Posted on 03/10/2011 8:25:09 AM PST by pabianice
Absolutely.
Funny. I detested statistics, it was completely uninteresting to me in college...like sharp pencils in the eyes.
In my job now, I do a LOT of data extraction and dissemination, and to my surprise, I found that data did interest me, but...it had to have context. As an intellectual exercise, it was painful. As something with real ramifications and applications, I find it fascinating.
Maybe there is more to that than meets the eye...
In the end, they hired some female ditz who had barely graduated high school and was adept only at making herself disappear whenever the workload got a little heavy. Go figure.
I agree, and I am a female that is somewhat “male-brained” in my interests.
When our daughter was small, she had access to her older brothers’ toys and some she played with, but she mostly wanted girl toys. Being slightly affected by feminist thinking at the time, I was horrified when she wanted a Barbie doll at age 3. I realized then that girls follow their innate interests just as boys do. We have seen over the years that trying to make girls masculine and boys more feminine has been a recipe for disaster.
In other puzzling new, “Girls Have Disproportionate Number of Dolls”
When I was 13, I was trying to fix a lawnmower engine that was dead. I went to drain the gasoline into a styrofoam cup and...it dissolved in my hand (as we all know it does...now)
So I got another Styrofoam cup and dropped some gas into it…same thing. I grabbed a Maxwell House coffee can and drained the gas into it, filling it ¾ full. There was a bag of Styrofoam pellets nearby, and out of curiosity, I dropped one in.
It disappeared.
So I grabbed a handful and dropped them in…poof…they were gone. This was fascinating. I began throwing handfuls in, just to see how many would go in. Eventually, it turned into a thick goo, and the pellets stopped disintegrating so quickly.
Now I had this coffee can full of thick goo, and had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t throw it in the trash, so I just stuck it, paint stirrer and all in back of some cabinet and forgot all about it.
When we moved out of that house a few years later and were cleaning out the garage, I walked over and saw my dad through the window, holding this can in his hand, looking at it quizzically, his countenance a picture of pure bewilderment.
LOL! A blind squirrel finds a nut...:)
(Great Thomas Sowell quote, btw...)
Because we love taking care of babies, animals, and other helpless things that need to be nurtured. For most of us, it's in our DNA. Also, new techniques have made it possible for a 120-pound woman to handle a 1200-pound horse, so more women can go into a large-animal practice. And while many years ago some male ranchers, farmers, and horsemen held secret or not-so-secret prejudices about the competence and abilities of female large-animal vets, those have mostly gone away now, so they're willing to use women vets for livestock.
Anyway, back to the main topic: women who love science in general are attracted to the life sciences. I went to grad school to be a scientist and for a long time I was absolutely enthralled with my work, and was willing to put in endless hours in the lab. Eventually I realized that a career in science was going to mean I probably couldn't have marriage and babies, because my field would always require a sixteen-hour workday. It was fun, but I never got to see the sunshine or take a day off because the rats always needed attention. It would be easier being a physician (which is part of the reason half of all med school classes are now composed of females).
I know some woman engineers, computer scientists, and physicists. They're great, they do wonderful work, they're pushing back the frontiers of science just like their male colleagues, and they never, ever whine about equality; they just do science. Equality isn't an issue anymore; the value of the work they do is the sole issue for them and their colleagues. They are not screaming and calling men pigs.
Very well said.
The visible employees serving bank customers today are virtually all women. It now seems odd to occasionally see a male bank teller. Likewise, clerks/salespeople in retail stores and restaurants are by far predominantly female. Even in hardware/bldg supply/gardening and plant stores/nurseries there appears to be a predominance, or at least nearly that, of females. I seriously question where young men are finding employment.
My daughter is transferring to Salem State.
" But nearly a third of women (against just 9 per cent of men) also believe that working part-time is “important” or 'somewhat important. ...."
That's the reason that less women are at the top of any profession that demands being a workaholic. It's not rocket science.
For whatever psychological reasons, only two thirds of women have no problem with simply showing up for work for 40 hours per week. That pretty much rules out having the same number of women as men being at the top in careers where being at the top requires being a workaholic and not merely working 40 per hour week.
The majority of medical school graduates are now women. Yet, female M.D.'s, on the average, make less money than male M.D.'s.
Why?
Because a large number of female M.D.'s go into Family Practice, decide to drop their hospital admitting privileges so that a "Hospitalist" can treat you as an inpatient if you really get sick and then see clinic patients only 4 days per weeks, during clinic hours, so they they can have "Quality of Life" without a beeper and with three day weekends.
Since they essentially function as glorified Physician's Assistants, they are paid accordingly or are simply replaced by Physician's Assistants by the bean-counters. The same goes for the male Family Practitioners that make the same lifestyle choices.
The female M.D.'s who actually suck it up, become Hospitalists or full-time surgeons and deal with those critically ill patients in the ICU or a perforated bowel at 3:00 AM get paid the Big Bucks. The bean counters know that such a person cannot be replaced by a Physician's Assistant.
In a highly competitive, supply and demand world, you can have either:
(A.)the Big Bucks
or
(B.)a four day work week with no nights or weekends so that you can pursue "Quality of Life"
Unless Mommy and Daddy own the company you work for, you are not going to get both (A.) and (B.) but that is exactly what the victim feminists demand for women.
She never was into dolls and can wield a chain saw and other tools like a pro. She has hunted with her dad/brother and shot 2 8-pt bucks and still shoots trap with dad. Her friends are amazed at the things she knows how to do.
I always figured it was what interested them and I have seen where the majority of females do lean towards the "more nuturing" fields.
Glad you appreciate them...I have always thought there was a commonality to being a young person where you do things, and later can look back and think “What must my parents have been thinking? They must have thought I had a screw loose!”
I guess the truth is, we all have loose screws as kids, and it is the job of our parents to help us tighten them down before everything comes apart! (Liberals think it is the job of society/government to do that...)
One of my favorite movies is “October Sky”, because it seemed to capture that...thing, whatever it is, that makes boys mix things together to see what happens.
I live in Massachusetts, and my wife told me the other day that there was a house in Sudbury that the cops were called to because some teenage kid was mixing chemicals to do something.
MY first reaction was: “So? Heck, when I was a young teenager, I was mixing all kinds of stuff together...”
My wife said no...it was different. The kid had mail order chemicals, the police called in Hazmat teams, closed off and evacuated the street, they had helicopters overhead and such.
Apparently, the kid’s mom had called the police. This appeared to be more than your standard 12 year old “what happens if I light this on fire?” curiosity.
Yeah, THAT is different. But, it is true. Some of the stuff I tell my wife I did as a kid she is amazed at, and I said I thought all kids did stuff like that, and she said “I sure didn’t...”
My husband is similar to you. He was one that caused many grey hairs in his family !! But he was always curious how something worked. Luckily he passed down that curiousity to our children as I will say I am quite boring...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.