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. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as "feminist activists who want to destroy our language." Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, "in-between" gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children's discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that "gender ideologues" have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.
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Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children's interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying." And so every detail of children's interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children's lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.
one may wonder whether it is really necessary for us to ask people as often as we do what sex they are. On the Internet, we frequently interact with people without knowing their gender. Some people place high value on controlling what information about them is made public, so why do we force them, in so many situations, to say if they are male or female?
Is the desire for such information a residue of an era in which women were excluded from a wide range of roles and positions, and thus denied the privileges that go with them? Perhaps eliminating the occasions on which this question is asked for no good reason would not only make life easier for those who can’t be squeezed into strict categories, but would also help to reduce inequality for women. It could also prevent injustices that occasionally arise for men, for example, in the provision of parental leave.
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wherever homosexual relationships are lawful, the obstacles to gay and lesbian marriage would vanish if the state did not require the spouses to state their sex. The same would apply to adoption.
It may be unfair, but by working shorter paid hours, women are managing to achieve a reasonable balance in their lives. In a regular survey produced by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, only 16-18% of women (depending on whether they have young children) across Europe report dissatisfaction with their work-life balance, against 20-27% for men.
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Men are still more likely than women to be in paid work. Across the OECD countries some 83% of men of working age are in the labour market, compared with 64% of women. But the share of women at work is still rising. In the Nordic countries the gap between men and women has almost gone and in most of the big rich countries it is only ten or 15 percentage points. In the emerging markets it is much wider, not least because women do a lot of unpaid work in family businesses and farms that do not show up in the figures. However, in China the gap, at about 12 percentage points, is smaller than in many Western countries.
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Measured by how many full-time jobs those hours would add up to, the average employment gap between men and women in the OECD widens to around a third. That is because women, particularly if they have children, are much more likely than men to work part-time (see chart 1), and even in full-time jobs they work shorter hours.
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Pejic, who sometimes models women’s fashion, sometimes men’s (though guess which gets more attention), is the chap memorably described by US FHM in a widely-reported hissy fit as a ‘thing’ that prompts them to ‘pass the sick bucket’ — despite his popularity with their own readers. And more recently as a ‘creature’ and ‘a fake’ and symbol of ‘abject misogyny’ by outraged female columnists citing him as the ‘final proof’ that they were right all along, that high fashion is run by an evil gay paedo conspiracy against women that wants to do away with ladies altogether and replace them with ‘young boys’.
Though perhaps the outraged feminists of both left and right should welcome Pejic with garlands since he means that women can finally opt out of the fatal gay embrace of high fashion altogether and leave the gays and their Ganymedes to it….
Whatever Pejic does or doesn’t symbolise about the world of high fashion it seems to me that he and the scandale surrounding him definitely, dramatically personifies something that is going on in the wider culture that feminists, along with everyone else, are often far less keen to notice
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t in the last couple of decades the male body has become ‘objectified’ in mainstream media as much as the female variety. The way that ‘beauty’ and ‘prettiness’ is no longer the sole preserve of women. The way that glossy magazines with men’s airbrushed tits on the cover have become the most popular kind — with men. (Which lends a special irony to the banning of a mag that featured a topless Pejic on the cover by Barnes & Noble — they knew Pejic is male, and don’t ban topless males, only females, but were worried the image ‘might confuse their customers’.)
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the way that colours, clothes, accessories, products, practises and desires previously thought ‘feminine’ have been greedily taken up by men – and often relabelled ‘manly’ in a way that only succeeds in unwittingly satirising the very concept of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’.
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How would it feel to look in a mirror and see not your own reflection but instead how you would look as the opposite sex? You can explore this strange alternate reality at this year's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition where Peter McOwan and his colleagues from Queen Mary, University of London and University College London will use mathematical wizardry to produce gender reversed images of faces.
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Despite the crisp clear details and blended colours, a photo is just a series of dots, called pixels, of different colours. Any photo, including one of your own lovely visage, is represented in a computer as a long string of numbers, each representing the colour at a particular pixel. Just as a string of three numbers marks a point in three-dimensional space (it gives its coordinates), so a string of N numbers sits in what mathematicians think of as N-dimensional space: so mathematically you can think of a photo as a point in an N-dimensional space, where N is the number of pixels in the photo.
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First of all the researchers calculate the average face by simply averaging the values at each pixel over all the photos in the set. This new string of numbers represents the average face and the position of the points representing the other faces show how they differ from the average face.
