This article still assumes that the preferences themselves are inherent rather than the result of gender socialization.
Even where you see girls excel more at verbal and arts and boys at STEM, how much of that is due to what they were encouraged to be interested in and spend their time on when younger?
I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math. That suggests there's a significant cultural/social element at play.
IIRC, boys and girls have similar overall mental abilities. There are a few specific abilities where boys are slightly better and a few specific abilities where girls are slightly better. But abilities are not the same as preferences.
Regarding preferences: boys and girls show distinct preferences for toys and style of play from an early age (basically, before they could possibly be socialized). Even chimpanzee children show distinct toy preferences by sex (and they match human toy preferences).
Speaking anecdotally: I often speculate that the only people who could possibly believe that boys and girls do not have fundamentally different preferences are the childless. I live in Portland, OR. This is one of the most liberal, politically correct subcultures in the entire world. My kids are enrolled in a program at the local park and the person administering the program made sure to specify their gender pronouns. They had a discussion about the gender of a species of worm that is a hermaphrodite. And yet, everywhere I go, the boys are into monster trucks and super heroes and the girls are into dolls and princesses.
As the culture wars have heated up over the last few years, I have started asking parents we encounter about how they socialized their kids. Basically ever single one tells the same story: we went out of our way to make everything as non-gendered as possible, but our boy wanted to play with trucks and our girl wanted to play with dolls.
A sample size of 11 males? With over 14 choices? Actually codifying 15 different possible behaviours from which an "interactions" score is determined by researchers? not blind, let alone double blind? It reminds me of the chocolate paper [1]
You will see that the "total interactions" with boy toys is the same for male and female. You might say: No, the women's one is lower. Well, that's what error bars are for. Error bars tell you: Be honest, you actually don't know. So for all intents and purposes they are equal. It's also surprising that they are comparing humans and monkeys, but the don't use the same metric. The paper for humans uses "Mean seconds of play-time", but the study for monkeys had to come up with a new metric "total interactions" to achieve a similar looking graph. Why?
For the plush toy, the female result was 1.5 minutes, ... but the standard deviation was 3.8 minutes ... so ... what does that tell us? It tells me, design a better experiment!
Here's a better methodology: Take 2 "gendered" toys with accelerometers and take 200 monkeys one-by-one, with trackers. Then automatically measure (in a fully blind study) how long each monkey spends which each type of toy presented. I'm not saying the effect does not exist. But this paper does not show it does.
I still laugh at the argument that there are fewer women in tech because computers were marketed as a toy for boys. The thing is: when I started with the computers (some thirty years ago) almost nobody had them at home in my country, and they sure were not advertised as any kind of toy for anyone. Actually, back then even the concept of advertising was new to us. Yet the computers at the university computer labs were all occupied by guys.
Interestingly enough my computer science teacher at the school was a woman. I am grateful to her, because she tught me to program without even having access to computer (the course was about basics: variables, algorithms, control flow, etc. By the time I was able to access the computer all I needed was syntax for that particular language).
My computer science teacher in the university was also a woman. And one of the best known computer science educator in my country, author of many books was also a woman.
And nobody thought that was somehow peculiar or strange.
My degree was in hard science (BS in chemistry and physics, then MS in physics and astronomy). I think the had about an equal split between men and women as our professors. Once again, nobody thought twice about that.
But it was still exclusively guys spending their free time in the computer labs.
Everyone's preferences are going to have some social element. Why is this a bad thing? The only thing that should matter is that people are free to pursue whatever life they are interested in, whatever the reason.
In practice it's a problem because there are so many people who the the difference in numbers as an indicator of an inherent (i.e. biological) lack of aptitude. See also: Google Memo.
Socially influenced preferences aren't necessarily a bad thing in theory. Personally, as a woman in software, I loathe that we socialize our children to have different interests based on gender even when their aptitudes are the same. It means that a lot of girls who might find STEM careers fulfilling don't even consider investigating let alone pursuing them, because they think of STEM as being "not for me".
The fact that you currently understand that lower aptitude is not the reason there are fewer women in STEM, in spite of the numbers, tells me that this problem could be solved by giving people the correct facts regarding the situation and showing how the arguments for aptitude being the reason for the imbalance are flawed.
Secondly, there could very well be some evolutionary basis for differences in preferences between men and women when it comes to liking "things" vs "people" (in addition to culture being a factor - just want to note I'm not trying to argue there is no cultural factor here). I am currently reading a book called "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky that in one part discusses a study where they put chimps in a room full of toys and observed which type of toy the male and female chimps went for. If my memory is correct, the female chimps more often went for the dolls and the male chimps went for the cars (I don't have the name/authors of the study handy, but I can dig it up. The fact that Sapolsky, a respected primatologist from Stanford, thinks this study is legitimate enough to mention in his book indicates to me that the study doesn't have any serious flaws). Clearly the female chimps were never culturally predisposed to prefer playing with dolls, so there is something else going on here.
> I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math.
Nothing special about China there: girls do better than boys at math pretty much everywhere. But the difference (in girls' favor) is even bigger at verbal tasks. The article talks about this specifically, and the implications from it.
Aside from that, sure, preferences are influenced by both society and by biology. The article states that directly:
> "It’s simplistic and scientifically untrue to say it’s one or the other."
Even where you see girls excel more at verbal and arts and boys at STEM, how much of that is due to what they were encouraged to be interested in and spend their time on when younger?
I don't remember exactly which study it was, but there's evidence that in some cultures (IIRC China?) girls do better than boys at math. That suggests there's a significant cultural/social element at play.