Girls Inc. was looking for ways to get their girls interested in fast-paced, high-paying jobs where women traditionally have been left out. Architecture and engineering certainly fit the bill. [...]
the girls will travel to various construction sites and talk to professionals in the field. Girls Inc. also is looking to build a new, bigger facility, and the summer camp girls will play a large part in the initial design, even being given a chance to pitch their project
— newsherald.com
More on the gender gap in architecture:
131 Comments
BTW, #6?
Rwanda...
jla-x, no one is forcing wieners on you :)
I do not see why you're blending very different things together. it is amostly like you are reading gender as part of some ideological package that includes denying specific desires (be they hetero or homo). I do not agree at all. For instance, I am not with what some specific liberal papers try to do, which is to deny that for many people, their desires are concrete and singular (wrt to the sex they prefer). This is what the Independent in the UK does now (it has become pretty much obsessed with masturbation and porn of all kinds, a zombie of itself; it used to be one of the few decent papers around) and it is, in my opnion, not only in bad taste, but has crossed into ideological grounds where they're fighting the wrong battle, in my opinion.
I never claimed that sex was not a concrete and discrete, differentiated and differentiating aspect of our life that we should deny. My concern was gender, not sex.
also keep in mind, just as much as wieners gross you out, so do vaginas gross out gay men. :0) it is not about being liberal or conservative (there are many conservative gay men and women), that is a question of what one likes or does not like.
chatter,
Olaf, why? because Im not silently wrapping your kebab sandwich, you redneck ignorant nitwit. No, it is not a relevant card to play but then again, who am I conversing with here... you suffer from the hubris of combining dumbness (and I'm not generalizing, I have never read anything vaguely intellectually stimulating by you, Olaf, whatever your prétentions are or were) and arrogance.
Whilst you make fun of Rick, and whatever my opinion on his opinions, he has always been polite, never launching attacks on your persons. Unlike you, an Archinect hyena.
I wouldn't say that about myself. I'm no saint. However, the essence of your point is probably true to some extent.
Olaf,
Here's the interesting thing about Sweden. They ranked 40th with respect to gender equity in 2004. In 2014 they moved up to 4. That's impressive, very impressive. If they did it by changing pronouns, or by suggesting that boys wear bras- and succeeded- imagine how that could impact thinking in the United States to eliminate the need for title 9 or safe spaces that double as summer camps.
Marc Miller,
I was reading about Sweden and Finland. Partly for other reasons but I did read about that as well. I read about it, too.
tammuz... ah... I remember you.
In doing a bit of researching to read on the subject, I found this article that is very much in tune with how Im thinking. from We shouldn’t fight for “gender equality”. We should fight to abolish gender
"the existence of gender itself is, by definition, inherently oppressive. The aspects of a gendered identity which one person deems to be positive will equally act to oppress another member of the same sex, who would be unrepresented by such a definition. In fact, the diversity of men and women means that creating a unanimously positive personality type is simply impossible. And even if such an attribute was identified, its association with a specific sex would imply that people of other identities lacked this characteristic. Not only is this concept of gender harmful, but the noxious idea that we can associate a positive set of behavioural characteristics with a physical sex is intrinsically flawed."
"With each gender stereotype that is dispelled, we move a step closer towards equality and liberation. But instead of trudging along the laborious and indirect path of eliminating these stereotypes one at a time, we should be clear and proud of our aims. Indeed, the façade of “redefining” masculinity and femininity isn’t a compromise, it’s a contradiction. The aim of “gender equality” doesn’t go far enough - we need to confront the very concept of gender itself."
However, I am more doubful that it is just trudging an indirect path. As I said, I think that by accepting the gendered division (creating a sisterhood of sorts to paralllel a bortherhood) and essentialism, one conserves these at the very roots of the culture and these shall be sown yet again to flourish in different and unexpected ways. why not, again, create and nourish a space for the abolishment of gender divisions altogether. what is really so wrong about doing away with these myths atogether, instead of patching up and limping along.
would they accept transgender kids?
chatter - as always I appreciate your hate free opinions of white American Males, your true colors always show through. I was so joking about the rednecks............so far I would suggest jla-x has made the most successful points, but it appears you still would like to create a real divide between Gender and Sex. This is where the real disilluioniment on your end begins......Where do Gender roles come from? Where did society come from? Once you eliminate society how do men and women tell each other apart? If Gender is a social term and sex is a biological, then I guess you are suggesting there is no connection? I wouldnt expect you capable of a brief and concrete answer but you can try.
