Social norms certainly affect people’s choices, but if there is no difference between the preferences of men and women then Caitlyn Jenner is just a man who changed his appearance. There are more than superficial physical differences between men and women in general, or there aren’t, it can’t be both.
Well, in terms of interests people can like whatever they want. If you are female, like comics and video games and sports and think you’re a man, then you’re letting society victimize you.
I owned a home interior store for several years. I had 2 female decorators and 2 male both of whom were gay. I found myself a lot more involved in decorating than I ever imagined I would be. It turned out I had a knack for proportions, scale and anything dimensional which are all very male things. I assisted on several award winning designs as well as many celebrity home interior designs.
Of course there are things that more men than women are interested in, and vice versa. The problem kicks in when you assume that that tells you anything at all - or should tell you anything at all - about an individual woman or man.
Generalisations are only useful when you’re dealing with probabilities and large groups. When you’re dealing with an individual, they become stupid. If an eccentric supervillain presents you with a group of 1000 random men and a group of 1000 random women, and demands that you pick the group that’s better at online gaming and if you get it wrong he’ll push you off a skyscraper, then if you’ve got any sense you pick the group of guys. But if you meet a woman and assume that she knows nothing about online gaming and loves chick lit, rather than finding out about her as an individual before making assumptions, then you’re stupid.
Everything in this thread that’s been mentioned, I can think of a person of the “wrong” gender who is in to it, that I know.
Except for the bows of course but I know no one in that field - except for HoneyBadgerDC and his butch lesbian friend, of course. So that’s even as well 
As for interior decorating - yikes, you’ve never watched HGTV, Fear Itself, huh?
I grew up around strong, independent women and have never underestimated the ability or interests of women in my life, but I’d still say there are general categories of interest that most women seem to have little interest in. (Usually for good reasons - I can’t make any good case for being a fan of comics or video games, for example.)
One of my favorite sightings is the SO in the speed shop. He’s practically got a woody from all the shiny bits; she’s somewhere between bored and thinking about how long it will take her to pack and leave him. But then there’s my female siblings, one a former master VW mechanic and the other a retired shipyard fabricator… who had SOs that couldn’t use a screwdriver right two times out of three…
Are we being deliberately obtuse here? I hope not. (ETA: aimed at the earlier posts, not the last few.)
Products have target markets. The target market for tricycles is little kids, while that for powered scooters is the elderly. You can try advertising one product to the other group; but you’ll get few takers. The target market for rock-and-roll varies from age 15 to age 70. But it’ll probably be different bands for the various groups. The target market for used Chevy’s is different from the target market for new Mercedes. Pay day loans are sold to different people than are sold margin lending for their stock portfolio. Ditto basketballs vs. golf balls.
Nobody finds these ideas at all strange. But as soon as we substitute in male or female for age groups or socioeconomic groups, a lot of people seem to take leave of their senses.
The concept of “target market” is not about saying “absolutely 100% of our customers are like this, and absolutely zero percent of our customers are like that.” It’s about aiming a product at an identifiable subgroup of humans and then advertising the product to that subset.
Typically you aim the advertising at the absolute center of the demographic and expect some spillover into the fringes of the demographic. If men buy 80% of golf balls, you aim 100% of the ads at men and expect to pick up the 20% of golfers who are women along the way. If women buy 80% of Calphalon pans, you aim 100% of the ads at women and expect to pickup the 20% of home chef-wannabes who are men along the way. Business is all about efficiency, and chasing the tail of a distribution is inefficient.
Now when it comes to political commentary and to social policy things *ought *to get more nuanced. If indeed math majors are 65% male, 35% female we ought not go around acting like it’s 100% / 0%, or offering scholarships only to men “because that’s more efficient”.
Last of all there is a chicken and egg feedback loop. People who are raised with strictly separate gender roles will tend to adopt most of those roles in adulthood. Folks who are raised with more blended gender roles, or almost none at all, will likewise be more blended. We have a very hard time separating any given person’s individual nature from the results of their individual nurture from the results of society’s influence at large.
