pelican,

That is a fair statement.

Just as a side comment and not wishing to qualify anything you said, I would like to see more pioneer history made known. I know from the lives of my mother and the women in the family before her what women are capable of. They are role models.

There is nothing to be gained from the gender war. Well, nothing for the general public that is, but there are those who continue to 'earn' their daily bread (a lot of it too!) from stoking the faux conflict.

OTB
Thanks for your measured response.

I agree that there is much to learn from pioneer women and many of the hardships they had to overcome.

As for the gender wars, it has come time for people to accept that men and women now have equal access to various opportunities. In those areas where there are more men than women (or vice versa) there are often compelling reasons which are overlooked and not included in any deep analysis. Rather there is a tendency to immediately jump to the gender discrimination route. In some cases discrimination might be part of the story but in many cases that one reads about, there is a real failure to raise other factors which may be closer to the truth.

It does women and men a disservice to push the idea of equity as measured only by statistical outcomes without identifying all the 'whys'.

pelican,

True.

In combat I would not like to carry an even heavier pack because affirmative action decreed that special units had to have women as well.

Similarly and without exception I expect the commanding officers of such units to have have gone through the very same selection process, training and field experience as those they command. The reasons are compelling and have nothing to do with 'sexism'.

While all must have equal opportunity, equality of outcomes is rubbish and in some cases downright unfair and discriminatory. Affirmative action, affirmative action targets and especially 'positive' affirmative action are impractical ideological lunacy, serving only to keep some show pony billboard feminists in their cosy sinecures in academia and the public bureaucracies.

But then, I suggest that relatively few men would do their best work in child care centres.

Vive la difference!

Equal opportunity is one of those things that sounds good at first, but when you actually think about it, it turns out to be just as much nonsense, and anti-human, as equal outcomes.

Everyone in the world can’t have an “equal opportunity” to enjoy the view from your bedroom, can they?

A lame person and a gifted athlete can’t have an equal opportunity to win the sprint race, can they?

A mentally retarded person and a talented mathematician can’t have an equal opportunity to be a professor of mathematics, can they?

No. And there’s no reason why they should.

Even if we were to enforce equal opportunity by law, and provide for real equal opportunity by drawing lots for who should get the job, the result will be wrong in ethics, or rational values of fairness, for three reasons.

First it will be an injustice to the most meritorious applicant who misses out on the job in favour of a worse, or even completely incompetent applicant.

Secondly it will be a disservice to the consumers of the service, the satisfaction of whose market demand is hijacked by officious meddlers.

Thirdly, it will involve an infringement of the property right of the employer on the basis of arbitrary moralising which is an abuse of power.

The very fact that equal opportunity, like equal outcomes, cannot ever be realised in practice, and any attempt to do so involves the unequal use of aggressive force, make it morally wrong.

It may be said that an ugly old man can equally perform the duties of a waiter as a pretty young girl: asking what guests want to eat, bringing and removing dishes etc.

But the customer and the entrepreneur are the only ones competent to know the essential criteria of the services to be performed; and in preferring good-looking to plain or ugly, they offend no-one else’s right, because there is no right to violate other people’s freedom of association on the basis of the intellectually and morally bankrupt dogma of equal opportunity. The officious meddler does not and cannot know better.

I agree with the article and more especially with your comments Jardine. Society tells us that to discriminate is bad but the contrary is necessary. We discriminate all the time, be it in issues of safety, who we want our friends to be or whether we want terrorist organisations free run to kill and take hostages in our public places.

Discrimination is good for society. What is not good is forcing everyone to have the same self destructive views.