I was having a nice discussion with a lovely young woman earlier today. She presented her view that a large part of gender-role expectations ("women are better at x than men, men are better at y than women") is predominantly taught to children by their parents, and that these roles are not so much natural as they are an ingrained tradition that is taken for granted. I'm suspicious. I think personal development is essentially equal parts nature and nurture (at least one is not so predominant that the other is diminished utterly), such that yes, children can only find out that they're good at, and like, things that they have the opportunity to experience [here I agree with her], but that you can't be made to like something simply by experiencing it--in other words, the fact that some women seem to enjoy cooking is not only because that's what they were exposed to, but that they actually do enjoy it innately [i.e. that a predisposition toward something is not learned -- and here my agreement with her diverges]. Perhaps many men and women would enjoy things that are often associated with the other sex, if they were exposed to it more as children, but I think that they still do incline toward the things they do because they have an instinctive affinity for it.

What do you think?

There's more that we discussed, and there's more that you can discuss, too, but I'm just leaving this here as a conversation starter. I might make another thread with another point of our discussion as a conversation starter if this one goes well.

Do you think gender roles are antiquated social constructs? Or do you think that men and women are different, in more than just the obvious physically dimorphic way? Please share your experiences and discuss.