More U.S. Women Crack Glass Ceiling

Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that, as of Nov. 30, women represent 50.6 percent of the 48 million employees in management, professional and related occupations. —More U.S. Women Crack Glass Ceiling (Washington Times/UPI)

Women are much more likely to go to college than men; they tend to study harder, get higher grades, have fewer drug problems, are more likely to seek help from their professors, etc.

I’m blogging this in part so I can find it again the next time I get a freshman paper with a thesis that goes something like, “This one literary work, in which a female character faces oppression, proves that all women are oppressed in every possible way, and because that sucks, sexual discrimination should therefore be stopped immediately.”

Some people may say “It’s about time men got a taste of what it’s like,” but that’s hardly fair to the generation of boys who are growing up in a very different world from the one their grandfathers and great-grandfathers ruled — a new world which many of their fathers helped bring about.

My parents had a fairly traditional division of labor until my early teens, when my father’s neck injury forced him to retire on disability and my mother went back to work.

My wife stays home with the children full-time, and she is home-schooling Peter in kindergarten this year. Because she breast-fed she did the vast majority of the late-night baby-walking; she also does the the children’s laundry (which includes deciding what they are going to wear each day, apparently because I have no sense of style, which I won’t deny). So that’s all fairly traditional in terms of gender roles, but I do all the dishes (we tell the baby not to play with the dishwasher because it is “daddy’s”) and give all the baths, and when I am not at work I make about half the meals and do nearly all the diapers. Leigh does do all the bills, but she generally does that sort of paperwork in the evenings while I’m getting the children ready for bed. It also means she controls the finances, which is fine with me; it’s a bit embarassing having to ask her for cash so I can buy my $1.80 plate of salad in the cafeteria a few times a week — at least Nora Helmer and Lucy Ricardo got allowances. (But if I’d been interested in money I’d have never been an English major in the first place.)

Anyway, I’ve blogged on boys in school before.