*pokepoke* It's 2012, not 1959....

The metaphorical position on the screen isn't meaningful. the social hierarchy in raids is WAY more important. In general, the raid leader is in charge, and makes final decisions, the next most important person in the raid is the healing lead. nobody gives a shit what the dps have to say about a problem. tanks have very limited information about what went on. the healers know whats going on, they are the Consigliere to the RL's Don.

gender notwithstanding, the healers are leading you through progression.

Your "men were the hunters, women were the foragers" is actually pretty inaccurate as well. In primitive times and even colonial/frontier eras, men were the hunters AND the foragers. Women cared for the home. Why? Because that's where the children are, and since it's women having them and women feeding them (breastfeeding), they were kind of stuck. Didn't mean anything about ability.

In the 40s as you also brought up, men worked and women stayed at home because men had spent the better part of the last few hundred years making sure that women didn't have any options that men didn't give them. Happily for women, that changed.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_division_of_labor_%28evolutionary_perspective%29

Though not every hunter-gatherer population pinpoints females to gathering and males to hunting (most notably the Aeta[5] and Ju'/hoansi[6]), the norm of most current populations divide the roles of labor in this manner.

I'm a woman and I don't like the way we're being treated in the society sometimes, but I'm secure enough with my own capabilities to acknowledge that there are differences between men and women that extend beyond their roles in reproduction. The way some of these commenters respond outragedly suggest to me that they're the ones who are having victim complex of having been treated unfairly.

Women did plenty of the damage themselves, Galatea. For example, "a woman's place is in the home" was popularized through mid-to-late 19th Century lifestyle magazines written, owned, and published by women. Before the Industrial Revolution, most businesses were home-based, and everybody -- man, woman, or child -- was expected to contribute.

Why would women encourage each other to stay in the kitchen? Class conflict. Lower class families needed every paycheck they could get, while upper-class households could afford to keep one potential wage-earner home. Children are delicate, they said, and should be nurtured rather than rushed into the workplace. The upper class painted their lifestyle as superior, and the one to which middle-class families should aspire.