Feminism and natural sex differences

No idea WoD. It's not my area really. I'm very sceptical of histories. Just like the other research isn't done in a vacuum, neither is history. It reflects how we understand the world now. So any reason that people gave would just fill me with .

I agree to an extent. But why does any of it have to be divided by penis/vagina? Different people enjoy different things. People should be able to do what they find fulfilling. Why introduce gender into it?

I've never come across a feminist that says 'you woman should work like a man and if you don't you are letting yourself down'. I've heard a society tell women they should work else they are wasting their skills and I've heard a society tell women they should stay at home else they are letting their children down. The feminists I've met say women (and men) should have choice and that these are constrained by society.

But there is no way a study can identify all the reasons why the women behaved the way they did. It engages with the story they tell about why. They may or may not believe the story, they may or may not think it is the whole picture. But the crux is research cannot find out the ultimate 'why'. It doesn't operate in a vacuum, the researcher doesn't operate in a vacuum, neither do the respondents. That isn't to say the research doesn't have value, but its value lies understanding how we make sense of the world not in finding the ultimate 'true' why - that's intellectually impossible.

yes Writer and I of course should read the book first before critizising. Just that I see it so often - it is claimed that "But women want it this or the other way themselves..", even though in reality it's not much of a choice.

claig

The problem is ultimately that you believe the differences are natural. There is little evidence for this, and a great deal of evidence for discrimination, perceived differing roles in childcare affecting career choice, and for sociation. But since you just accept that choice is essentially 'free', there is little point having the discussion.

Ultimately I return to what I said earlier-the model you offer supports a static status quo with the assumption it is natural. But different societies have different differences between men and women, different 'natural factors', yet each could be treated individually as you do 'ours'. So we're left with a huge problem-either women's bodies change rapidly and hugely over very small time periods and geographies (at leats in terms of evolution) or sociation is the key factor in patterning choices.

These are the questions that relate to the OP-not is there a difference-there is-but what evidence is there that it is 'natural', and why does that matter anyway in terms of how we structure society. I don't really see what relative pay rates for engineering and law have to do with it.

I didn't say there are no jobs in engineering. I said they pay less than lawyers like Cherie Blair and the finance jockeys with their fatcat bonuses. People are often told and encouraged to enter engineering, and then are extremely poorly paid for it, even after getting PhDs and slogging their guts out on subjects that are far more difficult than law and finance.

"Research has shown this is not due to discrimination but lack of interest. You can't tell people what they want to do, basically. Women tend to choose more people-oriented occupations rather than science and engineering."

OK, but you have no way of telling whether this is due to "innate differences", or socialisation.

It would be interesting to see if there is a difference in the subjects taken at GCSE and A-Level between girls from mixed state schools and single-sex v academic private schools.

Claig you are talking a lot of balls about engineering. You honestly think there are no jobs to be had in engineering - encompassing the entire telecommunications industry, energy (coal, gas, oil, nuclear, refineries, power stations, transmission systems, energy conversion systems in our houses), computers, software, everything we walk on or travel in, sports equipment, buildings, a whole variety of entertainment equipment, producing music, television and film, almost everything we touch, use and see, and so on and so on almost endlessly? That is a bonkers argument.

agree entirely with WriterOfDreams. I believe the differences are caused by nature, they are natural and they exist due to the major difference between women and men i.e. childbirth. I believe that women are naturally better at reading and understanding people precisely due to the fact that nature intended this in order to protect children.

Also agree entirely about the majority of women preferring people oriented subjects as opposed to mechanical subjects. This is also true of men, but I think there is a higher proportion of men than women who are drawn to mechanical subjects. This doesn't make anybody superior, it is just a difference in interest and inclination.

