This is part of what i’ve been saying for 13 years…yes we ARE different! check out this article…

http://www.dickinsonstate.com/digest.asp?ArticleID=1647

from StarTribune.com, Minneapolis, Minneapolis

Jennifer Delahunty Britz: Punished for their gender’s overall success

GAMBIER, OHIO - A few days ago I watched my daughter Madalyn open a thin envelope from one of the five colleges to which she had applied. “Why?” was what she was obviously asking herself as she handed me the letter saying she was waitlisted.
Why, indeed? She had taken the toughest courses in her high school and had done well, sat through several Saturday mornings taking SATs and the like, participated in the requisite number of extracurricular activities, written a heartfelt and well-phrased essay and even taken the extra step of touring the campus.

She had not, however, been named a National Merit finalist, dug a well for a village in Africa or climbed to the top of Mount Rainier. She is a smart, well-meaning, hardworking teenage girl, but in this day and age of swollen applicant pools that are decidedly female, that wasn’t enough. The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today’s accomplished young women.

I know this well. At my own college these days, we have three applicants for every one we can admit. Just three years ago, it was two to one. Though Kenyon was a men’s college until 1969, more than 55 percent of our applicants are female, a proportion that is steadily increasing. My staff and I carefully read these young women’s essays about their passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place.

I was once one of those girls applying to college, but that was 30 years ago, when applying to college was only a tad more difficult than signing up for a membership at the Y. Today, it’s a complicated and prolonged dance that begins early, and for young women, there is little margin for error: A grade of C in Algebra II/Trig? Off to the waitlist you go.

Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions. Last week, the 10 officers at my college sat around a table, 12 hours every day, deliberating the applications of hundreds of talented young men and women. While gulping down coffee and poring over statistics, we heard about a young woman from Kentucky we were not yet ready to admit outright. She was the leader/ president/editor/captain/lead actress in every activity in her school. She had taken six advanced placement courses and had been selected for a prestigious state leadership program. In her free time, this whirlwind of achievement had accumulated more than 300 hours of community service in four different organizations.

Few of us sitting around the table were as talented and as directed at age 17 as this young woman. Unfortunately, her test scores and grade point average placed her in the middle of our pool. We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write “admit” next to her name.

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

We have told today’s young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How’s that for an unintended consequence of the women’s liberation movement?

The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a “tipping point,” where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you’ll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.

Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges? These are questions that admissions officers like me grapple with.

In the meantime, I’m sending out waitlist and rejection letters for nearly 3,000 students. Unfortunately, a majority of them will be female, young women much like my daughter. I will linger over letters, remembering individual students I’ve met, essays I loved, accomplishments I’ve admired. I know all too well that parents will ache when their talented daughters read the letters and will feel a bolt of anger at the college admissions officers who didn’t recognize how special their daughters are.

Yes, of course, these talented young women will all find fine places to attend college — Maddie has four acceptance letters in hand — but it doesn’t dilute the disappointment they will feel when they receive a rejection or waitlist offer.

I admire the brilliant successes of our daughters. To parents and the students getting thin envelopes, I apologize for the demographic realities.

Jennifer Delahunty Britz is the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College. She wrote this for the New York Times.

The title of an article on WorldNetDaily (WorldNetDaily.com is a fiercely independent newssite committed to hard-hitting investigative reporting of government waste, fraud and abuse.) …”Mom,’ ‘dad’ to be axed
from school textbooks? “
Zelda’s revenge: Gender-neutralizing bill
could also jeopardize prom kings, queens
Posted: March 9, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

A traditional-values organization in California is warning the state’s residents that a bill pending in the Legislature, if approved, could remove all references to gender in public schools – threatening even references to “mom” or “dad” in textbooks.

If the bill, SB 1437, were to become law, warns the Capitol Resource Institute, “it could potentially require gender-neutral bathrooms in our schools and all references to ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ or ‘mom and dad’ removed from school textbooks as the norm.”

Sponsored by Democratic Sen. Sheila Kuehl – a lesbian actress best known for playing Zelda in “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” in the ’60s – the legislation would add “gender” (actual or perceived) and “sexual orientation” to the law that prohibits California public schools from having textbooks, teaching materials, instruction or “school-sponsored activities” that reflect adversely upon people based on characteristics like race, creed and handicap.

Sen. Sheila Kuehl

States Capitol Resource Institute on its website: “The reason this is such an outrageous bill is because it is the most extreme effort thus far to transform our public schools into institutions that disregard all notions of the traditional family unit. SB 1437 seeks to eliminate all ’stereotypes’ of the traditional family so that young children are brainwashed into believing that families with moms and dads are irrelevant.

