Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up"
Here I can agree, I personally discriminate on the basis of sex, not in that I believe women inferior to men but rather that I believe each sex better suited to different tasks and vocations. That is not, however, to say that I believe women should be prevented from taking up lines of work that men traditionally hold. They are free to do so, but as in the example you give later I would feel uncomfortable having my car serviced by a woman.
<flame-retardant suit on>
Normally I would ignore this sort of comment (which probably belongs in some soc. newsgroup), but I feel obliged to point out that:
- The female
, in addition to passing the same exams as her male classmates, has probably had to put up with a fair load of B.S. questioning her right and ability to be there. The ones that keep at it long enough to graduate are the ones that *really* want to do whatever it is, and IMHO are more likely to try harder.
Not my point, I didn`t say I would refuse, as in my example, to have my car serviced by a woman, rather, that I would not feel comfortable doing so. This is not prejudice, it is a statistical judgement based on the fact that, as a percentage, I know few women who are competent car mechanics but I know a number of men who, by the same criteria, I would call competent.
Chicken and Egg: How much of "each sex [is] better suited to different tasks" is due to little girls being pulled away from the Lego and toy trucks, and encouraged to play with Barbies? Being told that they are *pretty* not *smart* as a form of approval?
Very much so, I did not intend, even though my post may have appeared that way, for one minute to suggest that women were *unable* to carry out certain tasks, just that they seem less suited to certain vocations that others. For example, I know a number of good female History or English students but very few good female mathematics or computer science students. This is not, I believe, because women are not "suited" to computer science rather that they have never been encouraged at high school etc. to learn about such subjects which are seen as male preserves. I wholeheartedly believe this should not be the case, and my original post may have been misleading, I just believe that in the current system very few women do become good at science/technical subjects. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"
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paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk