Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to discuss gender inequalities

I'm sure someone could easily make an argument that we are genetically predisposed to discriminate/war against the Other, however you define that.

I disagree. A race can be thought of as a very extended family, and it is natural to for people to be slightly better disposed to be people they are slightly related to, just as they are much better disposed to people they are closely related to.

Didn't take long.

During the course of this thread I read my son a Curious George Haloween Party book. In one picture Betty was dressed up as an astronaut. Wyatt said Billy should have been the astronaut because, "girls can't be astronauts, only boys can be astronauts". I said some girls have been astronauts. He said then why haven't I ever seen them? Granted i've only taught him skills not content so he's talking about whatever he's seen in his four years of pop culture.

No, it did not. And whether or not we find one of these "Well, you see, it's very natural...biologically based...but we need to rise above it" arguments more or less valid than the other, I find them both a risky place to start from when talking to children about inequality. I'm not a fan of sociobiological explanations for human behavior, in case you can't tell. As I like to say to my husband, mammals also eat their young, but nobody goes around justifying THAT.

Socio-evolutionary explanations often come off as ad hoc rationalizations anyway. Where's the causal link? Isn't adaptability supposed to be a key strength of the human species?

Useful and practical information and devices for the prevention of unwanted pregnancy dates back at least to 1850 BC (Kahun Papyrus), but here in the US dissemination of such information was considered obscenity and punishable by law as recently as the 20th century, and distributing prophylactics to unwed couples was a crime as recently as the 1970s... all because of a Victorian style moral code, which traces its roots to a medieval Europe suffering catastrophic population loss. The top layer of society adapted by hunting down midwives (the keepers and distributors of knowledge relating to pregnancy prevention) as witches, though they did keep such knowledge for themselves in the elite (just ask Casanova).

Many significant cultures recognized the sexes as equals, and had relaxed views about sexuality, even to the point of incorporating sex into their religious observances. But history is written by the victors, and that's not the information the Texas school board wants you to see.

"Gender inequalities" mostly result from differing interests and aptitudes of males and females, and imposing quotas to get equal representation is both unfair to males and bad for society, because it means selecting people on a non-merit basis. A recent article discusses the harm of crusades against "gender inequalities":

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2012/07/when_college_women_studyscienc.html
Science Quotas for Women--A White House Goal
by Charlotte Allen
Minding the Campus
July 9, 2012

When college women study science, they tend to gravitate toward biology--about 58 percent of all bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in biology go to women. In contrast, women earn some 17 percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering and computer science and just over 40 percent of bachelor's degrees in physical sciences and mathematics. The likely reason for this, found in the study The Mathematics of Sex" (2009) by Cornell psychologists Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, is that women tend to be drawn to "organic" fields involving people and living things, whereas men are more interested in the objects and abstractions that are the focus of STEM majors. Aversion to math plays a role too: a University of Bristol study finds that biologists tend not to pay attention to scholarly articles in their field that are packed with mathematical equations.

Yet the Obama administration sticks closely to the hard-line feminist argument that the problem is bias: women are somehow being denied access to STEM courses. On June 20 the White House announced that it would issue guidelines expanding the scope of Title IX to cover science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

When college women study science, they tend to gravitate toward biology--about 58 percent of all bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in biology go to women. In contrast, women earn some 17 percent of bachelor's degrees in engineering and computer science and just over 40 percent of bachelor's degrees in physical sciences and mathematics. The likely reason for this, found in the study The Mathematics of Sex" (2009) by Cornell psychologists Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, is that women tend to be drawn to "organic" fields involving people and living things, whereas men are more interested in the objects and abstractions that are the focus of STEM majors. Aversion to math plays a role too: a University of Bristol study finds that biologists tend not to pay attention to scholarly articles in their field that are packed with mathematical equations.

Yet the Obama administration sticks closely to the hard-line feminist argument that the problem is bias: women are somehow being denied access to STEM courses. On June 20 the White House announced that it would issue guidelines expanding the scope of Title IX to cover science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

...

So right NOW, at this moment, would you say we're at the point where ALL differences in apparent male/female "interests and aptitudes" are 100% biologically based? Why is NOW that moment? Why weren't we at that moment, say, 20 years ago, when that "58 percent of all bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in biology going to women" you cite below was a MUCH lower number?

This is such a silly argument. No offense, Bostonian, but it's just silly. I love how we keep moving the goalposts, too. Oh...er...it looks like a lot of women are majoring in biology now! Well, um, I guess we might need to retire that whole "The womenz, they cannot do the scienz" trope. Wait, wait! "Teh womenz, they cannot do teh ENGINEERINZ!"

It seems that Charlotte Allen is unaware that biology is a science.

LOL. I saw this time and time again when I pre-reviewed bio papers and PHD theses. Back then most of the authors were male.


This will lead to colleges being disintermediated by private merit-based assessment teaching and increase colleges' irrelevance in society. IMHO this is a good thing in the long run.