Here we go again, folks. Under the equality rubric, a female public defender from Ventura County wants to make it legal for women to sunbathe topless in California’s public beaches and parks, without being “exposed” as sex offenders under the state’s Megan’s Law. According to the following article by Kate Folmar of the Mercury News, Liana Johnsson claims that the current prohibition against female topless sunbathing is sexual discrimination.

Sexual discrimination? Is she crazy? If Johnsson’s desire is to become European, why doesn’t she move to France… or voluntarily double her income-tax contribution to the US Treasury? Ironically, Europe, with its liberal, socialistic, secular practices, offers women lots of discrimination. Ask any American woman who does business with European men; she will tell you about rampant discrimination.

Notwithstanding that the religious foundation of this country, respected by traditional families in all 50 states, classifies public nudity as lewd and offensive, baring breasts will yield unintended — yet obvious — consequences to all of us. If female topless sunbathing in public beaches and parks were to become legal, traditional families (the majority) will no longer visit them. The resulting drop in park revenues would compound Governor Schwarzenegger’s challenge to balance the budget. Kids won’t be able to swim on hot days. Moreover, the spectacle of topless women will lure lots of unwanted wackos to these public places.

If you really believe that toplessness for man and a woman is the same and that nudity laws have compromised your equality, you have reached the bottom of the sanity barrel. Get real. Respect families. Boundaries exist for a reason. Go to a private beach. Stop wasting the time and money of the rest of us taxpayers.
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Topless law may put women on offender list
LEGAL CLARITY SOUGHT ON ISSUE OF EXPOSURE

By Kate Folmar, January 29, 2005, Mercury News

SACRAMENTO - Picture a gorgeous day. Surf and sand. Perfect time to erase unsightly tan lines or just enjoy the sun’s warmth on your chest.

At least, if you’re a guy.

Under a little-known law, it’s illegal for women to sunbathe topless on California state beaches or in state parks. Worse, some lawyers contend, topless sunbathing could land women on the state’s sex-offenders database for life.

So lawyers with the Conference of Delegates of California Bar Associations are shopping around for a lawmaker willing to clarify the law, or even take a step toward what they view as gender equality.

It may sound like one of those wacky, only-in-California stories that appeal to television news shows. Indeed, “A Current Affair” and Fox News are interested.

But backers of “breast equality” — spearheaded by Liana Johnsson, a public defender from Ventura County — say there’s much more at stake.

The concern is that a woman can be arrested for indecent exposure for removing her bikini top on state beaches — although no one has found a specific case.

A December appeals court decision from Orange County determined that someone who is convicted of indecent exposure must register as a sex offender under California’s Megan’s Law. Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer, said he knows of no topless sunbathers on the Megan’s Law database. Under the law, there must be “lewd” intent for an indecent-exposure conviction, which requires registration as a sex offender. It does not trigger a posting on the Internet, meant for more serious crimes.

Nevertheless, Johnsson and others argue, the court’s decision opens a disturbing possibility.

She wants bans on topless sunbathing to go the way of laws prohibiting women from voting and barring breast-feeding in public.

“My hopes are for equality,” Johnsson said. “My bottom-line hope is that we get the last law on the books that’s sexual-discrimination-based off the books.”

Lobbyist Randy Perry of Aaron Read & Associates, who represents the lawyers’ group, said there are other concerns beyond whether women have the fundamental right to bare breasts on beaches. If the benchmark of indecent exposure is lewd intent, who defines lewd?

“If a woman’s there, putting on suntan lotion, lathering it up, is that lewd?” he asked. Or, what if someone is just offended by the sight of bare breasts? “Is lewdness in the eye of beholder?”

Perry hopes to find a bill author soon. The most likely option is to specifically exempt from Megan’s Law topless sunbathers who have done nothing else wrong.

Johnsson’s preference would be total legalization. But she knows hers is a long-shot quest that could take time.
“The fact that it’s illegal for me to do something that men can do is like a wound. And the fact that you would have to register as a sex offender is like salt in the wound,” she said. “Yes, it’s OK that they should take the salt out. But it doesn’t eliminate the wound.”

California’s rules on topless sunbathing are scattershot, reports a travel Web site. The state has several beaches where topless or nude sunbathing are informally allowed.

In liberal Santa Cruz, where shirtless women have been known to protest in the city council chambers, an equality push in the 1970s led to an open mind toward female toplessness on beaches. According to county law, “nudity” is narrowly defined as being “devoid of opaque covering” below the belt.
California’s parks and beaches ban nudity, but a department spokesman said people are almost never cited. “What our rangers do is ask them to cover up,” said parks spokesman Joe Rosato. “They get about 100 percent compliance.”

Assemblyman Ray Haynes, a Temecula Republican who does sunbathe shirtless, is skeptical of the effort unless someone can show him a specific case of a sunbather forced to register as a sex offender.

“It’s just a way to try and punch holes in the law,” he surmised. “Until we have a real problem that needs to be addressed, we’ll leave Megan’s Law alone.”

