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Please score: Men and women, because of their inherent physical differences...


maaku

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Men and women, because of their inherent physical differences, are not equally suited for many tasks.

 

There are physical differences between men and women that in general affect the suitability of one gender over the other for certain tasks. For this it is easy to find examples. However I find that is not enough to satisfy the claim under all possible interpretations.

 

Compared with men, women are often smaller, have less physical strength, and have different reproductive organs. This certainly does make women candidates better on average for certain tasks such as fine craftsmanship (requiring small, dexterous hands), and less suited for tasks requiring physical strength such as search and rescue in extreme environments. And no man will ever be able to physically replace a woman when it comes to the motherly tasks of birth and nursing. In addition, it could be argued that sexual differences indirectly lead to dangerous social complications if men and women were mixed in certain professions, such as front-line infantry combat. In these cases it might be better for society to pick one gender over the other for that category of work.

 

However much of the claim rests on the phrasing "equally suited for many tasks", in which I would place special emphasis on the word many. "Many" can mean more than two, in which case the previous examples support the claim. However a less pedantic interpretation would interpret the claim as that the number of tasks men and women are not equally suited for is comparable to the number for which they are. I argue that this is not the case, and therefore reject the claim without further clarification. Most tasks in life, whether it is choice of profession, parenthood, or simpler tasks like buying groceries or balancing a checkbook, are performed equally well by both genders. The subset of tasks where physical size, strength, or sexual organs play a role is remarkably small. Furthermore, as the information revolution continues, machinery is replacing more and more tasks that once required fine dexterity or physical prowess. More and more men and women are required to perform knowledge-work, and there is little evidence that men and women think so drastically differently so as to be better at one profession of knowledge-work than the other.

 

For me to accept the claim, I would need clarification on what is meant by "many": more than two tasks, or a majority of tasks? Also, is the subset of tasks to be considered constrained in any way? Are we talking about the primordial tasks of early hunter-gather humans, or the modern tasks of today's information economy? Without clarification, I am forced to evaluate the claim very generally, and in doing so I find that it lacks adequate support.

 

My opinion (please read and score the essay first): in this essay I tried to find common ground to expand upon the one-sentence issue, providing enough context to actually refute the claim. However I think this was a failed approach. I spent the whole second paragraph agreeing with the claim before disagreeing with it - a single sentence would have done fine. Spending half the essay adding to the claim and then spending the other half tearing it down sounds a lot like a strawman...

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