It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The vast majority of men across history died without fathering any children. Doing so was a very real competition to secure power and women and defend what you had from the marauders. Our ancient ancestors were the ones that won these competitions; the ones that lost either died in combat or died as celibate servants to the more powerful men. So even though monogamy and modern society in general has changed the rules somewhat, the instinct is still deeply ingrained in most of us.
Women of course competed with each other for the attention of the most powerful men, but when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, ultimately all that mattered was that they and their children were cared for and protected. Even in the absolute worst case scenario, your tribe being conquered and all of your men slaughtered, you would most likely be taken as a wife or concubine by the conquerors and life would for the most part continue on as usual after some time. So it isn't surprising that women would be predisposed towards cooperation. Raising children means that you get far more from being able to get along with your tribe and integrate peacefully into a new one if need be, than "winning" any single small victory. And in turn, women that were obsessed with small victories were more likely to piss their tribe off and find themselves ostracized or exiled.
This explains the difference in male and female bullying behaviors as well. Boys publicly display dominance because it confers status. Girls do it far more subtly, in private, so that they can put other girls down without breaking the veneer of social harmony or changing the way others perceive them.
It's not immediately clear to me whether "it's a game" or "it's a test of reading ability" makes it sound more competitive.
"I want to win at the game" vs "tests = boring" / "I'd better do well on the test as it sounds important and people might think I'm stupid" vs "it's only a silly game"
Perhaps one leans towards being competitive about what your peers think of you, and one towards being competitive about what teachers/adults think? Not sure.
At risk of being patronizing, you're probably being downvoted by parents who figure you don't have kids.
We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to our children. Yet at age 3 my son completely ignored the giraffe we were trying to point out at the zoo, and would only focus on the irrigation pump. That kind of experience was repeated often with him and my daughters.
One daughter would only build babies out of the meccanno I taught her to use. OK, they were robot babies and that's awesome, but still. This was before school, none of them had daycare, and we never had a TV.
These sorts of stories are repeated ad infinitum among parents, usually in the context of "I can't believe what I used to think..."
> We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to our children.
[...]
> This was before school
My son's favourite colour before he started daycare was pink. That rapidly got policed out of him by other children and disappointingly by staff in day care.
We persevered - "anyone can like any colour; boys can have pink as their favourite colour, girls can have blue as their favourite colour" and it sort of worked, but he's now in his first year at school and the policing from other children is pretty fierce (although the teachers are much better).
Have you considered the possibility that your family has been putting strong pressure on your son (probably against your conscious wishes) to like pink, and that he has been trying to satisfy what he perceived a parental demand? Children learn by picking up and copying parental behaviour and preferences.
Possibly a bit tangential to the discussion, but there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis in respect to male/female color vision differences.
For example, red-green color blindness affects about 7% of males, and < 0.5% females. IOW on the whole males are more likely to be able to see and respond to blue than red or pink.
There's also intriguing if incomplete evidence that among humans with normal color vision, females are more likely to have finer color discrimination ability in the yellow-orange-red end of the spectrum compared to their male counterparts.
Of course, there are going to be a few males "outliers" who have superior color discrimination ability, so a boy could very well appreciate pink even if it's not as likely as it would be among girls.
>> there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis
That makes no sense to me. I'm Greek and in my neck of the woods boys and girls are not expected to wear specific colours, at least not when I was growing up.
If you do a search for Greek traditional dress you'll notice that the colours that dominate are white, black, red and some shade of brown, but they are both pretty much equally distributed between men and women.
That's empirical and maybe someone somewhere has a proper data'd study that contradicts me but you really won't find anyone who can point to examples of pink dominating women's traditional dress in Greece.
I believe the same goes for other cultures. Every time I see the traditional ornamentation of people from the Amazon, or sub-Saharan Africa for instance, vivid bright colours seem to dominate for both sexes. If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).
And there's nowhere a shade of pink to be found.
So I think this blue vs pink thing is definitely a cultural phenomenon and that it's really just affecting specific parts of the world.
> If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).
Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of those traditions. Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males. That is, the idea is females see these colors more distinctly or are more visually "sensitive" to these colors.
"Pink" is relevant because it's merely red "diluted" with white, that is, lower saturation of a red hue.
No doubt cultural influences are enormously important re: attributing colors as symbols of gender identity. I was only writing about the possible genetic/biological factors contributing to selecting which colors are assigned to males vs. females, and such factors could certainly be quite secondary.
