Sorry, I forgot who said this:
Human sex, gender and behavior are much more fluid and complicated than our common sense labels suggest.
This is true of almost every word in the language. How about “liberal” and “conservative”? Yet we still communicate better with words than without them.
Laura wrote:
What percentage of women that you know have been offered the option of trading sexual favors for career advancement?
My conservative estimate: 20%What percentage of women that you know have performed sexual favors for money, power, or other material gain?
My conservative estimate: 15%
Why do you consider these to be disadvantages? They seem like powerful advantages to me.
Many of the people here disagree over how much of a relative advantage or disadvantage women have in contemporary American society. Women, instead of stating that there is still discrimination in America, how about describing cases from your personal lives where you suffered discrimination or oppression? That would be more convincing. I’d like to see a whole new thread started just for that, to collect anecdotal data.
I will provide an anecdote: I took a year off from work, and lived on my savings, trying to start up a government contracting company by getting together some friends and some technical partners and submitting SBIR grants. I wasted a year of my life and a lot of money, and didn’t win any contracts.
If I’d been a woman, I would probably have won a few $100,000 contracts that year, and would now be wealthy. In the SBIR program, grant applications from women-owned companies go to the head of the line, and receive extremely favorable treatment.
But if I’d been a woman, I probably wouldn’t be chasing SBIR grants, because I’d have a successful career in academia, because I would have gone to grad school at a name-brand school like MIT. 48% of the students accepted into MIT are women. 26% of women who apply to MIT are accepted; 10% of men who apply are accepted. This despite the men having, on average, higher test scores.
I’m posting anonymously, because I fear getting turned down at an upcoming job interview if they google my name and find me complaining about the advantages women have over me. I’d feel free to complain about the advantages men have over me if I were a woman.
my best girlfriend prospects at this moment are girls who’ve (regularly) traded sex for money. i hardly know any other women.
Just curious. How is that possible? I’m not doubting you—I just can’t imagine how that could be, unless you work in a porn studio in Antarctica.
In other words:
1. Women couldn’t wear trousers 100 years ago, but can today.
2. Men still can’t wear dresses.
3. Therefore… um, what? Men’s rights are 100 years behind women’s rights? I don’t think that’s what you meant to say.