4 ms·

Assuming you are male, that may be the real sex difference: Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything, they apologize for not being "good enough" even when t

• Grustaf 9y ago
  "Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything" I don't think anyone at all is claiming that. At most people are claiming that girls are better at verbal and emotional skills, while boys are better at visio-spatial things.
  • projektir 9y ago
    When the explanation for women being paid less / having less power overall is that men have superior bodies for tasks (from athletes to programmers), it does seem to come off that way. It's little help that women have better verbal and emotional skills if they do not appear to be valued in our society.
    • aianus 9y ago
      The highest paying jobs are managerial not technical. If anything emotional skills are much more valued in our society.
      • projektir 9y ago
        Yet high-paid managerial and control jobs are dominated by men.
        • kamaal 9y ago
          This is because emotions and empathy are a small part of management. Bulk of it is politics. And politics is a ultra-competitive space which it own demands.
    • Grustaf 9y ago
      You should take care to separate these two very different questions. You should also not forget that there are values other than monetary. I'm sure most people "value" their midwives or nannies infinitely higher than their plumbers or even bankers.
      • Mz 9y ago
        Yes, that is why nannies and so many other Pink Collar Ghetto jobs are paid so poorly: Because we value these people so much.
        • Grustaf 9y ago
          I don't know if this is sarcasm or too deep for me to grasp, but my point is that there are many forms of value. Not just economic. Income is not decided based on how much the majority of people value occupations, it's not even a factor. Soldiers are usually highly valued but earn very little. Monks have often had even higher status and made no money at all. Money lenders were reviled but rich. Etc etc etc. EDIT: Soldiers do earn little considering the risks they take, and the status of the job. This is still true in countries with modern professional armies, but it was much more true historically. So much so that many higher class people would actually _pay_ for the privilege. They had no shortage of money but wanted the glory that military service could bring.
          • Mz 9y ago
            Soldiers are usually highly valued but earn very little. My father and ex husband were both career military. You are misinformed. In the US, soldiers get relatively little cash pay because they are provided free room and board, free medical, a free burial, free life insurance, and can access a host of other free amenities for merely flashing their ID card, such as access to free legal services for some purposes. If they serve at least 20 years, they get a retirement check for life. If you join at age 18, as most soldiers do, you can retire as early as age 38 and readily pursue a second career. Unless you were maimed in war, you will still be young and able-bodied. They can buy a house with no down payment and the federal government will help them pay for college. Military retirees tend to be in quite good financial shape. What the federal government does not give them in cash pay it more than makes up for in countless benefits. People who say they value what you do but do not want to pay you adequately for the job are basically taking advantage. Women are routinely expected to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, because they care. I am a woman. I have been homeless for 5.5 years. I am incredibly sick of people acting like "we love what you do!" And then not wanting to pay me anything. I have spent a lot of time deconstructing this problem space and I very much expect to get paid these days. I do a lot less giving it away for free. Because the vast majority of people expecting me to benefit them because I care absolutely do not care that I struggle to get enough to eat every month and I need money to get off the goddamn street and back into housing. Poverty in the US is overwhelmingly an issue for women and children. If we valued women so much, this travesty should not be true.
  • ambivalents 9y ago
    Of course no one is going to claim that and expect to be taken seriously. But as a fellow girl, in my years socializing in groups I have certainly experienced this sentiment. There seems to a tacit agreement that girls that are good at something traditionally male-dominated, like programming or math, are an exception to the rule. In other words, there is a rebuttable presumption of mediocrity in these areas. If you excel at them, good on you, you must be a true whiz to do so in spite of your gender.
    • kaybe 9y ago
      Apparently physics checks your gender if you approach it and if it finds you female suddenly makes itself at least twice as hard. At least this is the impression that a large part of the population seems to have, according to what they tell female students of physics. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
    • Grustaf 9y ago
      "good at something traditionally male-dominated" Yeah but that's different, I was replying to someone saying that the general opinion was that girls are not good at anything at all. That is simply not true, almost nobody believes that.
      • posterboy 9y ago
        ... over the hole world, on average, and in the past?