IMO in order to have a useful discussion we / society needs to not be intellectually sloppy. Start by defining your terms and proving your assumptions. e.g. From the OP:
“Women just aren’t interested in STEM, so why should we worry about diversity in tech?” is pure B.S.
But
“As a group, statistics (which, how reliable?) show that the current college-aged women in the US are generally less interested (how much?) in STEM than the corresponding men. Why is this the case? How can we prove our answer is correct? Should we attempt to change this? Why? To what hoped-for result? What steps, if any should we take to change this, and in which direction, starting from kindergarten and extending up through retirement?”
IMO, that’s a useful statement of a question and an approach to an answer. The first version is simply lazy TV talking head garbage.
My bottom line: It isn’t helpful to society or to us as individuals for any of us to let that kind of lazy thinking define what the questions are. Much less to fall for the ignorant “answers” they appear to provide. Most of us are smarter than the guests on Geraldo. Why do so many of us persist in thinking at that level about the bigger questions before our society?
Personally, I think Caityln has just changed her physical appearance and the pronoun she chooses to identify with. She’s a woman because that’s who she wants to be. I don’t need to know what her brain looks like or what hormones are flowing in her bloodstream to identify her as a woman. If she didn’t like make-up or glamorous clothes, she’d still be a woman.
One day I hope that people can change their genders at their own whim, without having to prove to a doctor that they have a tragic condition. If people want to take hormones so they can grow boobs or a facial hair, I say they should be able to–provided they are aware of the health risks. No one gives a person the third-degree for other cosmetic alterations, so I don’t see why transgender surgery has to be treated any different. It’s their bodies, their lives.
I agree. Being another gender because you want to is absolutely fine.
Being another gender because you like things the other gender likes and therefore you think you must have been born “wrong” is probably based on those social norms.
I’ve never had the chance to learn, but would love to. Carpentry in general, too (electricity is about the one type of DYI-stuff I’d rather leave for other people).
flips the table over and uses it as a shield to protect her from HBDC’s indignant reply that “making bows is not carpentry!”
I worked in a factory that was heavily female. One of the men in my team quipped that “gee, guess there won’t be much sports betting here”. Most of the people in the room simply grinned; a matronly Production Operator asked “basket, soccer or bikes? :D” They also had several teams for the quinielas, the state-operated soccer bets: one per work team, including several which just happened to be all-female.
Is it possible to make generalizations, market for certain targets, etc.? Yes, but sometimes it isn’t the best bet. Some of you may remember that the female versions of WoW armors got more coverage with time, as Blizzard realized that ohmygodweactuallyhavewomenplaying and most of them hate chainmail bikinis! Do all women hate chainmail bikinis? No. Is everybody who plays WoW enamored of them? Blizzard discovered not.
I’d agree (although I’d hope that it doesn’t quite reach the Plan B/OTC level - I do think some kind of medical supervision is a good idea with such drastic biomedical efforts). I’d be much more interested in seeing the social/linguistic adaptation, so that there isn’t perpetual friction and discord over, say, pronoun choices. 
The question is, though…are people happy to adopt most of those roles* they’ve been assigned*? The last 30ish years have seen a lot more strict gender roles for children in toys, behavior and dress than the 1970s and 80s did. We went from unisex Garanimals, Lincoln Logs, Lego and Tinker Toys to “basic” t-shirts that are cut differently for boys and girls, not to mention different in decoration and color, with toys so gender divided that they put in different sections of the toy store to reassure Grandma she wasn’t accidentally buying a “girl” puzzle for her grandson.
