I'll do it my way
WHY can't a woman be more like a man, wondered Henry Higgins of his protegee Eliza Doolittle? Susan Pinker, a psychologist-turned-journalist, thinks the question is still being asked, sotto voce, by those who fret about the absence of women in boardrooms and laboratories.
Male, she says, is the "vanilla gender"; the norm from which female deviates. Now that women are free to work in any field, their choices are expected to mirror those of the men around them. So discrimination, albeit covert, is often held to be the cause when more women studybiology and education than computing and physics, or take part-time and public-sector jobs rather than work ...