172driver wrote:
However, even if the woke brigade wants us to believe otherwise, men and women are not the same. For starters, one can bear children, the other – not so much. Nothing to do with society.
People who make fun of the “woke brigade” is misrepresenting what they really are saying. Obviously men and women are different in a lot of respects at the biological level. However, I would have hoped that now, in the 2020’s, we would have got past saying that the presence of an uterus make women intellectually less suited to certain tasks. (I’m not making this up. That was a serious claim by many people in the 19th century.)
Airborne_Again wrote:
that the presence of an uterus make women intellectually less suited to certain tasks.
This is most decidedly NOT what I’m saying.
Isn’t it bizarre, though, that we accept there are physical differences between men and women, but somehow we can’t accept that they might exist in the brain as well. There, for some reason, we are all clones and open vessels, that you can fill with societal ideas at will to create a human.
What are the effects of these “differences”?
somehow we can’t accept that they might exist in the brain as well
Same as the differences in brain cells of the same person between 18 years old, 40 years old and 80 years old…they can’t have the same brains? still no issue for them to fly an aircraft
These debates are “intellectual” hostages to fortune. It is never long before somebody sets somebody up into having to deny some ridiculous position which they never claimed.
We have had various threads on the general topic already. Some listed below under “Threads possibly related to this one”.
This thread (unless it gets merged with the main one) is about US v. Europe.
172driver wrote:
This is most decidedly NOT what I’m saying.
Sorry for misinterpreting you, but then I don’t understand the connection between a person’s ability to bear a child (or not) and his/her interests – in particular that of flying.
There are lots of very obvious social differences US to Europe.
For a start, the European scene is impoverished. Most of Europe has practically no GA – especially the bits where GA would work really well – and a lot of it is due to dysfunctional government systems and corruption. The bits where there is a lot of GA tend to have a dominant “club” culture which is relatively social but most members rarely go past the club next door. Keeps the avgas cost down; most of these are quite poor. In the UK, there are few “clubs” in the accountancy sense but there is a heavy rental scene, with most participants not flying at all unless they can cost-share. In Germany and Switzerland there is more money and more willingness to spend it, which manifests itself as more touring (which is indeed expensive). Whereas any look in US GA social media shows a near total lack of interest in cost sharing, or sharing anything really, so evidently they can afford their hobby.
Like there are “stable rats” (girls mucking out stables, hoping to get a ride) there are “hangar rats”, but the EU national minimum wage makes it unviable to have a “hangar rat”, which excludes a lot of young people from hanging around GA. The NMW has destroyed most jobs which young people had to work their way up. In N Europe it is practically impossible to have somebody working “on the cheap”.
In the US, GS is just much more integrated into society, due to a lot more runways. Many of these are not making money but the FAA (taxpayer) funding keeps them open.
Peter wrote:
In the US, GS is just much more integrated into society
Perhaps that is it. In the US, GA is socially more accepted, more mainstream. But that raises another question. Are women more likely to chose activities that are socially accepted instead of “fringe” activities ? More so than men? Perhaps.
Yes; definitely. Women are more social. Men are much more likely to get into lone activities. Look at who goes fishing, train spotting, plane spotting. OK; maybe you can have wonderful and intellectually engaging interactions when doing these things, but somehow I doubt it 
So a structure where there is more social activity will select more women. The US clearly does have that. The whole thing is more a “part of life”.
However, there are two groups in GA, and this is true probably everywhere:
My impression is that the two don’t mix much.
