Not a Post Sexism Society
Posted by
Kevin
So the Washington Post printed an opinion piece that had as its central theme the notion that women are idiots. No, really:
“I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can’t add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) I don’t mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most — Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher — were brilliant outliers.
The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don’t think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.
So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.”
This was an edited piece. And editor either solicited this piece or read it on spec and decided that it fit within the pages of the Washington Post. He or she read it, edited it, and ordered it placed into the paper. No other editor or superior stopped it and no other editor or superior has removed it or apologized for it. And it does need to be apologized for. Labeling an entire group of people as “dim”, pretending that a writer’s own insufficiencies and prejudices are somehow the same as research and insight: neither is acceptable for an actual newspaper engage din actual journalism. This is nothing more than a milder version of the old National Journal resistance that segregation was required to save White culture. Save America form the dim-witted women is this piece’s not so under undertone.
Now ask yourself this: at a paper that saw fit to print this dreck, do you think the editors can be trusted to evaluate the work of female reporters and writers fairly? Do you think those editors are going to want stories that touch on issues that have traditionally considered women’s issues? Do you think those editors are going to be fair and honest towards female executives and politicians? Do you think those editors are going to be interested in stories about women’s health or work issues, especially those told from a woman’s point of view? Do you being to understand why feminism is necessary?
That article is still on the front page of the Washington Post’s website as of this morning. We do not live in a post sexism society.
Well, as a general rule, I doubt that the paper cares much about those issues, and therefore editors who care greatly about such issues won’t find a home there.
But, if you’re looking for coverage of women’s issues in the Washington Post, you’re lost already and might as well be looking for a copy of Moneyball on Dusty Baker’s (hypothetical) book shelf.
But, shockingly, I don’t think that publishing such a piece would, in and of itself, cast doubt on any and everything involving gender issues, including internal evaluation of a female reporters’ work.
The most annoying thing about these kinds of pieces, though, is that publication seems to think it’s no harm, no foul as long as the (bylined) writer is female.
There’s room for such an opinion, I guess. However, it is not needed for a mainstream news outlet to waste prime (virtual) inches on parroting a message that isn’t particularly salient or novel.
It’s a bad choice, content-priorities-wise. But, assuming I had any faith in mainstream newsreporting, this one opinion piece would not be enough to kill it.
Comment 3/3/2008
Maybe I didn’t read the same article. Point out to me in the article where the information she cited was incorrect or false. If you don’t like what was said, then fine. But it seems to me she was frustrated with the fact that it is women, not men, that are feeding the perception she cites.
Comment 3/3/2008
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Well, Big U, my main criticism about things in the article being true or correct, as you imply, is that she lumps evolutionary theory, with socio-cultural gender binaries. A
Highly developed memory as an evolutionary holdover from the hunter-gatherer age (assuming that’s even true - if men routinely beat their wives in primitive society - can I claim evolutionary biology for keeping the pimp hand strong?) is not the same as a penchant for Manolo Blahniks as cultivated by a fictional character played by Sarah Jessica Parker. By the way, my kick game would shut that bitch down - I know, that fact alone makes me a raging hypocrite; file it away for a rainy day, Morris.
The more I read the hunter gatherer shit, the worse it does against the sniff test. I can buy arguments like this. For example, our tastes for fattening food and sweets have evolutionary roots, as the sweets alerted us that what were eating wasn’t poison, and fat was desired when food sources weren’t stable. That makes sense. Calculating spear trajectories, that evolutionary - okay, sweetie, then explain to me why the global popularity of futbol dwarfs that of football!
Watch the fuck is chick-lit anyway, or chick flicks! I own A League of Their Own on DVD, and I can practically quote it line for line - I can still throw a spear many yards and drop a baby on its head though.
Also, what the fuck does it mean to make a house a home - if the article is casting the first sexist stone, might I suggest a blowjob as the most efficient means to accomplish such a platitudinal goal!
Comment 3/3/2008
digglahh > I was referring to the parts about women fainting in Obama’s presence, women yelling “I love you” to him during his speaches, etc. The section that was actually posted on the site didn’t included any of the context of the article or any of the facts that the author presented.
I assumed eveyone would look at the actual article rather than assume what was posted was the whole thing.
