The problem with arguments from evolutionary psychology is that a lot of them are in the form of "back in the day, things were like this..." or "I'm sure it would be an evolutionary incentive for..." The female brain wants children and a mate to protect and rear them? Well, okay. Why wouldn't the male brain? It has just as much stake in passing its genes to the next generation, and making sure that generation reaches adulthood to do the same.
Well if you believe in evolution and natural selection then you also necessarily believe that nature preserves traits that enhance survival and reproduction. Would it make sense for nature to produce a species that doesn't want children and requires societal pressures to have children? What happened before we formed societies?
Now keep in mind most of the evolutionary history of our species has occurred before we had consciousness and had thoughtful control over our behavior. There is an asymmetry between men and women and there always has been. Men can, theoretically, reproduce dozens of times a year if not more while at most a woman can reproduce just once a year. Sperm is cheap and eggs are rare and valuable. From this natural difference males and females would develop somewhat different reproductive strategies.
Men are more likely to seek quantity of partners while women search for quality. The strategies converge because human children require a lot of attention, investment and education, whether now or in our ancestral past. So natural selection would also select for men who were more likely to make an emotional investment in their children. So you see men are somewhat pulled between two reproductive strategies, one quasi-polygamous and one monogamous.
Changing social stats are at least good for one, basic lesson: the current state of things isn't necessarily dictated by biology, because it hasn't always been and won't always be the state of things, even with the same biology.
Obviously we have control over our actions and are not biological determined in the sense that we have to act in a certain way. If you recall I said nature built in a desire to have children to varying degrees, but humans have many desires and in our current environment many of these desires conflict with child rearing. Most importantly our environment has many forms of contraceptives, so we can engage in sex (natural selection made sex enjoyable for obvious reasons... so we'd have lots of sex and reproduce) and not automatically have children. So men can engage in sex with many women, as to a certain extent they are biologically programmed to do, and yet not have any children to show for it. However in our ancestral past (where these genes would have been selected for originally) the result would be many children for the alpha male stud.
I don't think the changes show that society is pushing women away from having children, so much as careers are now a real possibility, and women are still being given the choice between a career and kids. Also, you don't have to look any further than children's toys to see values being assigned by gender at an early age.
Is gender a societal construct. What would happen if parents raised boys as girls and made them wear dresses and play with dollies and other traditional girlie things? By your way of thinking they would grow to like the dolls and like the dresses?
No! One study looked at 25 boys born without penises who were subsequently castrated and raised as girls (Reiner 2000). All of them showed stereotypical male behavior despite their parent's best efforts to raise them as girls. Most of the boys, on their very own, declared that they were boys (just think of how rare that normally is). Nature persevered over nurture.
There is a famous case involving Brenda. Brenda was born as Bruno, but lost his penis when he was an infant. The boy was castrated and the doctors built an artificial vagina. Brenda's parents consulted sex experts who claimed that gender was a societal construct and were told to simply raise Brenda as a girl and all would be fine. However from the earliest memories Brenda always knew that she was really a boy, she rejected her clothing and her dolls and played with boys and stereotypical male toys instead. At age fourteen she was suicidal and threatened to kill herself if she wasn't allowed to have a sex change operation. Her parents then informed her that she was actually a boy and today she is a man married to a woman.
POINT? Toys are constructed for males and females, toys do not construct males and females.
And no I'm not denying that some males like to play with tradition female toys and vice versa.
