Dear whistler,

That was precisely the point that I was trying
to make - 'that individual human qualities are
not gender specific..."

That perhaps in the future - gender won't matter at all.
It will be our individual qualities that we will be judged
by.

However, as StG pointed out - it's a long, long, way
off yet.

Foxy, I'd say that gender is one of our "individual" qualities. It influences so many aspects of our lives, from physical strength to the way in which we process tasks, with women being much more able to multi-task than men. It also affects things like menstrual cycles, with many women and girls suffering terribly each month and no doubt losing some productivity as a result.

I'd say that it is impossible to ignore any of those things. Women themselves proclaim their gender as being a defining and positive characteristic in most cases. Certainly whistler and her intra-cranial companions think so.

I can see no reason why those differences need to be negative on either side. Women do what you prefer and are good at and men do what we prefer and are good at and we all stick together as one species and get on with living. It's worked for a few hundred thousand years although I doubt that either gender was ecstatically happy on the whole for very much of that time. Still, here we are.

profiling by stereotype is bad profiling, a legacy of the inequity of bad government.

smart government produces smart profiling such that the best person for the job, regardless of gender, race, age, colour or ethnicity, is selected.

gender only matters when there is inequity.

all things being equal, women and men contribute different life experiences to the advantage of the whole community.

That just seems a bit simplistic and wishful. Dunno when you've last looked at the news or read the paper but the world isn't perfect and never will be.

We all profile (or judge) others based on perception, appearance, our own personal history, education, uneducation (whatever the opposite to education is), beliefs etc. It's not a symptom of bad governing, it's a symptom of being human and having instincts and prejudices which flow through to how we run our society.

As for jobs, most women aren't best equipped for many jobs men do. Same goes the other way too.

Very few women could stand in a factory stacking 25 kilo bags of product onto pallets 8 rows high for 8 to 10 hours a day 5 days a week. Quite obviously there's a percentage of women out there who can but based on common sense and the amount of people who apply for jobs the tacit requirement is gonna be that they need to be male.

A certain amount of profiling is needed to keep things ticking over.

It isn't nice, but it's the way things work. I'd like to live in some sorta equality utopia as well. But that ain't gonna happen on earth.

An executive dreams up an idea, has an
assistant who says it can't be done,
and a secretary who does it.

whistler, can you please enlarge upon either or both of these two concepts:

>>smart government... smart profiling<<

And please, don't start your response with "Absent..."