Comment 3/3/2008
Guys, did you consider that the article was a poor attempt at humor? I really don’t think it was a serious piece, so parsing each sentence is kinda silly, Digg. The stuff you object to were meant to be laugh lines. At least that’s the way I read it. All she proved is she isn’t very funny.
Comment 3/3/2008
Ted,
It’s worth noting (as I assume you’re already aware) that if this is meant as humor, it more strongly supports Kevin’s thesis. It’s pretty common for editorialists to know nothing about current scientific fact, but usually they’re paid to at least have a clue what will appeal to readers, like misogyny.
Comment 3/3/2008
This article is so far from misogyny that I wonder if you guys actually know what misogyny really is.
Comment 3/3/2008
BU,
Okay, don’t normally agree with you, but generally you seem to be sane. Are we reading the same article? The one I see includes the claim that women’s “brains [are] permanently occluded by random emotions” and that “[in an] [o]ffice of Women[,] nothing ever gets done and everyone [would] spen[d] the day talking about Botox”.
Comment 3/3/2008
Okay, here’s my take. She exaggerated some things, on purpose, to prove a point she was trying to make. The way it seemed to be written was that she is tired and frustrated of women who continue to feed negative ideas about themselves. She also acknowledges that women tend to be better at some things and men tend to be better at some things. She also seemed to indicate that a lot of the staffers on Clinton’s campaign were there because of their sex. If anything, I would have expected that to get the sharpest rebuke, because she seemed to be pretty serious on that one.
Now, having spent the better part of 20 years in office environments made up mostly of women, I can advise that in my experience, the majority of women DO let emotions guide alot of their decision-making. At times that is an excellent thing, and at times it is a horrible thing. The majority tend to never forgive or forget a slight or injustice, and the majority have stated they prefer to work with men because there is less politics, back-biting and abuse than when working with other women.
Now if you look at the article, you will note that every negative seems to be preceded by a reason as to why things “appear” that way to her. It seems to me she is saying “because of what women are doing, maybe they are proving these things”. That’s not hate, that is simply frustration.
Is she wrong about the women fainting? No.
Is she wrong about Clinton’s staffing decisions and indications about how her campaign has seemingly fallen apart? I don’t know, you tell me.
Stating negatives does not equate hatred. It may be stupid or ill-informed, but it is not hatred.
In the two things you sited, Dan, the first she was stating what it looks like to her when women at a POLITICAL RALLY swoon and go all ga-ga over a man who is potentially going to lead the country. These are women who are supposedly helping shape policy and elect the candidate. I wouldn’t want a guy voting for a female based on which one has the largest breasts so why is it wrong to not want a woman voting based on how much the leader makes her swoon? Hardly seems a positive image.
The second was regarding something one of her female friends has said she wants to write. Followed by the words “we exaggerate of course” indicating an over-the-top comment meant to prove a point.
It is unfortunate that in today’s day of political correctness that an article like this can be classified as misogyny. Maybe I’m just seeing the article differently than it was intended. I do not know the author or the paper’s leanings so perhaps there is a background I am lacking. But looking at the article itself, there are enough “buts” and “as a result it looks like” comments to make it seem to me that she is generalizing based on what she is actually seeing and has experienced. And again, that is not hate.
Comment 3/4/2008
After reading Big U’s comment above, I withdraw my comment #6.
Yikes.
Comment 3/4/2008
BU,
Thanks, you make a good point. I have to admit that I didn’t read the whole thing because I frankly couldn’t stomach it.
But one quibble, I didn’t say ‘hate’, I said ‘misogyny’. Misogyny includes the debasement and devaluation of women on the basis of their womanhood. This certainly counts, quite regardless of any putative truth in the devaluation.
Comment 3/4/2008
Okay, a long comment. Sorry, but I was trying to cover all the territory I wanted to mention at once.
Big U -
Sorry, no sale. This was in no way an expression of “frustration” about how women are “feed[ing] negative ideas about themselves.” It was a complaint about why “other members of our sex besides us” - that is, the silly women lacking her and her friends’ superior insight - “don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess,” and doggone it, just be good wives and mothers and “not mind the fact that way down deep, we are … kind of dim” in a way that insures that “number of women in [male-dominated] fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.” That “reason” apparently being that women’s pre-frontal cortex is like “Cream of Wheat.”
