Excellent post, @NJSue.
I thought we had gone well beyond the notion that “all sex differences are arbitrary and culturally imposed.” The notion that kids were a tabula rasa on which we enlightened adults would write the appropriate politically and morally correct instructions was the conceit of the educated class in the 80s and 90s, I think.
When we had kids, it became clear that much of their personalities was hard-wired. ShawSon was an observer and would wait to jump into activities, and would be happy to have help. ShawD would jump right in but was insistent that “I do it myself.” From the earliest age, whenever ShawSon saw a stick, he would pick it up and brandish it as a weapon. When he went to (an excellent) pre-school (sponsored by Radcliffe with all of the political correctness that could possibly be mustered), all but one of the boys seemed imprinted on a single instrument of power (for some boys trucks and/or construction equipment, for others dinosaurs, in my son’s case, medieval weaponry, for another cars). These kids had encyclopedia knowledge of their chosen instrument. The boy who did not was raised by a lesbian couple and he would rummage in the costume chest and wear dresses. We never saw a single girl who seemed so singularly focused on an instrument of power in either pre-school. Based upon our experiences and observations, ShawWife and I felt we really had to throw out the tabula rasa hypothesis.
Much of the work on sociobiology, which morphed into behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology, seemed pretty sound to me (though there was a lot of trashy pop sociobiology). I was a graduate fellow in a small organization that brought together some pretty extraordinary faculty members at Harvard and MIT. The first year I was a fellow, we had the rare opportunity to listen to sociobiology proponents Robert Trivers and E.O. Wilson and opponents Stephen Jay Gould and Dick Lewontin (and others). The essay by Stephen Pinker posted by @Twoin18 looks at the work by Synons that highlights evolution-based testable predictions differences between males and females that are consistent with the data. I did not know his work (this is not my field) but, from Pinker’s description, it seems persuasive.
None of this implies that women can’t be great scientists or should be home cooking. But the body of work does suggest that we throw out the hypotheses that all differences between males and females are due to social construction.
With respect to another one of your points, I was on the phone today with a very progressive distinguished Canadian conservationist. Very impressive guy – I’m surprised he hasn’t been awarded a McArthur fellowship. He and his wife (also on the progressive end of the spectrum) were noting that his son reacted to the “institutional and casual misandry if his schools and university” by adopting a strong right-wing political philosophy. In an NPR interview, Senator Fetterman said that the Democratic party had adopted a series of positions that made it hard for white males and males generally to vote Democratic. I think he was talking about the same thing.
Finally, @GKUnion, a good question on which I have small sample information. ShawWife regularly volunteers me to provide career counseling to the children of friends, whom she calls the “failure to launch” crew. Due to our location, most are upper middle class with some closer to middle. Most of the failure to launch crew are male (maybe all as I can’t remember any females at the moment). In other contexts, I have definitely counseled women – a number who were trying to figure out how to surmount the sexism in the tech industry and others in a group of highly accomplished young adult children of the famous, semi-famous and hangers on to them. But, none of those women were failures to launch. As @GKUnion noted, the safety net provided by the higher SES parents can mask the failure to launch.
