DS2 (4) comes out in favour of the patriarchy

There was some article I read somewhere about some country (bear with me there is a specific coming) saying women should exclusively drive public transport as they were a calming influence. (I know there's a thousand stereotype-genetic-pseudo-science objections there)

I mean as far as I saw in the year I spent there, trolleybuses and trams are driven exclusively by women.

in Russia women drive trolley buses and trams because those vehicles are run by the government and the pay is shit

men drive taxis for more money than uni professors (who are also women, btw)

Indeed they are! It is advantageous to have a range of different sizes etc. Plus most of a firefighters work doesn't involve fires (ironic I know) but rescue: car crashes; stuck in lifts; fallen in water etc. Nothing that precludes a women being involved in any of those scenarios.

women would be better at going in through windows wouldn't they...

That's interesting scallops :)

Unwind - my DH is a firefighter and he works with a woman on her shift. Yes obviously she doesn't have the strength of some of the other firefighters but that isn't usually an issue as there are plenty of jobs/things to do in a fire/rescue that don't require strength. Plus actually rescuing a person from a burning building single handedly (as is often the stereotypical scenario put forth by the scpetics) is not a regular occurence especially nowadays with advancements in cookers/fire alarms etc and there is always more than one way to skin a cat. However, she did have to overcome the fact she was a woman before people judged her on her ability. She also paved the way for more flexible working practices within their fire brigade (in terms of maternity leave and part-time work etc). But now the men have those advantages as well!

The job is more practical than strength based. So people with problem-solving skills who don't mind getting their hands dirty and getting stuck in would be good at the job. Also a basic knowledge of tools and knots would probably be useful - so join the scouts! They did change the physical requirements test for women (it is now more fitness based than strength based and whether they needed to do that is up for debate).

I've not met a woman firefighter but have seen a few on TV - on those programmes you skim across when you are knackered or on the news.

good point Sakura. I think you're right.

I've never seen a female firefighter - I suspect it might be one of the few jobs where a requiremnt for physical strength really does exclude women.

Thinking of the stereotypes - I blame tv, books, dolls, dressing up outfits... always gender specific.

Every house I can think of is that simple detatched house (e.g. Peppa pig). Girly nurse outfits, nurse dolls, Dadddys fix stuff, Mummy cooks.

That's interesting Sakura. And top points to Colditz for referencing Terry Pratchett. He is always right about everything IMO.

Claig, I vaguely remember learning about the Platonic ideal, that when we imagine a table it THE table, probably four legs and wooden, even if the table we have at home is white plastic or something. But can't remember any of the no doubt jolly complicated and fascinating detail.

ds (7) occasionally comes out with 'fireMAN' but is always corrected. Poor sod will probably rebel as a teenager and join the young Tories or a religious sect that believes women should be barefoot and chained to the kitchen sink.

not sure about that claig. I think it's probably just cultural. DD is being raised in Japan, as a Japanese, and she sees these pre-ordained forms, as you put it, quite differently to us, and yet they seem strikingly Japanese to me.
For example
me (one year ago) : what's your favourite animal DD?
DD age 3: a pink rabbit

me (in my mind): never heard or seen that before. what a wacky imagination! Cool...]

fast-forward one year and it's not as far-out as I orginally thought. Since she planted the concept of pink rabbits into my head (something non-existant in British culture) I've started "noticing" pink rabbits about. They pop up on clothing, in the subtlest of places. Or once in a random library book, just a small one, but there it was: a pink rabbit! DD had been noticing this cultural quirk that even DH (who is Japanese) hadn't noticed, from the age of three.
I reckon it works like that with gender: assuming doctors are men despite seeing only real doctors who are women. I mean, DD has only ever seen brown rabbits IRL

That's really interesting coldtits, I think that's probably exactly what it is (I remember the Pratchett quote now that you mention it as well :) He actually has a lot of good insights into all kinds of things!)

Still leaves the question of where it comes from in the first place, presumably children aren't born with the belief that houses have four windowns and a chimney with smoke coming out (and most children are pretty unlikely to see smoking chimneys in their day to day life these days, just like the steam train example) - so who is telling them 'this is what a house looks like', 'this is what a train is like', 'this is what mummies and daddies do'?

Other question would be - are these things just harmless nonsense (quite possibly!) in which case we shouldn't worry about it. Or do they have some far-reaching effect on people's psychology and adult beliefs, e.g. about gender roles (maybe helping to explain why even progressively-minded couples seem to so easily fall into the traditional setup of 'mummy' doing all the housework and cooking)? And also maybe other things like the feeling that when you grow up properly (and start a family with a mummy and a daddy etc etc...) you must aspire to living in something that looks a bit like the tooth-fairy house, even in an overcrowded overpopulated country where we might well be better off with more families living in apartments as they do in other countries?

Fascinating coldtits. You may be onto something there. I believe in Plato's theory of forms, the little of it that I know. I think he says that there are pre-existing ideal forms for things that we see. So there is a form for a cat, which is abstract and that any cat that we experience here is just a shadow of or representation of this universal pre-existing form. We all share the same world of forms.

Maybe the house and daddy and mummy are forms and universals and each individual house and mummy and daddy is just a particular representaion of that universal form. That could explain where these inbuilt notions stem from.

terry Pratchet had a theory ... that inside every child's mind is the world of the toothfairy. there is a house there. It is square, with four windows and a pointy roof and a chimney that has smoke coming out of i.

THIS is what children draw, when told to draw a house. My children draw this house, and we live in a terrace. Children who live on the 47th foor of a high rise flat draw this house.

I think it's the same with doctors and nurses, mummies and daddies etc.

Daddies Fix Things. Mummies Cook. Even if daddy is a chef and mummy puts flat pack furniture together with a butterknife and a grin!

You will have to look for other scapegoats based on facts then, rather than assuming without evidence.

Yes it is very ingrained, weird though that such beliefs still persist even though they're not remotely in synch with reality any more - e.g. plenty of female doctors both in real life and on TV or in books - in fact medicine may become a female-dominated profession before long when you look at the ratios of medical students in recent years!

Not just restricted to gender issues though, I've noticed parents and other adults insist to children that trains go 'choo choo' even though they don't and have not done so even in the parents' lifetime (and now maybe even grandparents don't remember steam trains being the norm) :) So it seems to me that someone somewhere is telling children an outdated but perceived as nice and cosy and 'suitable for children' version of the world with regard to gender roles, may well be happening through children's picture books, cartoons etc (I don't have children yet so not really exposed to these things!)

Actually I remember a while ago a little boy in my extended family insisting that 'daddies go to work, mummies stay at home' although his mum and dad both went out to work as did the parents of most of his friends. Would be very interesting to track down where exactly it is coming from.

They see it on TV.

But that's different, Goblinchild. There's nothing wrong with a child thinking that only mummies do cooking, if that is what they see because that is what is practical unless the parents do nothing to explain that it's not because she's a mummy that she's cooking, but because it makes sense for her to do it for whatever reason.

It still doesn't explain why my children as well have decided that doctors are men and nurses are women, when they've been treated by male nurses and female doctors? It's just so endemic.

We do asses materials used in school for equality and positive role models, and remove those with outdated and inappropriate stereotyping. However, the outside world has more of an impact.
I do remember a poster wondering about this when her son said 'Only Daddies can fix bikes' and I asked her if that's what happened in her house.
She didn't answer my question.