Marc that is interesting, but I always think comparing the US to any homogoneous culture like any of the Scandanavian countries is a bad analogy - even though Chuck D played in Sweden once (his wikipedia pic)..... With that said, I see solving equity based on intellectual capabilities quite easy to resolve but not so much physical, and this is where Gender arguments become moot points. Giving birth is still something only women can do naturally and being a mother is actually based on the biological connection. Take breast feeding, men can not do that. So culturally - does a breast feeding mother take her child to work, lets says she is in active military duty or a fire(wo)man - the answer is no. hmmmm...does that noe mean the Man must go out and be hunter gatherer? is this how Gender roles started, reality?
Gender is a social term, and sex is a biological trait.
My grandma once said men drink beer and women drink whiskey. If that's so, it's hard to assign a biological reason why that division was created. The same can be said for women wearing blouses and skirts while men wear pants and ties. There isn't a biological necessity due to difference in sex that caused that division. That's a social, gender division.
if a boy wants to be a girl, he can choose the pronoun "she" while wearing a skirt and switching from beer to whiskey. In that case they may retain the biological traits of a male, but carry the gender traits of a female.
now, if a boy wants to be a boy both by sex and gender, but wants to wear a skirt, can that be done? Yes it can. Because the utilikilt is awesome and masculine!
not sure OSHA would approve wearing a kilt the right way on a construction site........so what we are really saying is history can be reset and we can redesign the culture it created, to an extent i agree but there will be a limit eventually and for those who want to argue much of gender roles are related to sex that is where they will start............i will give you an example. I have always felt a man designed high heels. I can not imagine any woman finding these comfortable or practical. I say a man designed them because if you pay attention to ladies walking in flat shoes versus high heels you will notice their butt cheekc will pop up and down more when walking in high heels. this action attracts straight males. so maybe a man noticed that once and designed high heels? or maybe a woman noticed the attention she was getting and designed high heels? now is the high heel in this scenario a social thing or a biological thing (encourages mating)?......women drink whisky over beer to avoid being bloated, which is a mating thing.
Olaf, that part of my point, the ethos and mythos wrapped around one nation is lost in translation when applied to another given the differences in cultural dynamics and social plenums. But that doesn't make it any less interesting to try and translate those ideas and goals.
Your mention of Chuck D is a great one. PE (the group, not the other PE being discussed) among others travelled internationally communicating a particular type of struggle in a particular type of place. The framework framework of the music was so successful that rap as a style of music (technique perhaps?) be internationally recognized as a form of social protest. The words are different, the struggle is different, the place different- but the beats are the same (Yell with the prophets of rage!).... until they aren't. But to recognize the new style as part of a longer thread of history from different places is interesting and informative- that's where synthesis occurs.
I do have some questions regarding body politics, gender identity and your example of child birth, but frankly I'm not comfortable with putting them out here out of respect for women.
Mr. Marc Miller/ male pronouns (as an example of using pronouns to describe sex and gender)
i think it's clear that history frequently resets itself. the start of pax romana, the end of pax romana, the switch of rome from empire to republic, etc. gender bias and other social constructs change significantly between time and place. even if you look at a single place, a group like the amish will have different views than the townsfolk next door.
i don't think all women in all cultures through time wore high heels. that's a trend that can go away as easy as it came about.
jla-x speaks about social engineering as if it were inherently malignantly intrusive.
but isn't a lot of popular culture production, having its basis in generating wealth by easily building on, developing and glamourising existing remanants of previous social experiments (be they religious or socioeconomic, political) a continual social engineering, especially for your kids but also for the adults? How many times do we see, whether through musical videos, advertisements, video games a reinforcement of gender role playing? What a woman or woman is supposed to wear, how to act, how to be sexualized and sexual...
in fact, jla-x, social engineering is happening all the time, whether for the better or the worse. it is an admirable thing when a society realises that, consciously harnesses this capacity to determine itself and takes brave honest décisions to better the situation for those who have been marginalised and oppressed by the preceding social engineered structure.
.
High heels make mens' butts pop too. They do not discriminate.
Chatter, I do not have any ideological views on sex whatsoever. That is a personal preference. What I was getting at with the weiner rant is that we can achieve justice and equality in spite of our natural instincts, preferences, differences...we do not need to hide or deny our nature to secure equal treatment through laws and civility. We do not need to ask people to deny their genders and assume some genderless identity to create equality. Our society is set up to protect diversity not to hide it.
ALL words are constructs created in society of people to describe concepts... be it concepts of what we understand of biological realities, understanding of the physical and non-physical realities. When I grew up, gender and sex is largely interchangeable. However, the social cultures have been redefining the application of certain words especially in controversial subjects.
Given the context of thread and intended context of certain words being used, it is easier to understand "gender" as the social roles that had been traditionally associated with biological male and female. Note: These roles are differs geographically and temporally as we do not live in a static world. Sex is easy to understand in terms of the biological "male' and 'female". Gender in this context can be defined in terms of masculine and feminine roles but even that differs geographically and over time (temporally).