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The sociological perspective defines eroticism as the pornography of the dominant social class. In this view, eroticism has aristocratic associations, while pornography is a lower-class activity. Thus, pornography but not eroticism may represent a threat to the status quo. Yet, as numerous entries demonstrate, the eroticism of ‘high literature’ is just as capable of subversion as more popular forms of writing about sex.
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The gender of the author is another spurious yardstick, by which the pornography/eroticism distinction is sometimes measured. In this perspective, men produce pornography while women ‘write the erotic’. This argument falters when confronted with anonymity, or the extensive use of pseudonyms. Moreover, some authors employ strategies to make believe that the narrator is male or female, creating confusion as to the author’s sex or gender.
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Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.
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Today, scholars generally split the text into two main strands. One is believed to have been written by a figure or group known as the "priestly" author, because of apparent connections to the temple priests in Jerusalem. The rest is "non-priestly." Scholars have meticulously gone over the text to ascertain which parts belong to which strand.
When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same division, separating the "priestly" and "non-priestly." It matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90 percent - effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.
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The places in which the program disagreed with accepted scholarship might prove interesting leads for scholars. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, is usually thought to have been written by the "priestly" author, but the software indicated it was not.
Similarly, the book of Isaiah is largely thought to have been written by two distinct authors, with the second author taking over after Chapter 39. The software's results agreed that the book might have two authors, but suggested the second author's section actually began six chapters earlier, in Chapter 33.
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So, what gender is science? In short, it depends. When occupations or fields are segregated by sex, most people suspect it reflects fields’ inherently masculine or feminine task content. But this presumption is belied by substantial cross-national variability in the gender composition of fields, STEM in particular. Moreover, this variability follows surprising patterns. Whereas most people would expect to find many more female engineers in the U.S. and Sweden than in Columbia and Bulgaria, new data suggest that precisely the opposite is true.
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In labor markets, one well-known cause of sex segregation is discrimination, which can occur openly and directly or through more subtle, systemic processes
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Sociologists and economists have documented this cognitive bias and “statistical discrimination” through diverse experiments. It turns out that people’s beliefs about men’s and women’s different natures lead them to assess task performance accordingly, even in the absence of any actual performance differences.
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This study, and many others like it, is described in Cordelia Fine's brilliant new book Delusions of Gender. She offers a fair and detailed review of research on the psychological and neurobiological foundations of gender difference. Her finding is clear and persuasive: Whatever cognitive or personality differences there are between men and women cannot be attributed, except in a few isolated cases, to intrinsic biological or psychological differences between men and women, at least not in the current state of knowledge.
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Can we design teams to perform better?
Malone: We hope to look at that in the future. Though you can change an individual’s intelligence only so much, we think it’s completely possible to markedly change a group’s intelligence. You could increase it by changing members or incentives for collaboration, for instance.
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There is some evidence to suggest that collective intelligence exists at the organizational level, too. Some companies that do well at scanning the environment and setting targets also excel at managing internal operations and mentoring employees—and have better financial performance. Consistent performance across disparate areas of functioning suggests an organizational collective intelligence, which could be used to predict company performance.
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We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end—that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.
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We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end—that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.
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part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance. Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.
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There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.
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The research: Professors Woolley and Malone, along with Christopher Chabris, Sandy Pentland, and Nada Hashmi, gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.
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We’ve replicated the findings twice now. Many of the factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not. Things like group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation—none were correlated with collective intelligence. And, of course, individual intelligence wasn’t highly correlated, either.
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women can better judge whether a man is straight as they approach peak ovulation — or are in a romantic mood.
with so many people in so many countries demanding far-reaching change, the politics of gender is very much in play – in Europe and beyond. The main question is whether the growing number of women in politics will deliver the different perspectives and modes of leadership that many voters (or protesters) now seem to crave.
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The depth and gravity of the current economic and social crisis in countries like Greece, Portugal, and Spain present women with a new opportunity. Confronted with what many of them perceive as the equivalent of an “economic war,” women are playing an increasingly important role in maintaining their families’ financial security. And the more widespread this becomes, the more women will seek a political role that reflects their economic clout.
Of course, women’s changing status may not translate immediately into growing political influence. And the rest of Europe might never follow the example of Scandinavia, where gender equality has advanced much further than anywhere else. But such a dynamic does now seem to be in motion.
In nature, the balance of males and females is maintained by natural selection acting on parents. As Sir Ronald Fisher brilliantly pointed out in 1930, a surplus of one sex will be redressed by selection in favour of rearing the other sex, up to the point where it is no longer the minority. It isn’t quite as simple as that. You have to take into account the relative economic costs of rearing one sex rather than the other. If, say, it costs twice as much to rear a son to maturity as a daughter (e.g. because males are bigger than females), the true choice facing a parent is not “Shall I rear a son or a daughter?” but “Shall I rear a son or two daughters?” So, Fisher concluded, what is equlibrated by natural selection is not the total numbers of sons and daughters born in the population, but the total parental expenditure on sons versus daughters. In practice, this usually amounts to an approximately equal ratio of males to females in the population at the end of the period of parental expenditure.
