8 ms·

What’s So Scary About Smart Girls?

84 points by kareemm 12y ago

facepalm 12y ago
Yes, boys are worthless. The reason the article cites for educating girls is that then they'll have fewer kids, especially fewer boys who could end up making trouble. And frankly the specific organizations for sending girls to school make me feel uneasy. I hope similar organizations exist for boys? I am sure there are lots of bright boys in the world who also can't afford an education. Why make it gender specific? Why not just sponsor kids education, irrespective of gender? I could imagine in some countries it is more difficult to send girls to school than boys. But a "send kids to school" organization could simply spend more effort there to send the girls to school. No need to make a "girls education" organization.
- seanccox 12y ago
  There is a need for "girls education" organizations. How else do you propose humanity overcome the statistically significant difference between the number of girls being educated and the number of boys? Girls aren't getting special treatment, they are being singled out for specific support to overcome patriarchy(ies) that would keep them undereducated, isolated, and disenfranchised from power. That isn't an issue that a "send kids to school" organization would be addressing.
  - facepalm 12y ago
    I don't think those patriarchy issues or whatever are any consolidation for a boy who can't afford to go to school. Why does he deserve less help than a girl? It's not his fault if fewer girls are being educated.
  - hueving 12y ago
    You missed the latter part. They would focus on girl shortages where it was relevant and general shortages in other places.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  "You educate a boy, and he’ll have fewer children, but it’s a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family." Limited resources, maximise the effect. Also, the girls go on to be the caregivers traditionally, meaning the education has a knock-on effect. Thinking long term.
  - facepalm 12y ago
    "Also, the girls go on to be the caregivers traditionally" Not if they are educated, presumably. Or if so, then maybe the education was wasted after all? The logic of the article is to educate girls so that they have fewer children. And why shouldn't educated boys take care to educate their offspring?
  - Dewie 12y ago
    > Also, the girls go on to be the caregivers traditionally, meaning the education has a knock-on effect. Thinking long term. - "We must help these women more, because they must overcome the expectations of <gender stereotype>." - "We must help these women more, because it would be more useful since they are <gender stereotype>." Gender stereotypes: both oppressive and useful, depending on what you want to sell.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I could imagine in some countries it is more difficult to send girls to school than boys. But a "send kids to school" organization could simply spend more effort there to send the girls to school. So your suggestion is that they could do the same as they're doing now, but pretend otherwise?
  - facepalm 12y ago
    No - they should simply aim to give all kids a good education. For some kids it takes more effort than for other kids. No need to differentiate by gender. Suppose there was an organization that only sent boys to school. Now if for one boy it is very cheap to go to school, and for one boy it is expensive (maybe he lives further away or he is poorer or whatever), should the organization only send the boy to school for whom it is cheap? I think the organization should try to help both boys. Likewise an organization that helps kids should help both boys and girls, no matter if helping one gender is more difficult than helping the other gender. Suppose you are in hospital with cancer. Should they deny you treatment because other men only need a cheap circumcision? What does the illness of any other man or woman have to do with your specific problem?
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Camfed actually also helps boys. The thing is, when the disparities in school attendance are so great (7:1 in some places), because families almost always choose them when they can't afford to send all children to school, claiming to be gender agnostic would be almost ridiculous.
      - facepalm 12y ago
        Perhaps families make those choices because it is more efficient to send boys to school? If you can only afford to educate one of your kids, educating the girl might be less efficient because she might end up being a mother and unable to put her education to good use. So they would be acting with the same logic as the "girls education" organizations. Those are the results if you go by efficiency, rather than equality. Maybe some other solutions could be found, for example "we pay for your boy's education, but only if you also let us educate your girls". In any case, I think if an organization also helps boys, it shouldn't claim to be a "help the girls" organization.
