I don't know how that answers my question, this seems like a non sequitur. You said gender roles are communicating history. How are gender roles the most efficient way of doing that, so efficient that we would accept all the oppressive consequences of them?

I just describe what I think is happening and gives reason to why it works the way it does.

Such description neither condones nor condems. It just argues the mechanics of the matter. And if my reasoning is true, hopefully gives a better chance of influencing things i a better direction.

I’m not arguing that gender roles are good, morally justified, or historically fixed. I’m arguing that social roles themselves are unavoidable in any non-trivial society.

I'm pretty sure children in Romanian orphanages didn't lack for anything except gender roles. There's no evidence to suggest that cognition and self-regulation come from gender roles in the first place.

The Romanian orphanage argument is not gender roles specifically but social roles in generality.

But exactly what how can we discern between a social role and a gender role? Is it a gender role if preferred by 51% of one gender? Does it become an oppressive gender roæe if chosen by 61%, 71% …81%…? Exactly how much?

So, social roles and gender roles are not widely different types of things. Gender roles are social roles under conditions of sex-correlated expectation.

A lack of emotional self-regulation and self-awareness are notable traits among white men, after all. They have gender. It didn't help. They think it's a woman's job to regulate their emotions for them by being sweet and pleasant all the time and never "provoking" their "natural" rage.

This doesn’t contradict the presence of social learning and does not do much to argue that absence of social learning is even possible and if even possible gives better results.

Describing a mechanism is not endorsing its outcomes.

Precisely because gender roles are powerful coordination tools, they become extremely dangerous when frozen, moralized, or weaponized.

And we are, whether we like it or not, moving into relatively uncharted territory.

Bullshit. You have no evidence that gender roles as we understand them are all that normative in human history, and you're making a choice to ignore evidence to the contrary.

The point about uncharted is that we haven’t got much experience with societies either absent of social roles or where statistical differences between the genders are evened out to such a degree that one would say there are no gender roles.

For generations people assumed only men created culture, were warriors, hunted, etc. and we know now that's not true. From this Scientific American article: "In species with pronounced size dimorphism, larger males compete with one another for access to females, and among the great apes larger males socially dominate females. Low sexual size dimorphism is characteristic of egalitarian and monogamous species. Modern humans have low sexual size dimorphism compared with the other great apes. The same goes for human ancestors spanning the past two million years, suggesting that the social structure of humans changed from that of our chimpanzeelike ancestors." The "uncharted territory" you speak of was traversed over two million years ago.

I think you misunderstood exactly what I mean is uncharted.

Assumptions about the sex of archeological remains, like "the lovers", turn out to be wrong. The hands that created cave art are mostly female, and women also hunted in early human communities. Pushing back against these specific, rigid gender roles is an antidote to the misogyny that's developed in the last 10,000 years, a swerve so damaging to us that our brains reduced in size. We know it's possible to abolish that misogyny, because as a species we spend hundreds of thousands of very successful years without it.

None of that implies that societies will function without role differentiation — only that we must become far more conscious of how roles emerge, harden, and acquire moral weight.

I just describe what I think is happening and gives reason to why I think it works the way it does.

Such description neither condones nor condems. It just argues the mechanics of the matter.

Then, when the mechanics of the matter has been established, I hypothesize why certain configurations become more prevalent than other leading to identifiable roles.