Tuesday, May 20, 2008

What? Women are different than men?

"...in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced."
The thing about most gender stereotypes: none of them are true for 100% of the population; but most of them express real tendencies. Guys prefer working with stuff and women prefer working with people? That's hardly a put-down of women!

"Different but equal" shouldn't be a hard concept to grasp. Hopefully, with more data like this coming out all the time, our society (and especially our government) will quit trying to make women act like men because of a warped concept of what equality really means.

Besides, it would be a lot healthier if men acted more like women instead.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

To quote a little more from the article, "The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant sexism in the workplace."

I'm reminded of these lines from an old Eric von Schmidt song, ("Miniskirt" IIRC); he's talking about boys with long hair.

The people that it really annoys
say they can't tell the girls from the boys.
Well if that's the way they did it in their day,
Tell them that we've found a better way.

There are intrinsic differences, to be sure.