      • ambivalents 9y ago
        I interpreted Mz's comment as a somewhat facetious internal monologue I myself am all too familiar with. I agree with you, most people don't believe that, but it is nonetheless a belief that some women internalize after years of the socialization I described above. Yes it's not true that we're not good at anything, but there are subtle and pervasive forces at work in groups that cause women to believe this about themselves.
  • Mz 9y ago
    People usually do not have to proclaim things that the larger culture implicitly agrees is simply so true that "it goes without saying." You will tend to not be aware of such implicit assumptions, because they aren't typically overtly signalled, unless you, yourself, regularly run into social friction for defying cultural expectations. At which point it will be maddeningly obvious, and the thing that is most crazy-making is the degree to which other people act like you are a deluded fruitcake or radical feminist or something for stating the obvious.
    • weberc2 9y ago
      I would argue that there's a lot of friction you're not feeling by holding the mainstream position. For me, it's baffling that every disparity is assumed to be caused by discrimination despite so few actual cases of confirmed systemic bias, or that every conversation about inequality only examines the particular facets of life that are harder for women. It feels sooooo obvious to me that there is no significant anti-female bias, and it's almost certainly the case that men and women are bimodal in our preferences, and society is organized to accommodate the centers for each mode such that life is harder the further your preferences are from your gender's average.
      • Mz 9y ago
        Edit: The comment I replied to has been substantially edited, as has the follow-up reply to me. Thus, for people reading this, it may look like what I have said is "crazy" or reactionary or otherwise bad behavior on my part. I assert this is an additional means to be dismissive and disrespectful of me and I see no reason to try to further engage this individual. No good will come of it. But I am leaving this comment here anyway. --- I was one of the top three graduating students of my high school class. I fully expected to be part of a two career couple. That never happened. Instead, I was a homemaker and full time mom for a lot of years. So I have spent a LOT of time trying to parse how and why my life got so completely flushed down the toilet and did not turn into what I and so many other people expected of it. (One family friend bluntly told me "We all expected you to be a self made millionaire. What the hell happened?") This involved reading quite a lot of research about how and why the lives of men and women turn out differently. We may well see it differently, but that sounds to me like a polite way to trivialize my conclusions. My conclusions have not been drawn in a trivial manner. There has been quite a lot of study involved in drawing them.
• chillacy 9y ago
  Well that's sort of the idea of stereotype threat, in that it can warp your perceptions of not just other people, but also yourself, and that the self-doubt will cause you to do worse or drop out in the long run. I recall we had a comment exchange awhile ago about optimism/pessimism in the parable of The Two Travelers and the Farmer. In this case both the parent commenter and I may have had the exact same score in terms of seconds to an answer, but we both perceived the significance very differently. I also shared the idea that "it's easier to change ourselves than it is to change the world". I think this might be an example of where that could be applied. (Of course easy for me to say, I haven't lived my life with subtle social cues that told me not to be good at math or spatial reasoning, but there are other areas in life where I get to apply the same lessons).
  • Mz 9y ago
    I have spent a lot of years working on changing myself. My default preference is to focus first on what I have the most immediate control over. A) I think it is debatable whether or not it is easier than changing the world. B) For things like sexism (racism, etc), there comes a point past which the world needs to change if your life is to have any hope of actually improving.
    • chillacy 9y ago
      > I think it is debatable whether or not it is easier than changing the world. What if the inverse was true and changing the world was easy, and changing yourself was hard? If somehow you managed to change the world and not change yourself, then the world will be entirely fine, but you yourself will still suffer from the same perceptions as before (this is entirely possible, I've seen many a white male strongly believe that the world is prejudiced against them, and I recall some stats showing an increasing number who believe similarly in polling). In that case, the world is relatively good to them, but the mind creates its own interpretation of reality. Unless you believe people are un-changable, and changing the world means raising the next generation right and forgetting ours. Anyways, I'm not advocating to forget about activism, just saying I recommend looking inwards first before helping others. Like on airplane safety directions. And that's not a comment directed at you specifically, just a general observation to those looking outwards before looking in (it sound like you've done your share of introspection).
• weberc2 9y ago
  I don't know where or in what decade this has been true, but in the United States for all of my life, media, every level of the education system, corporations, and governments do everything they can to communicate that women are as good as men at anything and better at many things, and that any disparity is necessarily caused by discrimination.