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