Quotes About Gender

I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?'

If women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Quran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.

There are some societies where women are not even allowed to drive a car, and that restriction is based in the name of religion and tradition. There are other countries where a woman can be punished if she does not cover her head.

The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.

In 1979, Alien came out and Sigourney was in it with a bunch a guys. Nobody at that time expected the woman to be the hero, so that was a tradition that started.

Tradition has made women cowardly.

Washington and Congress are steeped in history and tradition, and that's been very male-oriented.

In most cultures, men represent tradition and women represent change and future. Women, because of their ability to give birth, are more connected to future. Men tend to keep the status quo.

After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.

Over my lifetime, women have demonstrated repeatedly that they can do anything that men can do, while still managing traditional women's work at the same time. But the same expansion of roles has not been available to men.

Despite the efforts of some parents, children still tend to act out the traditional sex roles of our culture. The child's peer group may have more of an influence over this than the parents.

Having one's traditional role questioned is not a very comfortable experience, perhaps especially for women, who have been able to remain children, and to benefit from work they did not and could not do.

I feel the feminist movement has excluded black women. You cannot talk about being black and a woman within traditional feminist dialogue.

It would have been convenient to be gay. Just because of the grooming, the narcissism, stuff like that. But I have this kind of roaring heterosexuality. Traditional, uncomplicated heterosexuality, an almost cliched Robin Askwith thing.

It's time for male leaders to not only ask for binders of qualified women, but to re-write the definition of 'qualified.' The best man for the job, may in fact, be a woman, whose biography is not traditional, but is rich with experiences and skills that are not necessarily learned either in school or on the job.

The tendency is to think if you are a professional woman, it's because you've turned your back on the traditional side. The tendency is not to recognize that we can excel as professionals without giving up our identity of being mother, wife and homemaker.

Before, back in the '50s, women didn't have as many rights as men, so they had to be that stay-at-home wife and take care of the kids all day. But now, with marriage, it's a partnership. It's not like this old traditional marriage that it once was.

No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions.

People still ask my husband and me which of us is the mom - which, as one lesbian friend pointed out to me, is like asking which chopstick is the fork. This pressure on us to embody normative traditions can be paralysing.

We still have not been able to move into those positions in our country that are really directing traffic among that 1 percent, and that's where women have to break through.

I'm so much more at ease now than when I was flying as Bob. Then, I was OCD about everything, always checking and looking for things. But flying as a female is effortless. I'm still checking traffic, instruments, and the radios, but it's easier to multitask, and flying is fun.

Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first began to think about what profession I should go into. It was 1978. I was seven and had just been handed over by the women of my family to the earnest and self-important gatherings of the men. I was no longer the responsibility of my aunts and older female cousins. I was now a man. This was a tragedy.