And what do I see? A lot more transgender kids and young adults. A LOT more. I think if we stay this course we’re going to have to reexamine our 0.3% population estimate. I’m aware that transgenderism is a real thing, and that increased visibility due to social media is a thing, and I do not for one second try to argue anyone out of their personal experience or identity. But I do wonder if our overly strict genderization of children is feeding *some *of this. Maybe *some *of the kids just want to wear a pink tshirt, and if we made that okay (again) for both boys and girls, there’d be a little less angst and drama and labels for some of them. Maybe there is a subset here who isn’t actually trans, but feels the need for more options in expression and interests. They shouldn’t be lumped in with those who are actually transgender, simply because they want to make bows instead of just shoot them. Different problem, different solution.
I agree so much with this, but I have to admit that I feel uncomfortable saying so out loud because I don’t want to appear insensitive to transgenderism. But I think it is crazy to disccount out of hand the role society plays in defining gender, and thus the pathologization of gender nonconformity.
But what if, by focusing on the demographic that you think exists, you are totally missing the chance to focus on the silent participants? Video games and comic books are a great example. It’s about 50% of video game players that are women now, but we still get bullshit answers about how we just “can’t” animate women assassins (Assassin’s Creed franchise). Comic book movies? Still no female comic book hero movie? Do you know how many women like these movies?
I feel like it’s only damaging companies to be so focused. Even after they do market research, they still keep targeting the demographic they have always gone after. Women need to be girly, and men need to be manly. Which only hurts both genders, and, if you must talk about business, makes businesses lose money.
Home Sales Parties.
Women = “What a great idea!”
Men = “If I want to fleece my friends for a few bucks, we’ll have a poker night.”
I’ve never seen anyone darn a pair of socks. Not even 30 years ago. Even then, sock were cheap.
Um. Maybe some straight men are just not interested in interior decorating. I’ve never been inside a gay man’s house (or apartment) that didn’t look like Martha Stewart had been through there.
I hate home sales parties with a passion and last I checked I was a woman. And I am by no means the only woman who hates this.
Generalizing is just going to get you. Every hobby you mention I’m sure someone of the “wrong” gender would be into it. And, there might be more into it, if it wasn’t so aggressively marketed as being “girly” or “manly”.
Speaking of which, I’ve got a whole pack of lesbian friends who can all play golf way better than any man.
Not all straight, unattached men are dorm slobs, though. I’ve known several men in their 30s or so who had showroom apartments or small houses, and were definitely het.
You’re absolutely right.
If a company’s product is bought 90/10, it’s smart to focus on the 90. If it’s bought 50/50 and the company stupidly believes it’s 90/10, well that’s stupid and they’re losing a lot of their would-be second 50 to the savvier competition.
As I said, folks, and especially folks in positions of authority, *ought *to be looking at the world as it really is, not as they lazily assume it to be or as some other moron lazily tells them it is.
For some things we see this happening. Using my example of golf balls, we see the market of female golfers has grown enough to be an identifiable demographic of its own; they’re no longer a coda on Golf (meaning assumed-to-be-male-only golf). So more forward-thinking businesses now offer women’s golfing shows, equipment, classes, videos, camps, leagues, etc. And are making good money doing so.
Unfortunately, large scale pop-culture artifacts, like full length movies, are a business proposition first and foremost. The fact they form a large part of the mileu which steers culture is a sad side effect.
And they’re risky ones at that. An exec can approve several conservative decisions that prove to be failures and probably have his/her career survive. But have one non-conservative decision go wrong and they’re probably unemployed and maybe unemployable.
The faster society is changing, the farther behind the corporate behemoths will be. Which means in effect they’re a drag holding our culture back. Even with no ill intent they’re a reactionary force. And I’m NOT suggesting they’re entirely without ill intent. Change of any kind is scary to the forces enjoying top dog status under the status quo.
Using your example, we’ll see an awful lot of YouTube homemade anime starring female comic book heroes before we see the first tentative steps by Big Money Studios in that direction.
Note I’m not advocating for this lazy-minded conservative situation, merely pointing out that it exists, warts and all.