I was going to post this in the comments for my Wednesday post, but it just got too long, so I'll make it today's post.

I seem to have kicked a bit of a beehive with my post on Wednesday. I was even called a sexist pig. I should know better than post something controversial at 1AM, so I will attempt to clarify.

First, to answer some of the specific questions from comments and in person:

Are men and women equal?

Not to sound like Bill Clinton, but that depends on what is meant by "equal." Should men and women be equal before the law? Certainly. They're not, of course; divorce courts massively favor women, while the criminal courts still haven't got a handle on how to deal with female crime victims. The longest day of my life was sitting in a jury box listening to the testimony of a 12-year-old girl describing in explicit detail every sex act performed on her by her pervert step-father, then watch her being cross-examined by the defense. When the rules for judicial procedures were set up, I don't think this was the anticipated situation.

If you are using "equal" in the way the screeching buzz saws lurking in places like Harvard's Womyn's Studies use it, then no, men and women are most certainly not equal. Ask any male member of our military that gets stuck in a combat unit with women. Or spend some time hanging around in Gold's Gym. The average man's warm-up weight is an immovable object to the average woman.

The question becomes, does it matter in the course of everyday life that I can do a dozen sloppy reps on a bench with a couple hundred pounds and Debbie can't? For the most part, not really. Bench pressing isn't a big part of being a CEO or a programmer or a doctor or a travel agent. But there are circumstances that it does matter. Like in combat. Or in some manufacturing jobs. Insisting that there be equal numbers of women in combat roles or on the floor at, say, Bethlehem Steel, flies in the face of all common sense. Everyone knows this, yet it cannot be said without being called "sexist."

Now to move to the next step. If there are obvious differences in physical ability between men and women, might it not follow that there other differences? For example, there are structural differences between male and female brains. Might this not indicate some sort of difference in cognition as well? Specific item: every woman I know, other than my mother, navigates by landmarks. The way to get from point A to point B is a series of waypoints. Most men navigate by spatial reasoning; point A is east of point B, therefore, what is important is that I keep a westerly heading, not what particular road I use to get there. Is one way superior than the other? That depends on the circumstances. Spatial reasoning works better on unfamiliar turf or when following a map. Landmark navigation works better on familiar terrain or following verbal instructions. Spatial reasoning is more flexible, and deals better with unexpected events (such as a detour). A landmark navigator knows instantly they have strayed from the path (I don't recognize that house/tree/rock/etc.), while a spatial reasoner will continue to push forward because they are still heading west, oblivious to the fact that the road dead-ends at a cliff.

In an ideal world, both methods would be employed. More importantly, either will get the average person through an average day.

What about other differences between the sexes? Most job categories are equally populated by men and women. However, some job categories clearly are not. In some, men are vastly over-represented, in others, women are. When I was in high school this was presented as "proof" that certain career options were closed to women by sexist pig men who forced women into menial jobs like nursing and teaching. Right about the time I started college (1982), there was a massive effort to get female college students into engineering, math, and science. As a science/math/engineering student, I was all for the idea. I was 18 and liked the idea of having women in my classes and study groups (and house and car and bed and anywhere else I was). I was vastly disappointed. Engineering 101 was in a 200-seat lecture hall. On the first day of class, there were about 10 seats with females in them. By the end of the class, there was one. Physics? Same story. Calculus? About 30% of the class was female, but only because BBA's had to have a semester of calculus to graduate. Second semester calculus had two women out of 30+ students. Every computer science course? All male except for one woman.

So what does this mean? Does it indicate a world-wide conspiracy to force women out of Chemistry 101 and into Home Economics? Are there armed guards at the door to the physics lab that prevent women from entering? No? Then where are they? I hate to waste electrons stating the obvious, but if NOW wants more women engineers, then women are going to have to leave Womyn's Studies and take math and science and engineering classes.

[Aside: this applies to blacks as well. In five years at UofM-Flint with a 20-30% black enrollment, I never sat in any class with a black student of either gender. To repeat: if the NAACP wants more black engineers, then blacks are going to have to leave Black Studies and take math and science and engineering classes.]

Given that there is no barrier to girls taking math and science classes in grade school, or women taking math and science and engineering classes in college, and yet those classes continue to be predominantly male, we are left with one of two conclusions. Either females lack ability, or females lack interest in math and science. We could argue about which it is, but at the end of the day, does it matter? Is there any practical difference between someone not having the ability to do a task, and not having enough interest to bother with it? I pay people to work on my cars. I get a lot of flack for paying others to do relatively simple repairs like brake pad replacement or oil changes. People... well, men actually... are constantly lecturing me about how simple it is to do such-and-such. The issue is not that I don't have the ability to change my own oil, I simply lack the interest. Back when I worked for minimum wage and went to college, I did all my own car repairs including engine rebuilds. That was out of necessity. As soon as I could afford to, I started paying other people to crawl around under my car, and spent the time I saved to do things I did have an interest in. So from a practical standpoint, lack of ability and lack of interest both end in a lack of participation, which is observed result.

