Yes, my comment was that girls raised in traditional religious societies are taught/trained/brainwashed into wanting motherhood (above all else, implied by all caps). I stand by that. What you describe is not the traditional society I was talking about, if you are promoting education and independence to your female children as well as your male children, without focusing on "feminine" and "unfeminine" pursuits. I was talking about societies that really do raise their daughters primarily for marriage and childbearing: think the Middle East, India, Quiverfull. As well as most societies across Europe and Asia until approximately the last century.
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I'm going to reiterate again: there is NOTHING wrong with a woman choosing to stay home to raise her children. There IS something wrong with considering that in any way the default, preferred, expected, or natural choice for a woman to make. Because then you're saying that a woman who chooses differently is doing something wrong in following her natural inclinations. When many people ("society") hold this belief, it makes it very, very difficult to change the status quo, for everyone to do what they CHOOSE.
I get that you had something different in mind when you used the phrase "traditional religious". But I see a difference between discrimination, and simply preparing you daughter to be a good stay-at-home mom, with the expectation that she will probably choose that. I kinda get the impression you are assuming it's an unlikely path. What if a little positive reinforcement of the value of motherhood is all it takes for a significant portion of women to choose that path? What if it's not necessary to discriminate to get wildly different outcomes for men and women? If you live in a society where a large percentage of women do choose to be homemakers, at what point does it simply become rational parenting to prepare them to succeed in the vocation they're probably going to choose, without putting up barriers in front of women that want to take the non-traditional route? There's nothing inherently wrong, in my opinion, with preparing your kids for the kind of life you generally expect they're going to have.
For comparison: I could do a lot more -- a LOT more -- to develop my son's athletic skills. He likes sports a lot and seems to have some talent in that area. But I think the odds are pretty slim that athletics will be a main part of his life. I'm much more interested in his academic progress. OK maybe that's because of where my interests lie. But it's not as if I'm discouraging him. It's not as if I'd be upset if he turns out to be a big athlete. I'd be happy for him. I'd come to his games and cheer him on, just like I do today. Am I a bad parent because I'm not taking him outside every day and making sure he gets the practice he needs to compete with the kids whose parents are gung-ho about sports? In my house, the default, expected, natural choice is academics over sports. (Preferred might be overstating it.) I don't think that is unfair. It's an expression of who I am.
Where our differences lie is that it seems completely benign to me to look at motherhood as something that many/most women should consider a "primary" priority in the arc of their life. I'm not going to get upset if my daughter doesn't choose the most likely path -- maybe she stays single and devotes herself to her art. Maybe she becomes a nun. But those are the more unusual choices. Why pretend that an unlikely alternative is actually the default and the most common choice is an unlikely alternative?
Consistent with that, I think the "normal" thing for my son to do is to become a father, and the odds are if he does that he will need to make enough money to support a family, so he needs to be equipped for that. But if he ends up being a priest or a stay-at-home dad, I would celebrate those choices as well.
You're right that I take issue with the demographics...because I don't believe them to reflect real choice rather than internalized stereotypes and pipelines/roadblocks in the system.
I'm not saying it's 100% one or the other, but I think it's important that we make the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. To be clear, I am against all forms of discrimination. But I don't think it's a slam dunk to say every demographic skew is due to discrimination. To cite some of the more obvious examples:
- Women are over-represented in kindergarten teach roles.
- Young men are over-represented in high-pressure wall street jobs
- A certain small geographic area in Africa is massively over-represented in marathon winners
And that is just the examples that are clearly due to inherent unchangeable characteristics. What about the differences that are just due to culture?
It shocks me how close you can be to "getting it" and still turn away. There is absolutely no reason to believe any of those 3 are due to "unchangeable characteristics." There was a fascinating story (I think NPR) about why marathon winners are predominantly from a specific village in Africa. It was a little to do with genetics, but also largely due to cultural practices. The way boys and girls are socialized from a young age can also explain why in our society men don't become teachers (although the ones that do are *awesome*, in my experience, including kindergarten teachers) and women don't make it to the upper echelons of high-stakes professions. I'm actually going to give you an inch: there MIGHT be a fundamental, genetic, population-scale difference between men and women and their suitability for various jobs. Maybe we'll only ever have 10% female truckers and construction workers. Or 30% engineers and financiers. HOWEVER...
Wait wait wait. Let's be clear about why we disagree. You are starting from the assumption that all human beings are identical, and then acknowledging their differences only when incontrovertible evidence proves that they are different.
For instance, suppose you examine the evidence of whether those African marathoners have a different skin color, on average, than their American counterparts. You could test that by measuring the exact shade of each runner's skin and prove that the difference is statistically significant. What that means is that in a universe where each runner's skin color was completely random draw from the same distribution, the odds that the average of the African runners' skins would be that much darker than the American runners' skin is so small that the results basically rule out the assumption (that each runner's skin is a random draw). But even that wouldn't actually prove anything until you also showed that there was no other cause of the difference (for instance it isn't caused by the Africans spending more time in the sun, or American use of a certain brand of soap that lightens the skin.) If you want to have the highest standard of evidence, you could basically never conclude that the Africans' skin was inherently darker, because there would always be more stones to overturn. If you had a
vested interest in denying the skin color difference, you could basically deny it forever. Even if scientists were showing you the underlying cause of the difference (I want to say melatonin but that's the sleep aid. The name escapes me.) you could then say that we don't know the cause of
that, whether it was influenced by diet, temperature, and so on. You could do the same with height difference by gender and so on ad nauseum.
