[EDITOR'S NOTE: This discussion has veered way off-topic and all off-topic posts on this thread will be deleted. Please stick to the subject of Taken In Hand relationships in future posts, everyone. Thanks for your cooperation.]

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Context is essential to understanding. With respect to your historical examples, two types of context are relevant: 1) the state of society at that time, and the relative states of men and women, and 2) the state of society at an earlier time, when the conditions that are being considered were different. One must then first evaluate conditions at that earlier time, and then trace changes and their effects through to the period being discussed.

And in doing any type of analysis, statistical or otherwise, one must account for all of the relevant variables. For example, if one did a study, or extracted from existing studies, to determine whether men or women were faster runners, but didn’t account for age, health, and so on, the conclusions would be meaningless.

This type of mistake or manipulation is one of the things that you should look for whenever you see a comparison claiming that “women [something] compared to men.”

Problems arise when data is selected to fit an agenda. But the worst conflicts are created when truth is considered irrelevant.

No one cares what the real numbers are. They just want to make political statements. [Kathryn Newcomer professor of statistics and public policy at George Washington University, in Insight magazine commenting on widely published rape statistics.]

The director of the UCLA Center for Women and Men told a reporter from the student newspaper that the “one-in-four” rape statistic was accurate and in fact had been published by the FBI and the American Medical Association on their websites. But when she was told by another journalist that this was untrue, she said, “The statistics don’t really matter that much in the big picture. We’re just trying to focus on the real issue here, to debate about civil rights, not bicker about numbers.” [Derived from National Review Online, May 18, 2001]

Bad statistics are harder to kill than vampires. [Joel Best, author of the 2001 book Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers From the Media, Politicians and Activists, New York Times, May 26, 2001]

When I inquired of Miss Hoeffler how she had arrived at the 40 per cent depression figure in the face of the finding that women were enjoying life most of the time, she candidly told me she was very concerned that the Harris study not be just another study reflecting ‘white male norms’ of research, adding that… she was doing her best to counter ‘phallocentric bias.’ I was not surprised to find that she had specialized in feminist theory at Hunter College. [Christina Hoff Sommers, Ph.D. (author of Who Stole Feminism), in the National Review, September 2, 1996]

When it comes to gender issues, journalists generally have suspended all their usual skepticism… We accept at face value whatever women’s groups say. Why? Because women have sold themselves to us as an oppressed group and any oppressed group gets a free ride in the press… I don’t blame feminists for telling us half-truths and sometimes even complete fabrications. I do blame my colleagues in the press for forgetting their skepticism. [Former CBS News Correspondent Bernard Goldberg, interviewed by Jack Kammer in Quill: The Magazine for Journalists, May 1992]

Please don’t take this as an attack on women.

I happen to like women very much. It’s just that I have found that it is difficult for men and women to have the best relationships, if we are full of bad feelings created by being given incorrect information.

And I would be happy to end this discussion on this note.