I'm not sure why either gender should surpass the other in math. - Edit 1
Before modification by Joel at 12/01/2011 02:36:15 AM
But I think what this and personal experience shows me is that while people need to be free to choose whichever path they want the efforts to erase gender differences in society are mostly in doomed to fail. There more differences between boys and girls than the plumbing. Society needs to be just but you can't make it equal. Both genders have strengths and weaknesses. Most people are willing to admit that but claiming men are better than women at anything beyond opening jars makes you a sexist.
Men are probably better on average than women at math. That doesn’t mean you cannot have women engineers but it does mean you will probably have less and the difference is small enough that really good women engineers will be better then most male engineers. The ones that are should be paid better but less qualified ones should not be promoted to create a false balance.
If we want to create more equality in pay we can do it by increasing the pay for historically female jobs but if you take this survey at face value most women would prefer you simply pay their husband more and let them be less concerned with a career so they can focus on their real interest which is family.
Men are probably better on average than women at math. That doesn’t mean you cannot have women engineers but it does mean you will probably have less and the difference is small enough that really good women engineers will be better then most male engineers. The ones that are should be paid better but less qualified ones should not be promoted to create a false balance.
If we want to create more equality in pay we can do it by increasing the pay for historically female jobs but if you take this survey at face value most women would prefer you simply pay their husband more and let them be less concerned with a career so they can focus on their real interest which is family.
There are definite physiological differences that tend to make one gender better suited for certain tasks, but that doesn't mean there's inherent inequality, only differences. The example I usually cite is the one SilverWarder provided on upper/lower body strength: The physical changes that occur at puberty tend to result in men having more upper and less lower body strength than women. That means they aren't the same; it does NOT mean they aren't equal (though in practice the ablities of any two people are very unlikely to be exactly equal). For some reason lately I've been obligated to tell a lot of people to go read "A Wrinkle in Time".
If you want equality you pay people on the basis of their performance rather than on the historical gender association of their particular profession and (believe it or not) it's when we substitute things like race and gender for performance that I think we err.