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Sex (male and female) is a biological property that determines an individual's reproductive capabilities within a species.

Gender (masculine and feminine) is a type of subjective generalization about the intellectual capabilities, values, and communication styles of a person according to sex. Unlike sex, the criteria for masculinity and femininity vary across cultures.

The Gender Trap is a belief system that blurs the distinction between sex and gender, leading people to believe that sex differences are more exaggerated than the actually are; that a person's attitude, interests, and cognitive abilities are somehow innate, permanent, and predictable by sex alone.

Possible Reasons for Getting Stuck in the Gender Trap:

* Selective Awareness: we have a tendency to only notice what we have been trained to notice. It might be easier for people to notice gender stereotypes than similarities between men and women and the many subtle ways people contradict these stereotypes.

*  Attributing Purpose: culture often teaches us to assign roles to things in nature. An example of this is the philosophical question, "What is the meaning of life?" without considering that there may be no objective purpose for life and that some phenomena, like life and sex differences, just occur through blind natural selection. The confusion of "is" with "should" is probably what lead people to fashion gender roles out of gender differences.

* Ambiguity of Language: ideas spread through verbal communication. All words are merely abstractions that convey bits of information. No one ever knows what one person's complete ideal of "femininity" actually is because words don't convey all experience. Nor do we receive words without interpreting them through the lens of our own world models. Words are convenient way to communicate fuzzy generalizations. Our language may reinforce gender stereotypes because it forces us to generalize what we mean.

* Survival of the Stable: gender roles may have developed because of their utility in creating a stable population and persisted out of tradition. Where reproduction is concerned, men are more expendable than women because of the relative high cost of pregnancy compared to insemination. For that reason, it would be more economical for a civilization ruled by brute strength and population size to assign men to combat and governing roles and women to homemaking and childrearing roles.

Why fight the Gender Trap?

The gender roles described above are becoming increasingly obsolete in modern society. Technology and a growing exchange of information reflects new priorities.  In the new environment we helped create, survival depends more on diplomacy and scientific progress than brute strength and maximizing population growth. In fact, population size and power struggles are threatening our species' survival rather than helping it.

I believe that humanity has reached a "coming of age" and is realizing more and more that the stereotypes of gender, race, age, culture, etc. have simplified our views of people but for the price of undermining the full potential of humanity in general. We are more than our conceptions. There is more to know than what we have seen. And we each have untapped abilities. Yet the gender trap tells us we what we can and can't do before we can a chance to see what we can do unhindered. Gender roles are reinforced by "neurosexism," a phenomenon coined by Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender,  pseudoscientific propaganda motivating single-sex education.

It's sad to me because it reinforces the myth that science, math, and logic belong to men and that the fuzzier, less rigorous fields of academia like art, literature, and psychology belong to women. Call me biased, but effective communication requires strong logic, precision, and factual evidence. It's clear that the division between the "two cultures”  isn't a lack of ability to convey subjective opinions. Anyone can do that regardless of how much they know about how the world actually works. Rather, I see that science and mathematics require a more sophisticated level of explaining the world. I see the gender gap in education merely reinforcing the idea that women are innately inferior thinkers.

The kind of communication that is needed to further technology requires the language of science, not subjective feelings. While art can be emotionally moving and effective at communicating complex ideas, art's lack of subjectivity makes it a poor excuse for a deep explanation of the world that only science and reason can deduce in the language of mathematics. Books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus clearly portray emotional expression as the female area of interest and logic and problem solving as a male domain. 

What's the point?

Skill, love, reason, happiness, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge can be human values instead of values only for select kinds of people. Stereotypes divide and limit society. Knowledge unites and empowers us.