Free Republic

THURSDAY, April 15 (HealthDay News) -- Parents may want their girls to grow up to be astronauts and their boys to one day do their fair share of child care and housework duties, but a new study suggests certain stereotypical gender preferences take root even before most kids can crawl. When presented with seven different toys, boys as young as 9 months old went for the car, digger and soccer ball, while ignoring the teddy bears, doll and cooking set. And the girls? You guessed it. At the same age, they were most interested in the doll, teddy bear and...

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell U by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 06, 2007 It looks like the university named after the father of our country has figured out a way to move gender studies to the next level. “Every Wednesday afternoon this past summer, a retired Army colonel named Jeff left his consulting job at a military base and headed to George Washington University,” Jennifer Ruark reported in the September 7, 2007 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “But first he stopped at home to change into a skirt.” “By the time he arrived at the university’s Speech and Hearing...

When I graduated from college, one of my old high school friends said that a B.S. degree stood for "B.S." When I got my M.S. degree, he said it stood for "More S...". When I got my PhD, he said that stood for "Piled Higher and Deeper." At the time, I just thought he was just jealous. But recent events in higher education have caused me to rethink my position. For example, I learned this week that Olga Gershenson, a professor of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Barbara Penner, a professor of...