We had a mouse in our house this week. The women screamed, and the men disposed of the mouse. Despite 15 years of women’s lib teaching us that men and women are really the same, it seems that there are persistent differences, and one of them reveals itself whenever a mouse arrives unannounced.
Of course, only women have breasts and wombs and bear babies. But those are not the only differences. Only men have an Adam’s apple. Why? Who knows! We’re just made that way.
Color blindness has a sex difference; ten times as many men as women are color blind. Stutterers divide by gender; five times as many stutterers are men.
High heels distort our general awareness of the big difference in height between men and women. In bare feet, the average man is six inches taller than the average woman.
The difference in average weight between men and women is not only 30 pounds but also a difference in the weight they want to be. Rich men are fatter than poor men; but rich women are thinner than poor women. Diet-users are 80 percent female and, you guessed it, 93 percent of those who suffer from anorexia are women.
Women’s life expectancy is eight years longer than men’s. That’s why life insurance costs women less per year; they’ll be paying eight years longer before they die and collect.
Twice as many men die accidentally as women. Fifteen years of gender-neutral teaching has not erased the fact that young men are the risk-taking segment of society.
That’s why automobile accident insurance rates are much higher for young men under age 25 than for young women. After men take the big plunge of marriage, their yen for other risks seems to wane and their automobile accident insurance rates decline.
Six times as many men as women are injured at work. Is that because men are clumsier than women? Not likely. It’s because most women are simply not willing to take the jobs where they risk bodily injury or death. We depend on the men to do those necessary jobs and protect us, don’t we!
Since 1964, federal laws have guaranteed women open access to every type of job, but 99 percent of plumbers are still men. Are we prisoners of obsolete stereotypes? Hardly. There are good and valid reasons why women don’t want to be plumbers, and even high wages can’t lure them to the trade.
On the other hand, 97 percent of child-care workers are women. Nobody dares to admit there is a biological maternal instinct, but the statistic can’t be disputed.
The gender difference is not just in physical labor jobs. Despite the crying need in industry for engineers, and the good pay they receive, 96 percent of engineers are men.
A new college graduate in electrical engineering can walk into a job paying $10,000 a year more than a new graduate in liberal arts, which most women choose. The Education Amendments of 1972 guaranteed women’s entry into any professional school of their choice, but still last year, 88 percent of the Ph.D.s in mathematics and science were awarded to men.
My husband tried to talk all our six children into attending engineering school. He argued year after year that you get more for your education dollar in engineering school and, anyway, you learn things that are true instead of so many false things taught in liberal arts that you have to unlearn later.
So, our four sons graduated in engineering, but the two daughters rejected their father’s advice. One daughter chose journalism; upon college graduation she went to work at less than one-half the pay any B.S.E.E. graduate could get. Was that sex discrimination? No, that’s freedom of career choice.
When it comes to spending money, however, women write the checks in two-thirds of the households, whether they work outside of the home or not.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the maternity leave case is a welcome breath of fresh air because the Supreme Court recognized that there are, indeed, differences between men and women. If the case had come up a decade ago, when the gender-neutral fad of the seventies was at its peak, the decision surely would have been different.
In the mid-1970s, the prevailing ideology was that there is no difference between men and women, and that the law should treat pregnancy just like a broken leg. Fortunately, we have survived that era of foolish feminism, and legislatures and courts are now willing to recognize that yes, Virginia, there is indeed a difference.
