Men and women are born equal but different. Deal with it
by Rod Liddle, Spectator:
[…] Gill had been addressing the issue of a new study, from Sweden, which showed that the greater the equality of opportunity in society between men and women, the greater the differentiation in what men and women choose to do. In other words, the differences between us are innate. There is nothing terribly new in this finding — simply that, as Gill pointed out, feminists are completely unable to take it on board. It is ignored or at best dismissed with a wave of the hand. And yet it is startling in its obviousness. There is not terribly much sexism these days in the National Health Service, for example. So why are 96 per cent of speech therapists female and 81 per cent of surgeons male? Because, I would suggest, a greater proportion of women than men would prefer to be speech therapists and have a greater aptitude for the job. With surgeons, the reverse applies.
Take a better example: education. An awful lot of energy, money, time and angst has been devoted to various schemes to persuade girls to take up physics. And indeed the proportion of women taking physics at undergrad level has edged slowly upwards as a consequence, peaking in 2009 at about 22 per cent. Since then it has plateaued, despite even more frenetic attempts to ‘level the playing fields’. Now, if you are able to argue that sexism in schools and the home was why so few girls once studied physics, then you are bound to accept, if you are sentient, that a concentrated effort over 30 years to shepherd girls into physics must have persuaded a small number of them to study the subject, perhaps unwisely. You can’t have it both ways. And indeed, the proportion of female physicists who go on to study at Masters level falls sharply to about 16 per cent (whereas at Masters levels in many arts subjects the proportion of women studying actually rises). That 16 per cent figure, I would suggest, is about right, for the proportion of women compared to men who have an aptitude for physics. And there is nothing you can do about it: it is innate.
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