In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Hey, that’s a girl!

Jay

My daughter is watching the StompOutLoud DVD, one of her Chanukah presents, and she just noticed that one of the dancers/percussionists in the opening sequence is a girl.

One of the most painful things about having a daughter, for me, is watching her discover the things that women still can’t or don’t do.  She’s surprised when she sees a woman on a construction crew, or a woman police officer, or a woman playing drums. She knows there are no women playing major league baseball, and I still remember the conversation we had when she was 4 and asked me if she could grow up to be a Yankee.  It’s as if my own childhood recognitions of the narrowing horizons are playing out all over again.

But then I realize the changes: when I was her age, I didn’t know any women who were doctors, or dentists, or accountants, or lawyers, or financial advisers – she’s met women who do all of that. The astronauts were all men. The first Presidential election I remember is Nixon/Humphrey in 1968; the first one she’ll remember is likely this one, with a woman front and center. My daughter has an aunt who’s a vet, and an aunt who’s a physicist, and the physicist’s sister works for NASA – that’s right, she is a rocket scientist.

When I was in second grade, I had to wear skirts to school, and I wasn’t allowed to climb on the monkey bars during recess. My daughter came home recently with a bruise on her forehead. I asked about it, and she said “I got kicked in the head”. Huh? “Well, you know that thing I do where I flip myself over and jump off the highest monkey bar and land on my feet? Turns out Charlie can’t do that”.  Hey, that’s my girl!

45 thoughts on Hey, that’s a girl!

  1. I desperately wanted to play drums as a little girl, but wasn’t allowed. It was unheard of. There were NO women playing drums as I was growing up.

    At age 13, I saw Karen Carpenter and almost talked my mom into it, but then, damn, they took Karen’s drums away from her …and as you know, it was all downhill from there.

    My own daughter was of course allowed to play any instrument she wanted; but boys are still very territorial regarding drums and brass sections (of marching bands, particularly!)…

    Thanks for a great post, reminding us of first principles! 🙂

  2. Back in my mom’s day, a bright girl who wanted to work could be a teacher, a secretary, a nurse, or maybe a librarian. That’s it. My mom would have made a GREAT scientist but she became an elementary school teacher instead.

    Yes, there were a few exceptions but you really had to be tough and motivated to buck the system as well as maybe kiss the idea of a spouse and family good-bye.

    We have a long way to go but we really have come a LONG way. Claudia Goldin wrote a paper called, IIRC, “The Homecoming Of America’s College Women.” I recall the stats – over half of the women who graduated college in the 1970’s and earlier were teachers. Chances are a lot of them went into teaching willy-nilly because that was the only option open to a bright, educated young woman. Nowadays, young women have a lot more career options.

  3. My mom had to wear skirts in school too…though not when she went to University, thankfully. I’m so happy skirts weren’t uniform for girls by the time I started school *shudder*.

    When I was younger I wanted to be a trucker. Of course I would have changed my mind by the time I grew up, I would hate being on the road for long stretches of time. But for a period of a few years there, I was obsessed with transport trucks and I would get super excited every time I saw a female truck driver go by!

  4. I’d hardly call my mom a feminist, and lord knows she sure as hell wouldn’t call herself one, but she’s a computer programmer.

    I love to tell the story of when I was about 5 or 6, and she took me to Wal-Mart to meet Barbie. Barbie was asking all the girls what they wanted to be when they grew up. When she finally called on me, I piped up, “A computer programmer!” I rendered Barbie speechless! 🙂

  5. I played percussion/drums from 5th through 12th grade, and almost continued through to college. It was a big part of my life, and so much fun. Dealing with the sexism sucked a lot, as i was pretty much the only girl, but it’s very very worth it.

  6. And I’ll definitely second the comment about boys’ territoriality in marching band. As a snare drummer for 4 years, and the only reliable one on line I got to take a lot of shit for having boobs and had to drag my line up behind me. It was very very very annoying, and I was pissed when I got passed over for section leader by a clueless guy. He wound up screwing around and I ran the line.

    That said, it would be extremely difficult for a well-endowed girl to march drums, and there’s not much you can do about that.