“The social experiment pro-homosexual activists have envisioned for our young children is mind-boggling!”

The organization notes the bill also applies to school activities, which include cheerleading, sports and events like the prom.

“Under SB 1437, school districts would likely be prohibited from having a ‘prom king and queen’ because that would show bias based on gender and sexual orientation,” said CRI. The measure also could affect issues like gender-specific sports teams.

Earlier this week, about 500 homosexual students gathered at the State Capitol in Sacramento to celebrate “Queer Youth Advocacy Day.”

According to the Sacramento Bee, demonstrators voiced support for Kuehl’s bill and AB 606, authored by Democrat Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, which addresses harassment and discrimination in schools.

“I refuse to settle for anything less than respect and equality in education,” 16-year-old Garrett Rubin stated at the event. “I shouldn’t have to be working so hard to get an education like everybody else.”

The Bee reported participants also spoke out against AB 2311, authored by GOP Assemblyman Dennis Mountjoy, a bill that would prohibit the “promotion of homosexuality in public education.”

as Newsday reports below from JAMA, there are Gender differences found in aspirin’s benefits.

Researchers say therapy prevents cardiovascular attacks in men and strokes in women.

By DELTHIA RICKS
Newsday

Aspirin reduces cardiovascular risk with a distinct advantage for each gender, protecting men against heart attacks and women against strokes, a study found.

Researchers reported the results of the study in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

The team gathered reams of pertinent medical data on aspirin and its protective effects and re-analyzed it. Led by Dr. David Brown, chief of cardiology at Stony Brook University Hospital in New York, the group was well-aware of aspirin therapy’s benefits for people who had already experienced a heart attack or stroke.

What had remained less clear was whether there were benefits for those who had never had either.

In short, could an aspirin tablet protect people from ever having a heart attack or stroke?

Now, after analyzing the effects of aspirin therapy in more than 95,000 patients who had participated in controlled clinical studies between 1966 and 2000, Brown and his colleagues have found that while aspirin indeed reduces cardiovascular risks, it does so across a sharp gender divide. Aspirin prevents heart attacks in men and blocks strokes in women.

“Aspirin affects platelets differently in men and women,” Brown said. Aspirin prevents platelets from clumping together. Women are more likely than men to thwart aspirin’s anti-clumping activity. Therefore aspirin’s gender difference with respect to platelets may be one reason that men and women have varying reactions to the medication.

Other theories may involve differences in various hormones on the cardiovascular system, Brown said.

In the research, the cases of 51,342 women and 44,114 men were analyzed, and demonstrated that, in general without aspirin therapy, women were more likely to have strokes and men were more likely to heart attacks.

Read this fascinating article from the Arbiter Online! It supports my view that the genders are very different from each other. however this doesn’t mean that we are not equal. People confuse equality with sameness. We are equal, but different. And that’s a good thing! considering how different our brains are, and our genetic and societal programming, doesn’t it make sense that we would communicate differently?

<<

This intriguing discovery is one of many signs of deep-rooted behavioral differences between the sexes that scientists are exploring with the latest tools of genetics and neuroscience.

Researchers report significant differences in the structure and functioning of male and female brains, in humans and in animals, that show up in different behaviors.

The differences apparently date far back in evolutionary history to the time before humans and monkeys separated from their common ancestor some 25 million years ago, according to Gerianne Alexander, a psychologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the monkey experiment.

“Human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” Richard Haier, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Irvine, wrote in the journal NeuroImage.

In the monkey experiment, researchers put a variety of toys in front of 44 male and 44 female vervets, a breed of small African monkeys, and measured the amount of time they spent with each object.

Like little boys, some male monkeys moved a toy car along the ground. Like little girls, female monkeys closely inspected a doll’s bottom. Males also played with balls while females fancied cooking pots. Both were equally interested in neutral objects such as a picture book and a stuffed dog.

People used to think that boys and girls played differently because of the way they were brought up. Now scientists such as Alexander say a creature’s genetic inheritance also plays an important role.

“Vervet monkeys, like human beings, show sex differences in toy preferences,” Alexander wrote in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “Sex-related object preference appeared early in human evolution,” she said.

Photo by Courtesy Knight Ridder Tribune

Alexander speculated that females of both species prefer dolls because evolution programmed them to care for infants. Males may have evolved toy preferences that involve throwing and moving, skills useful for hunting and finding a mate.

Besides observing behavior from the outside, scientists are using the latest brain-scanning techniques to examine what happens inside people’s heads when they’re thinking or acting.

PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagery) scans light up in regions of the brain that are most active while performing certain tasks. They’ve become a key tool of modern brain research.

Many studies have shown that men tend to be better at mathematics and spatial reasoning while women outdo men in verbal and language skills.