crystalmace 12y ago
Very good story.
nhaehnle 12y ago
The article reminds us of some very good points about our relationships with developing countries. Education does so much more for spreading democracy than drones do, but our monetary priorities don't reflect this, unfortunately. I stumbled in the last paragraph: It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States are trafficked into commercial sex each year. What does that mean? With on the order of 5 million births per year (both boys and girls), that would imply 4% of all women are affected. That seems a bit on the high end. Does anybody know what's going on here in terms of statistics?
- brc 12y ago
  I always always doubt the veracity of these numbers - how could you possibly collect them accurately? - but that is not to say I doubt the truth that the problem exists. The mistake in your logic is that you're assuming all the children trafficked were born in the USA. Most likely, they would be trafficked by people smugglers and sold as prostitutes, and would come from poor countries. From my understanding (and I don't claim much knowledge at all) the home-grown, self employed, 'Pretty Woman' type of prostitute is very much a minority.
- rosser 12y ago
  As I understand it, most of the American girls trafficked into sex slavery are runaways. They're typically "recruited" by a pimp who initially poses as a boyfriend or caretaker. Before long, he needs help coming up with money for rent or something, and it's "just this once", and, and, and... Appreciably lower numbers are kidnapped, or introduced into the trade by someone they already know.
- cturner 12y ago
  > Education does so much more for spreading democracy than > drones do, but our monetary priorities don't reflect > this, unfortunately. Education often gets reduced to money arguments. Is there a relationship between the amount we spend on education and the quality of it? As I see it - not beyond a point which is fairly low. You need to pay enough that people who are given to be teachers can live a comfortable life doing what they love. The hard bit is the culture - having people around who are motivated to be a teacher for its own sake. And not because it's simply a stable job, or for the prestige associated with it. We try to use money to blast momentum into broken culture - Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, poor neighbourhoods in our own countries. Sometimes
Dewie 12y ago
Feb. 25. 2014: Federal Government College attack: Fury at military over Yobe deaths. At least 29 teenage boys dead at Federal Government College Buni Yadi. Boko Haram doesn't only target education for girls. Though that is how the media seem to want to present it.
- slowmotiony 12y ago
  The media didn't give a shit when they were burning boys alive.
  - McGuffin 12y ago
    Stop kidding yourself, because neither did you.
    - elnate 12y ago
      How could I? I didn't know.
  - Joeboy 12y ago
    I don't think the media initially cared much about the kidnapping of the girls either. They were wrong-footed by the news spreading on twitter. I agree that the much lesser coverage of the deaths of the boys is not really OK though.
- tzs 12y ago
  A kidnapping is a crime in progress, so we'd expect it to remain in the news until it is over. A murder is a short term event, and so is only in the news for a short time unless something newsworthy happens in the investigation.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    Boko Haram's activities can be seen as an ongoing mission in suppressing education. These killings and kidnappings aren't isolated incidents, so in a sense, the murders weren't short term events. The kidnappings haven't been presented as an isolated event, either; it's been emphasized that Boko Haram, a known and active terrorist group with a "track record", is behind it, and that we must stop groups like this from doing the awful things that it is doing.
QuantumChaos 12y ago
The article tries to fit this event into a narrative about oppression of women, and women's education. And yet Boko Haram are against education in general, and in a previous attack on a school, killed 59 school boys, while letting the girls go. [1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/boko-haram-dontkillourboys.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/boko-haram-...
- tsotha 12y ago
  Yep. The entire basis of the article is built upon a false premise.