  7. No offense dude….I’m sure your daughter is awesome – but no woman could play for the Yankees. That has nothing to do with a glass ceiling put by man (only by nature).
    Also, I don’t think there’s a lot of glass-ceiling-ness involved in the dearth of women cops/construction crew workers. I happen to have a sister who is a cop – many women make fine cops. But my sister is unusually athletic/daring and also happens to be gay. She would be the first to acknowledge that most women couldn’t hack it physically or mentally (women have higher rates of post traumatic stress, much more hesitance to fire weapons in tight situations). If you think I’m just making this up, read Kingsley Browne’s excellent guest – blogging at the Volokh conspiracy on the subject of women in combat. While I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, and I know most people here won’t like his un-pc take on the topic, he cites a lot of data that is relevant to this, and the data must be dealt with.

  8. I don’t even know where to start with this one.
    Here goes. I’ll be brief.
    The first thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. The second, a soldier.
    Of course in 1965 this was frowned upon SEVERELY!
    I wasn’t allowed to join Brownies and watched my brother who is 14 months older struggle in Cub Scouts where he did NOT want to be.
    It’s truly amazing how that pattern continued into our adulthood and how it still affects us.
    7 years ago one of my patients in the office where I am a dental assistant told me I was too smart to be there and that he was going to teach me to fly planes.
    He did.
    Now when I fly kids I pay special attention to encouraging young girls.

  9. Suggestion, the patriarchy expresses itself not just in who plays but in who watches, and how the players are presented. My daughter could be a professional athlete, but she won’t see the women of the WNBA on the front page of the newspaper or as the lead story on ESPN.

    Trixie, my sister-in-law the physicist is also a skilled sailor; the last time we went sailing with them, the clueless guy who checked us back into the marina after the charter assumed her husband was the captain. That didn’t end well for him. She and her husband both want to learn to fly planes and I have no doubt that if they do, she’ll be better at it.

  10. I work in a field that’s closely related to construction work. I’ve never done actual construction work, but we do all the digging without the benefit of heavy machinery, and we’ve got plenty of hiking and hauling to do as well, so I’m fairly confident that the construction workers don’t have a hell of a lot on us, hard work-wise. My field’s contract archaeology, which is a lot more academic and is also an anthropological field. Anthropology is a much more “feminine” science in this country, and one of the most famous anthropologists is female. Contract archaeology has about a 60/40 male/female split, with many female-owned companies out there. In the generalities, the work’s just not that different from a lot of manual labor-intensive jobs, but we’ve got a lot more women than most of the others. There is certainly a class distinction there, as you have to have a college degree to do what I do. But if your theory, Suggestion, were correct, there still wouldn’t be very many women doing archaeology, because we wouldn’t be able to cut it. My guess is, though, that the differences have a lot more to do with class distinctions and gender expectations than whether I’m capable of digging as many holes as the boys.

    Thanks for pointing out the changes that have happened. It’s so easy to get discouraged, especially when it seems like we’re backpedaling. But the more positive images we see, the better we’ll get. Have you guys heard of Project Implicit? http://www.projectimplicit.net/generalinfo.php

  11. Comment’s like Suggestion’s make me wish that there was a simple online equivalent of giving the finger. Is there one, and I just don’t spend enough time on message boards to know it? If not, someone really ought to get to work on that.

  12. I happen to have a sister who is a cop – many women make fine cops. But my sister is unusually athletic/daring and also happens to be gay.

    Let’s all ponder the cluelessness of this for a minute: Suggestion seems to have absolutely no idea why a straight woman would find it harder being a cop than a gay woman. He can’t figure out why it’s harder for a straight woman to buck the entire system than a woman who already knows that she’s outside that system.

    My niece, who turns 6 in February, has started telling me what girls “can” and “can’t” do. She gets these from the other kids at school, mostly the boys, who tell her that she “can’t” do the things they do because she’s a girl, and it’s a boy thing, so she’s not allowed.

