Some of these posts horrify me a little. If any of you have the time, perhaps you could watch this?
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04knbny/horizon-20142015-7-is-your-brain-male-or-female
Because children see their parents from an early age doing gender-specific things, girls being steered into safer activities, boys sent off to be more active and persuaded to be more ambitious in every area from a scarily young age, our brain is so capable of moulding itself to fit the lifestyle taught to it that gender-specific toys are 'learnt' as a baby.
The Swedes gave 400 days free and fully paid leave to parents, all parents no matter their earnings or length of residence. They found at first that like most dads everywhere, the dads preferred to get back to work because they soon got bored. So they changed the ruling and now the time has to be divided equally. as result, it was discovered that the fathers bonded far, far better with their children and mothers had to let go and let the partners take over. As a result, quite a few fathers became stay-at-home dads, although in a country where most parents work that is still a scarcity, but at least dads no longer get funny looks when they take the babies to playgroups.
DS says he gets so fed up with mothers and grandmothers at parent evenings consoling their daughters when their maths marks aren't too good with 'Never mind, I wasn't any good at maths either'. He said the fact is, fewer girls are encouraged to do maths, the mothers are only usually able to help with creative, and language homeworks and the fathers are raely to be found at homework time - but he can see that the girls are every bit as good as the boys, they slide behind because they lose confidence in their ability and it certainly isn't from lack of his boosting it up.
So, what I THINK I am trying to say is - if we had a truly equal world where both sexes can be equally as good at everything apart from having babies (as the research in the programme shows, as even spatial ability problems can be solved just as well by women if shown another way to solve them) then what is the need for different titles?
When a science class was questioned as to their impression of a scientist, they all said a MALE in a white coat. How depressing. How 50s.