Monday, March 14, 2011

Presidential Psychosis – Gender equality Vs Global Meltdown


Posted by CotoBlozz

Rancho Santa Margarita, CA _ While the world  continues to blow up- literally, the President of the United States he decides to use his weekly radio address Saturday to fight for gender equality.  Although women are more likely than men to graduate from college today, they tend to earn less on average, face a greater chance of living in poverty and are outnumbered in critical subjects such as math and science, he said in his weekly radio and online address Saturday.  "Achieving equality and opportunity for women isn't just important to me as president. It's something I care about deeply as the father of two daughters who wants to see his girls grow up in a world where there are no limits to what they can achieve," he said in his address.



While the President makes an excellent point about gender inequality, there his argumentation is flawed:  While it is true about gender inequality:  The math and science issue is a choice:

For instance, women keep their personal lives and business lives very separate when it comes to social media, according to the 2009 Women in Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage, and Compass Partners. While women consider blogs great sources of information, especially regarding purchases, the vast majority of women use social networks solely for keeping in touch with family and friends.

Over half  of the women surveyed said they participate in some kind of blog activity (publishing, posting comments, reading), and 53% use social networks. However, women use social networks as designed:  75% use them to keep in touch with friends and family, and not so much as information sources or for making purchase decisions. That's a major insight considering this is the half of population making 85% of purchase decisions in the US.

Stay with me.  Now, consider during the National Center for Women in Information Technology meeting at the Googeplex last year, Vivian Lagesen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology presented her study of Malaysia  showing 52% of  all computer science undergraduates majors are female. Their view is that the field is very much in the tradition of the female role, since it is safe and mostly indoors, not unlike cooking, for example.
On the other hand, Maria Charles of the university of California Santa Barbara reported that the problem surrounding gender inequality has its roots in the belief that genders are different but equal.  Differences in attitudes about math and science between men and women  are greater in the developed world, than in the developing world, where women and men see math about the same.
The conclusion is that in the developed word,  women make career choices as a form of self-expression - mostly on misguided pre-conceptions, opting out of sciences, technology engineering and mathematics.  Charles suggests that forcing all students to take match and science classes would give them the opportunity to discover their interests and aptitude for those fields - a form of ridding the person of self-bounded rationality, for example.  Perhaps this is what the President is arguing for:  Pro-choice on legal murder, but against choice anent math and science.
But wait, there is more.  More importantly that Mr. Obama’s misleading rhetoric, is that while the President played golf and fought for gender equality, the recently-forced-to-resign _PJ Crawley appeared prophetic as Libyan rebels are loosing ground to its dictator.

And the Japanese catastrophe?  Fine – thanks for asking – that is, the President used weapons of mass disinformation to further his agenda, while neglecting to abide by Drs. Juran and Pareto:  Their First Law of Effective Leadership, known as the Pareto Rule and in the vernacular as the 80-20 Rule:  Focus on the vital few as opposed to the trivial many.

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