.

Unless there is somebody there blocking a boy or a girl from reaching a certain aisle, stereotypes are no issue. Yes, there are aisle that are predominantly pink and full of princesses, and others that are full of soldiers and weapons, but in the end... who cares ? Assuming that one is about girls and the other is about boys is itself sexist.

For example, ,my daughter loves dressing like a princess and using make-up, despite the mother hating both. On the other side, she really loves playing with trucks, scrapers etc. Shall I nudge her towards one topic or the other so that she will be "gender neutral" ? No, who cares. Whatever she likes is fine.

The ones having social pressure are not the kids, but the parents. "oh my God if I am going to give a doll to my daughter I will be a sexist bad parent". no, really, give her what she likes more,does she likes dolls ? Give her that. Does she prefer being an and engineer ? Good, give her the tools that she asks for, as long as it is what SHE wants, not you want.

If this means confirming some stereotypes.... well too bad, you're supposed to make your daughter happy, not some statician.

(disclaimer: I have a single daughter and probably I won't have any more kid so I guess I'm project on her also what I would like to have from a male kid... still as long as she is happy I am fine, regardless of whatever she wants to do of her life)

Why do you think bright pink aisled are geared towards one group? Everyone can like pink, I'm sure the people working in toystores are happy to sell pink dolls do boys or plastic guns and soldier dolls to girls.
The kids don't know it is "geared towards one group", they choose it on their own. As a father of a daughter, like myself, you should be well aware of how this typically works.