OK...I resisted until oooh at least page 2 of this discussion.
In the 1970s, when I was at school, the feminist movement was at its height (yes I am THAT old). The message I received loud and clear from the conventions of the day, via my teachers, was that men and women were equal, women were just as capable of fulfilling careers, and to be a housewife and mother if you had a brain was a criminal waste of time and effort.
The message was definitely that women and men were the same underneath, and that conditioning and social stereotyping were responsible for the differences. Men had had all the power for centuries, and the women were coming into their own and were equally able to perform all the functions which men have been performing for years.
In the UK, an equal opportunities commission was set in place, which made it illegal to speficy that you wanted a man or a woman for a job. Women were taken away from their traditional roles in the police (looking after children and rape victims) and moved into the front line along with their male colleagues.
The trouble is...women then went from a place where they were expected to be housewives and mothers, and to have no greater ambition than to be married and look after a home, to a place where they were expected to have a career, and to continue working while placing their children in nurseries and with childminders. To my mind, they are both powerless positions, because they remove the choice of where the woman wants to be from the woman herself.
While I think that women and men should be valued equally, we are not the same. Advances in brain scanning have shown that men and women think differently from the moment they are differentiated in the womb, and this is not the result of social conditioning, but the result of evolution and our genetic inheritance as men and women. Our brains develop differently, and they work differently too. A recent article in the Scientific American (great magazine by the way) suggested that drugs for depression and other mental problems with links to brain chemistry may have to be differentiated for men and women in the future, because research had shown that there are differences in the way that similar experiences are processed, depending upon your gender.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the brains which were used to make conclusions about the way our brains work were dead ones, and mostly male. When a woman's brain did not demonstrate the same things as a man's it was considered an anomaly. It was only with the advent of electoronic scanning and imaging that the differences became clear - to the point where it can be seen that men and women use different parts of the brain to process traumatic images, or to respond to stressful or pressured situations.
Thus it IS possible to make generalisations about men and women, and to say that we process information differently, we learn differently, and we see things differently and this is NOT a consequence of our conditioning or socialisation.
From: Rhombur Volos
I'd also like to add that the fifties ended fifty more than years ago.
Women aren't taught to be housewives anymore, in fact most i know would reel backwards at the very mention of the idea that they would become one.
It is true that most women are not taught to be housewives any more, but most of those who go on to have families go on to be the main carer for the children, and the person who does most of the domestic chores, even so. I avoided marriage and children as long as I could, but I discovered that I adored motherhood, and wanted nothing more than to be able to spend time with my babies and to bring them up. At that time I was working in the City as a senior manager, so I wasn't at home twiddling my thumbs.
In surveys of women with children, 80% say that they would like to give up work to stay at home with their children. 80%. Not all, by any means, but a significant majority. This makes the fight of the feminists in the 1970s to gain the right of women to enter the workplace and fight on a level playing field with men look rather sick. It saddens me terribly that children are placed in nurseries every day by women who would rather be looking after them at home, and I think we are going to pay the price of that as a society, in greater levels of mental illness in the future. People forced into paths they don't want to follow are bound to be unhappy. Not to mention the children, of course.
Research was undertaken a few years ago in the UK into the differences between children sent to nursery and those who stayed at home with their mothers, at 4. The researchers planned to demonstrate how the professionals in nurseries delivered a curriculum of material to the children and taught them in a structured way, and how much better this was than staying at home with their mothers. Unfortunately for their plans, their research demonstrated the complete opposite.
Children who were at nursery learned very quickly to confine their questions to pratical and safe subjects: where are the scissors? May I have a drink? When information was provided to them, their ability to process it depended upon their prior knowledge, and so what they learned was dependent upon what they already knew, and wasn't easily quantifiable as a group.
At home, mothers used their knowledge of the child to make information relevant, and consequently naturally used events from their child's life to help them make sense of new things. They used natural conversation around the home to discuss a diverse range of subjects and answered questions at the child's level.
This is an area where I think it can be generalised, that women listen and tune into their children in a completely different way from men. They both have their place, but I believe that men and women are not interchangeable as carers for children, and women are far better at coping with the apparent lack of focus that comes from a child's conversation and questions if left to decide these for themselves. I think that's why most primary school teachers are women, when there are no gender restrictions on becoming a primary school teacher.
From: Rhombur Volos
Girls in school are treated by the way they are percieved. Most schools i've seen have a pretty even distribution of boys/girls at optional science/physics/math classes, and even results. (all the way through highschool, at least. University level IT engineering courses still have to offer bonus points to draw any female applicants at all)
This is a significant point. In the UK, boys do dramatically worse at most subjects all the way through primary and part of the way through secondary school and then things reverse themselves. My own thinking about the reasons for this, is that boys are extremely badly served by primary school. They need good male role models, and yet the vast majority of primary school teachers are women - any men in Primary education seem to rise fairly quickly to headmaster level and drop out of directly teaching a class.