OTOH the info you contributed is intriguing because it appears to support the hypothesis I was referring to.
>> Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males.
That's interesting indeed, because I was wrong about the male/female dichotomy in Indian traditional dress: yellows and reds (and also fuschias, turquoises and so on) are worn equally by males and females. Blues and purples are also very commonly worn by women. The difference is in the patterns and the shape of the dress, but not in the colours. Apologies for that- like I said I'm Greek, not Indian.
Additionally, the other cultures I mention have an equal spread of reds, yellows, and what have you among men and women, so again I don't see how any genetic thing is at play here.
Finally- All this doesn't say anything about why pink is "girly" only in specific parts of the world. If pink in particular was a genetic thing then it would be all over the place, not just in a few countries.
If the parents are gendered, how can they possibly present a gender-neutral environment? They would have to cross-dress, vary their speech and mannerism, vary the length of their hair, be androgynous...
Perhaps the parents you're referring to are failing to realize just how strongly gendered their lives are.
But same sex parents report similar things happening. And many parents try really pretty to fight aspects of this - talking about movies and tv shows; not conforming to the roles; etc.
> Perhaps the parents you're referring to are failing to realize just how strongly gendered their lives are.
Yes, that's a large part of it. I think people also underestimate how much children pick up from society in general. Beyond what they get from their parents, they're still going to be meeting friends and family members, going outside and seeing other humans interact, other people are probably going to be buying them gifts (even if you try to avoid this, there will be times when people spring them on you), etc. There are a lot of influences we've stopped noticing because they're so pervasive.
You are being patronizing, though. Cordelia Fine, who does psychological research on this, has a great anecdote about this entire line of argument- the nonsexist parent who tried to do gender neutral parenting, comically failed, and then realized boys and girls truly are different, and now campaigns from the opposite perspective.
She brings up one such anecdote from another book, where parents really tried to give their daughter firetrucks AND dolls, jeans AND dresses, but at the end of the day, the girl was tucking the firetruck to bed like a good mom and wanted to wear dresses. That book was all about how girls have innate nurturing tendencies and so on.
Of course, the mom was the one tucking the girl to bed almost every night. It was funny that parents failed at giving their daughter fire-trucks, but it's even funnier that someone would ignore the massive impact their own behavior had imprinted on their kids. Same with dresses- mom may wear jeans frequently, but dad absolutely never wears a dress. How are you going to ignore this, even if your kid is only three years old? They learn to speak like you in such a short period of time, and you're going to chalk up zoos vs. irrigation pumps to biology? You say you're a proud machinist and woodworker in your profile. Does your wife spend equal amounts of time in the shop? Do you think your kids are not already making choices about whether they're more like you or your wife?
She also brings up some interesting research by Castelli et al [0], where parents are interviewed about their opinions about racism (ie: I am NOT racist, and I teach my kid to NOT be racist), but then evaluates them on their implicit attitudes towards race (everyone's somewhat racist, I hope you'd agree), and kids match their parents really well not compared to their explicit attitudes, but more in the implicit ones.
The truth is that if you tried to raise your kids in a gender-neutral environment, you completely failed, because we make it absolutely impossible, unless you control absolutely all media and social influence and tune your own behavior accordingly, which would be creepy and Stalinesque.
It doesn't mean that there are no innate gender differences, or that they undesirable, but it definitely means that parents who get together to talk about how they "can't believe what [they] used to think" because they've been awokened to gender differences have just swapped one unfounded source of condescension for another.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19271841
> Previous literature based on self-report measures has not found a clear relationship between the ethnic attitudes of White parents and those of their children. In particular, no study has evidenced such a relationship in the case of preschool children. In the present study, the authors measured parents' implicit and explicit racial attitudes as well as the racial attitudes of their 3- to 6-year-old children. They found that parents' explicit attitudes were not related to children's responses. In contrast, mothers' implicit attitudes (but not fathers' implicit attitudes) were significant predictors of children's attitudes. Results demonstrate that early racial attitudes might develop within the family.
That is very likely, considering how different girls and boys are raised in regards to authority and competition.
On reddit’s /r/science several people with degrees in the relevant fields have also speculated that this might be the case.
From personal anecdote, I can confirm that guys usually care less about what an authority thinks, and more about how they are in relation to their peers, while girls consider competition less relevant.
The reddit thread was already linked by someone else below. People with flair specifying their qualifications had to provide proof of having them, so only look at those comments.
