SERIES #2 – MAKING SENSE OF THE GENDER GAP

Just as many of you glanced at the title “feminism”, you would’ve thought this once again is an attack from the ‘man-hating’ clan. Some of you out there would say, “hasn’t feminism already become a world-wide concept, why another article on it”; others feel that the equity between the genders has been established long since around the last 1920s when the Universal Adult Suffrage was sanctioned. But is this the reality? Does pay equity exist?

If we talk stats, women still earn 73 cents against a dollar that a man earns for the same job. What could be the reason for the same? Let’s find out.

Do women perform any lesser than the average man on the academic front?

A study by the National Science Foundation, United States suggests that while boys and girls performed equally on the average, a larger number of boys were represented in the best and worst performers. What this means is that while women chose to take a very consistent chuck of the marking blocks, men show large variability in their intelligence distribution curves, which serves as the basis for understanding the gender differences in intelligence patterns.

Do women qualify lesser for science and technology related courses as per standardized testing?

Educational Testing Service (ETS) officials reported that 28% of the total women population appears for the SAT Physics Subject test. Could their scores suffice our demarcations in the job market? I beg to think not. Fewer women take the GRE Physics test, 16 percent of the sample and their scores show a standard deviation of about 150. But this is not purely gender based. It is intertwined with cultural stigmas. In general more colored students i.e. the Hispanics, Asians, African- Americans and others are known to be under-represented in this examinations- then how can we pose a female student bound by some pre-existing social stigmas against an American who has seen no discrimination to his rights ever before?

What is the real trend in the UAE?

Before we globalize our view of gender studies, let’s take a moment to understand the situation at home. The Global Gender Gap Index ranks the United Arab Emirates a low 105/130 when it comes to gender equality. However, since Emirati women have constantly out-performed men in several key areas and excelled in secondary and tertiary education and that significantly pulls up the ranks.
Girls have known to have performed far better than boys in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examinations conducted by OECD which close to 11000 students undertook. The study pointed out that nearly twice as many teenage boys vs girls in the UAE have poor reading skills and girls exceed boys by 31 points in terms of scientific literacy.

Quiet nerve wrecking for the chauvinists out there- but Malta, Jordan and UAE have set the status quo with great gender gaps, all favoring females!

Food for thought until next time…

An interesting way to look at the concept of chauvinism and why males tend to pull down women as they climb up the research ladders, already having well established themselves in other fields…

Since the day mankind (it doesn’t exclude women!) has set foot on the planet, it has always been working its way about advancement. Today we can 3-D print hearts and set in implants that can compensate for real life organs. These are products of researches that men claim to have excelled in, past the years where they deemed intelligence in women as a sign of evil and witchcraft. But this constant need for man, as in the male, to create life is interestingly a product of his inability to borne life. So he needs an answer to clone or design in life, in all its functionalities, while women are known to possess a sort of satisfaction: for they have the gift of giving life.