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The talking point about the dearth of women CEOs is a classic. The fact of this disparity might just as easily be understood differently: CEOs lead fairly unbalanced lives.
Women might recognize this difference and assume that men are the ones to be pitied.
We might just as easily say: Women are so much better adjusted, so much wiser for preferring relationships to dollars. We might as easily say: Of course women prefer literature to software engineering! It’s far more interesting. It has the power to transport, to move hearts and minds. Literature is the story one generation tells to the next. So many women study, teach, and produce great literature. Who is the wiser sex?
Women feel things deeply. We empathize. For good reason, when asked to identify their best friend, most men name their wives; most women name another woman.7 Soldiers write home to mom. And in the dead of night, small children cry out for one person.
A woman’s emotional life is her strength.
Becoming a woman means losing a body almost indistinguishable from a boy’s in terms of strength and solidity and growing into one that is softer, more sexually inviting, but more vulnerable, too.
Forced to rely on subtler talents, you develop them. You learn to strike with a glance; you learn to soothe with one, too. If done right, you fill your quiver with words, humor, intrigue, and emotion. You’ll spend a lifetime learning when to deploy each to greatest effect—and when to forbear and offer none. But for Pete’s sake, whatever type of women young girls become, they should all listen to feminists of a prior era and stop taking sex stereotypes seriously.
She’s lucky. She’s special. She was born a girl. And being a woman is a gift, containing far too many joys to pass up.