  13. First of all, Jay, your daughter ROCKS. I never could master that move!

    I have to be careful myself about playing into the stereotypes. Because I am not a fan of most ball sports, I forget that some little girls DO like football, basketball, etc. and that I should be careful about expressing any distaste for those sports in front of them. It’s just hard because the men’s versions of those sports and their fan culture are so overloaded with testosterone and women’s basketball/football is practically invisible. *sigh*

  14. Suggestion – you may never get a female Barry Bonds (although who needs more Barry Bondses?) but you could get a female Ozzie Smith, a female Ricky Henderson, or a female Phil Rizzuto. Even if woman couldn’t be Hall of Fame class (and I think they can) they can still be solid strategists and clutch hitters like, for instance, Joe Girardi – the new NYY manager. At the VERY LEAST there is a woman good enough to make the roster of a single A farm team for a club like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. And yet… nothing. I mean, women must *really* suck at baseball, ’cause my *cat* could make it on a farm team for the Devil Rays. But certainly it’s not sexism.

    Sorry to feed a troll, guys, but I can never let this particular type of statement go by uncommented on. I wanted to be a Yankee when I was a kid, too. I decided I’d rather be a neuroscientist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to see someone else break that particular barrier.

  15. “Turns out Charlie can’t do that” is priceless. I snorted coffee. I love her sort of non judgement surprise about it.

  17. i guess marching band gets territorial…but i saw far less of it in college marching band, where skill mattered more…and where our center snare was a kick ass female…and the horn section leader, and the first and second trumpet section leader…and in concert season, our principal horn was female…i always tried to encourage the girls to hold on until college, where the jerk offs were weeded out, and skill mattered…

    i also love to point girls who love percussion to evelyn glennie…possibly the most famous solo percussionist and concert percussionist on the planet…and she is completely deaf from birth…

  18. All I am saying is that the distribution curves for 1) men and 2) women who can succeed in baseball looks like this.

    And yet a lot of otherwise good ballplayers are discovering that they can’t succeed without steroids. So what does that say about the “inherent” issues?

    Just out of curiosity, what “distribution curve” means that the male umpires in the major leagues are able to accurately call balls and strikes while squatting behind the plate, but women like Pam Postema just can’t do it? I guess they just don’t have the physical strength to stand around in a ballfield all day, huh?

  19. Wait, we have a thread about girl drummers and no one’s even mentioned Meg White?

    After reading Wikipedia (not the link above), I actually like Jack White a little bit more — his maiden name is Gillis, you know. He took Meg’s last name when they got married (and kept it after they divorced, kinda like Susan Sarandon did with her first husband).

  20. Mnemosyne:

    What would be better, having women only in an umpire position while all the glory went to men, or giving them “a league of their own” where they can flourish?
    If you integrating baseball into one league, the vast majority of talented women wouldn’t have anywhere to go. Unless you wanted to have 1) an integrated majors league and 2) an all woman’s league for the women who couldn’t get into the integrated. But then why not have an all man’s?
    What exactly would you do to sports if you were in charge? Integration or separate? If Integration, how do you feel about the fact that most great women would have nowhere to go (other than minors maybe)? Wouldn’t integration just highlight disparities?

  21. What would be better, having women only in an umpire position while all the glory went to men, or giving them “a league of their own” where they can flourish?

    Nice dodge: “Let’s ignore the real, ongoing sexism in sports and talk about something that’s never going to happen!” It would be kinda nice if women were allowed to do a job that they’re qualified for at this exact moment rather than holding out a pie-in-the-sky notion that maybe, possibly, someday there might be a women’s professional baseball league, and then all of those women who want to be professional baseball umpires can work there and not worry their pretty little heads about getting to work in the men’s leagues. Separate but equal, baby!

    Having the WNBA as “a league of their own” is really working to gain societywide respect for women as athletes, isn’t it? If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a guy sneeringly refer to the WNBA as not being “real” basketball, I could buy the entire men’s NBA league, and have money left over for the NFL, too.

  22. “And yet… nothing. I mean, women must *really* suck at baseball, ’cause my *cat* could make it on a farm team for the Devil Rays. But certainly it’s not sexism.”

    I have no idea if there are women good enough to play professional baseball, but this claim is very, very false. Anybody who plays ANY professional ball is much, much, much better than ordinary run of the mill little league players. Generally, you don’t play any professional ball unless you were one of, probably the best player in your high school (for example), perhaps the best ever, by a wide margin. Don’t let the fact that the Rays are so much worse than other professional teams fool you.

