Hi there. Since you've made the suggestion that I am engaging in bad science, and presumably you have some better alternatives, I will give you an opportunity to showcase that to me and be more specific about my flawed arguments in the process. In the mean time I will clarify my actual views because you seem not to understand them based on what you've said. There are specific scientific ideas that make up the basis of what I am claiming. If you are not familiar with concepts like statistical variance, shared-environmental effects vs. non-shared environmental effects, and gene-environment interaction, you will not understand what I believe.

He also does not seem to understand that "the actual psychological traits of men/women/individuals," as he calls them, are not simply given but are themselves heavily influenced by external factors.

Well, I mentioned that these traits are partly innate and I gave some basic evidence for that: fetal testosterone levels in the womb are predictive of systemizing vs. empathizing. The ironic thing is that you chide me for treating innate factors as "simply given", but here you doing precisely what you're accusing me of doing except for nurture instead of nature, and you provide no evidence at all. Let me respond with the equivalent statement back to you: it is not simply a given that psychological traits are heavily influenced by external factors. It happens to be true that "external" (environmental) factors heavily influence differences in psychological traits (for individuals within a population) but not for the reason you think. Socialization effects make up a minority of this influence. The majority of the environmental influence on individual psychological traits comes from the effects of randomness, both in brain development in utero and in random life events.

I actually have stronger evidence that the psychological traits of men/women/individuals are partly innate but I didn't include it in my previous comment because I felt like it would be a waste of time to pile on more science that I would have to explain. Since you're presenting yourself as someone who is scientifically literate you can read the science yourself or read my summary of it without any scientific explanation. If you respond by displaying misunderstandings of the science behind what I am saying then I will be forced to not take your response seriously.

The tl;dr of the research is that a majority of the variance in vocational interests *among individuals within a population is explained by genes, and therefore it follows logically that a majority of the gender difference in vocational interests is almost certainly explained by genes. (If genes explain much of the differences between individuals it probably explains a similar amount of the difference between those same individuals as groups.)

Here is a paper from the psychologist Linda Gottfredson summarizing some of the research behind what I am saying. Since it is quite old it doesn't include some new research that provides stronger evidence for these ideas but it's a good summary nonetheless.

Linda Gottfredson: The Nature and Nurture of Vocational Interests

It seems probable, for example, that the worldwide male-female differences in preferences for dealing with things versus people (and thus in Realistic versus Social activities) will be found to have some genetic underpinning. Such genetically influenced subgroup differences would have two important implications for counselors. First, the menus of experience -- the social environments -- that cultures provide to the two sexes probably differ partly for genetic reasons. (Recall that people's rearing environments are to some extent their "extended phenotypes.") To the extent that gene environment correlations involving gender generalize to create cultural norms for gender socialization, they are probably targeted to the modal genotypes or average tendencies of a sex. But males and females differ enormously among themselves, so gender-based menus of experience, while perhaps serving the majority of both sexes tolerably well, may stunt the development of the many less typical members of each sex. If anything, then, genetically driven average gender differences in interests and other traits make it even more imperative that young people be exposed to a wide variety of environments. The differences between the subgroups should be respected, but so too should the individual differences within them.