Interestingly, whatever she may think about those “other” women, her own grip on facts is weak. For example:
No man contracts nebulous diseases such as Morgellons. Morgellons is controversial but it is simply untrue that “many if not all doctors” deny its existence. Moreover, I can find no indication either among believers or skeptics that it is a complaint solely or even largely of women.
Female fighter pilots, etc. I didn’t find comparisons for the particular occupations she cited, but I do know of figures for another area where women were expected to “always lag behind” men, indeed for which they were supposedly unfit: medicine. As recently as 1970, fewer than 8% of US physicians were women. By 2006, nearly 30% were. And that portion is sure to increase: In 2006, 42% of interns and roughly half of med students were women.
[Clinton] has wept on the campaign trail… No, she hasn’t.
…even though everyone knows that tears are the last refuge of losers. The supposed tears came the day before she won NH. Some have even claimed it was among the reasons why.
Her logical skills could also use some of “the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide.”
At least no man I know. Now there’s the way to really nail down the argument.
[Clinton’s debate performance] consisted largely of complaining that she had to answer questions first and putting the audience to sleep with minutiae about her health-coverage mandate. So her “every stereotypical flaw” included being too emotional and too smart at the same time?
The theory that women are the dumber sex … is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Which, she goes on to say, show that men are better at spatial reasoning and women better at verbal reasoning and that overall, both have essentially identical IQs. Her conclusion follows from her data exactly how?
Her math reasoning is no better.
Women really are worse drivers than men. This is “proved” by a 10-year old study showing women having 12% more accidents per million miles driven than men despite her own admission that men are three times likelier to be in a fatal accident. And to show her own understanding of the figures she cites, she says the figures are as they are “even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year.” But since the comparison was accidents per million miles, that last part is completely irrelevant to the argument.
So much for Charlotte Allen. Now, Big U, for you.
[H]aving spent the better part of 20 years in office environments made up mostly of women…. Trust me on this, folks, I know! I’ve worked around women! And my personal anecdotal experience is surely a valid source for generalized judgment! Either that or it’s pointless and not worth saying.
Is she wrong about the women fainting? No. Uh, how do you know that? Do you have independent confirmation?
There are two things here: One is her source, “Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich.” His Wikipedia entry describes him as “a self-labeled social libertarian and political conservative … very conservative, pro-Iraq war, pro-military and anti-Democrat [sic] Party.” Admittedly, Wikipedia is not the most trustworthy source on the planet, but even if this is overstated by an order of magniture, it still means the guy is a real right-winger and not what I would call a reliable source on anything to do with Barack Obama.
But second, hey, forget that; it doesn’t matter except for what it says about Allen’s choice of sources. Grant what he says: Five women fainted at Obama rallies since September. So in how many rallies? involving how many scores of thousands of people? he managed to come up with five cases of a woman fainting. This is supposed to prove something - anything at all - not even about women Obama fans but women in general? Nonsense.
I wouldn’t want a guy voting for a female based on which one has the largest breasts…. Neither would pretty much anyone else, I expect. But for eight years we’ve been afflicted with a president because enough guys thought they’d rather have a beer with him than with the other guy. So I’m not sure anyone is in a position to condescend about women being excited by Obama.
today’s day of political correctness Oh, don’t even start with that baloney. That’s a moldy cliche tossed around by people who want to be free to demean and degrade others without being called on it that was stale bread before it was even fully baked. Just drop it.
[S]he is generalizing based on what she is actually seeing and has experienced. But even though it leads her to consider “other” women dumb, with “brains permanently occluded by random emotions [and] psychosomatic flailings” and who “always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental” while forever and “for good reason” falling behind men in a variety of occupations, this is, you say, neither hatred not misogyny.
Okay, then, how about this: She has, by your own account generalized her personal experience and thereby projected a complex of negative characteristics onto an entire group. That is a standard definition of bigotry. Or, in reference to the particular subcategory at hand, sexism.
PS - One thing I am glad of in the article: It introduced me to Hildegard of Bingen, who does seem to have been quite a remarkable person, all the more remarkable because of the special obstacles she faced as a woman.
