From The Mind of Merc - Sexism

Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down. Today, following on from last month's post about misattributed inventions, I was thinking about sexism (again).

Following on from an earlier post about discrimination, it still baffles me as to why anyone would contemplate or be happy with having a sexist standpoint.
1)      How can anyone think they are better than another person because of their gender? A difference in appearance never means a difference in value or worth.
2)      How can anyone think it’s better to suppress the other gender? Especially when that can only be to the detriment of the entire species.

Going back to a previous post about stolen inventions, there are numerous occasions when women have demonstrated the exceptional contribution that have capability of making to the human race and yet they are continually shut down, shut out and generally told to shut up because they are not male. The key examples for me are undoubtedly Rosalind Franklin (I highly doubt Crick & Watson would have achieved what they did without Franklin’s work), Ada Lovelace (who actually wrote the programme Charles Babbage used for his machine), Katherine Johnson and Grace Hopper (2 amazingly gifted women who were crucial to the success of their companies – NASA and US Navy respectively).

Why is it so terrible for a woman to have created (or, apparently worse, be credited with) her achievements? What in the world makes sense in obstructing the possibility for development and improvement that including women and allowing an indiscriminate and unbiased approach to all walks of life could present? Just think what we could have achieved if men throughout history had not been so determined to obstruct, put down and ignore all the bright, gifted and capable women they encountered. If more women like Joan of Arc had been allowed or even encouraged to fight, particularly on the English side, would it instead have been them who prevailed? What if there had been less focus on only men being able to rule (a blatant fallacy given one of the first female rulers – Elizabeth I – ushered in a ‘Golden Age’ for her people), could the country have prospered further?

All those women who desperately sought education or a certain/political career and were denied because of their gender – what significant and potentially positive difference could they have made that could have improved the lives of everyone in the world? And, rather than asking the same question 100 years from now, shouldn’t this exclusion and prejudice finally stop for our own sakes? The choice is common sense or being counterproductive - surely this is not difficult.

As Robin Williams once remarked – particularly relevant given the recent US elections – “…there should a woman president…there would never be any wars - just every 28 days some intense negotiations.”