All groups who have power are by necessity conservative, because they wish to maintain that power and privilege. Men try to hold onto their power and privilege by valuing what they do and undervaluing what women do. However, this is changing fast, as women enter occupations that were previously male only. It is capitalism that is freeing women and giving them the chance to enter these occupations and outperform men. The barriers are being broken down. However, capitalism values some jobs higher than others, because it is able to earn more money from those jobs. As Xenia so often says, women need to enter those jobs if they want to earn the high rewards that capitalism offers. Men will not be able to hold women back easily, because in a free capitalist competitive socoety, capitalism will favour those who can produce the most wealth regardless of gender.

'is there something innate in men that makes them more dominating and more likely to demand money and status'

yes I think there is. This is not true of all men and women, but on the whole, I think there is a higher proportion of men who are more ruthless, single-minded and driven than women. I think it is a yin/yang type thing. I think it is again fundamentally related to people skills and caring for other people. I think that there is a proportion of men who are extremely ruthless and anti-social and care nothing for others, and it is often these types that rise to the top, because they are prepared to do anything and sell their souls for power. If you look at ruthless criminal gangs, they are nearly always led by ruthless, vicious, anti-social men who are prepared to go to extremes that most men would not contemplate. I think they exist because nature cares less about men and their role in the preservation of the species, and that is why these outliers exist far more often amongst men than women.

However, none of this means that we should accept discrimination. All doors should be open, all subjects should be studied and discrimination must be dismantled.

writerofdreams

Nobody is saying there are not patterns in any society which suggest that men and women within them don't want different things or behave in different ways. And nobody is disputing, although we would have different opinions on where boundaries lie, that 'men' and 'women' have some differences.

But there is a powerful trend in post-war western societies in particular to link those things with 'natural causes', as you do with 'childcare' and claig does with everything. That argument has a huge hole in the middle: here are two believed differences, so they must be related.

And the problem with that is that the differences in desire are culturally speciifc but the differences in body cannot be. If you visited 17th-century London you would find women excluded from political coffee clubs becasue they supposedly naturally lacked skills in social interaction, conversation and language use. Now you find them excluded form the same societies because they are supposed to nturally have those skills but they are deemed irrelevant.

And any broader perspective produces similar occurences, which suggests strongly that some aspect of the logical chain is broken, is extrapolation when all we can say is 'we believe in two differences', not 'there is a definitie link'.

I would like to get back to the study about high flying women "choosing" to step down.

In today's societly, I don't see it as much of a choice. Look at the general attitudes - a male CEO (with children) is a CEO. A female CEO is a horrible mother neglecting her poor kids and should not really have them if she does not want to take care of them.

A SAHM is doing the most important job in the world. A SAHD is a useless waste of space who should move his butt and get a real job.

We mentioned at some party that in case we happen to have children, my DH will be the one staying at home. People actually laughed as obviously, such an absurd statement can only be just a joke..

So no, I don't think those women in the study changed their minds because of biology.

but as　we've seen: for millenia, women have done the bulk of the physical labour for the human race: carrying water, the drudge of housework, horticulture/farming/hoeing, down the pits, the cotton mills, standing up in factories during the industrial revolution.... the list is endless.

Men, OTOH, have always had the cushy, light, prestigious, high-paid jobs (law, medicine, economics, science) that they traditionally excluded women from on the basis that their brains (or was it their wombs?) couldn't handle it.

The physical donkey-work for the human race has been done by low-class women accross cultures.

Writerofdreams:As far as the physically stronger issue goes mrsrisotto it is a biological fact that women (in general) can't build up as much muscle mass as men. If they take testosterone then their muscle mass increases, but other physical attributes also change such as amount of body hair and deepness of voice

I'm not trying to say that there are NO differences between men and women but I m trying to make the point that they are greatly influenced by society. Men and women both have testosterone and oestrogen. In differing levels granted but not hugely so and a big part of the difference we see in real life is down to socialisation.

I'm with claig here. THe reasons 'male' things enable them to run the world is because men do them, pure and simple

WHat that means is, anything men do is given a higher value because men do it.

SHopping? The Buyers- glorified shoppers- of shops are among the highest paid employees in a company. WHo are they? Men, of course.