Randy Thomasson of the Campaign for Children and Families is aghast at what he’s calling the “Drop Your Top” law. Any changes will just encourage public nudity and ruin family outings, said Thomasson, who usually wears T-shirts at the beach because of his fair skin.

Women, he said, are “repulsed” by overweight shirtless men. Men, however, are fascinated and stimulated by topless women. “This is not freedom for women,” he said. “It’s basically exposing women and foolish teenage girls to inappropriate treatment at the beach or park.”

Contact Kate Folmar at kfolmar@mercurynews.com or (916) 441-4602.

The following article by Sue Shellenberger of the Wall Street Journal describes a new twist to an old problem: golddigging. It turns out that, when faced with a romantic interest who favors pecunia over personality, a woman resents the “taker” attitude as much as a man does. Male golddiggers? Yes. Imagine that!

Fortunately, women are getting a taste of their own medicine, and they don’t think it tastes like r-r-r-rum punch (remember Mary Poppins?). Now they know how men feel, and this knowledge is good for both sexes. As I’ve been saying, ad nauseam, men and women are the same. Shellenberger’s article is more proof.

After reading her article below, check out my book, The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth, and related articles at NoNonsenseDating.com.
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The Latest Dating Headache: Women With High Salaries Wary of Gold Diggers

By SUE SHELLENBERGER, January 27, 2005, Wall Street Journal; Page D1

It wasn’t until her engagement party that Genine Drozd realized her fiance was a little too interested in her paycheck.

“I’m going to quit my job next year and just hang out,” Ms. Drozd says she overheard her fiance, then 24, an accountant, boasting to friends. Ms. Drozd, who at 21 already had a successful career as a public-relations manager, says the notion nauseated her. “At that exact moment I felt like I was going to throw up. I looked at him and thought, ‘Who are you?’” She soon broke off the engagement.

Now that women are snaring a majority of both college degrees and professional jobs, they’re getting a taste of something else that used to be a male-only province: gold-digging dates. Many women are surprised to find their earning power has become a magnet for the opposite sex. And based on my e-mails some high-earning women worry that their slacker dates will always be just that: slackers who want to be supported. It’s a growing concern for people in their 20s and 30s, not just because young women are earning more, but because young men feel less compelled to fit the mold of the traditional solo breadwinner.

Research by Megan Sweeney, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, shows a trend toward higher-earning women marrying at higher rates. Among white women, a $10,000-a-year increase in income predicted a 6.8% increase in the likelihood that a woman will marry in a given year. Among black women posting a $10,000-a-year income gain, the increase in the likelihood of marriage was 8.2%. This is a change from the past, when women’s earnings affected their chances of wedlock far less, Dr. Sweeney found.

Match.com, a dating Web site with 15 million users, is seeing a rise in men who specify that they want to date only women above a certain income level. In 2004, more than half, or 51%, of men specified a minimum income for dates, up from 37% in 2001, a spokeswoman says.

More men are going a step further, insisting on women who make more than they do. More than one-third, or 35%, of male users of True.com, a dating Web site with 2.7 million users, are seeking females with higher incomes, says Herb Vest, True.com’s CEO. Only 20% of male True.com users want a woman who makes less.

Some high-earning women fear attracting a live-in couch potato. Michelle Demus, 31, an account manager for a fashion wholesaler, won’t discuss her income. But she is doing well enough to rent an apartment in a fashionable Manhattan high-rise. On dates, she says, “I’ve had the Sugar Momma conversation” with guys who fantasize aloud about her supporting them. “Some guys say … ‘These ladies have it right’” in staying home, says Ms. Demus.

Her reaction? “It’s not a positive one,” she says. “I think, ‘Ah. You’re already looking to stop working?’” She breaks off such encounters quickly. Ms. Demus doesn’t rule out guys who make less, but they must enjoy their work. “For me the question is, are we intellectually compatible? Are you passionate about what you do?”

The pattern isn’t limited to young singles. In a recent e-mail, a 41-year-old divorced mother frets that her fiance, who lives with her, feels no obligation to help pay the bills and seems offended when she asks, saying his income is needed for his real-estate investment business. “He’s not supporting his fair share of the household budget and I worry about future entanglements,” she writes.

For some women, the answer is to keep their incomes to themselves. Nicole Harris, 32, a partner in a Cincinnati real-estate firm, once dated a mortgage broker who knew her substantial income and assets and must have boasted about it to friends. “When we broke up, all of his friends were shocked” that he let her slip away, because of her money, Ms. Harris says. Now, she is more private about money. Her current fiance, owner of two small businesses, doesn’t know what she makes. She doesn’t know his income either. They each know the other works hard, and that’s enough for now, she says.

Some women are wary of being trapped in the breadwinner role themselves. Some want the companionship of men who are as ambitious as they are. Others want the freedom to stay home with their children some day.

