Interesting article on benevolent sexism

[lumberjack_jeff]

8. I fully agree.

One of the biggest socially obvious examples of benevolent sexism is the college gender gap. A college student is 50% more likely to be female, and the reasons are all wrapped up in stereotypes. The fact that women are going to college instead of men is considered "a great accomplishment". We send our daughters to college because our sons can work on the fishing boat or in the machine shop or at the oil field - jobs unsuitable for daughters.

How can people who accept this as appropriate, yet simultaneously complain about the pay gap, prevent their heads from exploding through cognitive dissonance? Of course, of course, women are paid less, because the social expectation is that they are to be protected from hard, unpleasant and dangerous work.

Even the guy running the chainsaw tacitly accepts this system as justifiable - mom and dad could only afford to send one of their two kids to school, after all.

If we need to invent a new term (benevolent sexism) to avoid acknowledging the actual bidirectional nature of the street of sexism, that's fine.