Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox - A comedian found there was no science to support it.

A funny thing happened on the way 

to gender equality in Norway

by Carolyn Moynihan

A comedian found there was no science to support it.

To which part of the world would you look first for hard evidence that the roles men and women perform are a social construct? To Scandinavia, of course, where governments have worked for decades to ensure equality between men and women. Norway, for example, must by now be a gender equity paradise of male nurses and female engineers. Isn’t it?

Nope. A documentary first screened by Norwegian State Television three years ago blew that myth apart and at the same time raised questions about the scientific basis for even having that kind of equality as a policy goal.

The Gender Equality Paradox (video above), the first of a series of 40-minute films exploring hot button social issues, is both hilarious and serious – hilarious because it was created by comedian Harald Eia, and serious enough to cause the Norwegian government to drastically cut its funding for gender studies.

Eia, who happens to have a sociology degree, plays the role of the innocent who simply wants to know why, for example, men still account for 80 percent of engineers in Norway, and why a programme to recruit men into nursing has been a dismal failure. Like the court jester of old, he approaches experts in their ivory towers and people on the street with the same genial naivety, gradually laying before us something like a consensus among ordinary folks but diametrically opposed positions among the academics.


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