From: blais@milo.ifa.hawaii.edu (Kristin Blais)
Subject: Re: women working on bikes
Organization: Institute for Astronomy, Hawaii
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 08:06:26 GMT

In article <DAVE.92Sep4224401@pipi.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp> dave@pipi.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp (David Wuertele) writes:
>In article <9209040141.AA15426@hplomg.hpl.hp.com> BRANDT_JOBST/HP1900_01@HPLOMG.HPL.HP.COM writes:
>> I think there is an aversion to accept that nature passes certain traits
>> along over which we have little control.  We observe it in animals and
>> birds but we deny that it applies to us.  I can understand that this can
>> lead to difficult questions for which I have no answers.  Therefore, I
>> resign myself to this apparent fact and leave it be.
>
>That nature determines our mechanical (or other) abilities based on our
>sex is not an "apparent fact."  The only apparent fact is that there are
>relatively few women engineers.  We may hypothesize that this is a result
>of a natural bias of mechanical ability on the male side, but there is a
>very good reason why we should reject this hypothesis.
>

Yup, I am an Astronomer who majored in Astrophysics as an under-graduate.
My experience in my own family was that every time I tried to work on my dad's  

car to figure out how it worked, I was grounded- my brother who wanted to be 
an engineer was encouraged even after he cost my dad money because he 
took the car apart and neither one could get it back together. (Oh, we have 
three screws left over now what do we do.) The final time I tried to
work on the car, he locked his tools up.  I tried to get around that by
making friends with an older man who owned his own garage. I would hang out 
there after school, but I wasn't allowed to help, ("Why would you want to
get your pretty little fingers dirty). I took the ASFAB (ASVAB?) test in
high school and scored extremely high on the mechanical aptitude part.
So much so that 8 years and three states later I *still* get recuiting 
offers from the Air Force. (They keep upping the offer every time I get  
another degree) Anyway during college I had many friends who 
also had been actively discouraged from acquiring mechanical skills.
I am very happy that now I have my bike and can putter with it,and am 
and going to overhaul it myself rather than taking it to a shop, which charged
me $100 and did a sh** job. (Unfourtunately as a grad student I don't yet 
have a car :-( )   I don't believe that you  can say women are less adept
at x unless you can account for socialization. It may sound very logical
the way Jobst has framed, but it's really the same old sexist/bigotry
argument: They can't do it -it's not their fault that's just the way 
God made them. When you realise that this same argument was used to 
say that women shouldn't vote or get a college education( since they
were  born without the necessary skills, the strain of the blood going to 
their brain would make them sterile and in some cases kill them) you understand
that perhaps the people making that argument lack the "logic" gene. 
Or doesn't Jobst think that in order to become good at someting you have 
to have the "innate talent" AND have the opportunity to learn. One might 
also argue that whether someone has innate talent or not can't be even known 
unless the opportunity to show that is allowed them.
:-)
Kristin


Newsgroups: rec.bicycles