What I find interesting about that is that Language Log et al have been pushing the counter-meme (that it's not true) pretty hard for some time, but that doesn't seem to have stuck at all. Clearly at some fairly fundamental level people want it to be true.
(Women being bad drivers is another one. A friend of ours was hit in a bad piece of driving recently and said exasperatedly "It was a woman driver, of course". When I said "But women are much less likely to cause accidents than men are", they just looked rather blank and shrugged.)
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Date: 2008-09-28 10:47 am (UTC)(Women being bad drivers is another one. A friend of ours was hit in a bad piece of driving recently and said exasperatedly "It was a woman driver, of course". When I said "But women are much less likely to cause accidents than men are", they just looked rather blank and shrugged.)