International Women's Day

My bias is out front: I’m a male of the species and have been the owner-operator of a dick and a pair of balls for nearly fifty years.  Which means I can’t, don’t, won’t and shouldn’t speak for women.  However, I have had chance to observe that 51% of the population who are females, at various times in my life.  Some observations:

My mother was barely 5 feet tall.  When I was about 13, she and I re-shingled the roof of the carport at home.  A bale of asphalt shingles weighs 150 pounds.  Mother weighed perhaps 100 pounds.  She slugged the bale over her shoulder and started climbing the ladder to the roof, as if she was carrying a cup of tea.  Lesson:  Men and Women are just as physically strong.  The major differences between males and females, aside from the obvious ones, are that I can write my name in the snow with a reasonable amount of accuracy. 

Women combat soldiers in the Second World War, notably on the Russian front, were just as ferocious and violent as the male combat soldiers.  In some ways the German Werhmacht were scared senseless by the Russian women, as the women didn’t understand the concept of surrendering under a flag of truce:  They tended to shoot first and then ask what "Nicht Schissen!" meant while walking over the bodies.  Lesson:  Women are just as savage as Men given the same circumstances.

Computational engines and computer programming were both invented and perfected by women.  Ada Lovelace and the ENIAC programmers were all women.  None were recognized for inventing the whole thing.  Lesson:  Women are as smart as Men.  Frankly, they’re smarter, but they choose not to show it off.  I don’t know why, but it’s probably cultural conditioning.

Women can choose to do any number of things valuable to society.  Men, generally, are limited by our social conditioning to only hunt and gather, meaning go to work.  It is the extraordinarily rare man who would take five or ten years out of his career and earnings path to care for his children.  Women seem to do this as a matter of course, then swing back into the workforce hunter-gatherer role.  In exchange for this exceptional emotional and socially valuable flexibility, we reward them by paying women about 25% less than men for the same job.  Lesson:  Men, we’re lucky we haven’t been all killed in our sleep, save a few hundred kept as breeding stock.

The summary?  Men might be perplexed by the other half of the species, but we’re dumb animals at the best of times.  All we can ask, is that the women put up with us and we’ll try to fix things as best we can, with your guidance, love and support.