Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?

by Mary Jackson (March 2011)

India Knight on the subject of female bosses:

Unlike Ms. Knight, who is very nice, and has the intelligence to know her place. What more could a man want? Seriously, though, male bosses never irrational or petty or jealous? Perhaps not, if you tell them what they want to hear.

It makes me wonder if women as a group are simply not as suited to the academic or intellectual life.

When women get together they talk about fashion, relationships, gossip.

God, hard-wired for hierarchy, hard-wired for empathy and hard-wired to care and connect.  (Connect. Only connect. That is another of those vaguely computery phrases that is doing the rounds. ) Above all, we are hard-wired for gender.  Cordelia Fine has her doubts, but what does she know, being only a woman? From Carol Travis’s review, in the Times Literary Supplement, of Fine’s Delusions of Gender.

Back to Henry Higgins. In the song to which this piece owes its title, Higgins sounds out the ever-patient Colonel Pickering:

Pajamas Media again, this time ostensibly writing  about the way “feminists” – which ones is not made clear – have criticised Sarah Palin:

The histrionic attacks are rooted in something much deeper than simple political disagreement.

What the feminists hate is that, on the job, Palin is one of the boys.

This makes sense. In the UK we had the same with Margaret Thatcher. Because she was a Conservative, feminists on the left could not find it in them to celebrate the fact that the UK had its first woman Prime Minister, and so unsexed her. But the article was not about the election. Mary Grabar continues:

That Palin thinks like a man, or logically, is what has made the left livid.

As appropriate to their modes, they respond emotionally. The men in their movement, who have become one of the girls in terms of thinking, respond with personal insults, even going so far as to mock the looks of her baby, as Bill Maher recently did.

Now Ms. Grabar gets her teeth into her real subject which is how women have ruined everything. Those awful women with PhDs have taken over academia, laments Grabar, PhD, an academic:

The 1980s saw a concomitant change in the popular culture, as women wedged their way into boardrooms and military academies.

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