Some Thoughts on Gender Stereotypes

[equusregia]

rt_hon_rackman and I were in one of the stores in Downtown Disney on Sunday, helping a friend get discounts on some christmas shopping. While she looked around, I watched my daughter and hers entertain themselves by coloring some pictures of princesses. I have my opinions about the Disney Princesses (TM), which I will get around to detailing in this journal at

Comments

[crouchback]

I can't think of an extant society which I'd consider to have bias towards women, though I can think of a few in the distant past.

I don't know which way our society is trending. You have some things, like the fact that there are more women than men going to college, and they're more likely to graduate and get better grades, or you look at the fact that there are more women in the US than men, and you might wonder if we're slowly replacing patriarchy with matriarchy.

There are so many things that are hard to figure out. For instance, I often read or hear people attribute the predominance of males in hard sciences to the persistence of old boys clubs. I wonder if this is true-law and medicine (which is pretty much a "hard science" field) were at least as old boyish in the pre-feminist era, and they are much more gender integrated nowadays than the hard sciences. Was the hard science old boys network that much stronger than that which existed among lawyers?

One major problem I have in these discussions is the assumption that a profession having a ratio of male to female that is radically different from the ratio in the general population, when that ratio leans towards men, is a mesure of how discriminatory that field is towards women. I think there are some holes with that thinking, although I don't doubt that there is discrimination against women in some fields.

I'm trying to find a more recent version of the information cited in the URL you give, since it came from 2002 and might just reflect the bad economic times at the end of 2001. The Statistical Abstract of the US now appears to mainly come in Excel form, which I can't look at that on my computer. Still, I concede your point. Women in general make less, on average, than men in general.

I do think that while you can talk about men in general and say they have the edge, that for large subsets of men, if you told them they ruled the world, they'd laugh in your face, and they'd have good reason to do so. But I get your general point.

Argh, this is garbled. I'm giving up. I don't know even if I'm even making a coherent point.