I admit I had some difficulty coming up with good articles for you to read—not because they’re aren’t a lot of good articles, but because the quality of the articles tends to, mmm, rather one-sided.

To put it bluntly, arguments about the inferiority of women are lousy and are usually based in—if based in—sketchy research. Given that I don’t want you reading lousy arguments, this presents a bit of a conundrum.

One possibility would be to have you read articles on sex-complementarity, i.e., on the notion that men and women aren’t the same as one another, but complement one another; such arguments tend to be anti-egalitarian.

The main problem, for this course, with the complementarity arguments, is that they are for the most part based in religion. That a particular view has a religious basis is not in and of itself problematic, but I don’t want our discussions on sexual equality to be sidetracked into discussions of theology, hermeneutics, and knowing the mind of God.

A lesser problem is that many of more current pieces on complementarity are caught up in arguments over same-sex marriage; while we may end up discussing homosexuality in class, I do want us at least to try to maintain our focus on differences, similarities, and how men and women ought to treat one another.

I don’t know if this’ll work, but here are a couple of pieces to frame Tuesday’s discussion:

• Nancy Evans, Difference Feminism, March 2004
• Deborah Cameron, What language barrier? Guardian, 9.30.07
• Laura Ferro, Gender Inequality in the US,  3.19.12

Also, while not arguments per se, do peruse:

• Debate.org, Is gender equality possible?
• UN Gender Inequality Index 2011 (click on zoom to actually read the data)

This will hopefully give y’all any number of different ways to approach the topic—and provide for a thought-provoking class!