On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:04:42 -0500, Erin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
><DIGRESSION> Harkening back to the previous thread about when women
>get "socialized" out of their interests in computers (and other
>'hard' sciences), I'd have to say High School is when that happened
>to me and it had a lasting impact. I took computer science in grade
>11 (SPK on punch cards 1st term, BASIC on Commodore PETs 2nd term),
>one of 2 girls in the class. I was definately self-conscious in that
>class and didn't speak out much at all.
Oddly enough, this didn't happen as much at my high school; our
computer programming classes had a good split. Notably, however, the
instructional computing department at my high school had four people,
three of them women.
>1. Women/girls experience sexual abuse, assault, harassment, domestic
>violence far more often and regularly than men/boys, which is
>damaging to the core of a person's self and which takes a great deal
>of time and personal strength to heal.
As far as assault, harassment, and domestic violence goes, I don't
think this is true. Boys get beaten as often if not more often than
girls, in part because they're supposed to "be able to take it". I
know a _lot_ of men who have been severely damaged by parental,
sibling, or classmate abuse.
The evidence for sexual abuse is inconclusive, especially in light of
recent admissions that many of the sexual abuse stories that were all
the rage in the early 90s were in all probability invented by
therapists, confabulated, or just plain fraudulent. I'm not saying
that sexual abuse doesn't occur -- clearly, it does -- but I do
believe that we have no good figures on its incidence, or on which sex
is more likely to be a victim. Victim groups (and those who work for
them) are, unfortunately, not good sources of information because they
are extremely biased and have very powerful motivations to make the
problem to be as large as possible. Again, no criticism of the value
of those groups is intended; they serve a valuable purpose. They're
just largely worthless as a source of unbiased factual information.
Kelly
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