a-saleh 12y ago
Reminded me of documentary Solar Mamas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON_NQ1HnRYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON_NQ1HnRYs It is about program in Jordan to educate mothers in the poorest regions in basic electrical engineering to allow them to assembly and repair basic solar powered utensils. (Mostly panel->power adapter->battery->light) The most interesting question for me in the film was "Why don't you educate men as well?" with answer along the lines "Any man from here with any marketable skill would run abroad, from his family, mothers will want to do something to feed their children". Then there was the scene, where husband of one of the women in the program tried to force her back home and abandon the "solar" school. I wonder if we could change that attitude about educating women in men like these ...
- ars 12y ago
  Yah, that organization is extremely misandristic http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/barefoot-college-bunker-roy/ http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/barefoot-college-bu... A choice quote: "First we declared that men were untrainable. Men are restless, men are compulsively mobile, men are ambitious, and they all want a certificate to show for their efforts. And the moment you give one of them a certificate, he leaves the village looking for a job in the city." .... "Because the moment you give a woman a certificate, like a man, she’ll see it as a passport for leaving rural areas and going to urban areas to find a job." So basically like a person? And men and women are the same in this regard? But said that way you have no opportunity to bash men. Any organization that tries to destroy the concept of a family unit in the name of education is not a good organization in my book. They seem to be one of the worst of the bunch. Especially since the actual "education" they give is all but worthless - they teach basically nothing, and make the poor women think they have been educated.
tzs 12y ago
Duplicate from Sunday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728945
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - tzs 12y ago
    If the submitter did not intend to submit a duplicate, it lets them know that they need to be more careful in the future to strip extraneous query parameters from their submissions. Is that not useful? Also, for people that read via RSS who have not yet seen either submission, there is a reasonable chance they will see the original first, and might comment there. Hence, having a link in the duplicate submission's thread back to the prior submission, so people can go check for more comments there, is useful. I also put a comment in the original pointing to the duplicate, and noting it had more comments. Edit: the deleted comment to which this is a reply was raising the question of whether it is useful to note that a submission is a duplicate when the duplicate is doing better and has many more comments.
smnrchrds 12y ago
> Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. Any article that compares Iran and Saudi Arabia like this is a naive over-generalization. I'm not sure what the author means by empowerment, but Iran is much closer to US in terms of gender equality than Saudi Arabia. In Iran, 12-year education is mandatory for both genders. There are more female university graduates than male (around 60%), although much like US, fewer pursue engineering degrees[1]. More than half of medical students are female. Yes, girls are discriminated against in labor market. There are less likely to get a job if there is a similarly-qualified or slightly less-qualified male candidate and will probably earn less than their male counterparts, but don't you have the same problem in your country? I hope you understand why I hate it when someone puts the name of my country in the same sentence as Saudi Arabia, where they sentenced a woman to flogging because she dared to drive[2]. [1] I don't have any statistics, but in my university, 25-30% engineering students were female. There were less girls in traditionally male-dominated majors like civil engineering, compared to computer and electrical engineering. Also, the majority of Chemistry students were female. [2] http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/flogging-sentence-saudi-arabian-woman-after-driving-beggars-belief-2011-09-27-0 http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/flogging-sentence...
- tellarin 12y ago
  Interestingly, both Chemistry and Chemical Engineering also have a majority of female students in Brazil. I wonder why. I don't know if it's the same in other places.
- na85 12y ago