Men have their own conflicts over the issue. Not all men who seek high-earning dates want to be supported. David Morin is looking for relief from the pressure of the solo-breadwinner role. His wife stayed home with their two kids during their seven-year marriage, which ended in divorce. Working long hours then as a financial manager, he says he was so stressed that he found it hard to relax with his wife. “My emotions were on hold for a long time,” leading to blow-ups, says Mr. Morin, 29, a Hampton, Va., investor and personal trainer. He has since sought out high-earning women through a dating site, who are “more independent and more motivated than most of the guys I know.”

Other men pursue high-earning women because they are drawn to the personal attributes of go-getters. Success “comes with stories and experiences about how she grew her own business, took a financial risk, got herself through school,” says Patrick Shaughnessy, 39, Chicago, a product-support manager who is successful in his own right, but enjoys dating high achievers. “This is the kind of woman I want to be associated with. At the end of the day, isn’t it all about a laugh and a story? A shared experience?”•

E-mail me at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com. To see other recent columns, please go to CareerJournal.com.

Three excellent articles — posted below — appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes regarding the brouhaha at Harvard University over the comments of its president, Lawrence Summers, about women in science. Many women, like Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice, prove repeatedly that women can debate, with thoughtful logic, without running from the room to vomit.

The first article is a fascinating op-ed piece by Ruth R. Wisse (see below) appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 21, 2005. It demonstrates the existence in the hallowed halls of liberal academia, albeit in small numbers, of independent-minded women who can debate with calm, well-articulated logic — without automatically crying foul and discrimination every time a man challenges them… whether he’s right or wrong. Let’s not forget that Dr. Susan Hockfield, a distinguished neuroscientist, is the president of MIT, the pinnacle of scientific institutions of higher learning and a Charles River neighbor to Harvard. Brava Professor Wisse!

The second article, by columnist Sharon Begley, appeared in the Wall Street Journal a week later, on January 28, 2005. Her article claims that the only reason women opt out of top science positions is to raise families, not because of incompetence or intimidation.

The third article, by Dan Seligman at Forbes, gives scientific evidence, based on tests and career choices, that there are differences in visuospatial skills between some men and some women. This is the kind of evidence Lawrence Summers was referring to in his comments, before being beaten into submission and forced to grovel for forgiveness. Contrast this with Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who compared 9/11 victims in the World Trade Center to “little Adolph Eichmanns.” The liberals never once called Churchill on the carpet for this asinine, insane remark. Hypocrisy? You bet.

Seligman is reporting facts. Ruth Wisse and Sharon Begley counter their professional sisters who find it necessary to protest and whine to be heard. In fact, protesting and whining achieve the opposite result: disrespect. Learn more about this at NoNonsenseDating.com.
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Article #1: Gender Fender-Bender

By RUTH R. WISSE, January 21, 2005, Wall Street Journal; Page A8

Last week, the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, inadvertently provided further evidence of the opposition to free inquiry that currently governs our institutions of higher learning. Invited to speculate off the record on the “underrepresentation” of women in science, President Summers threw out some hypotheses, including one about innate differentials in aptitude between men and women, that may account for the phenomenon. At this point in his remarks, an MIT female professor of science quit the room, declaring to the press that she couldn’t breathe because “this kind of bias makes me physically ill.”

“What better proof than she of Summers’ thesis?” quipped a friend of mine — and, indeed, what better evidence of underprofessionalism than a scientist who becomes nauseated at the mere hint of a theory that differs from hers? But this woman had artfully framed her outrage. Her claim of “bias” was intended not simply to discredit the male who had asked whether there may be substantive differences between men and women, but to define the permissible terms of discussion. Her show of outrage and the ensuing media attention it elicited were designed to reinforce the claim that “bias” alone is responsible for the situation President Summers addressed.

This accusation of bias, advanced by feminists and often accepted at face value by the academic community, attempts to transform guarantees of equal opportunity into a demand for equal outcome. Thus, a huge majority of female professors at Harvard recently formed a Caucus for Gender Equality to protest the drop in senior job offers to women since President Summers came into office. Offering no evidence of discrimination in hiring and not a single example of a superior female applicant overlooked in favor of a less qualified male, the Caucus charged the president with having reduced “diversity” by failing to hire enough female professors. Although the university denied these unsubstantiated charges, it nonetheless instituted new rules for departmental searches that now require every committee to provide quantitative proof of how many women it has considered for a position at each stage of the screening and selection process.

Ironically, President Summers himself has on occasion advanced the view that affirmative-action procedures for women are necessary because of men’s unconscious bias. That particular unsubstantiated assumption, however, satisfies feminist dogma, whereas there mere possibility of other differences between the sexes offends it. The true character of the campaign against President Summers was corroborated when the same Harvard women’s group that is lobbying for more female professors reproached him for “speaking his mind as an individual” last week rather than toeing what they believe should be the university’s party line. Lobbying for women in the name of greater diversity, they used the club of gender to silence diversity.