Comment 3/4/2008
Dan M. - I was going by the dictionary definition of misogyny which simply says “hatred of women”. I can see your point using the word differently.
LarryE -
Re: the fainting - take a quick tour of the internet. video evidence and stories abound.
“we’ve been afflicted with a president because enough guys thought they’d rather have a beer with him than with the other guy.” And your proof for that statement? Have you done research indicating this was the reason people voted for Bush? Pot, kettle.
As far as my personal experiences go, they are what they are. EVERYONE’S views are colored by their own personal experiences.
The fact is, contrary to what the feminist movement wants to push, women and men are different, have different make-ups, react differently to things and have different strengths and weaknesses. And men will naturally excel at certain jobs while women will excel at other jobs. The real damage is being done by the people who keep insisting there are no differences.
Comment 3/4/2008
Big U,
Yeah, I didn’t read the link - I judged, from the excerpts here, that I didn’t have and was uninterested to. I’m not debating finer points of the piece, so I don’t think it’s relevant whether I read the whole piece.
Ted,
Yes, they were laugh-lines (to use that term loosely). I think Don Imus and Michael Richards were trying to get some laughs too; your point? I’m putting this on par with that, just saying that writing something off as humor doesn’t free it’s author of potential accountability.
Also, I never said I was offended by any of this shit. A couple of jokes based on stereotypes and common misperceptions, I only own (and incessantly quote on this very site) just about any routine ever performed by George Carlin, Chris Rock, or Dave Chapelle, so I can see why one would think I might get offended at some stereotyping humor.
My first take was that this was just a waste of a column. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t novel, and it wasn’t salient - empty inches. Dave Barry writes this same type of shit all the time (and he’s not really any better at it than this woman is), he’s not getting opinion pieces prominently featured in the Washington Post - as he shouldn’t - as this woman shouldn’t.
Whether one feels it’s sexist, true, a good attempt at humor, or a poor one, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a fucking waste of space.
Comment 3/4/2008
LarryE,
Thanks for that; I couldn’t handle slogging through that crap.
BU,
It is really surprising and impressive how poor the average dictionary is at capturing the real usage and meaning of words.
Note also that the Charlotte Allen seems to make the astonishing implication that her personal observations of behavior reflect innate differences between men and women.
Even if we pretend for a moment that mental sex is fully correlated with physical sex (It isn’t; transsexuality is quite real.) and that sex is binary (It isn’t; intersex occurs in more than 0.5% of the population. (I just looked up that number. Really? Wow, that’s a lot.)), Allen has made the now-classic blunder (not a land war in Asia) of attributing a real difference in a sampled distribution to an essessential different. As this guy puts it (very well, I might add), that’s just Platonism, a model of reality that was superceded centuries ago.
Comment 3/4/2008
Out of curiosity, (and at risk of going WAY off-topic), if personal observations, economic indicators (i.e. demographics of who buys what, who reads what and who is watching what on TV, etc.) and events widely reported and verified can not be used to come to generalized conclusions about things, then what can be?
Comment 3/4/2008
Sorry, I meant to write “NOT putting this on par…”
Comment 3/4/2008
I think Lou Reed said it best “there’s some evil mothers who will tell you that ….women never really faint”. Sweet Jane!
Comment 3/4/2008
BU,
Good data collection requires a “control” sampling, which can be a pain to get when you’re dealing with social issues.
The key phrase here is “self-fulfilling prophecy”: if girls are told by everyone around them that women suck at math, then women will continue to suck at math. That’s less common today than it used to be, but Western society (and all the others, from what I’m aware) still has high variance and some communities are quite bad about it… Parents don’t encourage their daughters to follow logic-based careers as much as they do their sons, teachers help boys but not girls when they have problems, there are insufficient female role models in many fields, etc.
We probably can’t find a community that lacks all of those biases, and creating an artificial one won’t happen. So we can’t look at society for the answer yet; the other option is looking at brains directly, which we’re still learning about. And even there you get the problem that kids’ brains will develop differently based on what they’re taught, not just how they grow.
…Last I heard, neuroscience has only gotten as far as saying “before puberty, boys and girls are intellectually the same.”
At this point it might be best to assume we’re all equal until proven otherwise, y’know?