  My observation has been that US media outlets are less and less independent and more and more simply the mouthpiece of the US Government. To that effect, it's pretty much become a requirement for any US media outlet to criticize Iran.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Perhaps you could point us to some elected women in powerful Iranian government positions to shed light on this 'American govt propaganda'?
waterhouse 12y ago
[pedantry alert] The headline made me think the article was going to describe the sexual/romantic tastes of some apparently important subset of heterosexual men. Or maybe the behavior of some set of boys probably in high school who are intimidated by smart girls in their classes. I wonder to what extent this is intentional... Meanwhile, the article talks only about educated girls, not mentioning the word "smart" outside the title, and there is a case to be made that "smart" and "educated" are, though correlated, distinct attributes. One could thus make a case that the headline is wrong, most likely for attention-grabbing purposes. Sigh. [end of pedantry alert] That aside, let's see. "Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society." Indeed. "What saddens me is that we in the West aren’t acting as rationally. To fight militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so much in the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating militancy." I wonder if this has anything to do with what a powerful tool control of the educational system is. For example, look at what the North Korean government is able to achieve through that means. Are the Western governments exhibiting some kind of restraint here? Is it just that they haven't really bothered? Is giving "aid" more difficult politically than beefing up the military? Or is it that serious funding of education would lead to fights about who gets to control it? I am ignorant of such matters, so I'll shut up now.
hellbreakslose 12y ago
There is that saying for that: behind every great/successful man there stands a woman :)
chroma 12y ago
It's interesting to see one commonality not mentioned by both the article and (so far) commenters. Boko Haram, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, and Iran differ in almost every way one can compare: wealth, nationality, race, language, political views, and more. But they do share one thing besides the oppression of women. Have you guessed it yet? There are no Taoists throwing acid in the faces of women. There are no Buddhists massacring students. There are no Hindu dictatorships refusing to let women drive, or decreeing their testimony to be worth half that of a man's even in the case of rape. No Zoroastrian state punishes thieves with amputation. Some of these religions have had their share of atrocities in the past, but they are rather tame now. Many of them have adherents who are ignorant, poor, and oppressed (especially the Tibetan Buddhists), but the doctrines and traditions surrounding them seem less prone to cause violence and unnecessary suffering than a book endorsed by every group mentioned in the article. I truly wish it were otherwise.
- vorador 12y ago
  I'm glad you asked this question. The answer is probably not the one you're expecting though. Boko Haram, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia all share the same islamic doctrine: wahabism. Basically, Saudi Arabia bankrolled the spread of wahabism in the world in a bet to increase its influence. Iran is something else altogether, and I think that will see a lot more progress in the coming years. Everything is more complex than it appears initially. One last thing. There are no Buddhists massacring students. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-dozens-of-rohingya-muslims-massacred-by-buddhists-in-rakhine-burma/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-dozens-of-rohingya-muslims-ma...
  - chroma 12y ago
    Thank you for the counterexample. It sounds like you know more about this subject than I do. I was actually hesitant to mention Buddhism, since it was partially responsible for the kamikaze and other horrific acts. Still, it does seem that different religions inspire different practices when it comes to violence and human rights. Parts of Islam (specifically Wahhabism and Salafism) are particularly bad these days. The US certainly hasn't helped the situation, but getting attacked by Predator drones is no reason to stone adulterers to death. Lastly, I feel bad after commenting on this article. I don't think this article has much to contribute to HN, nor do I think HN will contribute much to the dialogue. Sexism + politics is a mix that few can discuss with civility. Now I've injected religion into the mix. I apologize.

