At our most recent club meeting I made the point that around 75% of the students who assisted on Carnival Day were female and that 80% of the inbound exchange students in 9920 and 9930 were female. 

 

That prompted me to consider just some of the associated changes.  

 

Between the 1930’s through to the 1970’s females made up under 30% of university enrolments. Since the 1980s they have made up more than 50% now trending towards 60%.  

 

In the 1970s my doctor was female, and she had a photo of her graduation class on the wall. An obvious feature of the photo was that the very marked proportion of the group were male. Fast forward to today. In 2012 60% of registered doctors in New Zealand were male.

By 2023 that was down to 50%. That seems about right you might think? Yes, but when you look at the 2586 doctors who graduated between 2016 and 2020, 59% were female with males now only making up 41% of graduates. 

 

Males still dominate in areas such as engineering but even there the trend is increasingly towards more female participation. In aerospace engineering and technology for example for domestic students in 2024 there were 766 males and 460 females. Women still outnumber men in the “social services” such as nursing, teaching and social work but that is also slowly changing. 

 

Part of the explanation is that since the 1960's female participation in the workplace has increased but another powerful explanation is of course that roles that were once considered the preserve of men can be equally well done by women. In addition schools have actively encouraged girls to choose STEM  [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] 

Vanya and Sonia have led quiet and uneventful lives while taking care of
their ageing parents in their family home. However, their peaceful existence is upended when their glamorous movie-star sister Masha unexpectedly arrives with her much-younger boyfriend in tow and a plan to sell the house. Insecurities and old resentments boil over in a weekend of wild costume parties, hilarious misunderstandings and unexpected romance.

 

Please note that the correct price is $35/ ticket not the $24 that was advertised in the last Bulletin.

 

When: Thursday 17th July 

Where: Howick Little Theatre

Price: $35 a ticket

To make a booking: payment to Rotary Club of Pakuranga

02 0223 0017811 002

In what can seem like a superheated environment of information and disinformation, with competing views more easily amplified through social media and an often pretty loose use of some serious words I thought it might be helpful to run a session in each Bulletin of words that can and are used inaccurately. 

 

Readers of the Bulletin may have others that they want to share in future additions? To the editor please. 

 

Example include woke, fascist, genocide, far right, socialist, communist, conspiracy , slander/ libel and this bulletins word – hoax. 

A hoax “is a widely publicised falsehood created to deceive its audience with false and often astonishing information". 

For many of the things that are labelled as hoax’s such as the reduction of the ozone layer, the melting of the ice sheets or man landing on the moon etc to be hoax’s you would have to conclude not that not only the tens of thousands of scientists and others involved have got it wrong but that they are deliberately and consistently spreading something they know to be untrue. 

I guess that is possible,  but given the numbers involved it’s hard to imagine that deliberate attempts to deceive could be kept secret for so long.