Been lurking for a while, figured this'd be a good place to make my first post.
I'm a trans woman (MtF). This isn't the first time (and it won't be the last) I've observed something about gender stereotypes just from having lived on both sides.
One stereotype that's widely known in the trans community is that a disproportionately large percentage of trans women work in tech (or are tech hobbyists). The "MtF CS nerd" is probably the biggest trans stereotype I can think of.
This stereotype doesn't extend to trans men (FtMs). In fact, it's assumed that the ratio of MtFs to FtMs in tech is about the same as the ratio of cis men to cis women in tech.
In the main online trans community I run in, where this stereotype is endlessly touted as being true (often tongue-in-cheek), most of us start our transitions somewhere between 18-45 and by and large is biased towards people who started in our twenties (I started at 28, myself, and I'm 30 now). People who started before or after that are really rare in that particular community (there are other communities that swing younger or older, by the way -- I'm just talking about the group I run with).
The only real conclusion is that whatever biased us towards or against careers in tech based on our perceived genders must have occurred in childhood, definitely before college and probably before high school as well. It probably happened in toddlerhood, really. There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed into the spam filter.
This is why I think putting pressure on companies to recruit more and more adult women is fundamentally flawed. There just aren't enough adult cis women who are interested, no matter how much any company tries to recruit. I'm also particularly appalled by attempts to demonize Linus Torvalds for not having enough women as core kernel developers: it's not his fault that people perceived as female (i.e. cis girls and pre-transition FtMs) are told as early as preschool that they shouldn't be interested in technology. Fix that part of society instead of demonizing project leaders.
On the gendered toys thing, Rhesus monkeys show gender preferences for different types of toys. I'd be surprised but interested to see a follow-up paper about cross-species gender expectations forcing toy choices.
This study was done on adult monkeys. And AFAIK, in humans the differences in neural connectivity are negligible until testosterone kicks in. On the other hand, in adults, gender differences are drastic.
> And AFAIK, in humans the differences in neural connectivity are negligible until testosterone kicks in.
Possibly, I'm not a biologist, but the 4th paragraph of the intro is interesting in that regard:
"Prenatal hormone exposure is known to influence children’s toy preferences as girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an inherited enzymatic defect....show more boy-typical toy preferences than do their unaffected sisters or control girls....This preference is evident in CAH girls who look like and are reared as girls ... and despite the fact that most of these girls have typical female gender identity... When parental socialization was explicitly studied, one study found that CAH girls are more strongly encouraged to play with female-typical toys than are unaffected female siblings, yet they still show a masculine toy preference.... Thus toy preferences appear sensitive to prenatal androgen exposure..."
You are right. My bad. I've only briefly looked to confirm that the study was not specifically targeting juvenile monkeys. But in fact 52% (8+10)/(11+23) of monkeys were juvenile. Still, half are post puberty and taking into account "females reach puberty around age three while males are sexually mature by age four" (Rawlins & Kessler 1986, that probably diminishes this 52%. And as per the study itself "Overall sample size precluded analysis of individual age groups." So, I still wouldn't be too happy to transfer that results into human children domain.
> In the main online trans community I run in, where this stereotype is endlessly touted as being true (often tongue-in-cheek), most of us start our transitions somewhere between 18-45 and by and large is biased towards people who started in our twenties (I started at 28, myself, and I'm 30 now). People who started before or after that are really rare in that particular community (there are other communities that swing younger or older, by the way -- I'm just talking about the group I run with).
Well, I suspect that there are multiple issues at play that make techies more likely to have the MtF transition:
1) There are simply a lot more males in tech. So the MtF transition is likely to be way more common than the reverse.
2) Techies have money. Gender transition takes quite a bit of time and resource that someone poor is not going to have.
3) Bias to late twenties/early thirties probably makes sense as that's the first point where you have the resources and support to pull off the transition but is still early enough that your social system hasn't hardened into place (Trans-changes when you already have children are very disruptive).
That's fascinating; I would have expected the reverse: that people who are biologically male but identify as female would have had low developmental androgen exposure, thus a more "female-structured" mind that leads them in this direction, and thus have average aptitude for mathematics closer to that of neurotypical women.
What you're saying instead suggests that it's actually the continued androgenizing effect of male gonads on the body during puberty that determines whether the brain dimorphisms responsible for different mathematical aptitudes develop. Neat!
What the link says (and proves): after screening off sex-linked differences in aptitude for mathematics (by giving high school kids "mathematical IQ" tests, etc.), there's no difference left over in how often women vs. men go into math/CS. Both men and women go as often as they have potential in the field.
The only thing left to explain is where the difference in aptitude comes from. Right now, it is assumed to be a result of developmental androgen cues that cause spacial-navigation-related parts of the brain to grow bigger in men vs. women.
Transpeople, as a group that much more often gets a non-sex-linked androgen dose in the womb, let you take that apart further into the individual possible factors of "androgen exposure in the womb" vs "androgen exposure at puberty".
I'm a trans woman (MtF). This isn't the first time (and it won't be the last) I've observed something about gender stereotypes just from having lived on both sides.
One stereotype that's widely known in the trans community is that a disproportionately large percentage of trans women work in tech (or are tech hobbyists). The "MtF CS nerd" is probably the biggest trans stereotype I can think of.
This stereotype doesn't extend to trans men (FtMs). In fact, it's assumed that the ratio of MtFs to FtMs in tech is about the same as the ratio of cis men to cis women in tech.
In the main online trans community I run in, where this stereotype is endlessly touted as being true (often tongue-in-cheek), most of us start our transitions somewhere between 18-45 and by and large is biased towards people who started in our twenties (I started at 28, myself, and I'm 30 now). People who started before or after that are really rare in that particular community (there are other communities that swing younger or older, by the way -- I'm just talking about the group I run with).
The only real conclusion is that whatever biased us towards or against careers in tech based on our perceived genders must have occurred in childhood, definitely before college and probably before high school as well. It probably happened in toddlerhood, really. There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed into the spam filter.
This is why I think putting pressure on companies to recruit more and more adult women is fundamentally flawed. There just aren't enough adult cis women who are interested, no matter how much any company tries to recruit. I'm also particularly appalled by attempts to demonize Linus Torvalds for not having enough women as core kernel developers: it's not his fault that people perceived as female (i.e. cis girls and pre-transition FtMs) are told as early as preschool that they shouldn't be interested in technology. Fix that part of society instead of demonizing project leaders.