Being an excessively introspective individual, I have wondered about my sexist biases for most of my life. A few facts. When I was a young engineer and had met few woman engineers and had never met one that I viewed as having an engineer's mind I considered the possibility that women were probably less well adapted to an engineering career than men. When I went to China I met quite a few woman engineers and was quite surprised to find out how bright and curious they were. It was almost like I was wrong about woman engineers in general. Of course, now in this younger generation bright woman engineers are a common thing, more evidence that an earlier theory of mine was wrong.
Before, I participated in this forum I had a sense that there was something so fundamentally different about the way men and women think such that I would usually be able to tell who was a male poster and who was a female poster. I was actually pretty good at it I thought. Something like the way dowsers are pretty good at finding the pail where the gold is until Randi puts the lids on. Alas, the same thing happened to me. It turned out that when people had screen names identifiable as male or female I was very good at determining who was who. Alas when the screen name was ambiguous I just couldn't figure it out.
I've also noticed a transition away from some other anti-woman biases I held in my youth. In my youth, I thought a successful woman in business got there only through special advantages. Now the success of a great many women in business has put that little theory to rest as well.
Anyway, today I think I'm a pretty balanced objective observer of things male and female, but of course I always thought that even though I think I was wrong about what I thought previously.
As an aside, I was rooting for the success of Clinton before this stuff broke. I will certainly vote for her over somebody I see as pro-war, anti-science, anti-gay, etc. but I'm certainly going to be a lot less happy about it than I was before. I really think there is something seriously wrong with her integrity or her intelligence or her management style.
ETA: I wasn't real keen on the Bush administration and I think most of them were men. I did have the sexist theory that maybe if they'd had a few more women floating around that it might have curtailed some of their zeal for war.