There are extreme differences in boys and girls and the way that they react to schooling, and our education system in the UK (and, I guess, the US) has not woken up to the fact that boys need hands on physical experiences and a lot of physical activity in order to learn best. Thus, not talking about water volumes in theory with illustrations of jugs full or half full of water, but actual jugs, actual water, actual pouring. Not studying horse chestnut trees in their different states during the course of a year's growth, but real horse chestnut trees, observed in RL.
We have ignored the gender differences, and carry on educating boys and girls as though they are the same. They're not. Even when they are both subjected to the same teaching and the same environment at school, the differences are illustrated by the differences in approach between girls' and boys' leisure activities. In the UK, many boys go to Cubs and Scouts, and many girls go to Brownies and Guides. There is some crossover nowadays (mostly girls into scouting, rather than boys into guiding) but for the younger children the groups are generally separate.
My friend's daughter went to guides one day, and when my friend went to pick her up, found all the girls sitting quietly at tables, colouring in a map of the UK, with a different colour for each of the counties. The girls were chatting, and minutely colouring the maps, quite content. She remarked to the leader of the pack, that if the boys were asked to do such a thing, there would be general rebellion. The woman agreed it would not be an appropriate or possible task to give to boys of an equivalent age.
Of course, at school this must often happen. Schools reward the pupils who sit still, are compliant, and fulfil the tasks they are given, and punish those who disrupt the class and don't "concentrate". Ask any infant or primary school teacher though. It is boys which are more and more being diagnosed as dysfunctional because they can't "concentrate". Out of the kids I know within my own family and friends around five years old(a total of 25 children, 7 families in different places and schools), ALL of the boys and NONE of the girls have been assessed as having an attention problem.
You can tell that you have got me going on a topic close to my heart.... I am so angry when I think of the waste of talent that is continuing in our schools, while girls learn to be compliant and colour in to the edges and not beyond, and boys are condemned to years of boredom and inactivity which doesn't serve them well.
From: Rhombur Volos
To finish up: The average human is exactly what its social enviroment makes of it, to a point. There are undeniable differences between male and female minds, but trying to determine them based on your own impression would be to beg for a verbal stoning from the first women's rights enthusiast that glances your way.
I personally blame the commercial media, but then again i blame them for a lot of things.
The average human is not what it's social environment makes of it. Of course, we are all the products of our environment, but by far the greatest difference in men and women is in their genetic inheritance before they have watched their first TV programme and before they have been subject to any pressure to conform to stereotype. We are going to be a very unhappy society if we don't start making changes to accommodate those differences soon.
I celebrate those differences, and I think the world would be a much much better place if we took steps to honour those differences and use them to our collective advantage. Allowing people to make the best of every aspect of themselves - and to get back to the original posting - to give them confidence that they can do things, and no reward for being helpless and dependent on other people...that would be a target worth aiming for. To do that, we need to change education, and need to adapt our schools and colleges to make the best use of the ways that people learn.
Peter Senge says that most schools are not learning institutions, because they do not adapt their ways to the circumstances, or as a result of experience. They simply apply the same methods to all, blindly. How much better they would be, if they adapted to circumstances, changed the way that they approached lessons to suit the pupils and not the other way around.
Those gender differences that work to make girls successful in primary school start to bite them in the bottom by the time they get to their mid-teens. Once the educational system expects pupils to think for themselves, not to be compliant or simply to assume the attitudes and opinion of their teachers, girls start to drop behind. In the UK, research has found that girls in single-sex classes do far better in science and maths than girls in mixed-sex classes, and some schools now stream the sexes separately for those subjects.
The raging of hormones, seems to affect girls so that they wish to appear helpless and in need of rescuing, and the effect seems to be strongest in the sciences.
Some very good research into the social aspects of bullying showed that there were gender differences there too. The major reason for a girl being bullied was her lack of fashionable clothing; the major reason for a boy being bullied was academic success. There is a powerful antidote to your parents' wish for academic success if you are a boy and it will lead to being singled out for bullying. It is fascinating to note that for girls, academic prowess is among the least important reasons for bullying occuring....
What I want to know is...if men just get on and handle technological situations, how come the washing machine doesn't seem to fall within their remit? Every woman of my acquaintance is responsible for the washing in their family, for the alleged reason than their partners can't seem to read a care label and sort the washing, let alone use the programs on their washing machine....
OK rant over...sorry this was so long...*retires to corner to breathe deeply
Cali