    My sport’s hockey, and there was a professional goalie that was female that played for the Tampa Bay Lightning. On the other hand, there isn’t a single woman on the US (gold-medal winning) Olympic team that would make the top 100 (top 500, in all likelihood) cut for the men’s team.

    But this could all very well be an artifact of social pressures. You need a lot of people playing the game to get someone good enough to be a pro. Just because a small but growing number of girls and women play hockey doesn’t mean that they have reached the critical mass needed to make a breakthrough. Further, the sort of very early training you need to be really good (starting at 3 or 4 for example) is only a very recent phenomena, like the last 20 years or so (more like ten).

    My favorite example is chess. Last time I checked, there was only one woman in the top 100, Judit Polgat. This has been stupidly taken as evidence for the belief that women are inherently worse at chess than men.

    But the first native-born American on the list only comes in at around 75, and there are no others. On the other hand, tiny countries like Georgia and Croatia do much better. Does this mean that Croatians and Georgians are inherently better at chess than Americans? Of course not.

    It is very telling that people jump to the essentialist explanation for gender differences but not national ones.

  23. My daughter, sometime before her fourth birthday, told me she wanted to be a race car driver. And I said okay. Years later, some boys and men found out she could…and was not to be messed with on or off the race track.

    If it wasn’t for a traffic accident that nearly killed her three years ago, I’d be getting the go-kart ready for Daytona right now.

    She can do anything she puts her mind to, period!!!

  24. My daughter was about 3 when we were driving on the highway and she pointed to a passing motorcycle and said “I can’t ride a motorcycle because I was a girl”.

    So I’m the sort of mother who wants her to be able to do anything she damn well pleases, but I’m also a doc who spent enough years doing ER work to be completely terrified of motorcycles.

    I settled for “You can’t ride a motorcycle because you’re not a grownup, but grownup women can ride them” and hoping it wouldn’t come up again.

    She can do anything she puts her mind to, but I hope it’s not motorcycles! And Jim, I hope your daughter is OK.

  25. Your daughther will not grow up to see a woman play for the Yankees because there are some things women can’t do as well as men and the men who play major league baseball are the best at what they do and while there may be some women who are better than some men at baseball there are no women as good as those men who play major league baseball, period. Of course when it comes to women police officers and soldiers in a hostage situation where I am the hostage, my hope is that mostly men show up to save my ass, because if it is only women police officers or soldiers who show, well I figure my time to go has come. If I am being sued, prosecuted for a crime or divorced I’ll take a woman lawyer anytime, because they argue really well and are generally relentless. When I see women doctors, physicists, lawyers, corporate officers the thought passes through my mind, as I am sure it does others, did she get there on her merits or because of affirmative action or out of fear that if she didn’t get the position the firm, company or hospital might face a discrimination lawsuit and did they beat out an equally well qualified man simply to fulfill a quota. The best person for the job should get the job. Gender is irrelevant.

  26. And yet a lot of otherwise good ballplayers are discovering that they can’t succeed without steroids. So what does that say about the “inherent” issues?

    While there is steroid use in baseball it is not as rampant as the media has suggested. Look at Alex Rodriguez, he does quite well and it is anticipated, barring injury, he could very well surpass Bobby Bonds all time home run record. And yet, no suggests that Arod uses steroids. So the above statement is patently false. Most major league ball players do not use steroids.

  27. Y’know, I could have sworn we were talking about *kids* in this thread….

    At the age that Dr. Jay’s daughter is right now, there is negligible difference in what boys and girls can physically do, provided the child in question has had the opportunity and interest to develop said skills and hasn’t been FUCKED UP by society’s stereotypes. Any differences tend to develop later as different growth patterns emerge. And as I understand it, those physical differences have a hell of a lot of overlap.

    Why on earth do these threads always degenerate into “women just aren’t as good as men at xyz and never will be so there!!11!!!” They said that about just about EVERYTHING men did and women weren’t allowed to — flying, science, driving. Hell, READING!

    Jay — your daughter ROCKS. And the fact that she can accept that a playmate just can’t do something she can do and it’s no big deal? So mature! 🙂 She sounds like a fabulous kid.

  28. When I see women doctors, physicists, lawyers, corporate officers the thought passes through my mind, as I am sure it does others, did she get there on her merits or because of affirmative action or out of fear that if she didn’t get the position the firm, company or hospital might face a discrimination lawsuit and did they beat out an equally well qualified man simply to fulfill a quota.

