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Jul 7 / 8:23pm

Pegs and Holes

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

Why Women Don't Get Caught Up in Sex Scandals

The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “Women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path.

From Snarky Truth to Reasoned Explanation

Let’s break down two myths:

Myth 1: Women are intrinsically less good at computer programming or design

The argument that is most frequently used is that there are fewer women in computing and design because the women are either less interested or less adept. But even a casual observation reveals this as a fallacy: In the U.S. the percentage of women in undergraduate studies has dwindled to 11% [pdf], yet in India (in 2003), 55% of the Bachelor’s of Science degrees in Computer Science studies were awarded to women [pdf]. With India being a strongly patrifocal country, you would expect these numbers to be the other way around. Various findings indicate that women in India find Computer Science a female-friendly field; other studies reveal that women in the U.S. find math and science to be not female-friendly.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: a cautionary tale?

In part, women today are facing a storm of conflicting expectations. Women feel that they have to achieve in the workplace, they have to look fabulous, preferably thin as a model, and probably go under the knife for their first nip and tuck before they’re 30. Oh, and besides this they’re supposed to be perfect mothers and wives. They’re obliged to pull all this off simultaneously. What craziness is that?

Wikipedia Ponders Its Gender-Skewed Contributions

But because of its early contributors Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.
“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.”
Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.” Mr. Reagle is also the author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.”

Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.

Instead I’m going to tell it like it is. And what it is is this: statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs, because the press is dying to write about them, and venture capitalists are dying to fund them. Just so no one will point the accusing finger of discrimination at them.

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

gender

Pegs and Holes

Why Women Don't Get Caught Up in Sex Scandals

From Snarky Truth to Reasoned Explanation

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: a cautionary tale?

Wikipedia Ponders Its Gender-Skewed Contributions

Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.

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