A C.E.O of a company has more flexitime than an employee on a supermarket checkout (I know because DH is the boss and can easily get time off whenever he wants). So does that mean more women are CEOs (because it fits round the kids) and more men work on supermarket check-outs or in low-level office work? Does it hell.

Physical labour, Farming for example. It must be men doing it because they're stronger, right? WRONG. More than 80% of the world's food is grown and harvested by women, who own less than 10% of the world's land.

In Japan, maths is a "female" subject, because women are considered to be natural bookeepers. Literature is seen as a high-brow, intellectual pursuit, beyond the reach of women.

Men and women being different or the same is irrelevant here because Whatever men do will be valued because they do it, and by consequence more money and power will flow in their direction. They will used cultural means of excluding women (city bankers/businessmen entertaining clients at strip clubs etc)

This basic tenet of male dominance must be understood.

I think you need to remove the credit you give me. I do believe that on the whole we are free, we can decide what subjects interest us and we perform well in subjects where we have natural inclination. The majority of teachers are women, I don't think that they are holding girls back and preventing them studying science. I do believe that science is less interesting to the majority of girls and boys than a subject like English or history. That is why fewer undergraduates choose to study physics. I think this is the free choice of pupils. It also makes sense from a monetary point of view, because physicists will be paid less than financiers anyway, even though it is a much harder subject. It is also true if you are interested in power. Scientists and physicists are backroom people and politicians, spin doctors and power brokers rarely come from a science background, apart from Margaret Thatcher, who got a chemistry degree. However, she soon dropped that and studied for the bar, as most of them seem to do.

claig

My last post. What you are saying throughout is that you have identified innate differences between the sexes. The method you use for identifying those differences is to state 'society is produced by choices, these are the choice people make, therefore these are the traits that are innate'.

There are huge difficulties with that as a line of argument-principally that choices are not free. Hence what would be 'innate' would vary according to when and where you were. To give you more credit, you might be arguing that in modern European capitalism chocies are free, but that is not something most feminists would agree to simply because 'anti-discrimination' legislation exists-it ignores the day-to-day reality of the lives of women and men and substitutes an idealised and simplistic model in its place.

But, to return to the OP, I don't really see how that tells her what feminists think, because I don't think any feminist supports a naturalised model of the status quo.

'But if naturalised back formation from a simplified present is an argument, why can't we just accept that men's roles are ntaurally going to be valued more highly than women's because they currently are?'

but I don't think that men's roles are moe highly valued than women's. It all depends what job you do. The capitalist system ascribes value and it doesn't care if you are male or female. As Xenia always says, a binman is not as highly valued as she is in her job. Everyone decides what path they will follow, and if they choose the wrong path (such as engineering in my opinion) then they can't complain that Cherie Blair earns more than them.

They are fooling people telling them to become engineers. they always do that when there is a shortage of cheap labour. They say there is a shortage and try to encourage people to become engineers, and that way they keep the wages down and the capitalists make more profits. Ask Rivem , her husband is a top engineer who has invented things and he earns nowhere near what barristers, lawyers and financiers earn. Don't fall for the engineering trick.

'And you don't think that's anything to do with the fact that boys are pointed in the direction of "doing" toys, construction toys, things to do with helicopters, aeroplanes and trains.'

I think people have distinct personalities and inclinations and skills, and I think that they tend to follow those inclinations over time. I think that women didn't receive an education in the olden days, so they were not able to enter medicine. I think that medicine is a caring profession that helps people and that is why more women and men are interested in it, than in a mechanical subjects.

I doubt we will ever see more women in aeronautical engineering than men, because I think it is intrinsically a less interesting subject, and therefore fewer people are interested in it, and I think the few that are will probably always be men in the majority.

I am not sure exactly what Xenia does, but with all her private school fees, it sounds like she earns more than a top aeronautical engineer. How many top politicians are aeronautical engineers rather than barristers?

no i don't think that, because teh majority of boys are also not interested in aeronautical engineering.