    Hmmm…..that must be news to my maternal grandmother and her sisters as I do not recall 1940s-1970’s China(ROC, ROC/US, and ROC/PRC respectively) as having affirmative action for women who became a senior bank official and university science professors(Chemistry and Physics) respectively during the middle part of the 20th century.

  30. Look at Alex Rodriguez, he does quite well and it is anticipated, barring injury, he could very well surpass Bobby Bonds all time home run record. And yet, no suggests that Arod uses steroids.

    (A) Barry Bonds.

    (B) Jose Canseco suggested that A-Rod uses steroids, and there’s been a lot of subsequent chatter and speculation. Proof? No. But no one knew that Sammy Sosa was using a corked bat until it broke during a game, did they?

  31. My mother passed her MD exams, in Berlin, Germany, in the spring of 1945. This post makes me realize again how tough and dedicated she was.

    As to the argument about women’s “innate” abilities: until we live in a world where women and girls really are encouraged and supported and welcomed into these fields as strongly as men are, we won’t know what women can do. (I’d bet I could find all sorts of generalizations about African Americans and pro-golf until the rise of TIger Woods).

    The argument is doubly irrelevant to an individual: when my niece is considering whether or not to to go out for the college basketball team, she’ll think through whether she individually has the skills, the desire, the time; statistics about women’s muscle mass will be useless to her.

  32. And to Jay’s comment about his would-be motorcyclist daughter: my wife, stepson, step-granddaughter (age 12), and I were together for dinner when step-granddaughter piped up that she specifically didn’t want to be a scientist. The adults, all ardent feminists, were of course appalled and went to work, persuading her that of course she could be a scientist if she wished.

    After much too-ing and fro-ing, we discovered that step-granddaughter had been informed by a cousin that scientists had to go up in spaceships, and she just didn’t want to do that.

    Luckily, one of my step-daughters is a computer scientist, now high up in ATT managerial ranks, so we could easily show that Cape Canaveral was not a mandatory stop on the road to scientific success.

    P.S. Step-granddaughter passed on science anyway and now works as a reporter.

  33. Another interesting thing to consider about women and sports is how women are actually socially constructed to be physically inferior… Judith Lorber writes about it in “Paradoxes of Gender.”

    For example, it has long been “known” that women cannot run as fast as men. Well, since we have been allowed to run marathons in the last thirty-five years, women have cut their times by more than an hour and a half. In fact, women are increasing their fastest speeds more rapidly than men are.

    And as for the WNBA vs the NBA and this idea of “separate but equal” bullshit– women’s basketball uses a different-sized ball and different rules so the style of play is less intense, fast, and exciting than men’s basketball. Wonder what it might look like if the WNBA players got to play by the same rules as everyone else…

    Isn’t it strange that this never happens to enter the conversation when people are so sure that women are essentially physically inferior to men??

  34. I need to speak up for blue collar jobs and people.

    Way back in 1976 I got a job as a commuter bus driver. I was the first woman to drive a line bus in the tristate area (NY, NJ, & CN) since World War II. I drove from the NJ shore to New York City. My favorite route was to pick folks up from various bars and news stands in Brooklyn and drive them to Monmouth race track. The run was empty up from NJ to Brooklyn then full back to the track or full up to Brooklyn and empty back to the barn in NJ. Many of the men were too scared of Brooklyn to do the run so it paid $4.00 extra per trip.

    It was hard to get the job and harder to go from part time to full time – all an issue with management not the men. But once I proved I could drive as well as anyone and that I would keep my mouth shut – meaning not tell their wives if they were seeing someone “on the side” in NY. I was accepted as one of the men.

    I have found that in the white collar world it may be easier to land the job but it can be harder to be socially accepted. The phrase “not a good match” covers a multitude of prejudices.

  35. Here’s the funny thing: I went into aviation. Now, the statistics about flying and gender show that women are safer, more capable, better to handle g-forces. So, “innately” women are better pilots.

    My experience has certainly mirrored this: female pilots are less likely to engage in stupid manuvers that are dangerous, and more likely to have a smoother touch on the controls.