For example, in a computerized maze-searching experiment, it took females five minutes longer than males to find their way to a goal, according to Scott Mowatt, a psychologist at Wayne State University in Detroit.

But women outperformed men in a test of verbal fluency conducted by Wei-li Chang and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.

Haier, the University of California-Irvine neuroscientist, reported a striking difference in the structure of male and female brains. Men, he said, have much more gray matter in areas dedicated to general intelligence. Women, on the other hand, have far more white matter in those areas. Gray matter consists of the clusters of brain cells, or neurons, that process information. White matter refers to the network of specialized cells that support and connect the processing centers. Both are necessary for intelligence.

“Men and women apparently achieve similar IQ results with different brain regions,” Haier said.

“Many perceptive incongruities are rooted in the brain’s structural and functional organization,” said Allan Reiss, a neuroscientist at the Stanford School of Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif., who contrasted men’s and women’s reactions to cartoons and jokes.

Brain images showed that the language center on the left side of the brain lit up more in women than in men. This may explain why men appreciate one-liners and slapstick, while women tend to enjoy more complicated stories and funny situations, Reiss said.

“The long trip to Mars or Venus is hardly necessary to see that men and women often perceive the world differently,” he wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences>>>

From the Weston Town Crier…
<<<<AUThor helps break gender myth
By Mary Kate Dubuss/ Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Yes, there are many many differences among men and women. HOWEVER, this does not eliminate the differences between them. MY message is that we are equal, but very different. Treating each other equally should not be confused with treating each other the same…equality is not sameness. This difference is huge and profound. To get the best results, we must treat each other in harmony with the other’s style and characteristics, and these style and characteristic differences have no bearing on abilities. Men and women have different inherent styles and characteristics, yet we have equal intellectual abilities. That doesn’t mean we are the same or have the same communication styles. This is MY message!

Read this article from Newsweek, addressing some of the many physiological differences between men and women. With our brains being so different, it’s no wonder there is conflict and confusion between the sexes!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7243350/site/newsweek

Read this -

Our culture still seems bizarrely attached to the idea that men and women are in some way different. Women are still encouraged by mass media and private cultures to be homemakers. Heck, most of the reason the College of Consumer and Family Sciences has seen an increase in male enrollment is because they’ve been putting a focus on expanding aspects of their program like the outside world-focused hospitality and tourism management program.
Despite a few quirks of biology, men and women are really the same people, separated only by some organs (which are usually covered up anyway) and a wall of prejudice.

No no no!! This excerpt from the Purdue Exponent epitomizes the challenge of men and women working together successfully. We are not the same people, not be any stretch of the imagination. Every single physiological system in the body differs in men and women…every single one. The medical community is just now, finally, realizing that women cannot be treated identically to men and get the same results.

Within the past year a team of scientists determined that genetic markers prove this disparity. Read this carefully - Genetically, there are more differences between men and women than there are between humans and chimpanzees. The human genders are more different than each other than we are from monkeys! And we wonder why we have conflict and confusion while communicating?!

That’s why we need help! Men and women need to understand our different styles and needs in order to be most productive working together in teams, managing each other, leading each other, and forming successful partnerships…whether professional or personal.

And that’s why I chose this topic to immerse myself in and develop as my area of expertise. I find it not only fascinating and fulfilling, but timely and absolutely essential in order to help maximize business productivity and profits. Check out my website at http://www.janesanders.com/ to see what I offer to help businesses, associations, and individuals learn more about the communication differences between men and women and how to work them more successfully.

Did you know that many teamwork, productivity, and personality conflict problems in the workplace are due to simple gender communication style differences? Simple in terms of origin, but complex in terms of negative impact on business results.

Hi! I’m Jane Sanders, gender issues expert and trainer on gender communication in the workplace. I’ve researched gender awareness issues for over 12 years and consulted for many top US companies including MassMutual, Prudential, Toyota, Ford, Nestlé Foods, Choice Hotels, Boeing, and more. Trade associations in many industries frequently book my presentations on gender communication and my other topics as well:

GenderSmart® -
Improving Results through Gender-Savvy Communication

GenderSmart® -
Effective Communication with Women for Recruiting & Retention

I also offer other programs of great value and interest to women:

• Authentic Leadership for Women The Confidence Connection
• From Stuck To Stellar! Action Planning for Life and Career

And, I have developed a few other professional development programs at the request of several clients:

• From Pain To Polish! Powerful Presentation Skills
• Secrets & Tips for Higher Employee Retention
• Go For Results! How To Facilitate Meetings, Retreats, and Off-Sites

 All Content on this site is CopyRight Jane Sanders (GenderSmart^® Solutions)

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