Do you think men and women are 'of equal value but different' or actually 'the same'?

[TrillianAstra]

Just curious.

I'd go for option a.

Not very different, and on any one axis of difference the differences are small and the range is large, but I think there are average differences.

e.g. men are taller than women but if I took the next 10 men and then next 10 women who walked down the street the odds are that some of the women would be taller than some of the men

individual differences,nature/nurture make us all very unique. the plethora of women venus,pink brain,blah blah books are broad brush generalisations

if men and women were a certain prescribed way predictable and categorised life would be easier and dull

of course men and women aren't homogeneous and cannot be reduced by gender

which makes life much more interesting

Ah! I get you Elephants. You're talking about the way in which we have al been 'brain-washed' by society; so even we automatically approach our choices with a skewed 'male', capitalist pov.

I certainly am very guilty of doing just that, I am working hard at not judging other people based on what they 'do'.

Mmm...

I think that what happened in the financial sector is an example of group think. A lack of diversity can be very self reinforcing to orthodox views where people only recruit other people who are very similar to them and where diversity of opinion gets sidelined or dismissed. I don't think this is particularly specific to gender, there is plenty of research that suggests ethnic diversity is a factor in better decision making too.

I hope to goodness that the States never has Sarah Palin as President, but if they do it will be more about the very powerful girl/boy next door narrative that they have playing there.

ElephantsAndMiasmas - perhaps I am an interesting experiment on what you said way back up the thread about " if you are trained to be a truck driver from birth, presented with pictures of trucks, toy trucks, games to improve co-ordination etc, it's no surprise that your brain develops in a way favourable to truck driving".

From a very young age I had typical male toys, trucks, cars, etc. From age 6 I also drove tractors and other vehicles on my Dads farm. However, I hate driving. I am useles at it and have not done so for about 20 years and dont intend to ever again.

Now my dad wanted a boy I think, so I had a toy fort, toy garage, soldiers, cars, scaletrix etc as a child. Hot Wheels was my fave! Maybe that did encourage me to think out of the box, or maybe it made no difference whatsoever. I am not particularly girly, but dd certainly is. She loves all things pink and sparkly.

My Dad's hobby is driving steam engines so I spend a lot of my childhood around railways. Some idiots used to sympathise with him for having girls when we were bloody well stood there! My Dad just shrugged it off - he didn't miss out on sharing his hobby at all, he did everything with us he'd have done with a son.

Funny thing is though with the grandchildren it's a clear m/f split - the two eldest (boys) are really into trains, the two youngest (girls) really aren't interested. Maybe that will change when the 3yo is a bit older, I dunno.

Ha well there you go BB - it doesn't always work does it. And now look at you, on MN when you were probably raised to be playing whist in the village hall .

I didn't TBH mean the truck thing literally, although the various experiences are certainly interesting! More that people are often IMO looking for "biological" differences to account for aptitudes, when there are sometimes quite obvious separate "training" systems for boys and girls that account for them. If the truck driver kid did turn out to be good at truck driving, trying to account for it genetically would be IMO a bit of a fool's errand. It's just that the "training" that kids get has been (until v recently) been largely ignored.

Sarah Palin and Margaret Thather are individuals.

A group of women, mixed in with a group of men, will (probably, usually?) provide in general a more balanced outlook than a single-gender group. Putting one person in a position and thinking they'll represent their gender (half the population's) generalities seems to be missing the existence of individual difference.

And even without taking into account specific personalities and just going on categories, Thatcher and Palin are still white middle class and conservative, which a lot of women aren't. A black liberal one-legged working class man might have more in common, be more representative of, and have more similarity of perspective and operating method to a black working class liberal one-legged woman than Palin ever could, for example.

Regarding toys, my mum tried for a while to get me interested in dolls and dresses, but it didn't really work. I had a few dolls that I was attached to, but I used to insist on wearing trousers, and would also pedal my brother's tractor around the front of the house while he followed me, pushing his teddy bear in my pram. We both liked trains and lego.