Why Men this and Women that

Despite the publication of the results of a 25 year study in development, concluding among other things that the way the nervous system of a human being is hard-wired depends on the amount of testosterone in the womb at a certain point of embryo development, people still insist on saying 'men this' and 'women that'.

It ain't that simple.

First, you have to consider a continuum between the high testosterone leves at that time and the low levels. A continuum. Not either/or.

So what if male gender humans tend to be more to one end and female gender humans tend to be more at the other. That's just a correlation that is not high enough to draw all the Woman's Day conclusions that people bandy about.

Better, perhaps, to classify people as High-T and Low-T. Or maybe remove possible pejorative evaluations and call them T and N.

What is more, you can now do a normalised test to see where on the continuum your own nervous system sits. Wow.

I am about 60% T and 40% N.

No. That does not mean I am a big girl. It means I can read maps without turning them around and I don't lose my keys as often.

The T nervous system allows its owner to unthinkingly, naturally and without thought or effort make maps of reality and respond to those.

When the T puts his or her keys down, it is recorded in the map. If someone else moves them, that person, male or female, will not be able to easily find them. This is because they are working with the map they made, not the reality in front of them.

The N puts something down, again male or female, and makes no map. That step is not there. They see the reality directly. So if someone moves it, no problem.

I reckon there is a great opportunity here for researchers - redo ALL the research that has compared gender males with gender females. Do it on the basis of T - N, after testing the participants.

This will separate out the differences that are actually based on physical gender and those that are based on T-N nervous system differences. Across a continuum.

Research grants anyone?

Anyone got money to fund this?

It might not look important but the results could be staggering if we find much higher correlation N-T than we do M-F.

Where's My Towel?

When you stay in a hotel, the carts come around each day with the clean linen. The staff go into the rooms, one by one, collect the sheets, towels etc, drop them in the bin on the cart and then put the fresh ones out.

In most hotels in my experience, the people who do these jobs are female.

The system works well.

But, I have to ask myself, why is it that when a man is living with a woman, and the woman takes it on herself to deal with the linen changes, the old is taken away but not at the same time replaced with the new.

So the bloke comes out of the shower to discover there is no towel in the bathroom.

He should have checked first? Don't be silly. That would mean, for a bloke, him checking each and every single time. You can't expect a bloke to know what else is going on at the same time.

Of course the difference could be that the people working in the hotels are employed. The woman in the relationship is not. She is her own boss and as such is perfectly entitled to do the self-appointed, albeit unpaid, task her own way in her own time. Fair enough.

Aha! So while employed, the staff are acting under the instructions from someone else - the manager, the boss, the hotel standard protocol.

In my experience, the usual workplace gender imbalance applies and the jobs of this sort are mostly filled by men.

So, guys, if you have a problem with this the answer is simple.

Get yourself a paid housekeeper. This has several advantages:

• You will always have fresh towels, tea-towels, pillow cases, sheets, etc as and when you need them
• Your partner will not have to do that work and have more free time for herself
• You have created employment
• The employee's pay will be spent on things and benefit the economy

You have the chance to turn a whining complaint into a benefit for all.

Oh, one more thing. Keep your relationship with your employee professional only.