84 points by kareemm 12y ago

Yes, boys are worthless. The reason the article cites for educating girls is that then they'll have fewer kids, especially fewer boys who could end up making trouble. And frankly the specific organizations for sending girls to school make me feel uneasy. I hope similar organizations exist for boys? I am sure there are lots of bright boys in the world who also can't afford an education. Why make it gender specific? Why not just sponsor kids education, irrespective of gender? I could imagine in some countries it is more difficult to send girls to school than boys. But a "send kids to school" organization could simply spend more effort there to send the girls to school. No need to make a "girls education" organization.

seanccox 12y ago
There is a need for "girls education" organizations. How else do you propose humanity overcome the statistically significant difference between the number of girls being educated and the number of boys? Girls aren't getting special treatment, they are being singled out for specific support to overcome patriarchy(ies) that would keep them undereducated, isolated, and disenfranchised from power. That isn't an issue that a "send kids to school" organization would be addressing.
- facepalm 12y ago
  I don't think those patriarchy issues or whatever are any consolidation for a boy who can't afford to go to school. Why does he deserve less help than a girl? It's not his fault if fewer girls are being educated.
- hueving 12y ago
  You missed the latter part. They would focus on girl shortages where it was relevant and general shortages in other places.
hessenwolf 12y ago
"You educate a boy, and he’ll have fewer children, but it’s a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family." Limited resources, maximise the effect. Also, the girls go on to be the caregivers traditionally, meaning the education has a knock-on effect. Thinking long term.
- facepalm 12y ago
  "Also, the girls go on to be the caregivers traditionally" Not if they are educated, presumably. Or if so, then maybe the education was wasted after all? The logic of the article is to educate girls so that they have fewer children. And why shouldn't educated boys take care to educate their offspring?
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Also, the girls go on to be the caregivers traditionally, meaning the education has a knock-on effect. Thinking long term. - "We must help these women more, because they must overcome the expectations of <gender stereotype>." - "We must help these women more, because it would be more useful since they are <gender stereotype>." Gender stereotypes: both oppressive and useful, depending on what you want to sell.
icebraining 12y ago
I could imagine in some countries it is more difficult to send girls to school than boys. But a "send kids to school" organization could simply spend more effort there to send the girls to school. So your suggestion is that they could do the same as they're doing now, but pretend otherwise?
- facepalm 12y ago
  No - they should simply aim to give all kids a good education. For some kids it takes more effort than for other kids. No need to differentiate by gender. Suppose there was an organization that only sent boys to school. Now if for one boy it is very cheap to go to school, and for one boy it is expensive (maybe he lives further away or he is poorer or whatever), should the organization only send the boy to school for whom it is cheap? I think the organization should try to help both boys. Likewise an organization that helps kids should help both boys and girls, no matter if helping one gender is more difficult than helping the other gender. Suppose you are in hospital with cancer. Should they deny you treatment because other men only need a cheap circumcision? What does the illness of any other man or woman have to do with your specific problem?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Camfed actually also helps boys. The thing is, when the disparities in school attendance are so great (7:1 in some places), because families almost always choose them when they can't afford to send all children to school, claiming to be gender agnostic would be almost ridiculous.
    - facepalm 12y ago
      Perhaps families make those choices because it is more efficient to send boys to school? If you can only afford to educate one of your kids, educating the girl might be less efficient because she might end up being a mother and unable to put her education to good use. So they would be acting with the same logic as the "girls education" organizations. Those are the results if you go by efficiency, rather than equality. Maybe some other solutions could be found, for example "we pay for your boy's education, but only if you also let us educate your girls". In any case, I think if an organization also helps boys, it shouldn't claim to be a "help the girls" organization.

crystalmace 12y ago

Very good story.

nhaehnle 12y ago

The article reminds us of some very good points about our relationships with developing countries. Education does so much more for spreading democracy than drones do, but our monetary priorities don't reflect this, unfortunately. I stumbled in the last paragraph: It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States are trafficked into commercial sex each year. What does that mean? With on the order of 5 million births per year (both boys and girls), that would imply 4% of all women are affected. That seems a bit on the high end. Does anybody know what's going on here in terms of statistics?

brc 12y ago
I always always doubt the veracity of these numbers - how could you possibly collect them accurately? - but that is not to say I doubt the truth that the problem exists. The mistake in your logic is that you're assuming all the children trafficked were born in the USA. Most likely, they would be trafficked by people smugglers and sold as prostitutes, and would come from poor countries. From my understanding (and I don't claim much knowledge at all) the home-grown, self employed, 'Pretty Woman' type of prostitute is very much a minority.
rosser 12y ago
As I understand it, most of the American girls trafficked into sex slavery are runaways. They're typically "recruited" by a pimp who initially poses as a boyfriend or caretaker. Before long, he needs help coming up with money for rent or something, and it's "just this once", and, and, and... Appreciably lower numbers are kidnapped, or introduced into the trade by someone they already know.
cturner 12y ago
> Education does so much more for spreading democracy than > drones do, but our monetary priorities don't reflect > this, unfortunately. Education often gets reduced to money arguments. Is there a relationship between the amount we spend on education and the quality of it? As I see it - not beyond a point which is fairly low. You need to pay enough that people who are given to be teachers can live a comfortable life doing what they love. The hard bit is the culture - having people around who are motivated to be a teacher for its own sake. And not because it's simply a stable job, or for the prestige associated with it. We try to use money to blast momentum into broken culture - Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, poor neighbourhoods in our own countries. Sometimes

Dewie 12y ago

Feb. 25. 2014: Federal Government College attack: Fury at military over Yobe deaths. At least 29 teenage boys dead at Federal Government College Buni Yadi. Boko Haram doesn't only target education for girls. Though that is how the media seem to want to present it.

