One of the left-of-centre narratives that annoys me the most, year after year, is the idea that differences in gender preferences, habits etc. are socially conditioned. Anyone who believes such narratives might like to explore any of the following:
Prof Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate
Prof Susan Pinker: The Sexual Paradox
Prof Louann Brizendine: The Female Brain
Prof Simon Baron-Cohen: The Essential Difference
Put simply, the majority of men have male-pattern brains (there are exceptions, e.g. David Cameron) while the majority of women have female-pattern brains (Margaret Thatcher was clearly an exception). Yet public policy is based upon the ‘conditioning is everything’ paradigm, so decade after decade taxpayers’ money is spent in trying to persuade women to go into engineering when it’s mind-numbingly obvious even to the average village idiot that very few women want to become engineers.
My thanks to Katie L for pointing me towards an interesting piece on the TV presenter Michaela Strachan (link below). It’s good to see a women in the public eye speaking the truth in this area.