From: ednclark@kraken.itc.gu.edu.au (Jeffrey Clark)
Subject: Re: Discriminating Uni Faculties
Organization: ITC, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
Date: 18 Dec 92 02:03:32 GMT

weirdo@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Katie Slekowetz) writes:


>Would anyone care to post statistics about the most unevenly organised
>faculties they know, in terms of numbers of women and men?  Here at the
>University of Western Australia, Arts is 75% women, 25% men, while
>Engineering is the exact opposite.  And most of the rest are close to
>50/50.  Someone I talked to from Monash University in Victoria said that
>this was not the case there, but couldn't prove it.  Does this sort of
>separation still happen in other places?  Because this, IMHO, is one of
>the few examples of a situation in which men can actually claim "men's
>rights", meaning themselves being discriminated against - let's face it,
>most of the time that phrase is just men whingeing because they're not
>in control any more...

Katie, I think a greater proportion of women in one field of academia and a
greater proportion of men in another can be justified. Recent clinical
neuropsych evidence shows that women are superior to men in pattern
matching. This points to women being more effective medical practitioners,
financial forecasters and chess players in an environmentally equal setting.
Men are more capable at spatial tasks meaning that possibly they should be
more highly represented in occupations such as engineering or applied
mathematics. These differences are present in neonates and seem to be caused
by increased androgen action in males during brain development, causing a
different neural organisation from the natural (or default) female pattern.

Of course the majority of occupations are less biased in their requirements
for pattern matching and spatial rotation and there are many skills that the
sexes perform equally on, given equal environmental conditions. Therefore
the majority of occupations should have equal representation.

	There are more
female students in the Department of Psychology, Uni of Qld, the majority of
which want to pursue clinical careers. This it would seem is a good thing
(as women on average are better pattern matchers than men meaning they
should be better at making a correct prognosis) however I would hazard that
this effect is more socially driven than ability driven. Psychologists are
increasingly being thought of as a form of care-giver, like social workers
and school teachers. It seems that clinical psychology is becoming an
"acceptable" profession for a woman and therefore we get an increase in
women pursuing careers on this path. However women are not yet seen as
medical practitioners (though this is beginning to change IMHO) and I would
hazard that though evidence points to women being better able to perform
such duties, enrolment is still biased toward men.

Worst of all professional chess players are split into gender groups for the
playing of world championships although women should have a greater affinity
for the game. But we all know it's not ladylike to play chess, after all,
chess is a game of strategy and tactics involving LOGIC. What woman has
logic? (in case you haven't noticed the dripping sarcasm :-)). What should
be done is the removal of gender from chess competitions which will
eventually, in the not so far distant future, produce a woman world chess
champion (and probably never another male one from then on). Somehow I think
it might then become less fashionable to play chess over a glass of sherry
in a men's club (tee hee).

More exciting stuff from neuropsych is the finding that homosexual men
perform more like women than men on linguistic, pattern matching and spatial
rotation tasks (ie they have enhanced linguistic and pattern matching skills
when compared to their hetero brethren but lesser spatial orientation
skills). This further enhances the case for the genetic predisposition toward
homosexuality.

Jeff.


Xref: sparky alt.feminism:6154 soc.men:21286 soc.women:21557