To think this 'no sex baby' thing is ridiculous!?

[Tippitoesandbuttonnose]

I'm posting this as over the past 24 hours I've seen a post on here about someone thinking babies should not be assigned a gender and should wait till they're older and then just seen a news article where a couple have had 'unknown sex' on their babies birth cert!

AIBU to think it's ridiculous to try and make out like your child has no sex? Obviously they do. Gender IMO is different and as they go older by all means let them identify as the male female whatever but it's silly to not assign a sex when they obviously have a penis or vagina?

The reason I think this most is girls will be told about periods etc because it is what they will experience because they are female! So they're gonna know at some point right? Argh!

I know this isn't the most PC post but AIBU?

[hackmum]

Engineering, physics and computer science are indeed all male-dominated.

Where you need to look is further up the ladder. A majority of medical students are female, but two-thirds of consultants are male.

And that's replicated all over the place. There are more women than men in the teaching profession, but the majority of headteachers are men.

In nursing, 11% of nurses are male, but 13% of nursing directors are male - not a huge difference, but it's there nonetheless.

[grannytomine]

Agricultural studies and nursing degrees are counted as STEM subjects. What WISE call the 5 core subjects show a massive underrepresentation of women, and a situation that seems to generally be staying the same or getting worse. Changing the goal posts? Quote STEM and it doesn't fit so change to 5 core subjects. Women certainly aren't underrepresented in medicine, dentistry, veterinary science, law and you can't say maths is massively underrepresented when in some years women are close to 50%. But you carry on, you obviously will continue to play with stats but I'm too old to play games.

Hackmum I am assuming alot of Consultants trained when medicine was still male dominated, hopefully the situation will change (my DIL is hoping to be a Consultant in the next couple of years so helping the balance.)

I do find the Head teacher thing strange particularly in primary schools where women teachers significantly outnumber male teachers but almost all the Primary Heads I know/know of are male. A friend who is a teacher in London told me in her case it is because she left the SLT as she could make more money tutoring after school rather than spending time in meetings. I think she gets £50 an hour for one to one but can easily make over £100 an hour for small groups, she specialises in preparation for 11 plus and entrance exams for private schools but she is in an expensive area of London. She reckons she makes as much as a Head with alot less hassle. Don't know if other women teachers feel the same.

Re children having stereotypes I don't know if my kids missed out on this as they were home educated for the first five years of school. If you follow the Jesuit saying, "Give me a child till he is 7" then mine certainly missed out on gender stereotyping influences in the important years. I can remember my daughter at six or seven coming downstairs at 9 or 10 pm to ask her dad to show her how to do something she wanted to do in maths, more than once I escaped to bed while they were engaged in their favourite subject. Other times it would be about programming, she could have helped the balance in computer science but maths won out.

When they started school they couldn't fathom some of the unwritten rules about what boys and girls could or should do. Maybe more home education is the answer?

[AssassinatedBeauty]

Right, ok then. No issues with girls being put off certain subjects then. No issues with numbers of women maths, physics, CS, engineering graduates etc etc. It's all down to personal choice and definitely not any kind of issues around sexist stereotyping. And in fact boys and men are definitely discriminated against by women and put off from being nurses and vets, poor things. When all they want is a nice caring career, but they can't because of all the nasty women accusing them of being paedophiles.

I find it laughable that you don't understand why men are overrepresented as primary school heads. I love your idea that women choose not to be heads because they can make more money as a private tutor! That's definitely the reason behind it! How has anyone not thought of this before?!

[grannytomine]

I told you why one of my friends gave up on SLT and possible future role of Head and what her reasons were. She easily makes £50k a year tutoring on top of her teaching salary, obviously you couldn't do that everywhere but as I said she lives in London and the families she works for think nothing of paying £50 an hour for her services. You really have a chip on your shoulder, yes poor women only 80% of them getting to be vets, nasty men bullying them. Maybe you need to toughen up and grow up and do what you want without worrying about what other people think.

I can't imagine why being a vet has anything to do with being a paedophile so I think you might be a. confused or b. hysterical.

Did your stats game getting exposed annoy you?

[AssassinatedBeauty]

Ah, the old "hysterical" line. Shame when it's used by another woman.

My "stats game" was an attempt to actually look at the data rather than continually refer to personal anecdotes. I'd happily have a sensible discussion about the differences between subjects and take up by women/men. There's a lot of interesting stuff around why some subjects are highly skewed by sex, and not others. But I sense you're not at all interested in a genuine discussion.