why are women seen as the "weaker sex"?

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The notion that men have accomplished more intellectually is based on the fact that women historically rarely got credit for their intellectual contributions and most individuals are ignorant to the contributions women have made that they have been given credit for. In the past it was not unusual for female scholars to pass on their work to be published by male acquaintances, or even family members because many journals would not even bother to review works put forth by women.

While I believe there is sex differentiation in the way in which people deal with emotions, I do not believe either sex is emotionally stronger than the other. I think that's highlighted well enough in the Love and Dating forum.

And you can't state the phrase "technical studies" properly.

You are correct. In this day and age, no one is keeping women out of technical fields except women themselves. For some reason or another, when women go into the sciences, they tend to choose biological sciences or the medical field.

But as a woman who is in a technical field, and quite frequently the only woman in a class of over 80 men, I can tell you that I was never given preferential treatment. I never had a newspaper article written about me and all of my accomplishments were entirely merit based. I faced little if nothing in the way of preferential treatment or discrimination.

women have been prevented from achieving much in traditionally male professions - this is proven by the lack of women's rights and education that i mentioned before. i'm not making this up - patriarchal society is shown in the history books to have kept women from accomplishing things in certain fields to the same degree as men (or getting the recognition as Chronos notes). you would like to believe that it has something to do with women being intrinsically lesser, but it does not. men and women may have strengths in different areas, but that does not mean that either gender is lesser or greater.


yes, exactly. this is how men's sports are designed - for men to excel. once again, you prove my point. women competing in men's sports will not usually perform as well. this makes perfect sense. men would not perform as well in sports designed for women.


no, sorry. getting nads crushed still does not compare to childbirth. it may compare to the nausea, backache and cramps that *some* women experience on a monthly basis. maybe getting your nads crushed is slightly worse than that, but only briefly. giving birth trumps it anyway. (and you should have worn a cup).

by the way, i've had my fingers crushed in an iron safe. i have also been hit by a city bus as a pedestrian. nothing you say can demonstrate that women are weaker when it comes to pain, intelligence or emotions. brute strength - sure, men are stronger... but that is all.

Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Archimedes, Benjamin Franklin, etc.

Male intelligence proven.

No one denied that there are intelligent males. I suggest you re-read the post and put a little more effort into reading comprehension.

The highest IQ ever tested is a woman. There's been plenty of super smart women through history too, Marie Curie is one example that springs to mind, also Hedy Lamaar, Ayn Rand, Admiral Grace Hopper etc, in the past women didn't get the same chance as men to excel they were made to do other things and fulfil a different role, women were also hampered by child rearing.
Now that thats not so (or to the same extent), they are actually kicking males butts; there is now a big concern in the education sector 'why are male boys not achieving' it's actually not that boys are not achieving it's just that girls are now outdoing them. It's the same in the Universities, more women are graduating with degrees here than men.

i tend to agree with this.

if there is any truth to men being more blameful of women than vice versa (which i doubt; in truth the negative voices just seem to be the loudest) i would guess it's more because we tend to have worse self-esteem, be less assertive, and gentler in our dealings with other people. in other words, we absorb the blame and internalize it more than men would. i think women generally internalize everything more and men are more outwardly expressive. but at core, we're probably not all that different.




eh - this is obvious from your posts. it says more about you than about women.

The question of the milennium!!
WHY ARE WOMEN(generally) SO DAMNED MEAN TO EACH OTHER??

I don't know. I've been trying to figure that out myself.

One thing about women is that our bodies were designed for having babies, and that it's impossible for a woman to "bulk up" naturally by doing weight training and exercising. If a woman's body fat goes below a certain limit, her periods stop, and while that sounds like a good thing, it really isn't as it means that her bones are losing calcium density, which isn't good at all.

Patriarchal societies have not only kept women from doing many things that men can do, but they often blame the victim when a woman or girl is raped, whether it's because of something she was wearing, or that she didn't die trying to prevent the rape. Women in patriarchal cultures generally aren't allowed to become priests, and in some cases, the genders are segregated during worship.

all true, and some points i had not even considered.


many of us aren't that mean to each other. for example, most of us are being pretty supportive of each other in some threads on WP.

A bit off thread, but some of the stereotypes here are hilarious. I've been told before than I'm "freakishly strong" (especially since I'm very small) and my ability to fix almost anything seems to puzzle a lot of men - many get really flustered if they are corrected or advised in such areas by a woman and I get the "you don't look like someone who can do..." all the time. My husband loves to see the look on their faces in such situations

Bad male attitudes nothing more. I don't have a degree because I didn't want to suffer 2+ more years of BS that I couldn't apply in the real world (unlike my single year of technical school experience which gave me two certifications, one of which being my dream job). In the mean time a bunch of my male peers are HAPPILY! (keyword) unemployed, refuse to work and play on x-box live all day, courtesy of their easy to please mom. In the mean time proportionally more women are actually trying to go somewhere with their life not just thinking they are the s**t because they pwn noobs.

If you're talking physical strength, sure, men are superior. Cognitively? I don't buy that crap. Show me some evidence that men are generally superior - NOT just at a few very narrow skills like mental rotation.

Hehe. Me too.

I'm not THAT strong, but people piss their pants over my 'mutant strength' because I can actually do pullups. LOL.

Hey, the OP isn't talking about physical strength. She's talking about women getting the blame for being problem causers. Of course, that makes no sense. The main reason why I can't go out somewhere by myself at night is because of what men might do to me. Whenever I catch a glimpse of a dangerous driver, it usually looks like a man. I think that men who irrationally pin the blame for things on women are trying to compensate for their low self-esteem. That, or they enjoy causing emotional distress in their victims.