Re: Are Men Really More Intelligent Than Women?
Dear Mr or Ms Bastard, or 'Lucki', if I may be informal, I agree that the pressure to self-censor can come from other girls, and does very, very often. However, that's just a result of the same stuff we all hear from our infancy.
There is a lot ot be said for same-sex labs and schools. Girls regularly do very well in both maths and sciences at an all-girls school, and this often (from studies I have read) gives them the confidence to enter, and cope within, a male-dominated area of work -- because they've had their confidence sustained for so long. As a working environment, an all-female lab would be considered absurd, ridiculous, as would an IT department, but fewer eyebrows are raised when it's an all-male lab or all-male IT department. yet I'd sign up for an all-female IT department in a heartboat. (Chaps, queue to the left to make your 'ooo, so would I' comments.)
I do not trivialise sexual bigots. But I am so used to them that my rage-o-meter finally won't ring the alarm bell any more. I was in a job where the sort of comments Tim Hunt made would be considered pretty OK, compared to the other jaw-dropping shit. I could also talk about the racism, but that was a very unhappy place.
My ideal would be to work with those holding a feminist understanding of the world. That is to say, with women and men who saw their world as one where women and men were equally capable, equally human beings, and equally deserving of respect. IT IS NOT HARD. And yet, every day, women who should support women don't, and men who should know women as human beings apparently find that mind-boggling or laughable, and every day the world stays mean-spirited, intolerant, unequal, and sad.