But why bother? Skin tone is morally neutral. If we don't politically and culturally benefit from
believing that
everybody has the same skin tone, it's actually pretty sensible to say "Eh. It's a difference."
That's where I am with gender. Men and women aren't proportionally represented in Engineering degrees? Probably an inherent difference. Who cares.
That's not to say I don't think discrimination happens. Obviously some women are discriminated against. Obviously upbringing counts for something. But... er... last I checked women were getting more than 50% of the degrees in Biology. In fact women represent more than half the undergraduate degrees awarded in total. I don't have any
vested political interest in women being just as interested in every academic topic as men, so why should I get worked up about men being over-represented in Engineering (or women being over-represented in Biology?)
The key thing I'm saying here is that even though I'm against discrimination, I have an underlying assumption that if you group human beings by
any characteristic, you'll probably find inherent differences in any
other characteristics that you care to measure. I expect everything to be correlated, because in my view, everything measurable is safely assumed to be due to both nature and nurture, in varying proportions, unless and until it is proven that it is strictly one or the other.
... until stories like this stop happening, we really can't say we're there yet:
I am a newly graduated mechanical engineer. I got a job with a large energy company. The job demands weren't explained fully until I started training. When I expressed some concerns about the amount of hours I would be working, my manager made the assumption that it had something to do with my being a female. He asked me things like;
"Am I worried that I won't be able to get regular manicures and pedicures?"
"Am I worried that my biological clock will run out if I dedicate the next few years to my career?"
And finally, he outright said that because I was a good looking woman with pretty eyes and a great body and good GPA that there was no reason I wouldn't be successful in the company if I stick with it.
I have no idea what to do. I can't be the first to deal with attitudes like this, I'd love some advice from women who have been there.
This is, frankly, insane. She should hire a lawyer and sue, yesterday. She'd be doing everybody at the company (including men) a favor by getting that guy fired.
To bring it back around, suppose we stipulate that women are not discriminated against. Maybe you think they are, (and in some cases you would be right) but I'm against discrimination so we don't need to argue that point. Let's assume for a second that they are not. Suppose in a fictional society with no discrimination, some percentage of women freely choose to forgo a career in order to be home-makers, at a higher rate than men, with the result that women are under-represented in the public sphere. Do we need to be upset about that? The sense I get is that those women would be a disappointment to feminists, because they embrace the positive values of the home and family. If you wouldn't be upset by their choices, then maybe we agree on more than we realize.
I think women, in the so called "developed nations," specifically the USA and Europe, are MUCH better off today than they were 50 years ago. Or 100 years ago. And I think there are reasons for that, reasons that "traditional society" and conservatives have generally opposed. Things like education, contraception, representation in government. But there are still societies where this is not the case; a friend of mine was the only woman in her (engineering) program in India; and although her parents are VERY progressive for that country and encouraged her in that pursuit, and in going to graduate school abroad, she is still afraid to tell them that she has been dating a guy she met in college for years now (they relocated together). Too many women in her country still are not taught even to *read*. That is the product of traditional values, taken to their conclusion.
Ultimately I can't defend every single thing people do in the name of "tradition", for reasons beginning with the fact that many "traditions" contradict one another. I can respond briefly that men are also much better off than they were 50 or 100 years ago, and girls not learning how to read is not the worst thing about Indian society, by a long shot. I'm not generally moved when people say that something I disagree with completely is where my ideas are "leading".
One other thing we have veered away from: large families. I see nothing wrong with some people doing that because they want to. I do see a problem with promoting it on a societal level. Simply because, right now, at this moment in time, our planet cannot support this. If the Quiverfull movement were also staunch supporters of the space program, I would have no qualms. But the fact is if everyone has 7 children, with modern medicine to keep them all alive...we'll run out of space very, very fast.
We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now the major danger to western society is catastrophically low birth rates, and third world country birth rates are rapidly following us down. And doomsday malthusian predictions have a long, long history of not panning out, whether you're talking about population growth or peak oil and resource use.
Just as an example of how silly this is, it is well documented that men's IQ, while having approximately the same mean, has a higher variance than women's. That's a gender difference, and it doesn't even have anything to do with the averages. It certainly doesn't exhibit as two distinct clusters on the spectrum.
But the result is that there are (high) thresholds of IQ above which men are heavily over-represented. The higher the cut-off, the more extreme the effect becomes. If you're talking about a group of people whose membership requirements include unusually high IQ, men are going to be over-represented. For instance, recipients of the fields medal. Things like that. Similarly, more men have extremely low IQs and that's part of the reason men are over-represented in special ed classes.
IQ tests were created by men. White men.
. I'm at a loss for words here.
IIRC there has been some question about their validity across the population spectrum. I'm not sure though. But I take your argument with a grain of salt.
IQ is a better outcome predictor than pretty much any other measure.
I know for sure that there was a study done on the spatial reasoning tests (you know, the ones that determined that boys typically had better spacial reasoning than girls?) Turned out that when the spatial reasoning concepts were put in more "girl-friendly" terms, relating to fashion or home decorating instead of conglomerations of blocks, girls did better. Again going back to how the most unexpected things are social constructs rather than biological fact.
I am pondering the
nuclear rage that would occur among feminists if you rewrote math and engineering textbooks so that there was a girly version where all the questions were related to fashion and home-decorating... wowzers. I'm not sure this anecdote supports your broader argument.