"wow, it only took 50 years to accomplish legal equality and prove women are capable and competent in many areas men have always been."
Except that they largely aren't accepted as that. Legal equality is not the same thing as actual equality. Did you read the recent story I wrote on role incredulity and the authority gap? If not, I encourage you to do so and particularly to read the comments where tons of women and a couple of men talk about shocking instances of women being treated as less out of hand, even when they were doctors and lawyers. In fact, research indicates this goes on even at the highest levels of power.
Did you read the story about how 85% of American women begin being sexually harassed in childhood - in young childhood for a lot of them. How on earth is that equality? Sexual harassment is about domination and making sure that women know their place as sex objects and second-class citizens. Oh, and lest we forget the MeToo movement, where a million comments detailing abuse hit Twitter in the first 48 hours.
I'm glad that there was acceptance of women in the trade school you went to. Things are certainly better for younger generations, but there still are huge numbers of women who are essentially drummed out of STEM and other male dominated professions today because many men feel threatened by women. And I'm not going to dig up the research for you on that. If you want to learn more about that, there's plenty out there.
Gender indoctrination means women are told from a young age that boys are better at math and spacial relations and boys are then given toys that teach them skills in those areas where girls aren't — so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Women who go to all-girls schools and universities also don’t internalize so many of these narratives or desires to look more “girly” for their male classmates.
When they do still seek to go into medicine, police work, and other previously male dominated fields they get hazed, and sexually harassed, and attacked for doing so, so don't act like it's just due to women not naturally wanting to be in those fields.
"In 2019, the Sydney Morning Herald published a story on the rampant sexual harassment, bullying, and misogyny that female surgeons routinely experienced in Australia and New Zealand. It’s something that female doctors, and surgeons, in particular, experience in many countries.
To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”
And, in spite of all that, even when women were legally barred from a lot of these fields, they still studied them, found ways to learn things like math and science, and invented the hell out of useful stuff. But we never learn about any of that in school because a white androcentric model of "civilization" is still very much in effect. And that's what I was reacting to.
As I already noted, men did "a lot of this stuff exclusively" because they had barred women from having the opportunity and they were making use of the fact that they had women supporting them at home doing all the rest. If not wives, it was sisters or mothers. I'm sorry, I'm not going to celebrate that like some sort of great accomplishment. Throughout history men stole women's research and ideas and claimed them as their own, and largely prohibited women from competing with them. Woo hoo - go men! I'm certainly more than willing to celebrate the accomplishments of individual men who have contributed to our world, but the truth is even there, a lot of them built great things on the backs of slaves, or low paid Chinese coolies, or indentured servants, or factory workers who worked 100 hour weeks. Because patriarchy is a dominance based hierarchy that serves the needs of those closest to the apex of the pyramid.
I don't know about you, but I'm philosophically opposed to whitewashing that so somebody can go Rah, Rah team!
Oh, and which is it? “Men do 95% of the work that makes civilization work” or women have achieved equality in every area and are now outperforming men in many areas. Because it can’t be both…
