Frances Bell

Thanks for your reply Gunther.  It seems as if the roles that people occupy rather than their gender  may be a better explanation of their job satisfaction.
In UK also, women teachers predominate at Yrs Reception - 7 (called primary here) and this is sometimes used as an explanation of girl students  superior acheivements at School leaving  level, aged 16+ (called GCSE in UK).
However, I feel it is difficult to regard girls'  dominance of exam results as a "problem" since i remember the differential hurdles presented by (11 year olds) grammar school entrance and (18 year olds) medical school entrance where girls/women had to achieve higher than their male counterparts.  Now that these gender hurdles have been removed, women outnumber men.  This provokes some interesting reactions, see http://society.guardian.co.uk/NHSstaff/story/0,7991,749021,00.html
e.g. "Michael Crowe, a GP from Leicester, said when he was a medical student there had been eight men to one woman, but now the "pendulum has swung too far in the other direction".

He said: "There is a problem brewing and it needs correcting.""

Of course there are not 8 women to 1 man in Medicine

I am not sure of what we can learn from this but, as a woman, I do feel that the issue of gender balance in professions is a complex one that needs a rich understanding.  I also recall that male dominance of professions was rarely regarded as a "problem".

As I have struggled to keep pace with this interesting thread, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to think about different assumptions of "What is education for ?  For example (and not mutually exclusive)

• the betterment of the society - as a society, we are prepared to invest resources (pay teachers, build schools, etc.) for the education of (usually) young people
• the betterment of the individual - so that individuals can fulfil their own potential and live "the good life". This may be resourced by individuals or their families, or by society (e.g. a liberal arts education) but rarely available to "all" at the university level anyway.
• a commodity - that can be bought and sold - and is subject to market forces

In our discussion, it may be worth sharing our own perspective on education  (mine is that society should invest in education for its own and individuals' sakes, and that commerce has a place as long as the commodities it provides represent value for money and there are still informed committed people - teachers? - who can decide on this).  Also, like others in this thread, I think that we should remember the value of informal education (before, during and after formal education) where we not only learn practical and technical things but also how to be social beings.  I do worry a little that there may be dangers in overuse of computers, particularly in the early stages of education, so it's great to see Ger's "group rule".

It's also worth remembering that we live in a world where (though always improving) one in five adults remains illiterate, see http://www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?ID=5063_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC.

Hi Gunther,
I am curious that you say 30% of the (female) teachers working in school years 4-7 are on long-term sick leave in Sweden. Are you saying that there is a significant discrepancy in sick leave rates between men and women teachers?

Thanks for your reply Michael. You explained how closed source software was different from manufactured products.  I am curious to know if you think that OSS is impacting on closed source software.  Is there any improvement in the integration possibilties of closed source software with OSS packages and components? 

I apologise Nicole 
I don't know why I thought you were Niki.