However, we can not ignore that there had been a long legacy of gender roles in the social structure that had been to some degree linked with the biological sexes and certain differences between male and female human beings.
Anyway, out of curiosity..... what does all this have to do with the original topic.
Curt, you are correct that gender changes greatly from time and place, but there has never been a society where gender differences did not manifest in some way. Even the few matriarchal societies that have existed differentiate between male and female gender. Even remote tribes with no contact to the outside world have a social order constructed around gender. I am not saying that individuals can not/do not diverge from this, or that a third gender can not/has not existed, but as a whole gender is a natural feature of our species... and of all social species for that matter. I get annoyed by this debate for a reason kind of loosely related....that is the idea that our species is supernatural or above nature...this attitude leads to the delusion that we have dominion over nature.
I'm surprised that jla-x and olaf are so out of touch. Sooo surprised.
Can you explain? What exactly did I say that is "out of touch"?
I'm assuming that you didn't read anything that I wrote?
jla-x,
Nearly everything.
A specific example: "Gender free" is the most fucking dumb concept of all time. Gender is a real thing. It's biological."
Cool, can you explain why
Why should I have to educate you? I don't have time for it.
I'll assume you can't then. provide anthropological evidence that negates my claim. Can you find a society that is/was "gender neutral".
Teamshumanism is a fucked concept. No different than the false religious belief that we have dominion over nature.
^transhumanism
jla-x, why are you picking this fight on an architecture blog in the first fucking place? Go on twitter and find an expert on the subject who is wiling to educate you. It figures that someone like you, with your track record, wouldn't know where to look to get answers to your questions.
we should accept differences rather than pretend them away. Equality should be ensured through law and social acceptance of diversity not an over reaching denial of natural realities. That's all I ever said.
Davvid, I was addressing the first comment by chatter. Twitter? Is that where you get your info?
Why did you feel the need to comment in a debate that you clearly didn't read.
jla-x, People are on twitter. You can actually use it selectively to engage with people who know what they're talking about.
Also jla-x, the more I read of the 80 comments or so, the more I see that you're just being stubbornly orthodox. You're not bringing new information or experience into the discussion.
Chatter of clouds' argument is much more persuasive.
davvid,
You have a bias and that is clearly indicated by your response. Yes, jla-x has his bias to his view. You sought change and therefore a different thinking to that of the status quo is more persuasive and attractive to you.
Don't assume that is universally the same for everyone.
RickB-OR,
Of course I'm biased.
Good......no argument there... davvid,
Lets just remember, we live in a world with different viewpoints on this subject. This is one of those "Agree to disagree" moments and move on.
I've kind of lost track of that argument and both of you lost in pursuading each other or me.
davvid i do not think you read anything actually. Chatter directed the conversation into Gender vs Sex. Gender free social roles. Jla-x and I, I believe are taking a more biologiycal stance which in the spectrum goes towards Sex as described in this thread. jla-x according to chatter provided social engineering as a method for ensuring equity......furthermore i linked a study that has to do with a skill useful for architecture actually differentiating the sexes and abilities......its actually all relevent. If Curt is noting the reset in culture and Marc a course correction to the profession, the debate has circled around as i see it, sex vs gender and gender roles and how to rid inequality. one side is noting social engineering and the other side is noting to deny engineering or labeling altogether. that was the recap............and high heels we all agreed promotes wearer's sexiness - see Prince......now someone post the symbol for the artist formerly known as Prince.
and the debate here could translate over to bathroom laws which would be an architectural isssue.
Happy to oblige...
" jla-x according to chatter provided social engineering as a method for ensuring equity"
jla-x used the term social engineering in order to criticize the endeavour to open up a gender free space, objecting to it and expressing his réservations regarding soocial engineering. I picked up on this and said that societies are always undergoing social engineering (whether good or bad, consciously or subliminally) and that it would be a good thing in this case.
Olaf, you are not obviously not qualified to speak for other people and sum up their statements. kindly inscribe yourself within your perpetually misinterperating stupidity; don't implicate other people with it.
jla-x said "As far as rights go, it is essential to protect the rights of individual liberties. It is counterproductive to try and engineer a society as a means to achieve this through censorship, denial, and social engineering experiments" you said "jla-x speaks about social engineering as if it were inherently malignantly intrusive." and i said "" jla-x according to chatter provided social engineering as a method for ensuring equity". the statement is only false if you read your intentions for its use. jla-x clearly notes social engineering and you clearly argue as you confirm above that it could be a good thing.
how can you derive "" jla-x according to chatter provided social engineering as a method for ensuring equity" from "jla-x speaks about social engineering as if it were inherently malignantly intrusive."