That isn't to say that the question of ability-vs.-interest is unimportant, but it is untouchable due to the PC police on our university campuses.

Which brings me back to what I was getting at on Wednesday. Even in grade school, where the girls pretty much swept the awards and scholarships, one guy walked away with every math and science award. In an environment that seems to favor females (more on that in a bit), no female was able to excel in math or science.

Public policy implication: Primarily, it doesn't matter how much people scream, you can't hire what isn't there. Insisting that Boeing should lose its military contracts because they don't hire non-existent female aerospace engineers is nonsensical.

Superior vs. inferior

Every person has a different mix of natural abilities and learned skills. The value that mix has in any given market, or the status assigned to people who possess a particular mix, varies widely from one culture, economy, or time period to the next. My mix makes me good at being a systems analyst. I can spend every minute of every day playing with computers and be perfectly happy. Nestina screams in frustration while trying to check her e-mail. However, her particular mix allows her to create interesting and beautiful things from, well, almost anything. Her latest creation is an incense burner made out of, er, "borrowed" chandelier parts. In North America in 2005, a systems analyst makes a very comfortable living and enjoys fairly high prestige. Artistic people, on the other hand, don't do so well economically. I've known several; one worked a GM assembly line, one drove a bread truck, one is in the National Guard; I could go on, but I think my point is made. As a society, we don't value either the work or the person when it comes to artistic individuals, except in rare circumstances.

Now the big question: does the fact that in this time and this place, my mix of skills is more marketable or perceived as more valuable to society make me superior to Nestina in some absolute moral sense? Absolutely not. Does the fact that certain abilities favor one gender over the other make one gender superior to the other? Again, absolutely not.

A bit of an aside: I find it interesting how Hollywood and NOW seem to cling to a rather Orwellian definition of equality: men and women are equal, but women are more equal. From sit-coms to movies to cellphone commercials, men are stupid, immature, immoral, and clueless, and take endless shots to the balls from their morally superior, intelligent, mature, in-touch wives/girlfriends/mothers/female coworkers. If any show on TV dared to take 10% of the cheap shots at women that are routinely taken at men, the show would be yanked off the air, its sponsors boycotted, and the writers tied into chairs with their eyes taped open and forced to watch Oprah until their brains ran out of their ears.

Education

When I was in school, corporal punishment was still allowed. Mark Twain once commented to the effect that the gallows served to wonderfully focus a man's mind. The unmistakable sound of a stout piece of pine being applied to someone's backside does the same for little boys. Every one of us knew that there were lines that we had better never cross. The fastest way to find yourself grabbing your ankles in the principal's office was to show disrespect to a female teacher. You could push your luck to a certain point with the male teachers, but God help you if you messed with the ladies. There were other lines. They were very bright lines. We didn't cross them often.

In the 1980's the news media decided that corporal punishment was a Bad Thing. Stories were run describing vanishingly rare instances of teachers beating students bloody as if they were everyday occurrences in every school in the nation. Soon the desired effect was achieved and corporal punishment was banned. With male students freed from any meaningful restraint, classrooms erupted in chaos. Act two of this little drama was the drugs. With no other means at their disposal, schools started sending children home with a note to the parents that their (almost always male) child would not be allowed back into school without Ritalin or one of its equivalents. Please see your doctor immediately. With the introduction of ADHD as a defined mental illness, every male child in the nation was now officially diseased. The good news was that insurance would pay for it all. The bad news is that it has been known since the 1960's that these drugs cause brain damage in pre-pubescent children.

Act three is what I call the sissyfication of school. First to go was wrestling on the playground. Then dodgeball. Then tag. Then kickball. Then schools started with the idiotic zero-tolerance policies covering every conceivable thing from kitchen utensils to aspirin. Cafeteria menus had to be updated so there was no need for anything but a plastic spoon. Sharp corners were carefully rounded off and hard surfaces padded.

My biggest concern in all this is the effect on the tail-ends of the bell curve. It has long been known that the bell curves for men and women, while symmetrical about the same mean have significantly different shapes. The bell curve for males is flatter; fewer at the mean, more at the extremes. An IQ of 120 is pretty much the minimum for anyone in engineering and even higher for the top levels of math and science. The segment of the population below 90 are populating our prisons. There is a large preponderance of males in both of these groups. More importantly, they seem connected. What our schools are doing is attempting by whatever means necessary, including forced drug therapy (a method we have borrowed whole cloth from the Soviet Union), to make the male bell curve look like the female bell curve. This does not improve the lot of females in any absolute sense, only in a relative sense. There will be a future impact on the prosperity of both males and females as well: I think loosing an entire generation of theoretical physicists and aerospace engineers may prove important at some point down the road. Worse, I don't see a lot of evidence of any corresponding trimming on the left side of the curve.

I fear we are creating the worst of all possible worlds.

And that's a lot of words. I hope that clears things up.