The Shrine

Took fourth at the Indy 500. Because she's female, no one seemed to care much about anything else, even the guy who actually won.

I think this is awesome. I'm definitely for female equality and displays of same, especially in sports...possibly just so some of the girls I know who are passionate about it will will finally be happy...and so my mom will shut up about male-dominatied patriarchies in industry and the like...

It's only male-dominated because most women don't have an interest in it. There are just some seperators between race/gender that only occasionally get crossed, especially among gender. In most cases, we WANT to see more women in stuff that you don't see them in, but you just don't see if because of a lack of interest.

There are problems with when discrimination, like say, nobody wants to bother to see Women's Basketball, but part of that may be that if you had a Men vs. Women game, the men would totally outscore them. This would be more found in games where the differences between men and women are fleshed out more. In something like NASCAR, physical prowess isn't as big a deal as pure driving skill. And there are plenty of areas that men don't touch either (except maybe gays).

Women in gaming (besides maybe MMOs) are rare. Men in hairdressing or interior decorating (or fashion in general) are rare. Most women comedians suck. Blacks in metal bands are somewhat hard to find. White rappers are rare, especially given that blacks are only 20% of the population. Blacks always have a bass guitar in their basement. (Just kidding.)

There are fields where it crops up that one trait dominates, usually either gender or race, and it's merely because of the mindset and personality of that gender/race which motivates them to be in that field.

It's weird because we have such a diverse culture of people, but we don't see these groups mingle as much as we hope. Hell, even in some restraurants, I see strange gatherings of races: many BKs seem to have a large Mexican workforce (so much so that all of the sign are bilingual), or that I've been in more than one Steak N Shake where all of the cooks are South African (not black, I mean midnight-skinned South Africans who speak South African). It's not like it's a Chinese restruarant where you would hire Chinese to keep that image of being authentic.

I guess I'm going over the scope of what you wanted to talk about, but it does raise some familar issues with cultural seperation.