Note that the word ‘decision’ doesn’t mean conscious decision: we employ the usual ‘selfish gene’ metaphorical reasoning, in which natural selection favours genes that produce behaviour ‘as if’ decisions are being made.
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what if we are dealing with a human society in which cultural traditions over-ride the genetic imperatives (yet another example, this time not necessarily a benign one, of ‘rebelling against the selfish genes’). What if the religion of a country fosters a deep-rooted undervaluing of women? What if there is an ancient culture of despising women, whether for religious or otherwise traditional or economic reasons? In past centuries such cultures might have fostered selective infanticide of newborn girls. But now, what if scientific culture makes it possible to know the sex of a fetus, say by amniocentesis or ultrasound scanning? There is then an obvious temptation selectively to abort female embryos, which could have far-reaching and probably pernicious social consequences. I'll refrain from gloating over the possibility of Taliban-inspired woman-hating societies going extinct for lack of women.
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The Guardian has a report today on ‘sex selection of babies’, which is described as a ‘scourge’ of the developing world.
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This demo is the result of a study that was carried at the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy. We looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and we present the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.
HOW?
We analyzed millions of tweets collected by researchers from the University of Edinburgh between November 2009 and February 2010. For gender differences, we separated the tweets into two subsets as male and female tweets by using the first names of the Twitter users. For hourly differences, we grouped the tweets according to the time of the day they were posted (in each user's local time).
In the gender differences section, you can see which phrases are used more often by males or females. These results are given under the "Compare" tab.
We also looked at the co-occurrence statistics of phrases, seperately for the two genders. That allows us to take a phrase like "cup" and see what else males (or females) talk about they mention "cup" in their tweets in a distinctive fashion (with respect to the other gender). These results are given under the "Detailed Query" tab.
In the hourly differences section, you can see how the frequency of mentionings of a given phrase change over time during the day.
Men and women are different. You know that. But do they tweet differently? Tweetolife is a simple application that lets you compare and contrast what men and women tweet about. Simply type in a search term or phrase and compare. For example, search for love, and 63 percent of tweets that contain that word were from women, based on the sample data collected between November 2009 and February 2010.
"Racial exclusion in dating is gendered; Asian males and black females are more highly excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts"
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Women are more likely than men to state preferences for all characteristics except body type... Women tended to state preferences for many more characteristics than males (50% vs. 34%)...
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We see few racial differences in the percentages stating racial preferences. For those who state a preference, both white males and females are the least open to interracial dating within their genders – 29 percent of white males and 65 percent of white females prefer to date only whites...
White women (4%) are less likely than black women (8%), Latinas (16%), and especially, Asian women (40%) to prefer to date only outside of their respective racial group... - 4 more annotation(s)...
I have recently changed my twitter handle from @quietriot_girl to @quietriot_boy
I did it in a playful moment, in part, but also as a response to some of the most hateful misandrist bile I have seen in a long time, from, yes, you guessed it, feminist bloggers. Not just misandrist but also transphobic, nasty, nasty stuff. That in my mind boils down to the ‘eugenics’ element in ‘radical feminism’.
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my own gender identity is something I put into question quite regularly. I am ‘Quiet Riot Girl’ but what that means is often unclear to me. I am a ‘woman’, but I don’t feel much kinship with many women, just because of our shared gender and sex identity, particularly not feminist women, which are the ones from which I came. It’s like being in the sisterhood without any sisters.
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So @quietriot_boy goes a bit deeper than an internet nickname or a political statement against radfems who often ‘accuse’ me of being a man anyway. I sometimes wish I was a boy. I sometimes think I am one. The main long sexual/romantic relationship I had was with a boy who would probably have loved and desired me even if I had have been a boy. And that makes me happy and sad simultaneously.
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the study finds that whites are least open to out-dating and that, unlike blacks, Asians and Latinos have patterns of racial exclusion similar to those of whites. Like blacks, higher earning groups including Asian Indians, Middle Easterners and Asian men are highly excluded, suggesting that economic incorporation may not mirror acceptance in intimate settings. Finally, racial exclusion in dating is gendered; Asian males and black females are more highly excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts, suggesting that existing theories of race relations need to be expanded to account for gendered racial acceptance.
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