[rorymarinich]

Hilbert, I'm sure that you mean well and I mean this with no disrespect to you at all, but you're making statements that're unpleasant and bordering on outright offensive.

Statements like:

> Women are attracted to biomedical careers due to the role of human to human contact; generally women seek careers with such contact.

ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders. Social/antisocial patterns are not strictly female/male patterns. I know plenty of wonderful women who are antisocial and dislike direct contact with lots of people; I know plenty of guys who are sympathetic and warm and caring. It does not do you well to make such generalized statements about complex subjects.

Paragraphs like:

> With 'feminism', some enormously talented and determined girls as high school seniors believed "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women and do things, too.", made terrific grades in college and let that reinforce their belief, charged into 'male' careers, and paid a very high price in lack of children, busted marriages, and sometimes even their lives, literally. "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.".

are bordering on downvote-worthy. Are you really suggesting that women can't handle male careers? Really? Are we living in the seventies still? Because last time I checked we had a handful of women CEOs proving they could run Fortune 500 companies. I'm pretty sure some of those CEOs are happily married and have families. Sure, the male-to-female ratio is heavily imbalanced, but that's because women are fighting against centuries of irrational bias against their gender. Irrational bias that statements like yours don't help whatsoever.

For what it's worth, my mother has been a corporate executive at AT&T since before I was born, and she managed to be an excellent mother to me and my brother. So if you're going to say things like:

> that women can do as well as men in any field where their 'rational' abilities seem to permit is a big, HUGE mistake

then you are insulting not just an entire gender in general, but my mother in specific, and I'll ask that you meet me at dawn with your pistol loaded.

Finally:

> So, in another few generations, we will be left with women who are determined to be MOMMIES.

This is really, really, really stupid. Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic trait, that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them. While there is a biological impulse towards maternity, the fact is that career aspirations are social traits, inherited more from society than from genetics. Just because a girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — and let's pause for a minute to note how absurd it is that you'd say that; literally every girl is born to a woman who wanted to be a mother — doesn't mean that she won't decide she wants to get a job before eventually settling down, or maybe that she doesn't want to settle down at all. In fact, this is more likely the more permitting society becomes of women in the workplace, because working will seem less and less unfeminine the more it's shown that women can hold their own.

There are more women working now than were working a hundred years ago. Did women somehow evolve? Of course not. Society evolved. And society is continuing in the direction of affording women equality. Your attempts to study women like they're simply a byproduct of their genetics ignores what's actually happened in the last century.

[hackinthebochs]

>ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders. Social/antisocial patterns are not strictly female/male patterns. I know plenty of wonderful women who are antisocial and dislike direct contact with lots of people;

Why is it so hard to accept that biological sex can and does have a strong affect on emotional patterns? Testosterone and estrogen are the driving hormones behind our sex differences. It's a fact that testosterone affects aggression. So why is this so hard to accept?

Of course there are going to be outliers, but anecdotes do not disprove the general trend.

>are bordering on downvote-worthy. Are you really suggesting that women can't handle male careers? Really? Are we living in the seventies still?

Again, you're countering his assertion with an anecdote. It's wonderful that your mother was able to balance both, but that doesn't counter the apparent correlation with women's increasing career aspirations and the breakdown of traditional families. This isn't being sexist, it's being honest.

>This is really, really, really stupid. Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic trait, that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them.

You're missing the spectrum in between. You're right that career aspirations are social traits, but ambition in general is likely strongly rooted in genetics. So the question is does one outweigh the other in a particular individual. While his conclusion is a major leap, it's not without a semblance of reason.

This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.

[rorymarinich]

> It's wonderful that your mother was able to balance both, but that doesn't counter the apparent correlation with women's increasing career aspirations and the breakdown of traditional families. This isn't being sexist, it's being honest.

I don't think you're being sexist. I do think that your line of thought is completely wrong. The breakdown of traditional families is correlated with the breakdown of traditional gender roles, but this is not not NOT because working makes it hard for a woman to raise children. Rather, it's because women, given the choice to defy their traditional roles, have also decided frequently that they don't like the traditional family model and have chosen other lifestyles.

Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.

> This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.

I agree with you that there are uncomfortable answers! But I think that the uncomfortable answer is uncomfortable in the exact opposite of the direction you're going.

I don't think that the biggest problem in this discussion is that women are somehow genetically incapable of keeping up, because I know many women who can keep up and even surpass men at this. I think the biggest, most uncomfortable problem here is that vast swatches of our society are so wretchedly sexist that men have a hard time seeing just how difficult it is for women. We assume that we are in fact living in a post-sexism world, and that everybody is equal, when in fact we have decades and decades to go before women are truly seen as equals in society. And I'm not somehow exempt from this, by the way; it's been a process of literally years of talking to women and slowly realizing just how shitty they've got it.

Jean Hsu here is just one of hundreds of women whose stories have forced me to accept that while we might have a more equal society than history has ever seen before, that does not mean we are as equal as we ought to be. The status quo is still unfortunately sexist, and while one day perhaps we will get to the point where we can honestly assess the differences between men and woman, the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do. The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.

It's not that I'm calling you specifically sexist, hackinthebochs. And I apologize if I ever made it seem like that. But the society we both live in is profoundly sexist, in ways we don't even recognize, and so a lot of the arguments to be made about how it's okay that women have experiences like this are rooted in logic that's as sexist as it is commonly accepted. Does that make sense?

[pbhjpbhj]

>Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.

Your anecdotes don't lead in the direction of your conclusion that "women are [not] finding it hard to be emotionally available". Carly Fiorina I'm sure found it hard to be "emotionally available" when her step-kids needed comforting and she was in a board meeting. See http://web.archive.org/web/20071101051517/http://www.careerj... for example which strongly suggests that her husband Frank's retirement enabled her.

I'm of the opinion you can't have it both ways. Either kids or work in almost every situation one will get marginalised.

>the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do

Can women scratch their own balls? I'll answer for you - no they don't have any (in general), despite how equal you want things to be that isn't going to change. Men and women are different.

>The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.

You're talking about capability but I think you're looking at the wrong thing. The reason there are less off one sex in traditional roles of the other sex is little to do with assumptions about capability IMO. IMO it's about desire of individuals to do those roles as much as anything.

Also in this line you meant men, right?

[bluesnowmonkey]

> [...] our emotional patterns are not tied directly to our genders.

Of course they are. Gender has a direct effect on one's emotional patterns. (Direct effect does not mean only effect, by the way.) Depending on whether you have XX or XY chromosomes (or some other combination), you will grow up with different organs in your body and different hormones in your blood. Such things define your gender, and they directly effect the emotions you experience.

As an example, men are prone to wanting to engage in pistol duels at dawn over minor quibbles.

[wlievens]

I think this is just a frustrated troll making really, really elaborate "yo mamma" jokes.

[rimantas]

  > ignore the fact that our emotional patterns are not tied
  > directly to our genders

It's a fact? Source?

  > I know plenty of <…>
  > It does not do you well to make such generalized
  > statements about complex subjects.

Indeed. You knowing someone is not exactly a science.

  > Your argument only holds water if you think that "wanting to be a mommy" is a genetic
  >trait,

Oh, it is not? That's interesting.

  > that women are born either wanting kids or not wanting them. While there is a
  > biological impulse towards maternity, the fact is that career aspirations are social
  > traits, inherited more from society than from genetics

And I wonder, why nobody is fighting horrible inequality in numbers of women giving birth compared to those of males.