So far, while her current career choices include baby doctor and veterinarian — and Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, too — Barbie has not branched out into technology or engineering.
Published by Lisa Kansas July 25th, 2008 in "Science", For the ladies, Shame on you for being a woman, What would we do without such great advice?
Best line in the whole article.
Usually I don’t blog about these kinds of studies, as they irritate me no end–either they are driven by a need to prove women are “inferior,” or if the study doesn’t pan out in that desirable direction, they are full of inanities delivered in tones of hushed astonishment–“Girls have caught up on test scores, which researchers attribute to more taking higher math classes like calculus.” Wow! What a brilliant and insightful theory that is. Next they’ll be trying to tell me that if I start eating an extra meal every day, I’ll gain weight.
I saw that on MSN too, and stuff like that has to be blogged, preferably under pictures like the one you chose. Anyone looking at that and saying, well, gee, who knew? needs to be mocked publicly.
‘”We need to know that, if our measures aren’t capturing some aspect of math that’s important,” Camarata said. “Then we can decide whether there’s an actual male or female advantage.”‘
uh, yeah… it’s not that you should be challenging your children more, it’s that you need to know if one set is better than another. geez.
Here’s another way of looking at this, though: the stuff that usually makes it into print, the stuff the media loves to trumpet, is usually “another study shows how women are inferior to men in yet another way based on ridiculously shoddy evidence!” Rarely do we ever see a headline saying “study shows women, men essentially the same”. Because that’s not the sort of sexy headline that sells, the way “women are inferior!” does. From my perspective, it’s actually a great thing that the stunningly obvious fact that women are actually capable of doing math is making headlines, after decades of propaganda to the contrary.