Shamefully, they appear to have succeeded. Sounding more like a prisoner in a Soviet show trial than the original thinker that he is, President Summers recanted his error, has apologized at least three times for his insensitivity, and will no doubt hasten to appoint and to promote as many females as he can. The casualties of this exercise are genuine discussion of why women excel faster in some fields than in others, and the kind of intellectual independence that universities were once expected to promote.

The slogan “gender equality” reduces diversity on campus still further by pretending that all women share the same set of views. Protesting that there are currently only 85 tenured female professors at Harvard, about one-quarter of the faculty, the Women’s Caucus boasts that almost all of them agree with its politics. Meanwhile, in a country that has just elected a Republican president and a Republican Congress, one could not find, among Harvard professors, a quarter of a quarter who hold conservative views. Divergent thinkers are driven out of the universities to the think tanks where intellectual initiatives are encouraged rather than suppressed. On the campus, intimidation; beyond the campus, the democratic arena where better ideas can contend and prevail.

Had he been allowed to go on speculating about gender differentiation in the academy, President Summers might have taken up related issues, such as the effects of seeking parity in a marketplace of unequal resources. Given the far lower number of women in the sciences, one unacknowledged consequence of female preference in hiring may be the compensatory pressure to hire and promote women in the humanities and social sciences. The “feminization” of some branches of these “soft” disciplines has been a palpable byproduct of this strategy — feminization referring not just to the numbers but to what and how women who ostensibly share the ideological disposition of the Women’s Caucus tend to teach. Does this not necessarily reshape the nature of higher learning in ways that we would be wise to scrutinize?

Unfortunately, the problem President Summers addressed will persist despite the attempts to silence him. No one doubts that women seeking careers in science face greater challenges than those in other academic and research fields. At a recent forum of Harvard graduate students, a succession of budding female scientists expressed their anxieties about having chosen careers that will conflict, more than most, with their no less strong desires to raise and nurture a family. More than one young woman present felt that a job with reduced pressure during her childbearing years might better suit her needs than competition at the very highest levels. The good news is that most of the young women acknowledged that their dilemma was one of choice rather than a product of discrimination against them.

The very notion of “underrepresentation,” based as it is on the implicit goal of numerical parity, greatly prejudices our ability to understand why women make the choices that they do. If women gravitate to the hard sciences less than to other fields, we ought to grant them the intelligence of sentient creatures, recognizing the potential loneliness of such choices while trying to understand why groups and individuals act as they do. It is not President Summers who owes women an apology; it is the complainers and agitators who owe both him and all of us an apology for trying to shut down discussion of an “inequality” that is not likely to disappear.

Ms. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard.

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Article #2: Harvard Chief’s Words On Innate Differences Lack Basis in Science

By SHARON BEGLEY (Science Journal), January 28, 2005, Wall Street Journal; Page B1

That’s odd, mathematician Lenore Blum thought. At a math institute where she once served as deputy director, Mondays seemed to bring more than their share of announcements of new theorems, the gold rings of mathematical discovery.

Prof. Blum, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, quickly figured out why. Male mathematicians hanging out together on weekends wound up doing math, inspiring each other in a way that produced breakthroughs. Women were rarely included in these get-togethers; they weren’t invited and felt awkward inviting themselves.

Stories like this have been making the rounds of academics ever since Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, in a now infamous lunch address, suggested that the relative paucity of women in science and math (they represent 25% of the work force in these fields) might reflect “innate differences” between men and women more than social forces.

Scholars have demolished some of the widely held beliefs about why fewer women enter science. Contrary to myth, for instance, women are not handicapped in becoming scientists because social forces steer them away from math and science in high school. To the contrary. As sociologists Yu Xie of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Kimberlee Shauman of the University of California, Davis, showed in a 2003 book, “Women in Science,” “girls are not only on a par with boys” in how many math and science courses they take. “They also attain significantly better grades.”

Their interest in science continues in college, where women earned 51% of the undergraduate degrees in science and engineering in 2001, compared with 25% in 1966. As Mr. Summers correctly implied, social forces shooing girls away from science just aren’t what they used to be.

So let’s look at “innate differences.” Exhibit A for the innate-difference crowd is that fewer girls than boys score in the top 1% on standardized math tests in high school, supposedly a sign that girls can’t master the math that underpins much of science and engineering.

But the gap at the top, while real, is irrelevant. Among those who ace these tests, boys are more likely to enter science than girls, who tend to choose other fields, find Profs. Xie and Shauman. Therefore, if equal numbers of girls landed on top, larger numbers would likely become scientists and engineers than do so now — but men would still continue to hold more science jobs: Top-scoring girls reject science careers. (As an aside, Prof. Xie tells me that a fair number of boys who don’t get eye-popping scores in such tests enter science and engineering, and succeed.)

