QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Thu 17th February 2011, 8:31am)
I somehow missed that the "gendergap" list was a Wikimedia-controlled mailing list.
In any case, one of the problems I'm seeing in the analyses I'm seeing of the "problem" is that nearly all of them are from people who suffer from monotaxocausophilia. I suppose they're either seeking a boogeyman to blame, or are trying to find the Minimum Necessary Change required to Make It All Better.
Well, the single-causists come out of engineering disciplines, where you admit that everything has many causes, but you try to start on the significant things first, and neglect the secondary effects, lest the problem grow so difficult that it's not even attackable, let alone solvable.
My own favorite wars in this area are between people who identify a pathogen like HIV as the cause of an epidemic like AIDS, and the Duesberg/Root-Berstein idea that the syndrome of AIDS is just a result of a dozens of environmental stressors that finally cause the immune system to give up the ghost, and that HIV by itself is totally harmless.
And if you think that sort of war of philosophies doesn't still go on, consider the
colony collapse disorder in honeybees, where the whole hive just flies off in various directions and dies. This has spread from country to country and from hive to hive, just like it was some new pathogen or set of them. There are people seriously suggesting that it's a multicausal thing where Mother Nature has just given up, as our poor honeybees are inundated wtih stresses from pesticides to cell phone radiation to working too hard too far away from home, with not enough pay, to whatever. And so we'll never narrow this inherrently multicausal thing down to just one or two pathogens, as we finally did with all of the AIDS-related diseases (where it was HIV plus something else, almost all the time). That war actually continues with the bees, and you can see it while it plays out. If you haven't guessed, I tend to be on the engineering side.
(With HIV, just about all the people who thought HIV was harmless and refused to take anti-HIV drugs, finally died of AIDS. So that was the end of that).