Mercy shook her head. "I didn't mean well staffed as in competent teachers. I meant well staffed as in a smaller student to teacher ratio. Or did England never have that sort of problem? It was all the rage in the States." She paused. "Or so I heard. I didn't have children or any reason to really follow it, but I picked up things through idle chatter here and there."
She listened as he went on about ... she wasn't precisely sure, but caught on that something had been lost in translation between her question and his explanation. She finally did manage to work out that apparently witch and wizard were gender-specific, and she worked out which was which. Or which was witch, ha-ha.
"I've never really bought into that," she admitted. "The ideology that one gender is naturally gifted at one aspect of the world and shouldn't bother with the rest. I think there are enough female chemists and biologists and doctors to surpass the idea we aren't any good at those sides of things."
She, personally, was of the mind that it was still enough of a male-dominated world that women still tended to assume submissive or lesser positions, and old-fashioned women bullied the weaker-willed daughters into the traditional roles. She counted herself fortunate that her family never subscribed to that idealism.