Another tenet of “innate differences” is that male and female brains differ in a way relevant to the ability to understand and do science. Of all the claims like this over the years, the only one that has stood up even a little is that exposure to testosterone in utero is associated with better numerical and spatial ability, such as being able to mentally rotate objects or intuitively understand blueprints. Men generally have higher testosterone exposure before birth, when the brain is developing.

In a paper scheduled to appear in the journal Intelligence, however, scientists in Germany report that only women with relatively low testosterone exposure scored worse than men on tests of spatial and numerical ability. Women with relatively high exposure compared with other women — half the sample — scored as well as men. However testosterone boosts the brain’s spatial and numerical ability, an awful lot of women are getting enough of it to benefit, even when they’re getting less than men.

In general, for every finding that boy brains have an edge (they’re bigger) there’s a finding that girl brains do. For instance, scientists reported in Nature Neuroscience last year that women’s cortexes are more complex, with more of the intricate folds that underlie higher brain function such as that needed for science.

More important, if scientists have learned one thing about the brain it is that our gray matter is highly malleable, responding to signals from the outside world. That seems to come into play with spatial ability. “You can decrease the gap in spatial ability if you remind women of their identity as Ivy League students,” notes psychologist Joshua Aaronson of New York University. “When people invoke biology they’re implying a fixedness, but that’s not true: Biology can be changed by social context.”

Prof. Aaronson has shown this in his studies of “stereotype threat”: If you’re reminded before a test that society thinks the group you belong to does badly on whatever the test tests, you do worse than if you’re not reminded. This holds for girls taking math tests, blacks taking standardized tests and white boys on the basketball court. It also accounts for at least some of that gender gap in top scores on math tests.

The fact is, women leave science when they have kids. If you’re pushing a stroller you’re not building a quantum computer. “The tenure clock runs at the same time as the biological clock,” says Susan Ganter, executive director of the Association for Women in Science. “It doesn’t allow for women who want to both be successful and have families.” Women often have to choose between the two; men don’t. Perhaps that’s what Mr. Summers meant by innate differences.•

You can e-mail me at sciencejournal@wsj.com.

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Article #3: Sexism at Harvard: The violent reaction to Larry Summers’ comments about women mathematicians didn’t leave much room in the media for a discussion of the facts.

By Dan Seligman, February 28, 2005, Forbes Magazine; page 100

When all else fails, appoint a commission. In a real emergency–like when you’re the president of Harvard and are being hysterically assailed for wondering aloud about the possibility of an innate component to the male advantage in mathematics–appoint two commissions. Testifying to the ghastliness of his situation, and to the fact that he was running out of ways to merely apologize, that is what Lawrence H. Summers did the other day. Both commissions will look for ways to hire more female academics, and one of them will specialize in hiring on the hard sciences front.

Is it really absurd to think there might be innate gender differences in mathematical ability? An avalanche of scientific research, not to mention the wisdom of your grandmother, supports the idea of significant innate differences between the sexes. Some scholars, notably David Geary of the University of Missouri-Columbia, have argued persuasively that this premise is in fact required by the logic of Darwinian natural selection. (Darwin referred to this branch of his argument as sexual selection.) Yet when Summers mentioned the possibility of innate differences–and asked whether they might be related to underrepresentation of female academics in math and science–he got seriously pounded by fellow academics, the public and the press. His apologies ended with a fair amount of groveling.

But Summers has certain numbers on his side. Three telling details: 1) A 2001 survey conducted by the National Science Foundation established that there were 285,500 individuals with Ph.D.s working as mathematicians, computer scientists, physical scientists and engineers, and only 11.5% of them were women. 2) In the index of a math text the names attached to mathematical discoveries–Gauss, Euler, Riemann, Newton, Legendre, Poisson, Fourier, Cauchy and so on–almost invariably belong to men. 3) Since 1938 only 3 of the 335 winners in the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition have been women. The test, whose graders do not know the names of the contestants, is one of ingenuity, not knowledge, so a possible lack of access to advanced math courses is not very relevant to the outcome.

Did gender stereotyping yield these lopsided results? It could have influenced the Ph.D. count. But it’s hard to dismiss the other two phenomena as due primarily to sexism. Summers’ enemies did not present any evidence that gifted young women are urged not to take the Putnam exam.

The Harvard story got big-league national coverage. But like academe, the media proved overwhelmingly hostile to the idea of innate differences, and it is very hard to find articles registering any interest in the avalanche of research. A partial exception was a Jan. 24 New York Times article, which ran on the front page and performed an amazing feat: It cited a number of neurological and hormonal differences between the sexes, related them to lower female test scores in math, yet ended up supportively quoting experts who say that “baseless sexism” is the real reason for the paucity of females in math and the physical sciences.

What does the research tell us? Among scholars not passionately committed to explanations based on sexism, one finds three powerful and biologically based reasons for the shortage of women in the physical sciences.

