Well, mom was a coal miner, my niece oversees an engineering department while her husband was a stay at home dad when their kids were young, and I taught in college before I married a paramedic with a day job in a lab, so go figure.

I will say that the pink-collar jobs I've had were the pits in terms of pay and conditions. I'd never get sent home off the longwall to change clothes because they looked too much like another employee's, nor would a railroad boss try to fire me because somebody saw me laying block in my spare time (yes, that happened; it was "unfeminine" to work on my own house.

The idea that nice clean office jobs are the only worthwhile target has crept up on young men, but no one seems to be catching on. We have a generation that doesn't know how to use basic tools to perform what used to be routine chores and repairs. The local school doesn't have shop class or home ec any more because they assume, vaguely, that "you'll hire somebody to do that manual stuff." Who is "somebody" then?

Thomas, may I present Pandora.

Any human being who has survived into puberty is painfully aware that male and female are different. If they were not we would not be here. The issue is not, and should not be, whether men as a group or women as a group should have, or do better at, certain jobs. There are differing tendencies over the populations but these are not a valid basis for individual decisions. The initial question for an employer should be a very simple one of 'can this individual handle this job?' If the answer is yes then the employer needs to deal with whether the candidate will be a good fit and that is where the intangibles may come in. Some of those intangibles may strongly correlate with gender but for the most part are not gender specific.

Meanwhile should my great granddaughter someday prove to be the best candidate to drive the Little Blue Piggy Bank I trust that Brother Moedinger will hire her. If not, what matters is that she will have received equal consideration on her merits. There will probably be all kinds of good reasons not to have hired her but 'Girl' is simply not one of them. For now being seven years old is!

GME

Edited once to correct the spell checker's correction of 'Linn'. Sorry.

Well we can outsource "filthy" manufacturing, why can't we outsource other "lowly" jobs?

We are reaching the point where be a parasite (not necessarily used to be rude) is put on a higher pedestal than the workers that create. We fail to consider that without creators, the parasitical jobs die out. (Parasitical: Doctor, Lawyer, Executive, etc.) It is a symbiotic relationship; without one, the other is unable to function well or at all.

My teachers have spent years attempting to convince me that I HAVE to go to college and "make something of myself". Many have claimed that I would could do so much better than what I want to do, and some even claim my goal is unattainable for me. I even had a guidance counselor ask why I would possibly want to take the school's welding class, as it was "dirty" work and beneath me. It would have been laughable if it wasn't so stupid.



If she can do the work, thats all that matters. Gender, and other classifications like it should have no bearing on whether or not someone gets hired.

The whole article is, frankly, laughable at its ignorance, as is the shadow transportation minister. I can't see how she got that job.

Never underestimate management attitude as well. When I was training to be an engineer, I had a Road Foreman along on a student trip, and in the conversation he casually said, "Women don't belong in freight". I don't know if things have changed much in the several years since I left, but I kind of doubt it. Official EEO policy and real-life attitudes often are two different things.

Honestly, I think the problem is the gender-bias in toys. Except for a few years with Lionel, no one has really tried reaching out to girls until very recently with mechanical or electrical toys, and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics heavy fields show a male dominance there too. Well, until very recently anyway. *

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AtZfNU ... PGv3ugg48t

Likewise, another field I'm involved in, the Equine sporthorse industry is so female heavy on the lower levels of the sport, because of how many little girls get toy horses.

That is certainly true. So many girls, like me, get told that trains are a boys thing and get discouraged. But if we girls are determined enough, we carry on with our interest.
lois

Well, today is today and not 1946 when the Thomas books were first written. There was a much different set of expectations then that certainly did not include female engine drivers. Today, our expectations are very different, with women able to find a career in fields that no one ever imagined them in, in spite of Thomas.

So to lay the blame on Thomas for the small number of women "train-persons" is like arguing that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a primary source of racism.

Yet, even back in the day women could get a railroad job.
While it wasn't as a locomotive engineer, I had a aunt, now long deceased, who worked as a brakeman (brakewoman?) for the Messabi, DMIR, back in the 1950's into the '60s. I think she started there in the '40s, during the war. She told me stories (that I barely understood, if at all) about her days in the Proctor yard and down at the ore docks in Duluth. She had trouble with some of the men, but most accepted her as long as she did her job, which she apparently did, as she worked there to retirement age. She must have been a pretty tough woman, but even when I was about seven years old I thought of her as a "pretty" lady.

I wonder if she could have ever become an engineer if she had been so inclined?
I'll never know. She's long gone, as are all of the adult people from that era.

I've heard that Thomas is devasted to learn of this accusation about him keeping women away from being train drivers. His best girl, "Little Engine That Would if it Could" has been very depressed lately by this news. She was always such a happy little engine!
Mark D.