As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

It matters when you want to evaluate whether a group has gotten a bad deal in society.

For example, if girls tend to prefer playing with dolls instead of toy cars, is it nature or nurture? If nature, then maybe there's a biological basis for why less women go into stem. If nurture, then maybe it's society's norms and expectations that explains why women more often go into people-oriented jobs like teaching and nursing.

When you look at it this way, you can see why the difference has political implications.

I'm fairly visual-spatial. I now make little websites and take photos and play SimCity. But when I was a homemaker, this largely got expressed as an interest in clothes and household decor because those were basically the avenues open to me. It wasn't particularly fulfilling.

I thought dressing well and being pretty would get me a happy marriage. It didn't. I thought having a nice home would get me a satisfactory social life. It didn't.

I liked being a mom and I liked being home with my kids, but a lot of the rest of it wasn't really what I expected or wanted.

I spent a lot of years pursuing some mirage where I thought X would get me Y and being disappointed. I also spent those years sorting out why my life didn't work and resolving a lot of issues.

There are ways in which I'm very stereotypically feminine and have a history of reading to others as very feminine. But I actually don't enjoy cooking, never learned to sew or crochet or similar, etc.

I've worked hard at sorting this for myself so my life can stop making me crazy. It tends to be a lot of drama when I try to comment on it. No matter how carefully I say "X research resonated with me personally and was useful for me personally in making my life work better," inevitably other people will jump up and say (in essence) "Well, that isn't true for me and you are evil and bad and wrong for saying this is true for women generally and you don't represent me!!!!!" type nonsense.

It's insane amounts of drama that is essentially unrelated to whatever I actually said and it makes it nigh impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion.

I think some of what I've learned over the years does generalize. But I am increasingly reluctant to try to say anything about such because that's even more drama than saying "X made sense for me as an individual trying to sort my own life."

Based on those experiences, the odds seem long against there ever being research that really seriously sorts this for "the world."

There's a fairly simple explanation: in egalitarian societies femininity is socially acceptable even in "traditionally male" occupations. So women don't need to act "masculine" to make progress in those jobs. When it's socially acceptable for a CEO to be a mother and a woman, more women will feel comfortable pursuing a family in addition (rather than in exclusion) to a career.

There's another fairly simple explanation: "equal opportunity" is not the same as "non-sexist". Without knowing how "gender-egalitarian"-ness is measured (it's suspicious that it uses the phrase "more developed") it's impossible to tell what the societal attitudes actually look like. But it's entirely possible that the countries with the most egalitarian laws still have strict gender roles that are socially reinforced.

So either way the lesson isn't "feminism is wrong" or "equal opportunity is meaningless": either equal opportunity allows women to succeed without abandoning their gender role, or egalitarianism masks the harm of socially reinforced gender roles, or maybe even both.

Much like "if climate change is wrong", even if "gender disparity is innate and egalitarianism doesn't eliminate the differences" (or whatever one might construe the paper's outcome to mean), the worst case outcome of social justice is that we've made the world a nicer place and "butch" women, "girly" men and non-binary folk face less resistance. Or, y'know, maybe we're right and the changes actually eliminate injustice and help everyone.

That said, it's telling that Jordan Peterson and James Damore are mentioned in these HN comments as if they were legitimate authorities (not to mention actual "NPC" throwaways as if this were reddit) and nobody bats an eye. So maybe to those people social progress is bad.

"It matters when you want to evaluate whether a group has gotten a bad deal in society."

I am not sure why would I want to do that.

As a leftist (being pro-equality), I don't really want there to be anybody who got a bad deal in society. But why should it matter which group are they part of? It seems chauvinistic to me.

Correlation equals causation if you like the implications. Soft science is hard science if it helps you justify your biases.

Same reason people flock to a failed "psychologist" who tells them to clean their room and live like lobsters (except, y'know, he doesn't actually understand lobsters either). Same reason some random Xoogler kid misquoting cherry-picked "facts" is defended by HN commenters. Same reason a throwaway troll comment remains unflagged and undeleted for hours.

But hey, as long as we all pretend to be anarcho-capitalists, we can still claim we're revolutionaries.