The first is a male advantage in visuospatial skills, i.e., the ability to imagine what objects would look like when rotated in space. These skills are especially critical for geometric tasks and multistep problem-solving, where it often helps to “see” the solution in the mind’s eye. There is no doubt that visuospatial ability, which is affected by sex hormones, is biologically based. Doreen Kimura, professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University and author of Sex and Cognition, is among those who see innate factors at work. “I think there’s some biological basis for high-level mathematical reasoning,” she says. “It’s hard to see what else it might be that’s driving those winners in a Putnam competition. It’s such a peculiar skill set.”

Next is a greater male variability in intellectual skills. In math and many other disciplines men are overrepresented at the extremes: more gifted students but also more who are learning-disabled. On the math SAT men are 30% more likely than women to score in the 600 to 649 range. But they are 150% more likely to score over 750. And, as noted, they are 11,067% more numerous among Putnam winners. The variability pattern clearly has a biological basis, and it is not confined to Homo sapiens. In his 1998 book Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences, David Geary presents data indicating that many different bird and mammal species also exhibit greater male variability, in traits relating to health and vigor.

A final reason for the shortage of women in math and the physical sciences is a lack of female interest in the core content of these fields–many of which tend to emphasize abstract and mechanical themes. Studies matching equally gifted men and women, all of whom have the ability to make it in the physical sciences, have shown that the men are about eight times as likely as the women to enter these fields. The talented women repeatedly look around for something else, preferably involving disciplines affecting human beings (like, say, biology). A lot of research supports the idea that the male-female difference in interests is hormonal. This is also the view of Patricia Hausman, a behavioral scientist who often consults on employment issues. Addressing a National Academy of Engineering meeting a while back, she noted the widespread assumption that these differences are driven by “socialization,” then swatted the idea: “I find the evidence against this view overwhelming. Sex differences in behavior–with girls more attentive to people and boys to geometric shapes, blinking lights and three-dimensional objects–emerge in the earliest days or months of life, long before socialization begins.”

All very persuasive. Unless, of course, you are committed to a particular theory about baseless sexism.

Parade Magazine interviewed First Lady Laura Bush for the issue of January 16, 2005. In this interview, Mrs. Bush surprised me with her comments about how American boys are raised:

“I think we really need to pay more attention to boys. I think we’ve paid a lot of attention to girls for the last 30 years, and we have this idea in the United States that boys can take care of themselves. We’ve raised them to be totally self-reliant, starting really too early. They need the nurturing that all humans need. And I think there are a lot of life skills that we teach girls but we don’t teach boys. We actually have neglected boys.”

Not only do boys now attend college at lower rates than girls, Mrs. Bush points out, but “they’re the ones who are in trouble, who have been adjudicated, who can’t read, who are not doing well in school and drop out in frustration and embarrassment. A lot of the times, they’re the ones with the drug and alcohol problems.”

I don’t remember any other high-profile person articulating the over-emphasis on girls and the neglect of boys. And, women wonder why boys don’t emote in ways that would please them. In my book and articles, I stress repeatedly that men and women are the same — unfortunately, though, we are socialized differently and programmed for conflict. Well, according to Mrs. Bush, through neglect, boys are also programmed for failure. Thank you, Laura Bush, for bringing this critical issue to light.

Read my article “Five Myths About Women.”

Does it make sense, in 2005, that Valentine’s Day is still focused on women? Think of all the jewelry and flower commercials, on radio and TV, asking men to remember their women on February 14th. No commercials asking women to splurge on their men, are there?

My book, The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth, gets to the “heart” of this matter. I am anti-Venus/Mars and believe old-fashioned dating protocols are responsible for relationship-killing double standards and the high divorce rate. Men and women are virtually the same and want the same things. Unfortunately, we’ve been socialized differently and programmed for conflict.

Our culture, despite the professional and financial progress of women, continues to view romance as a one-way street, from men to women. Don’t women view their men as sweethearts, with equal desire to please them on Valentine’s Day? If so, why doesn’t the holiday feel that way?

If you think I’m just bloviating, the National Retail Federation states that men outspent their women more than 3:1 on Valentine’s Day, 2003. Read the following from an NRF press release:

Most American men are going all out for Valentine’s Day, according to the findings of a new National Retail Federation (NRF) survey. The NRF 2003 Valentine’s Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch for NRF, found that men are ready to spend this holiday, with the average man planning to spend $125.96 on Valentine’s Day. Women, on the other hand, plan to spend $38.22.

“It seems very clear to us this year that most men plan to celebrate Valentine’s Day in very traditional ways,” said NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin. “The average man is planning on a big celebration - sending flowers, giving a card and taking his wife or significant other on an evening out.”

Enough said.

Let’s get real, folks. If you do the crime, you should get the punishment — man or woman. The law is supposed to be blind to gender, yet we see countless examples of leniency towards women. What do you think?
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Commentary: Searching for a silver lining in death penalty’s gender bias
2005-01-06
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson (The Athens News)

The only time that executions stir more than a public yawn these days is when a woman is scheduled to die. That was true again recently when the scheduled execution of Frances Newton in Texas, Dec. 1, drew a flurry of headlines.

