I suppose there have been some gains and changes.  “You’ve come a long way Baby” is one of them.  Our infantile half is now smoking and is quite cute about the way her Virginia Slims makes her distinctive and not even a teeny little bit male.  Co-education seemed to be the answer.  Put boys and girls in the same schools and classes and there would finally be parity.  For those of us who were in the “Ed Business” we often thought how much better it would have been to separate out the sexes in schools as was the practice when I taught in Elizabeth, NJ.  The Jr. High was as high as integration went and then back to the olden days of separate high schools for boys and girls.

The school house may have been updated so that there were separate bathroom facilities for each sex but that wasn’t the point.  The content of the education each sex received was different even if the textbook was the same.  The bias and predilection was to teach and favor the male.

We still cannot help it and I am not sure if it should not continue to be this way.  We educated little boys to be men and little girls to our baby girls even when they become moms.  The two income families where each member works still show that boys will do men’s work while women are beneath a glass ceiling and I am not just talking about the woes of Carlton Fiorina.

In my house, which is a traditionalist one, I do not try to avoid cooking but that task is Carol’s.  I do the cleaning up afterwards and am called upon to reach up to high shelves to take down things my “baby” cannot reach.  She is the short one and that seems to still be the physical difference between men and women.  Men are taller, bigger and stronger and, as they age, they lose their hair and gain a lot of baggage around their middles.  Women, I think, work harder throughout the day planning for the next days as they work to keep things in order.  Their education told them to stay in the kitchen and work from the home for the kids needed them.

There is a difference between men and women but their education – even if mandated the same by law – becomes a difference in preparation for life. Boys’ sports are a good example.  It is their sports that both men and women attend and cheer their preference in “games” that resemble war. Our biases and much of our resources are spent on showing little boys that they are superior to little girls and this grows with them as they grow up.

Education favors the male of our species and in many ways it is a good and proper discrimination.  But it is more discriminatory than good.  Think on this.