There seems to be two distinct paths in the journey to equality.
The first path suggests women are under represented in engineering; because they’re being oppressed, held back, discriminated against, and/or brainwashed by society.
It asks – if only more girls played with building blocks and Meccano as children, then this gender asymmetry in engineering later in life, would disappear.
This perspective sees men and women, boys and girls, as the same blank slates at birth; an empty brain whose ideas, interests and ambitions are culturally informed, and coloured in my their social experiences.
The second voice suggests that women are underrepresented in engineering, because women are not the same as men, and are just less likely to want to be engineers.
Radical, I know.
It asks – maybe men and women are, in general, not the same and we shouldn’t expect them to make the same life choices, or be equally distributed in engineering as a result?
Maybe masculinity and femininity are not just socially constructed, but also innately different, and maybe we’re not all brainwashed after all…
Maybe we are just making free choices?
Maybe we’re actually different?
Seriously, is that such a controversial idea?
We’ve opened our eyes to how a person’s sexuality is not socially constructed, people are born gay, it’s who they are.
Is it too much to suggest that masculinity and femininity have similar biological roots too?
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all have equal opportunity to be engineers, or teachers, or psychologists, or anything else – it just means we shouldn’t be surprised if women and men choose differently.
And no – being different doesn’t mean we aren’t all equally useful to society.
For we are all uniquely important, and no single life is more or less valuable than another…
But are we the same?
~
Source:
[1] https://tinyurl.com/2p977m94
Images by marcel-strauss, shaun-low, liam-briese, filip-mroz-oko, michael-fousert from Unsplash