Newton, an African American, was convicted in 1987 of murdering her two children and her estranged husband to collect $100,000 in insurance money. Newton’s attorneys claimed that she was the victim of lousy representation, tainted evidence, and a rush to judgment by cops and prosecutors.

In Texas, the claim of legal taint, racial bias and pitiable defense attorneys is so routine it almost always falls on deaf ears in the state court system. In most cases, the condemned are eventually executed. But Newton is a woman, and that guaranteed that her claim would get noticed. Even Texas departs from its death-row “dispatch them quick and often” stance when it comes to women offenders. Newton has languished on death row for 17 years while her appeals meandered through state and federal courts.

Newton’s case, though, is hardly unusual. Women commit more than one in 10 murders. But only one in 50 convicted women murderers get the death penalty, and few of those sentences are ever carried out. Female executions account for slightly more than 1 percent of executions. Women are far more likely than men to get their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

If Newton is executed, she will be the first woman executed since 2002. When Oklahoma executed three women in 2001, the state had the grisly distinction of executing more women in one year than any other state in U.S. history.

The gender bias that riddles the death penalty as much as racial and class bias is a good thing in that it saves the lives of women. What’s problematic is the rationale for saving their lives. Prosecutors regard women as less violent, less threatening and more emotionally unstable than men. If they kill and maim, they supposedly do it out of blind love or loyalty to a man. This reinforces the notion that women are the dainty sex in need of guidance, protection and, ultimately, male control. This strips them of any social and moral accountability for and control over their acts. It makes it even easier to marginalize women.

Husbands and boyfriends physically and emotionally savage many women. Yet, if women kill their mate, courts more often than not consider it self-defense. They are not branded or demonized as dangerous, violent sociopaths. When that argument doesn’t fit, and women kill for the same reasons men do, many prosecutors, judges and juries still are reluctant to impose the death penalty. If they do impose it, there’s a similar reluctance to carry out the sentence.

That happened in the case of pick-ax murderer Karla Faye Tucker in Texas. Before Tucker was executed in 1998, conservative evangelicals Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, both death-penalty hard-liners, rallied to her defense and demanded that she not be put to death. Robertson publicly called her “a sweet woman of God.” Robertson and the evangelicals claimed they backed her because of her jailhouse born-again Christian conversion. But scores of men also have grabbed at the Bible and found God on death row. There’s no record that Robertson or the others called any of them “sweet men of God” and leaped to their defense.

The gender double standard has raised howls from some condemned men, death-penalty opponents and even some feminists, who argue that gender, just as race and wealth, should play no role in determining who lives and who dies in the nation’s death chambers. But that argument won’t get any further than the argument that racial bias is ample reason to dump the death penalty. The Supreme Court put that to rest years ago when it ruled in McClesky vs. Kemp, which mandated that generalized statistics of race were insufficient to invalidate a death sentence. For a defendant to have any chance of having his sentence overturned, he’d have to prove that the death penalty was imposed based on racial bias in his particular case, something that is usually difficult to prove.

Even if more women wound up on death rows, and were executed as fast as or faster than men, it wouldn’t make the death penalty any fairer or less barbaric than it already is. While gender bias perpetuates stereotypes of female victimization and warped notions of male chivalry, it still offers some hope that prosecutors, judges and juries are willing to put legal fairness and human compassion before the bloodlust to legally kill. That should be the case regardless of whether the accused is Frances Newton, or a man. Copyright PNS

Editor’s note: PNS contributor Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and author of “The Crisis in Black and Black” (Middle Passage Press).

You can learn a lot about your love life by examining the behavior of animals. No, I don’t mean watching them fornicate! I mean learning how to read signals from the “opposite sex” the way animals read — and heed — signals before impending natural disasters.

The Indian Ocean tsunami has killed about 150,000 people as of this writing, and that is a world tragedy. But, so far as we know, no animals have died. That’s amazing.

Read my new article “Romance Lessons from Tsunami Animals.”

Marc H. Rudov
Author/Publisher
The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women
(ISBN 0974501719)

Are you tired of being single but can’t seem to get off the merry-go-round of perpetual singledom?

You can read my thoughts about this all-too-common subject in two articles:

1) “New Year’s Eve: The Loneliest Night of the Year” (FoxNews)

2) “Did You Make Your New Year’s Revolution?”

Don’t spend another year contemplating your navel. Take action, today!

Marc H. Rudov
Author/Publisher
The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women
(ISBN 0974501719)

There is a lot of fuss being made over that new book, He’s Just Not That Into You. It’s amazing that women are so naive to behave like fools, sitting by the phone, waiting for “him” to call. How pathetic. Equally disturbing is the guy who will not stop pursuing a woman who is “not into him.”

I keep telling you that men and women are not different. We are the same. Alas, we’ve been programmed to think and act differently, but we pay for that socialization in our conflicts with each other.

