Tuesday 9 March 2010

Quote of the day: On women’s “equality” [updated]

    “Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, ‘equality’ is a disaster.”
                                          - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

UPDATE: On a not entirely unrelated note:

    “Lots of folks seem very upset about a government press release about a paper that doesn't seem yet to be publicly available.  If the press release comes out without the paper, my prior is that they want the headline but don't want anybody looking too closely 'till the media's lost interest…
    “The press release says that the Ministry of Women's Affairs has found that, comparing students with the same Bachelor degree (Commerce, for example), men earn more than women right after graduation and that the gap rises over time.
    “Using ocular least squares, peering into the main classes for the different Commerce subdisciplines, I can't help but wonder whether they've missed something rather important.  Namely, Economics and Finance are male-dominated while Marketing and Management are not..
    “If we've got gender differences across majors, and if we've got reasonable pay differences across majors, then it would be shocking NOT to find substantial pay differences across genders if we aggregated at the degree level…
    “Luckily, most of the wage gap goes away once you condition on the kinds of things that are observable: part time and full time status, industry, and so on.”

More on that last point here and here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

To the Heinlein quote: Yup!

Equality is not an ideal and its pursuit a bottomless source of empty dullness. Exploit your advantages!

Danyl said...

Funny you should mention Heinlein - I've just reread Friday. I love the guy but his female characters tend to be nymphomaniacs who love being sexually harrassed and appreciate the odd gangrape. I don't think he's a good go-to guy for quotes on gender issues.

Peter Cresswell said...

@Danyl: You've just described some of my favourite female characters. :-)

James said...

@Danyl: You've just described some of my favourite female characters. :-)"

Hmmmm,I would have thought the HandMirror crones would be agast with indignation at that comment by now....;-)