Message-Id: <l03102800b08e884b8387@[153.90.236.25]>
In-Reply-To: <199711111744.JAA06279@isaac.exploratorium.edu>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 15:51:22 -0700
To: pinhole@exploratorium.edu
From: Steven Eiger <eiger@montana.edu>
Subject: Re: Pinhole Daily Digest
Linda and others,
I enjoyed your letter, and certainly would not argue with any part, as it
is all fact. I just wonder what our response ought to be. My response has
been to try and treat everyone equally. Some might argue that this will
not do, as young boys seem to beg for more attention; and hence equal
treatment may result in unequal treatment by other measures. I personally
believe that genetics plays a far larger role than most people are willing
to believe. This stems out of my interest in those bizarre twin studies
which, to me, underlined the power of genes in determining behaviour; and
the efforts of a handful of feminist women friends who were either
scientists or mathemeticians and desperately tried to get their young
daughters to take a more mechanical outlook on life, and failed. They all
eventually learned to laugh at this, and to appreciate the creativity of
their girl's play within a different mode. Likewise my son never would
touch a rag doll, even at 6 months old. Thus I believe that it may be that
women are not attracted to engineering, and that if we never reach parity
there it is just fine. On the other hand I have seen a strong push to get
women involved in my field, physiology and cellular biology, and at least
thru the post-doctoral level, this has been a tremendous success. This
strongly argues that women must have been discouraged in the past, and they
just needed encouragement. I think that we ought to focus our attention on
encouraging women to try for scientific fields, and ensure that they are
paid equally, and generally try to be as fair as possible. But when after
this is all done and there still is a paucity of women engineers, we should
let it lie and say well there are also few men in nursing. The pay issue
is not trivial for in some countries women make up most of the doctors, and
the pay is low for them; we ought to pay people fairly; are doctors paid
well here because they were men? I may be motivated to write this because
of my son who is about to start school next year; I do not want him to be
discriminated against for his sex. what if a large portion of what we are
seeing now is genetic, we do something social to try and counteract this,
and end up with a truly screwed up generation. I believe we ought to know
more about all this before we proceed with any major social engineering
experiments; or what will we say to the parents of the shy boys in the
class. While there may be some differences in general, there will always
be a tremendous overlap between the sexes in terms of shyness, interest,
trying to please, etc. My suspicion is that teachers have treated both
sexes fairly equally for a few years now, the equal acceptance by both
sexes to our medical school here argues for that, and that the real
problems lie in those damn TV shows or whatever is driving popular culture
at present. The studies which show that if girls are treated differently,
different outcomes occur are no doubt good, but they never ask what was the
cost to the boys in the class, how did they turn out. We must choose a path
which is acceptable to parents of all children. Studies may show that the
little boys can handle or improve with a little bit of discrimination, but
they haven't been done yet. Maybe the answer is single sex education for
all. Steve Eiger