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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.



I don't think your analogy holds any water, and I also find it disrespectful of the typical father's love for his children.


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.




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