dreamer_easy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dreamer_easy) wrote2008-09-01 08:42 pm
dreamer_easy) wrote2008-09-01 08:42 pm
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Bric a Brac from the world of wimmins
Turns out boys are not better than girls at maths and science. Hooda thunkit?
Hulk vs. Valkyrie! "Every male chauvinist pig in the world will tremble!"
Down Under
Australian women still face sex bias, including high levels of outright sexual harassment. A national plan means to tackle that, plus "Boosting women's retirement savings, encouraging family-friendly work practices, [reviewing] sex discrimination laws, and promoting women in leadership roles."
This one's from June: Gender wage gap under review: with women still earning less than men, even for comparable work, the Australian guvmint plans a pay equity tribunal.
Challenge to legal boys' club: female barristers are being systematically excluded from work; state governments seek to redress this.
Designer vaginas blacklisted by gynos: Australian and NZ doctors reject the West's version of Female Genital Mutilation as unnecessary, dangerous, and exploitative.
To hell and back: appetite for life regained: Lucy Howard-Taylor's Biting Anorexia "is the only memoir written by a recovered anorexic to be endorsed by the Eating Disorders Foundation of NSW because it refuses to glamorise the disorder".
Australian women wrong on heart disease: survey: "Most women mistakenly believe that breast cancer is the leading cause of death among females, underestimating heart disease as the nation's biggest killer."
Hillsong hits schools with beauty gospel: troubled young women taught by unqualified counsellors to boost their self-esteem through nail polish?
Family violence unit incomplete: promised domestic violence police unit for NSW pretty much forgotten.
Abused wife thought: "I've got to kill him".
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world
Women working for the government or contractors in occupied Iraq under threat from their male colleagues: After rape victim used cell phone to call for help, KBR bans use of personal phones in Iraq. (See also this blog post from last December.)
In the UK: Rape victims told alcohol consumption may cost them compensation. The relevant body, CICA, admits it was wrong to reduce compensation by as much as 25%, but refuses to review such cases unless victims complain. One woman's story: 'I did my bit in reporting a rapist, the authorities didn't do theirs'.
Still in the UK: Sex assaults: Police accused of adopting 'Life on Mars' attitude. The former head of Derbyshire CID: "My advice to cops is: investigate. If someone gets their car nicked or their house broken into and their DVD player's gone, then you start an investigation, irrespective of the respectability of the victim. While some forces are embracing change, there are other individuals playing the Life on Mars stance where they allege that most cases are false allegations and not worth pursuing."
Hulk vs. Valkyrie! "Every male chauvinist pig in the world will tremble!"
Down Under
Australian women still face sex bias, including high levels of outright sexual harassment. A national plan means to tackle that, plus "Boosting women's retirement savings, encouraging family-friendly work practices, [reviewing] sex discrimination laws, and promoting women in leadership roles."
This one's from June: Gender wage gap under review: with women still earning less than men, even for comparable work, the Australian guvmint plans a pay equity tribunal.
Challenge to legal boys' club: female barristers are being systematically excluded from work; state governments seek to redress this.
Designer vaginas blacklisted by gynos: Australian and NZ doctors reject the West's version of Female Genital Mutilation as unnecessary, dangerous, and exploitative.
To hell and back: appetite for life regained: Lucy Howard-Taylor's Biting Anorexia "is the only memoir written by a recovered anorexic to be endorsed by the Eating Disorders Foundation of NSW because it refuses to glamorise the disorder".
Australian women wrong on heart disease: survey: "Most women mistakenly believe that breast cancer is the leading cause of death among females, underestimating heart disease as the nation's biggest killer."
Hillsong hits schools with beauty gospel: troubled young women taught by unqualified counsellors to boost their self-esteem through nail polish?
Family violence unit incomplete: promised domestic violence police unit for NSW pretty much forgotten.
Abused wife thought: "I've got to kill him".
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world
Women working for the government or contractors in occupied Iraq under threat from their male colleagues: After rape victim used cell phone to call for help, KBR bans use of personal phones in Iraq. (See also this blog post from last December.)
In the UK: Rape victims told alcohol consumption may cost them compensation. The relevant body, CICA, admits it was wrong to reduce compensation by as much as 25%, but refuses to review such cases unless victims complain. One woman's story: 'I did my bit in reporting a rapist, the authorities didn't do theirs'.
Still in the UK: Sex assaults: Police accused of adopting 'Life on Mars' attitude. The former head of Derbyshire CID: "My advice to cops is: investigate. If someone gets their car nicked or their house broken into and their DVD player's gone, then you start an investigation, irrespective of the respectability of the victim. While some forces are embracing change, there are other individuals playing the Life on Mars stance where they allege that most cases are false allegations and not worth pursuing."
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I think there is a fundamental methodological problem involved in this study (but then, I have lots of fundamental methodological challenges to nearly every piece of sociological analysis) - there is a lot of comparing unequal things. There does seem to be some support for the notion that while the "average" man and the "average" woman will perform roughly equivalently on certain tests, there is greater variation among the boys scores.
The problem I have with a lot of this type of research is that it makes the fundamental assumption that the assorted other variables can truly be isolated and that sex can be the only variable examined. I do not believe that this is so: individual tastes, preferences, backgrounds, etc, seem to contribute far more toward whether someone chooses to put in the work to be good at a subject. Heck, we don't understand why, given two classmates, one of them will call a subject "easy" while another finds it "hard." Until we do, anything we try to say with authority should be considered suspect.
My own anecdotal evidence is this: I took the hardest math class in my life in 1989. 43 people started the class, including 3 women. 17 finished the class, including 3 women. 5 went on to the next semester, including 3 women. My anecdotal conclusion? Very few women choose to do this, but those who do are very good at it. (I was in the 17, but not in the 5).
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i wonder which bit the former derbyshire cid's referencing here...an overall outdated way of looking at crime, or the bit where the series' lead character was raped and it was treated as a great big joke? :/
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