Comment 3/4/2008
“At this point it might be best to assume we’re all equal until proven otherwise, y’know?”
It is possible to be different and yet equal. Something that seems to have been lost on society as effort continues to be made to make females more masculine and males more feminine.
Comment 3/4/2008
And of the females that *are* more masculine than your idea of “female”? Would you have me forget all the Calculus I learned and enjoyed, and go learn to cook instead? Are you concerned that if I get an engineering job, I’ll be too “emotional” and disturb my coworkers? My brother’s emotions are at least as strong as mine, his math skills are far worse, and it’s at least as much nature as it is nurture in our cases.
Comment 3/4/2008
BU,
To answer your comment at #17, if by “come to generalized conclusions” you mean “adjust ones model of the probability of various events”, by all means do!
If you mean “form an association between a blunt feature (such as physical sex) and another feature with no observable causal connection (like mathematical reasoning) and consider that association as definitional of the class formed by the first feature”, then no, no you can’t.
If you want to conclude that the next woman you meet is most likely to be in the 46th percentile for math ability compared to the men you know, go for it. If you want to conclude that women are worse at math then men, stop it.
Comment 3/4/2008
well, I concede Rachel. You have proven to me that there are absolutely no inherent differences between men and women. They are identical. Although research would seem to say something different:
http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i26/26a00102.htm
And Dan, if all you pulled from that article was one sarcastic reference to math, then that is too bad.
I am constantly amazed at how the politically correct look at anything that may say men as a rule do better than women at something is a criticism of women. And yet if someone states women are better than men at something that is fine and is often supported by groups supposedly pushing for equality.
http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i26/26a00102.htm
Comment 3/4/2008
Oh, for fuck’s sake, BU! I used math as an example because I actually had the number 46% handy (I don’t remember how much better women’s G-tolerance is than men’s.) and it’s easy to make concrete. Show some intelligence and generalize from an instance!
If you’ve found groups that uncritically accept claims about how women are better than men, you’ve found ignoramuses or bigots. Shocking!
Comment 3/5/2008
Again, to keep this from dragging on and on, this will be my last on this. And hopefully I won’t screw up my html tags again.
Big U -
Fainting: So it happened? :shrug: My question about what this is supposed to prove about women in general stands. Interesting that you focused on a short passing reference and ignored an entire subsequent paragraph which began with “Grant what he said.”
Bush and a beer: I’m surprised this seems to come as news to you, since it was widely discussed during both the 2000 and the 2004 campaigns, the attraction, especially among men, to the “everyman” Bush you’d “want to have beer with” as compared to the “stiff” Gore and the “patrician” Kerry. You might do what you called on me to do: a little research. Oh, and if you still want to wrongly insist this is a case of pot and kettle, I’d remind you that even if it’s the pot that’s calling the kettle black, that doesn’t mean the kettle isn’t black.
EVERYONE’S views are colored: That’s why we should use a broad range of data instead of personal anecdote before we try to make any sweeping judgments.
Men and women are different: It’s pretty well established that men do have an edge in spatial/mathematical reasoning and women an equal edge in verbal abilities and memory. Significantly for this discussion, that conclusion was based on data, not anecdote - and, importantly, on cross-cultural data (to show the differences are not a cultural artifact). But those facts are grossly misapplied in talking about occupations for two solid reasons:
First, the differences do exist but in each case the overlap far exceeds the difference, something that folks taking your view never seem to remember. The very most that could be claimed is that as a general rule, all else being equal, each sex might have an advantage in a certain limited number of occupations that are heavily dependent on one of those sets of skills as opposed to the other. In short, not much.
Second, all else is very rarely equal. Looking at innate differences is interesting in neuro-psychological and evolutionary terms but is not useful in sociological terms, especially in terms of employment, where personality factors like interest in the field, drive, ambition, and more come into play; even family tradition can play a role.
Bottom line is that using innate psychological differences as a basis for predicting men will always outshine women in some lines of work (and vice versa, which you mention but interestingly those who make this argument rarely do; I include here Allen, who did not name one occupation at which women do and will continue to naturally excel over men) simply will not wash. Too much more is involved.
