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If you have an active life of the mind, about 10 years of mind-aging (fueled by learning, thinking, creating) creates as much cognitive distance as the average gender gap.
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The gender gap in cognition styles doesn't really change much after adolescence, so at some point after 35 or so, college-age people seem more alien than peers of the opposite sex.
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I think there's a sort of spindle shape to the gender gap (age on y axis, gap on x axis). Babies are basically alike whatever their gender. So are people 70+. The gender gap is at its max around 27-30 for thinking/life-of-mind people, and maybe 45 for people who don't think much.
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People who don't think much (or do so in stylized ways that avoids novelty) tend to essentialize gender by local cultural pattern, so you get exaggerated performances of locally archetypal male/female LARPing around early 40s with non-thinkers.
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Then as these closed-thinkers/non-thinkers age, you get gendered aging caricatures where the performance distance stays roughly constant (and exaggerated) but the de facto distance narrows (same kinds of grumpiness, close-mindedness etc).
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The reason active, open-to-experience thinking triggers convergence faster is people start to phone in minimum-viable gender performances but otherwise tie identity evolution to other aspects of life.
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