Any inborn differences are definitely exaggerated by society. This is what feminists have called ‘male socialisation’ and ‘female socialisation’.
I tend to return to ‘is this behaviour demonstrated in our nearest mammalian relatives? Ie the other Great Apes?’ when trying to figure out what is nature and what is nuture.
Boys being more into rough and tumble play (due to being stronger than girls and thus less afraid of injury/less need for self protection?) is something that occurs cross species, whereas as stuff like clothing differences (girls in pink with less sturdy shoes!) obviously does not, and in humans it often begins before the child is old enough to display any interest, so it’s an adult projection onto the child…
But then I tend to think of extremely gendered dressing as something that has arisen as part of human-mate attraction/sexual signalling - hence Saturday night nightclubs being all
high heels, short skirts and false eyelashes for the women and tight v neck t shirts designed for maximum-muscle-display and fake tan for the chaps.
Whereas at home on Sunday morning both sexes are probably wearing near-identical baggy sweatpants and hoodies!
(and gender nonconformity within same sex attracted groups can function similarly, although perhaps in a more complex, more nuanced, distinctively subcultural way).
If we were more like other mammals we could discard all the weird gendered dressing and just sniff each other’s bottoms 🙀 but as we are the only species that routinely conceals our primary sex characteristics (genitals) we’ve evolved (?) to have some noticeable secondary sex characteristics (female breasts and hips/thighs, male facial + body hair, male deep voices, significant height differences etc) and then we further exaggerate those secondary characteristics for mate-attraction (and date night with our existing partners).
look at traditional weddings for the most obvious example - bet your average bride and groom both wear jeans on a normal Saturday, but she’s now wearing a white gown and him a dark suit!
(obvs same sex couples disrupt this a bit and there is no expectation for a bride-bride couple to both wear dresses, but most groom-groom couples do wear suits, often with more colour/texture variation than grooms marrying brides).
All just idle thoughts, really.
My main takeaway from it all as a parent is that we should try our best not to project onto small children and encourage them to develop their own interests and tastes, whilst being aware enough of the bell curve averages to use it to our advantage (a heads up on what might be to come) without using it to limit our children or freak ourselves out when our own children are outliers.
Statistics and averages are for societal forward planning (what services is this population likely to need in future?) rather than a parenting manual.