The real damage is being done by the people who keep insisting there are no differences. Damage? Precisely what “damage” are you talking about? And who are these people, specifically? Name five. And since you use the present progressive tense, the citations have to be no more than - I’ll be generous - 10 years old. And they must say that men and women are identical, that there are no differences beyond the obvious physical ones.
I’ll leave your other comments aside except to note that they sound more than anything else like expressions of anxiety about how society and social relations are changing.
Comment 3/5/2008
Oh, and Dan M. -
You’re welcome.
Comment 3/5/2008
“If you’ve found groups that uncritically accept claims about how women are better than men, you’ve found ignoramuses or bigots. Shocking!”
Go into any court and take a look at who gets custody of the children in most instances simply based on gender. Tha would be my clearest example of a group (the legal system) claiming that women are better than men and facing virtually no repercussions.
Comment 3/5/2008
…or just an example of the reinforcement of social norms.
And, by the way, even if it was “proven” that on average contemporary women are more skilled in areas related to general child care than men, that wouldn’t mean that those abilities would be, per se, attributed to innate biological factors. It’s a learned behavior, and women have traditionally (willingly or unwillingly) spent more time learning that behavior and playing that role.
That’s like me saying the proliferation of Dominican superstars in the MLB proves that they are better athletes than other groups. No! But, they do dedicate themselves passionately and specifically to one particular sport and the results seem to affirm that.
Comment 3/5/2008
“The real damage is being done by the people who keep insisting there are no differences. Damage? Precisely what “damage” are you talking about? And who are these people, specifically? Name five. And since you use the present progressive tense, the citations have to be no more than - I’ll be generous - 10 years old. And they must say that men and women are identical, that there are no differences beyond the obvious physical ones.”
No one will say men and women are identical. Heck, no one will say all men are identical. However, there is a significant movement stating that the non-physical differences between men and women are not inate but rather only affected by outside influences. First name I can think of who holds this view is Elizabeth S. Spelke, Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
Comment 3/5/2008
BU,
I don’t know what phantom comments you replied to me about, but they weren’t mine. Read back on what I said… I never claimed that men and women ARE the same. Maybe I was wrong to say “assume” at the end of my first comment… Let’s say “pretend” instead.
Anecdote does matter here, because the anecdotal counterexamples present situations that you don’t want to quash: the OP article does mention women who stand out as NOT being dim, and I’ve merely used myself as another (perhaps poorer?) example. Painting women as dumb or bad at math means you will continue to hold back women who could’ve been great scientists or engineers… And the same is true if you tell boys they’ll never grasp emotions and the finer nuances of language, and thus hold back potential singers, writers and actors.
There are similar situations where it is good to learn the details of how reality works, but in most cases operate based on other, less-accurate models. Free will is a good example: anyone who accepts a mechanistic universe (or at least brains, which you must given your stance on the male/female brain issue) must eventually concede that free will is an illusion. But that’s a depressing way of looking at the world, and not a very convenient one either. So we pretend that we have free will, and model other individuals as entities who could make choices in any direction, because it’s healthy and convenient.
We do the same thing in physics: Newton was wrong, but he’s damned convenient as a basic approximation and as something to teach your students when they’re unlikely to go on and learn Einstein.
So, yes… Men have an edge over women in some things, and vis versa. That doesn’t mean we should go around saying “Oh, women should just be homemakers, they’re better at it.” What we should be doing is to tell kids they can be whatever they want, and if more girls grow up to *want* to be the homemakers, that’s all well and good. But they should make that choice themselves, not because society has told them that they’d be crappy scientists.
Comment 3/5/2008
By the way though, thanks for the link to that Chronicle article. In some ways it backs me up pretty well, but there’s also new data I’ll have to go through at length.
And yay for being a data-point, albeit only an obscure one…
Comment 3/5/2008
I actually agree with the bulk of what you are saying Rachel.
I have two daughters and one son and spend a lot of time telling them they can do whatever they want.
My one daughter sucks at math and anything math-related. My other daughter is three grades ahead of her age in math because she loves it and excells at it so much. So I don’t believe I am trying to stereotype women. I’ve watched as my girls have grown into two distinctly different individuals.
Comment 3/5/2008
A bit of shameless self-promotion: At my own blog, I combined my comments here, added a whole buncha other stuff, and posted my own reaction to Allen’s essay; this is the link.
Comment 3/6/2008