Read my article “The Golden Rule Dictates Your Sex Life.” It is about the hazards of unilateral pursuit — whether it be men pursuing women or women pursuing men. Pursuit should be mutual. Period. Anybody who obsesses about another human being — either pursuing or waiting — needs a lot of therapy. Seriously!

What is the Golden Rule? It’s not what you think. Read the article.

Marc H. Rudov
Author/Publisher
The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women
(ISBN 0974501719)

Below is the best critique I’ve seen on the book He’s Just Not That Into You. It was written on 01.05.05 by Dominic Knight in The Sydney Morning Herald. According to Knight, this book is actually insulting to women. I agree. Read my book, The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth. Compare for yourself.
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Carrie and co have inspired a book which pushes women towards the wrong kind of man, writes Dominic Knight.

Haven’t the writers of Sex and the City made men suffer enough? First we had to feign interest in their show while the women in our lives were addicted to it. But that apparently wasn’t harmful enough to our relationships, so now the new book by S&TC writers Greg Berendt and Liz Tuccillo is convincing women to take anything less than constant male affirmation as proof that He’s Just Not That Into You.

One of those endless self-help books that are the American publishing industry’s equivalent of the doughnut - easy to wolf down but not very good for you - HJNTIY tells women to stop making excuses for imperfect men. If we aren’t calling you constantly, inundating you with flowers and otherwise making you feel like princesses, then you should pull the plug.

While its hook is empowerment through insisting on such high standards, HJNTIY isn’t exactly a feminist manifesto. Female readers are constantly told by suffering fellow-traveller “Liz” to distrust their instincts and obey the “tough love” advice from the all-knowing “Greg”.

The book tries to convince women they can’t change the way men behave, and that a man’s help is even needed to get the courage to realise they’re in a bad relationship. As Salon.com’s Rebecca Traister put it, “Behrendt’s tone is a bracing slap administered by a man to the face of a hysterical woman.” And what qualifies Greg to so insensitively demystify the mysteries of men? Well, he used to behave like the guys in the book. Not exactly an endearing qualification.

Greg tells women not to wait by the phone, because “if he’s not calling you, it’s because you’re not on his mind”. To call him yourself, he insists, would be humiliating. Which leaves women to hang around for even longer until a guy arrives who deigns to overwhelm them with love and affection. It’s not exactly a sure-fire recipe for success.

We shouldn’t expect anything more practical from the writers of a series which ultimately left its viewers with the same dumb luck. Want to be happy like Carrie Bradshaw at the end of S&TC? Just dump your boyfriend for not being that into you, collapse broken-heartedly on the floor of a luxury hotel in Paris, and hope that at that exact moment the love of your life coincidentally walks into the foyer and spontaneously decides that after six years he is into you after all.

But not all men behave like Mr Big. (Some of us even tell our girlfriends our names before the sixth series.) This book made my blood boil on behalf of romantically inept men everywhere. “Women often say to me that men run the world,” Greg writes, probably because it sounds less sexist if “women” say it. “That makes us sound pretty capable. So tell me, why would you think we could be incapable of something as simple as picking up the phone and asking you out?”

Well, Greg, any romantically inept man can come up with hundreds of excuses not to call. Phone calls and emails are agonised over precisely because of being “that into” the object of affection. Some men are modest enough not to deluge women they like with attention precisely because they think they’re so “beautiful”, “amazing” and “brilliant”, as Greg constantly tells his readers he knows they are, even though in his dating days he wouldn’t have returned their calls.

Berendt pushes women away from sensitive, caring - yes, perhaps also somewhat dorky - men and towards the ultraconfident phone maestros who enjoy the thrill of the chase. But beware: maybe the guy who calls you up and sweeps you off your feet the day after he got your number is good at that because he’s done it dozens of times before. As a glib book like this would put it, he’ll be probably be just as smooth when he’s breaking up with you.

So ladies, I urge you: give dork-boy a call instead.

While I mainly dislike the book because it’s making the dating game even harder for sensitive new-age wimps who don’t act like Greg, its stereotyping is broader than that. Men aren’t always decisive tough-guys who know how to get what we want. (Ask Simon Crean.) And of course women are often just as commitment-phobic, emotionally unavailable and badly behaved as men. For instance, one English husband would probably do well to read a book called She’s Just Not That Into You If She’s Having David Blunkett’s Baby.

To be fair, HJNTIY does contain some useful advice in its later chapters. People often make excuses for inadequate relationships, and even though chapters such as “He’s Just Not That Into You If He’s Having Sex With Someone Else” seem self-evident, we’ve all known women who would have benefited from realising this earlier - Princess Diana, for instance.

Most people, though, should resist the temptation of believing that the solution to loneliness is a six-word maxim. While a few women trapped in particularly bad relationships may benefit from the avuncular Greg telling them “don’t waste the pretty”, my advice would be “don’t waste the money”.

Dominic Knight is a writer on The Chaser Annual.