We are programed that way. While still living in caves, it was man who went out to kill the big ass monster for dinner, while the woman prepared it into a tasty casserole back in the cave
But that's all conjecture, especially the second part. Remember, this is more or less what I study at university, I'm familiar with a fair amount of literature on the subject and it's not as straightforward as the media will have you believe.
As I mentioned to JSR, women can actually gather more food than men, as a whole, in many hunter-gatherer societies. This is due to the factors that influence the availability of meat sources such as population, climate, environment, and animal behaviour. It is also due to parental factors as infants will usually be taken along with their mothers while foraging but older children not. This requires mothers to forage for things that expend a minimal amount of energy and is safe for their offspring. Gathering fruits, nuts, vegetables and whatnot usually falls in to this category.
While meat sources are far more efficient and valuable than other sources of food, they can be more difficult and dangerous to acquire so you end up with many early societies relying on vegetation, fruit and seafood (depending on location) for the majority of the year. There's also a significant difference depending on season, fecundity, number of children, and age of children. Women wont do the same jobs as each other, their jobs will vary depending on specific circumstances. During the dry season, you might see nearly every women out foraging for food and due to this increased energy expenditure, you see reduced rates in fertility and such. Also, during the dry season you may see the differences in the sexual division of labour reduce significantly.
Check out Hurtado et al., 1985 (Female subsistence strategies among Ache hunter-gatherers of eastern Paraguay). I don't think I've read that one before but it seems to give an a brief summary of related literature. I'm familiar with the work of three of the four authors as those three formed a fair portion of a research justification I did earlier this year on the long-term effects of month of birth in societies exposed to extreme seasonal conditions (not my ideal research area but I got a really good grade for it).
Some of the big players in anthropology and related biological areas are still divided on things like the exact role of religion and its origins; how much is social and how much is biological. If some is biological, was it selected for or was it a consequence of prior neural and cognitive adaptations? You can't just conclude "we are programmed that way" because it makes sense to you or maybe you read it somewhere. Things aren't that easy to ascertain in anthropology. There are three ways to go about investigating this: palaeoanthropology (and related genetics), comparative anthropology and ethnography. The first one, you need to find evidence of these adaptations or "programming" either in the fossil record or DNA. Funnily enough, fossils of human skulls actually tell us a fair amount about the brain and researchers have been able to make inferences from these fossils. I think one of the main areas is the evolution of the neocortex whether fossils show evidence of Broca's area and Wernicke's area. The second one, you have to make assumptions based on a related species; often chimpanzees or bonobos. The thing lay-people forget with this kind of research is that chimpanzees are just as evolved as us, 4 million years ago they didn't look anything like they did today. So there's caution when interpreting findings of modern-day chimps to draw conclusions about our 4 million year old ancestors that weren't any closer related to chimps than we are today. The third way is ethnography. Find a society that lives similar to how we did a couple thousand years ago and make inferences from their social patterns and structure. A lot of assumptions involved with this one too, so interpret with caution.
Whenever you see an article in news about cave people or our ancestors, it's probably wrong in more than one way. Rarely are there findings interesting enough to the general population, so the media likes to have a bit of fun by having journalist-educated people interpret scientific journal articles and make wild interpretations. I see all sorts of nonsense related to human evolution published by major news companies.
Men and women have had different rolls, goals and ambitions from the beginning of time.
True, this would go pretty far back to some of the first organisms billions of years ago. However, you commonly see the roles of males and females reversed. I think it's birds that have their chromosomes opposite to ours (ZW system) and you're probably aware of pregnant male seahorses as well. Other species have the roles reversed where males will look after the young. I've already talked about the extreme social differences between bonobos and chimpanzees. We seem to be more related to bonobos yet their social structure is different to ours (ours being more similar to chimpanzees). So you can't sit there and assume that our roles have been innate since Sahelanthropus tchadensis ~6mya. Even if they were innate in Sahelanthropus, our brain has gone through significant evolution over the last ~1.5 million years. Earlier than that, there may have been significant behavioural and social changes brought about by dental evolution and bipedal evolution. Both could completely change the social dynamics of our ancestor species.
However, there were far more men with the ability and desire than women.
As I stated at the beginning of this reply, desire may have little to do with it. It's more about the sexual division of labour and the roles of individuals in a society. I believe that article I linked even mentioned the rare occasion women would tag along and hunt. This might only be a rare occasion because women generally have a different role to fulfil rather than a lack of desire. Today, desire may have a lot to do with it and roles are less important. Whether it is innate or not is definitely debatable. Research has shown that, overtime, people (men and women) can get used to nasty things like blood, guts, excrement, and vomit. When women have children their tolerance for this things tends to increase.
Men were programed to be the ambitious, aggressive, curious, "Get 'er Done" types. While women......not so much.
I'm sure you can find a few journal articles out their to support your view but this view definitely isn't established as the norm. There will be people on both sides of the fence, perhaps more on one side than the other. Ambition is hard to investigate. To establish whether it is programmed, you can't exactly use modern samples. You have to interpret it through behaviour, which is in turn largely inferred from physical evidence (bones, tools, etc). Lots of assumptions to rely on with that one. Depending on what you mean with aggressive, you certainly could argue that one convincingly. However, as for curious and 'get 'er done types', I would refer to what I said about ambition.
I make jokes about the role of women in society and they are just that...jokes. I don't discriminate against women, however, I don't over-estimate the role of women either.
Yeah I do want to stress that I'm not someone who goes around calling people a misogynist. Plenty of women openly claim they hate men yet misandry doesn't even come close to having the social stigma that misogyny does. That is definitely a bit unfair for us guys so I'm not too bothered if someone says they really don't like women or like to make jokes about them. There's always room for comedy, nothing funnier than someone being 'offended'
SPEAKING IN GENERAL TERMS because no data is available or exists
Yeah I'll grant you that for most of the things you said in that second paragraph but the thing about 'programming', as covered in my above arguments, is something that actually has plenty of research and interest in fields of biology, psychology and anthropology.