    Now, if we’re to follow the “statistics” coupled with my own anecdotal evidence, we should see that aviation should be heavily female. You should only see women pilots, and a very rare male (who should also be gay). The public perception should be that guys just can’t fly airplanes, and women are really the only ones who know how.

    Yet, it is EXACTLY the opposite. Which, to me, suggests that it has nothing to do with my chromosonal arrangements, and a WHOLE lot to do with sexism and how what we raise our kids to be.

  37. LeggoMyMeggo writes,

    For example, it has long been “known” that women cannot run as fast as men. Well, since we have been allowed to run marathons in the last thirty-five years, women have cut their times by more than an hour and a half. In fact, women are increasing their fastest speeds more rapidly than men are.

    When I read this, I flashed on a picture in a book I had when I was a kid. The book was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Body Shaping for Women. The picture was of body builder Lisa Lyon standing with Arnold on her shoulders; he was pressing a large dumbbell too.( I googled for the picture but couldn’t find it.)

    Now, Arnold has his share of biases, both implicit and explicit, and yup, there was fat-shaming in the book. But what stuck with me was that picture, and the story he told about how tired he got after just a few minutes of carrying a friend’s baby. He told her he was afraid of hurting the baby, but *really* his arms were killing him. He added that a fit woman might be not able to deadlift as much as he, but she could likely outdistance him at the track. His point was that women should not underestimate their strength and physical potential.

    Each *individual* athlete has to decide what challenges/sports are best suited for his/her body. Saying that there’s no point in women playing serious sports because few women have exactly the same physical talents as A-Rod is kind of like saying that top footballer “Little Lionel” Messi is not a “real” athlete because, at ~5′ 6″, he could never cut in the NBA. In reality we recognize that the skinny Messi is currently better than beefy ~6′ 4″ footballer Luca Toni. So I don’t think the objection to women in sports is about size and muscle mass…

    I also agree that the original subject of the post was *children*, and the messages they get. The point is not whether grown women can play identically to grown men (that, after all, just sets up “men’s” play as the irreducible normal standard), but whether female children see any images that let them know they can maximize their physical condition and athletic skill.

    P.S. Apologies to any Luca Toni fans who don’t want to hear that Messi’s the better footballer. But he is. So there! And I’m not even a Barcelona fan!

  38. The drumming thing surprises me. even in the 80s, about half of the drummers in my high school marching band were female, as was the drum major.

    But there are definite job biases. I drive a semi. I have been harassed over the CB, given static in truck stops and scowled at by drivers, dispatchers and weigh-station cops alike.

    Tough luck for them. I make good enough money doing it to shrug and go on my way.

  39. As to the argument about women’s “innate” abilities: until we live in a world where women and girls really are encouraged and supported and welcomed into these fields as strongly as men are, we won’t know what women can do.

    It’s of course notoriously hard to pin down exactly how genes and environment interact to produce a specific trait, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come to some tenative, probabilistic conclusion. Thanks to Title IX, a lot of women and girls have gotten a lot of opportunities to participate and accel in sport—not the same opportunities as men and boys, to be sure, but nontrivial opportunities: enough (I submit) to draw some probabilistic inferences about innate abilities. Because—and it depends on the sport; we mustn’t forget Lynne Cox—in a lot of sports we do see some large divergences between male and female performances that (I submit) cannot plausibly be attributed to socialization.

    Take something that’s easy to measure: track and field. Take the mile. The top U.S. high school girls mark for the 1600 meters in 2007 was 4:38.15. That’s a fast time for anyone, male or female. But that national top time for girls is good enough to place, say, fifth in the Hayward Area Athletic League boys’ final. The national boys top mark that year was 4:04.09.

    That’s a rather large gap—an average gap, it cannot be repeated enough times in this contemptibly sexist world; there is overlap—but still, in the aggregate, a big gap. No doubt the size of the gap would change if we changed our socialization practices. To take an absurd but illustrative example, if we raised our boys, and only the boys, in small cages, then the girls would obviously be faster. Less ridiculously, we could encourage female athleticism more than we do now, or male athleticism less, or both, and the gap would shrink. By how much?—it’s hard to say exactly; it depends on exactly which cultural changes you make. Suffice it to say that it would (I submit) be very surprising to see a woman play for the Yankees, and still more surprising to see parity.

