Hello, Lena, and thank you too.
I agree with you; maybe most statements in the list I posted are
untrue. In fact, I'm not sure if there are out there any serious
research on that field of knowledge. I suppose that, in time, science
will unveal the secrets of our brains and then we'll be able to tell things
with a scientifical base. By now, all we can do is create mailing lists
like this one to try to guess what we really don't know.
It's possible
that I'm completely wrong; anyway, the hypothesis that we still
carry some evolutionary traces from our troglodyte past in our brains
appears to me as plausible. In fact, recent investigations by Robert
Provine about laughter revealed marked differences between men and
women patterns, and also a strong relationship between laughter and
speech (he specifically stated that laughter and trickling were the first
way of communication that appeared in the human being, inherited
from the ancestors and later replaced by language.
But, as human beings, we always have a "sixth sense", or some kind of
intuition about ourselves that make certain things appear to us as
believable. Dogs inherited the pack behaviour from wolves, why should
it be different for human beings?
And another question would be: should we retain our biological
inheritance or should we "pass to the next chapter" in evolution
and override those traces, if any exist?
Regards
Miguel Ángel
Hi Susan, hi Miguel,
I agree with Susan that you have to be very, very
careful using "women
are like this, men are like that" stereotypes, and I believe that most
statements in Miguels list are untrue (thank you anyway, Miguel, it
was a thought-provoking impulse and interesting to read). If some of
them are true, they are true not due to "the nature of women".
Instead, they are self-fulfilling prophecies: because these
stereotypes exist, women are socialized to comply with them, and so
they become true, and so the stereotypes continue, and so they
continue to be true...
So I do think that there is a chance that reworking
the interface
might help! If little girls get puppets, and boys get computers, and
a lot of people tell the little girls that they are more interested in
people and flowers than in programming and expect them to behave
accordingly, and provide excuses if they are not good with computers
(while they tell the little boys to just go figure it out), chances
are very good that there are a lot of women out there who would
benefit very much from a wysiwyg-editor.
Including me, my mother and my sister, by the way.
It's just important that this is not because
"women just are like
that", but because we live in a society that makes them like that.
Best,
Lena