slowmotiony 12y ago
The media didn't give a shit when they were burning boys alive.
- McGuffin 12y ago
  Stop kidding yourself, because neither did you.
  - elnate 12y ago
    How could I? I didn't know.
- Joeboy 12y ago
  I don't think the media initially cared much about the kidnapping of the girls either. They were wrong-footed by the news spreading on twitter. I agree that the much lesser coverage of the deaths of the boys is not really OK though.
tzs 12y ago
A kidnapping is a crime in progress, so we'd expect it to remain in the news until it is over. A murder is a short term event, and so is only in the news for a short time unless something newsworthy happens in the investigation.
- Dewie 12y ago
  Boko Haram's activities can be seen as an ongoing mission in suppressing education. These killings and kidnappings aren't isolated incidents, so in a sense, the murders weren't short term events. The kidnappings haven't been presented as an isolated event, either; it's been emphasized that Boko Haram, a known and active terrorist group with a "track record", is behind it, and that we must stop groups like this from doing the awful things that it is doing.

QuantumChaos 12y ago

The article tries to fit this event into a narrative about oppression of women, and women's education. And yet Boko Haram are against education in general, and in a previous attack on a school, killed 59 school boys, while letting the girls go. [1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/boko-haram-dontkillourboys.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/12/boko-haram-...

tsotha 12y ago
Yep. The entire basis of the article is built upon a false premise.

a-saleh 12y ago

Reminded me of documentary Solar Mamas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON_NQ1HnRYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON_NQ1HnRYs It is about program in Jordan to educate mothers in the poorest regions in basic electrical engineering to allow them to assembly and repair basic solar powered utensils. (Mostly panel->power adapter->battery->light) The most interesting question for me in the film was "Why don't you educate men as well?" with answer along the lines "Any man from here with any marketable skill would run abroad, from his family, mothers will want to do something to feed their children". Then there was the scene, where husband of one of the women in the program tried to force her back home and abandon the "solar" school. I wonder if we could change that attitude about educating women in men like these ...

ars 12y ago
Yah, that organization is extremely misandristic http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/barefoot-college-bunker-roy/ http://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/barefoot-college-bu... A choice quote: "First we declared that men were untrainable. Men are restless, men are compulsively mobile, men are ambitious, and they all want a certificate to show for their efforts. And the moment you give one of them a certificate, he leaves the village looking for a job in the city." .... "Because the moment you give a woman a certificate, like a man, she’ll see it as a passport for leaving rural areas and going to urban areas to find a job." So basically like a person? And men and women are the same in this regard? But said that way you have no opportunity to bash men. Any organization that tries to destroy the concept of a family unit in the name of education is not a good organization in my book. They seem to be one of the worst of the bunch. Especially since the actual "education" they give is all but worthless - they teach basically nothing, and make the poor women think they have been educated.

tzs 12y ago

Duplicate from Sunday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728945

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- tzs 12y ago
  If the submitter did not intend to submit a duplicate, it lets them know that they need to be more careful in the future to strip extraneous query parameters from their submissions. Is that not useful? Also, for people that read via RSS who have not yet seen either submission, there is a reasonable chance they will see the original first, and might comment there. Hence, having a link in the duplicate submission's thread back to the prior submission, so people can go check for more comments there, is useful. I also put a comment in the original pointing to the duplicate, and noting it had more comments. Edit: the deleted comment to which this is a reply was raising the question of whether it is useful to note that a submission is a duplicate when the duplicate is doing better and has many more comments.

smnrchrds 12y ago

> Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. Any article that compares Iran and Saudi Arabia like this is a naive over-generalization. I'm not sure what the author means by empowerment, but Iran is much closer to US in terms of gender equality than Saudi Arabia. In Iran, 12-year education is mandatory for both genders. There are more female university graduates than male (around 60%), although much like US, fewer pursue engineering degrees[1]. More than half of medical students are female. Yes, girls are discriminated against in labor market. There are less likely to get a job if there is a similarly-qualified or slightly less-qualified male candidate and will probably earn less than their male counterparts, but don't you have the same problem in your country? I hope you understand why I hate it when someone puts the name of my country in the same sentence as Saudi Arabia, where they sentenced a woman to flogging because she dared to drive[2]. [1] I don't have any statistics, but in my university, 25-30% engineering students were female. There were less girls in traditionally male-dominated majors like civil engineering, compared to computer and electrical engineering. Also, the majority of Chemistry students were female. [2] http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/flogging-sentence-saudi-arabian-woman-after-driving-beggars-belief-2011-09-27-0 http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/flogging-sentence...

