You are in the woods. Before you are two black bear cubs. Due to the circumstances of the hypothetical, you have only two choices for where to stand. Choice A is between the cubs and their mother, who is feasting on armyworms. Choice B is between the cubs and their father, who is raiding a beehive.
Which do you pick?
Choice B, right?
It is illogical to walk away from easy food and then choose to attack the strong food rather than the weak food. It is somewhat less illogical to run away from easy food and attack an imminent mortal threat to the most important things on the entire planet. What makes an adult bear decide that bear cubs are not food, and also the most important things ever? Emotions, probably.
Most mammals employ liberal doses of hormones to ensure that a mother forms a powerful emotional bond with her child. Humans are not an exception. Remember that the placenta allows chemicals to pass directly from mother to child and vice versa. The emotional bond between father and child has to form in the same way as it would form with anyone else. I'm not saying that a male can't be as emotional as a female, but males never experience a 280 day interval where something is constantly giving them intravenous injections of chemicals evolved specifically to create an emotional response.
My point was that the emotionality of females and males is strongly biological, has likely existed since the common ancestor of all mammals, and the notion that it is significantly impacted by human social constructs is not tremendously plausible in my opinion.
A developing fetus literally injects behavior-changing chemicals directly into its mother's bloodstream for months before it is born. In species without strong pair-bonding, a juvenile may never get the chance to push any evolution-programmed buttons on the father to initiate a parental bond.
So my opinion is that the median human male probably does not experience emotion as strongly as the median human female, because male emotions do not affect reproductive success as strongly or as reliably as female emotions. There's no particular reason to attach any cultural importance to it. Being more or less emotional than someone else is neither good nor bad. But it does affect behavior, and therefore relative suitability for specific work roles.
Evolution does not care if you literally cry over spilled milk, or if you can continue running up the beach even after the hundred men in front of you, to whom you had grown attached in the weeks prior, get torn to shreds before your eyes. It only cares about whether you will have living descendants in the future. But your fellow humans care about that when they are deciding whether or not to hire you into a vacant position. Your emotional programming will make you more suitable for some jobs, and less suitable for others.
But that is definitely not the sole reason why some professions have something other than a 50-50 split between the sexes. It accounts for some of the difference, but nowhere near all of it.
Exact! I'm a male and I'm highly emotional, like many other males. I have had many problems with macho corporations with alpha males who look down at me because I don't smoke and I don't want a big car and "I don't have the shoulders". Too bad for them, I've created my company now, so they've been prejudiced about my skills.
Worse: People tend to support only women about this. I wish we could stop being sexist in treating gender issues, and help "Everyone who's weak" rather than "Everyone who's a woman". Because there are strong women too. My government has 6.000€ donations for women who create a company and 30.000€ interest-free loan with no collateral. We need to help based on the criteria which makes it more difficult for people, like "Help everyone who's taking care of his children", or "Help people who live an ecologist lifestyle which doesn't look macho" rather than "Help women". What's the gap between people who have an alpha character and the people who intuitively position themselves as victims? What's the gap between macho men and strong, dominant women?
It's a generalization to say "women" instead of pointing out the trait that makes it a weakness.
Indeed. Though, it's not just about women and men.
The malignant, controversial issues of domestic violence against women, black oppression, the discouragement of male emotional expression, and gender-based wage gaps -- to name only a few -- were never the disease, they were an awful symptom. Instead we must focus on the actual disease -- spousal abuse, racial discrimination, emotional abuse or manipulation, and incomplete or inaccurate wage information, respectively.
I understand that it's impossible to attend to all concerns of all people simultaneously. Governments and organisations need some way to focus what limited resources they have. Though perhaps, just perhaps, instead of taking the easy way out they might determine eligibility for assistance programmes or subjects of public awareness campaigns by the circumstances by which that target is disadvantaged or victimised and not just what's between the target's legs or how dark or not the target's skin is. This is really quite difficult and, in the case of assistance programmes, requires a knowledge and understanding of an individual's situation. As we know, this is remarkably difficult for any government or organisation to do. However, it is absolutely necessary if we are to justify providing these very powerful tools only to victims and not their attackers as well.
Any group which continues to advocate for targets based on criteria over which the target has no control and which does not advocate for others normalises the victimisation of those targets for which they do not advocate. That advocacy is vile and we must address it.
