Posts Tagged Men and Women

The flying nun got everybody stirred up the other day by saying:

“May they be seen, may their work be valued and raised, and to especially the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait  – wait for their children to come home for from danger, from harm’s way and from war. I’m not finished. I have to finish talking – if the mothers ruled the world there would be no goddamn wars in the first place.”

The left is decrying “censorship” because FOX cut the cussing (and the rest of the statement with it) out.

Personally, this underscores you’re on solid PC ground claiming women are superior to men (not just the flying nun, but entire women’s studies departments claim this), but you’re in trouble if you claim men are superior to women – just ask Larry Summers who was disinvited to speak by the University of California Regents after they were reminded of Dr. Summers remark that it would be worth researching whether the dearth of female professors in the hard sciences was due to innate sex differences. How is this different than saying mothers are more innately fit to run the world than fathers? Just asking.

I also have to wonder at the condition, if moms ran the world.

Umm, don’t they already?

Saint Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuits) famously observed “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man”. I not so famously have observed that women in general, and mom’s in particular, have the children — boys and girls — to at least seven. I’d pay money to see a discussion between Mr. Jason Whitlock and Mrs. Sally Field on this subject do we have insufficient fathering in this country?

At the risk of raising ire from the right people, I’ll also point out that “momma’s boy” is not a compliment.

So my answer to the question What would life be like if moms ran the world, I have to say not much different. Actually, I take that back. If we mean only moms ran the world in a dictatorial fashion, then there would be more emphasis on reducing risk across the board – physically, economically, etc. And there would be more emphasis on religion. And we’d all wear clean underwear under penalty of law. I say this because these are two areas where men and women are different – women are more risk averse and more religious, and everybody knows about moms and clean underwear.

But an end to war altogether? No.

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Summers Heat

In case you live in a cave, Harvard’s president Larry Summers is in hot water for floating the possibility that there are more men who are innately outstanding in the sciences than women. This runs headlong into the academic consensus that the only difference between men and women is that women are more caring and nurturing than their male counterparts who would destroy the world if left to their own devices. OK, maybe the real academic consensus is that there aren’t any differences between men and women that the obvious physical ones and any observed differences are due to societal conditioning. 

I commented about my own experiences on women in college level physics (there weren’t any when I got my degree) on an interesting post at Tom Maguire’s. I’m happy to note that women now account for almost 25% of the bachelor’s degrees in physics. As to why women are under 50%, I have to offer my succinct answer: I don’t know. It could be that more men are innately talented in that field than women, just as I wouldn’t be surprised if women weren’t better in some other field of intellectual endeavor. I don’t think you can just rule it out because you don’t like it. Another alternative, one you probably won’t hear from a university president, is that the level of teaching at the undergraduate level in math and science is generally wretched (that was my experience) and women are more likely to go into an area of study with better instruction. Again, the accuracy of the hypothesis can’t be proven without proper experimentation. At least, that’s something they did teach me in those physics classes back in college.

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