« "The failure of central planning and state-managed economies is one of the big themes of the 20th century. But Obama’s handlers have yet to tell him." | Main | Girl on a Path »
July 25, 2012
Liberals believe that a male conspiracy prevents women from excelling in mathematics and the hard sciences.
A Short Guide to Leftist Conspiracy Theories: The reason that no womanin all of human history has invented the transistor radio or the C compiler (we can blame a chick for COBOL) is attributed to sexist conspiracies. The fact that there are fewer lady physicists than man physicists is attributed to sexism by people with Ph.D.s in physics. People who are presumably familiar with the concept of standard deviation and mean can’t understand why a sample population with a larger observed standard deviation in intelligence has more outliers.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at July 25, 2012 8:34 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
The supposed male conspiracy to keep women down would have to be no less than 12,000 years old -- the approximate beginning of the Neolithic. In all that time women have not been able to "break those bonds." Not a very good track record for the fair sex, is it?
Posted by: Don Rodrigo at July 25, 2012 9:38 AM
What keeps women on the outs in science and engineering is not only the lack of a peculiar intelligence, but an unreasonable, dogged, testosterone induced cussedness. Inotherwords, the same things that keep most men out, but multiplied. Most women do not view this as a defect.
Posted by: james wilson at July 25, 2012 10:58 AM
Well, I've never understood how personal preference was, or should be, the subject of a conspiracy, but you'd have to credit the Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr with being co-inventor of (or is that co-discoverer of) Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum technology, which is the basis for everything from torpedo guidance to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, CDMA, and wireless phones. Surely there was a little math in that. And, she was pretty and a good acress too. :-)
Posted by: Amazed at July 25, 2012 11:19 AM
What keeps women down is other women. The one queen bee in a hive rule is particularly effective in keeping them down in organizations.
Posted by: Fat Man at July 25, 2012 11:57 AM
I thought it was the Stone Cutters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE
Posted by: Mike at July 25, 2012 1:13 PM
Women are better jugglers. Males, as a group, have superior focus.
But reality is hard on the absent-minded of both sexes; we are all encouraged to live in the here-and-now, and stop focusing on things that (in the minds of those who surround us) should not be focused on. (Accused of nit-picking and the like.)
The mental life has no gender; nor should it.
Women will rise in engineering and math as they have in the life sciences, but never in enormous numbers . . . because we--collectively--have a genius for the details of everyday life that men are less likely to share.
Few genius women are as deeply weird as genius men. We hide it better, and can set it aside more easily, should we happen to be called to motherhood.
This is okay. In fact, it's a damned fine thing.
Posted by: Joy McCann/Little Miss Attila at July 25, 2012 5:54 PM
Amazed - Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and in the political sphere Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi. Just for starters.
Having said all that, the "geek" mentality that's almost a necessity for the development of technology is almost absent in women. Kari Byron is just about the only well-known one I can think of. Worth thinking of if you're of the male persuasion, I might add. :)
Posted by: Fletcher Christian at July 26, 2012 2:37 AM