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RUSH: Elizabeth in Acton, Massachusetts, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, sir. How are you?
RUSH: Fine.
CALLER: Mega-mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you.
 CALLER: I just wanted to address that study you spoke of where they said men are sometimes smarter than women and sometimes stupider. I think, you know, if you study history, for several thousand years women have been using, you know, pots of boiling water to clean things and to cook, and it took a little boy in Scotland, James Watt, to look at a pot of boiling water and invent a steam engine. No offense to women. I am one. I have sons and daughters. I love them, but you know something? Men have invented so many wonderful things, probably because their wives complained and they invented something to solve a problem.
RUSH: Wasn't it a man who invented the brassiere?
CALLER: (laughing) Yes, probably.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: You know, each time a woman gets in a car --
RUSH: Thomas Crapper invented the toilet.
CALLER: That's right, that's right, because women probably complained going out to that outhouse or peeing in a chamber pot wasn't any fun, excuse me for saying so.
RUSH: You know, Elizabeth, I'm reminded of an old phrase. I forget who uttered this, some philosopher, and I've always cherished this for some reason. I've always admired it, and I've always found it pretty profound in its own way -- and I want to warn you: If you're a feminist, you are going to hate this. But the philosophy is very simple: "A man who thinks he's smarter than his wife knows not how truly smart she is." (interruption) See? Dawn's not even a feminist and she's rolling her eyes in there at that because she understands what it means. It's a pretty serious indictment here for Elizabeth to make. She says men are smarter. Women have been boiling water on the stove for decades, but a man had to invent the steam engine. I don't think that has anything to do with intelligence, in defense of women. I think they're different. I don't know how many women inventors there are. I don't think it has to do with intelligence. It's like you can boil it down to the remote control unit. The worst thing you can do is have it in your hand watching TV with a woman and surf around there. Men are prone to just surf around. I used to have a car once. When I lived out in California, I had a car that had a radio that would do an auto-scan of your presets, and it would just scan the stations that were in your presets. The general manager's secretary had to go with me somewhere to some speaking event. We got in the car and I turned on the scan and for like five minutes I didn't stop it because I didn't hear a song that I wanted to hear. I just kept the auto-scan going.
"Are you going to stop that at some point?"
"No! I haven't got to the song I want to hear."
I'm marveling at the technology that my car radio can do this, and she's upset that A, it's happening, and B, that I'm enjoying it -- and she wasn't even my wife! But that doesn't mean she's dumber than I was. It's just different interests, different things intrigue. Like I have my iPhone or I have my computer. It's not enough for me to be able to use it. I want to know how it works so if something goes wrong I can fix it, or I can describe to the tech what it's doing wrong so he can fix it fast. Women don't care. It better come on when you turn it on, and if it doesn't, there will be hell to pay. There won't be any curiosity about why it doesn't work. There will just be anger. This is not anything to do with intelligence. It just has to be with different ways that they use their time. The feminists tried this experiment. They gave little girls GI Joe and gave little boys, what's her name, Barbie, and the little boys still created war with the two Barbie dolls. The little girls are out there putting outfits on GI Joe. Pure and simple. It's just different. I don't know that it indicates any difference in intelligence. It all depends on how you measure this stuff, and then you gotta get down to: What is intelligence? You know, is it what you've learned, or is it simple common sense? I choose the latter, and that does lead to problems, too. |
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RUSH: By the way, this spirited defense of women that I just gave, when it was a woman that said, "Yeah, men are smarter," what I did was a spirited defense of women. I got a story here from the AP's technology writer, Jessica Mintz, about computer science. "For more than a decade, academics and technology..." (interruption) I'm in the middle of the story. Yes, I'm going to talk about Hillary, but there's not really that much to say. I told you at the beginning of the program I'm not that interested in making this whole program devoted to Hillary. Everybody thinks they can do it better. Everybody, no matter who they are, no matter how many years, think they can do this better. All right, here it is, I'm going to give you the most noteworthy events from all five television interviews that Mrs. Clinton did yesterday.
WALLACE: Why do you and the president have such a hyper-partisan view of politics?
 HILLARY: (Cackle)
SCHIEFFER: It would require, among other things…
HILLARY: (Cackle) I'm sorry, Bob.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What's your response?
HILLARY: (Cackle)
WALLCE: Send my best to the president.
HILLARY: (Cackle)
RUSH: That's it. That was about the most noteworthy -- nobody challenged her on anything -- well, Russert did on Iraq, but none of the Drive-Bys reported it much. We'll get to the sound bites, but I just don't want to make her the focal point. Here's what I was saying. "For more than a decade, academics and technology executives have been frowning at the widening gender gap in computer science. Everyone has a theory, but no one has managed to attract many more women. Now, some computer science researchers say one solution may lie in the design of software itself -- even programs regular people use every day." Oh, I get it, it's the software's fault. "Laura Beckwith, a new computer science Ph.D. from Oregon State University, and her adviser, Margaret Burnett, specialize in studying the way people use computers to solve everyday problems -- like adding formulas to spreadsheets, animation to Web sites and styles to word processing documents. A couple of years ago, they stumbled upon an intriguing tidbit: Men, it seemed, were more likely than women to use advanced software features, specifically ones that help users find and fix errors. Programmers call this 'debugging,' and it's a crucial step in building programs that work. Beckwith decided to investigate why women and men might interact so differently with the same software.
"She pored over 30 years' worth of books and academic papers from psychologists, education researchers, economists, computer scientists and others about gender differences in problem solving and computer use. One theory grabbed her attention: High confidence correlates with success. Both men's and women's confidence in their ability to do a challenging task affects their approach and the outcome. And most studies indicated that women -- even ones who study computer science -- have less confidence than men in their computer skills. So Beckwith wondered, could that be one of the culprits? Are women less confident than men when it comes to software debugging? Are women less willing than men to try using these advanced features?" This is a no-brainer. Confidence is a key to anything, software debugging or whatever. Confidence, desire, are 80% of achievement, all other things being equal. It took a couple years of research to figure that out?
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