tellarin 12y ago
Interestingly, both Chemistry and Chemical Engineering also have a majority of female students in Brazil. I wonder why. I don't know if it's the same in other places.
na85 12y ago
My observation has been that US media outlets are less and less independent and more and more simply the mouthpiece of the US Government. To that effect, it's pretty much become a requirement for any US media outlet to criticize Iran.
- hueving 12y ago
  Perhaps you could point us to some elected women in powerful Iranian government positions to shed light on this 'American govt propaganda'?

waterhouse 12y ago

[pedantry alert] The headline made me think the article was going to describe the sexual/romantic tastes of some apparently important subset of heterosexual men. Or maybe the behavior of some set of boys probably in high school who are intimidated by smart girls in their classes. I wonder to what extent this is intentional... Meanwhile, the article talks only about educated girls, not mentioning the word "smart" outside the title, and there is a case to be made that "smart" and "educated" are, though correlated, distinct attributes. One could thus make a case that the headline is wrong, most likely for attention-grabbing purposes. Sigh. [end of pedantry alert] That aside, let's see. "Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society." Indeed. "What saddens me is that we in the West aren’t acting as rationally. To fight militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so much in the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating militancy." I wonder if this has anything to do with what a powerful tool control of the educational system is. For example, look at what the North Korean government is able to achieve through that means. Are the Western governments exhibiting some kind of restraint here? Is it just that they haven't really bothered? Is giving "aid" more difficult politically than beefing up the military? Or is it that serious funding of education would lead to fights about who gets to control it? I am ignorant of such matters, so I'll shut up now.

hellbreakslose 12y ago

There is that saying for that: behind every great/successful man there stands a woman :)

chroma 12y ago

It's interesting to see one commonality not mentioned by both the article and (so far) commenters. Boko Haram, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, and Iran differ in almost every way one can compare: wealth, nationality, race, language, political views, and more. But they do share one thing besides the oppression of women. Have you guessed it yet? There are no Taoists throwing acid in the faces of women. There are no Buddhists massacring students. There are no Hindu dictatorships refusing to let women drive, or decreeing their testimony to be worth half that of a man's even in the case of rape. No Zoroastrian state punishes thieves with amputation. Some of these religions have had their share of atrocities in the past, but they are rather tame now. Many of them have adherents who are ignorant, poor, and oppressed (especially the Tibetan Buddhists), but the doctrines and traditions surrounding them seem less prone to cause violence and unnecessary suffering than a book endorsed by every group mentioned in the article. I truly wish it were otherwise.

vorador 12y ago
I'm glad you asked this question. The answer is probably not the one you're expecting though. Boko Haram, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia all share the same islamic doctrine: wahabism. Basically, Saudi Arabia bankrolled the spread of wahabism in the world in a bet to increase its influence. Iran is something else altogether, and I think that will see a lot more progress in the coming years. Everything is more complex than it appears initially. One last thing. There are no Buddhists massacring students. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-dozens-of-rohingya-muslims-massacred-by-buddhists-in-rakhine-burma/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-dozens-of-rohingya-muslims-ma...
- chroma 12y ago
  Thank you for the counterexample. It sounds like you know more about this subject than I do. I was actually hesitant to mention Buddhism, since it was partially responsible for the kamikaze and other horrific acts. Still, it does seem that different religions inspire different practices when it comes to violence and human rights. Parts of Islam (specifically Wahhabism and Salafism) are particularly bad these days. The US certainly hasn't helped the situation, but getting attacked by Predator drones is no reason to stone adulterers to death. Lastly, I feel bad after commenting on this article. I don't think this article has much to contribute to HN, nor do I think HN will contribute much to the dialogue. Sexism + politics is a mix that few can discuss with civility. Now I've injected religion into the mix. I apologize.