    But we shouldn’t let that get in the way of Ila Borders.

  40. Ailurophile:

    My mom would have made a GREAT scientist but she became an elementary school teacher instead.

    My uncle (an elementary school teacher) likes to say that one of the worst things to happen to education was women being allowed to get better jobs, because all the smart women left for better-respected, better-paying positions.

  41. women’s basketball uses a different-sized ball and different rules so the style of play is less intense, fast, and exciting than men’s basketball. Wonder what it might look like if the WNBA players got to play by the same rules as everyone else

    …
    It might have looked like the now defunct American Basketball League, whose women players used regulation “mens” balls, and a 25 second shot clock. But it struggled in the media shadow of the WNBA and went out of business.

    If you like pure hustle, women’s college ball is more exciting than men’s. Where guys seem to pass endlessly around the 3-point circle, women drive towards the net.

    Jay’s post made me remember when I encountered girl fearlessness thirty years ago, while I waited in an emergency room for my foot to be sewn up. “Which daughter is it this time, Mrs. Johnson?” “This time, it was Susie who fell out of a tree she was climbing and broke her arm.”

  42. This I totally disagree with:

    #27 courage the cowardly dog Says:
    When I see women doctors, physicists, lawyers, corporate officers the thought passes through my mind, as I am sure it does others, did she get there on her merits or because of affirmative action or out of fear that if she didn’t get the position the firm, company or hospital might face a discrimination lawsuit and did they beat out an equally well qualified man simply to fulfill a quota. The best person for the job should get the job.

    In my experience women are often better doctors than the men I have encountered. It has gotten to where if I have a choice, I will always go with the woman. I went to three male doctors, then finally a woman who diagnosed my problem immediately and helped me get help to fix it. If I hadn’t run across her, I might be dead now. In my case, it never crosses my mind that she may have gotten the job but not been qualified. As I see it, if the men are pushed out by the women (or minorities)with affirmative action, chances are the men aren’t very good and should seek another profession. Look at how many get in because they come from wealth. How many deserving men who aren’t wealthy are pushed out by that?

    I am very happy about affirmative action. It may have saved my life. It has helped many very qualified women go into many professions, and do well, when they might have been blocked by prejudice before. How much talent, innovation and intelligence were wasted before that?

    Makes me think of the orchestras, and how at one time it was thought that only men that could play well. They changed the way they did auditions, so that they auditioned behind a curtain or wall and the resume had all gender clues stripped. All the sudden there were all KINDS of talented women that could play as well as the men. Who’d a thought it? Now orchestras are far more mixed in gender.

  43. My uncle (an elementary school teacher) likes to say that one of the worst things to happen to education was women being allowed to get better jobs, because all the smart women left for better-respected, better-paying positions.

    It’s also one of the reasons that schools for black kids went sharply downhill: the brilliant African-American men and women who used to be shunted into education (since it was the only option other than “elevator operator” or “maid”) can become doctors and lawyers now.

    Unfortunately, our entire educational system is still set up on the assumption that you’ll have lots of really smart people who don’t have any other options but to become teachers, so you don’t have to pay competitive wages.

  44. #27 courage the cowardly dog’s comment about affirmative action is bull$&*#!

    Let me point courage towards v442 (July) of Nature titled Does Gender Matter?

    These studies reveal that in many selection processes, the bar is unconsciously raised so high for women and minority candidates that few emerge as winners. For instance, one study found that women applying for a research grant needed to be 2.5 times more productive than men in order to be considered equally competent (Fig. 2)12. Even for women lucky enough to obtain an academic job, gender biases can influence the relative resources allocated to faculty, as Nancy Hopkins discovered when she and a senior faculty committee studied this problem at MIT. The data were so convincing that MIT president Charles Vest publicly admitted that discrimination was responsible.

    I suspect this applies to every area of life for women and minorities. Read it and weep, courage.

  45. I am very happy about affirmative action.

    Splashy: so you’re happy that an “equally” qualified man was deprived of an opportunity because of his gender? Isn’t that what feminism ostensibly has fought against?

    The notion that your life would not have been saved had you been treated by a male doctor is sexism in the extreme. But I guess that’s ok when women do it right?!?!?

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