Bravery and biology: Reshma Saujani argues that (in general) boys are brave risk-takers while girls are cautious and risk-averse. She thinks this is how we teach them to be, and that teaching girls differently can solve the problem. She looks at computer coding in particular, which is very male-dominated. But Eric Raymond, legendary programmer and instigator of the open source movement, sees things differently:

I, on the other hand, look at this and see the bioenergetics of human reproduction. … It would actively surprise me if this difference could be socialized away. I think the attempt is as doomed as the early kibbutznkis’ attempt to raise children in creches. Traits close to our central mating strategies are pretty strongly conserved across cultures and resistent to social engineering.

A central tenet of political correctness is that people are trained to be what they are, so social engineering can change people’s nature. Yet despite repeated failures, often blighting millions of lives, the PC crew continue to ignore biological realities. A quintessential pc-vs-reality clash.

This theme motivates the current barrage of “women” articles in the ABC, which are remarkable for the extreme banality of the stories, i.e. they don’t merit being published unless there’s an underlying agenda.