in no way did jla-x provide social engineering as a method ..well ...for anything really. and no where did I mention that, according to me, he does. In fact, according to me, and to him, jla-x rejects social engineering as a method for equality.
jla-x: That said, equality can only be ensured through law not through social engineering, censorship, or denial.
whereas I recognise its place (I would have said read my posts above but I think you would do yourself and others more disservice by reading than by not reading altogether)
how can you pretend to read more complicated literature - as you do- when you cannot even understand pretty straight-forward positions. more so, how could you be so dumb and arrogant (by forcing your idiotic minterprétations as summation of what our positions are) at the same time? it is a rhetorical question.
as i recall the edo period in japan had a lot of what would essentially be gender bending. males, even samurai, often carried themselves in a feminine manner dressing up and such while women became more sexually liberated while dressing and acting more like men.
That mostly went away during the meiji period where the government stepped in and schools started re-education people to act more towards their gender norm.
i would suggest history teaches us that social engineering will create a greater gender bias, whereas a more libertarian society, which would be more accepting of androgyny and related sexual or gender norms, would have less distinction between genders.
Let me help you Read Chatter - jla-x according to chatter provided social engineering as a method for ensuring equity" from "jla-x speaks about social engineering as if it were inherently malignantly intrusive." "....It is counterproductive to try and engineer a society ....." That said, equality can only be ensured through law not through social engineering, censorship, or denial.
and then Curt drops a bomb, see Curt can read without devious and specious intention like the angry rants of a repressed man in a society he hates - Chatter.. I used the work Specious, did you get a hard-on Chatter?
Curt I do like this statement:
i would suggest history teaches us that social engineering will create a greater gender bias, whereas a more libertarian society, which would be more accepting of androgyny and related sexual or gender norms, would have less distinction between genders.
The question would be - are libertarian society's engineered?
curtkram, why would you assume that a libertarian society is not one undergoing social engineering?
Social engineering is the attempt by legislators to change the operations of institutions or the behaviour of individuals in order to achieve a politically determined goal. That may sound sinisterly manipulative, but the only way to avoid it altogether is to end politics. State schools and universal health care are the two most obvious examples of ideology-laden programmes almost everyone supports. Even a society that rejects both is not one that avoids politics altogether, since the very decision to roll back the state is, of course, deeply political. source
and I do not see the connection with the topic when you cite the transition from the edo to the meiji periods in japanese history. are you trying to prove that one period was more reliant on social engineering that then failed in the society's transition and transformation?
i agree with the above cited article; social engineering happens all the time, in all periods, whether voiced as such or not. in a way, , you could look on it as social anthropology seen from within, in its expansion and development, exactly in the same way that there is no human society without its anthropoligical presence, there is no human society without social engineering.
is it that you merely view social engineering from the viewpoint, as criticized within the article, that it is an overt means of control by a individualism-restrictive authority (hence, from the perspective of liberalism -non-libetarian?)
But that is a prejudiced way of seeing it. in a libertarian society, the values of individual liberty, freedom of choice and so on are philosophically conceived, propogated and forcibly applied. by intellectual, moral, legistlative, executive -and of course, economic- elites and authorties onto their societies. this is yet again social engineering. and this is exactly why, i think, Conservatives view liberalism with a suspicious eye - because to them, rightfully, the social engineering behind it is overtly evident and the values it consciously delivers and implants are antithetical to theirs in fundamental ways. what might be oblivious to them is that their myths of what is natural (to man, woman, religiously, philosophically) are equally that.
so, even this endeavour to have a girls-only architecture club works within the agenda of a particular social engineering project. but for me, there are implicit contradictions in it. its foundations are laid on grounds it shares with what also propos up sexism and misogyny
to add, and in connection with your point about transition curtkram (at least as I understood it), no one says that history moves in a linear and progressive way. certainly there are paradigmatic moments between the syntagmatic narratives. This is how révolutions happen. But at the same time, even paradigmatic moments arise from within the components of the syntagmatic narrative, the weakening of some and the strengthening of others to result in what seems like a rupture of the prévalent gestalt. What I mean to say here is there is no opposition between one period and another...that is an acontextual way to view things.
Just like one could cite a certain period where gender fluidity was a norm followed by one where this was dismantled; I'm sure there are also periods where the gender role identification was followed by periods where this structure was dismantled. There are no lessons to be had here except that, the larger your sweep across history, the less history has to teach you. Unlike you, I don't think history can give you such a categorical formula of for what works or not. at a certain moment, it is all much more about a particular context of components and their dynamic interaction.
You see the tokugawa shogunate as a failure in government?
Libertarianism advocates less government intrusion. So, while there still may be an influence from the government on social engineering, there would likely be less government involved when compared to a liberal government, where government involvement in influencing social engineering is more accepted
(anyone else notice that this has become a lot of mansplaining?)
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