Woman's Day has come and gone. Yet another day dedicated to promises, 'upliftment' of women. Fiery speeches by famous women and demands and lobbies made for 'equality'. While I have nothing against the demand for equality, a point that struck me in all the demands and complaints was that we seem to be striving towards similarity rather than equality. While it is undeniable that men and women are equal, are we really the same? But then do we really need to be?

In many families with kids of opposite gender and same age we often find the parents comparing their nature and attitudes. What many fail to understand is that comparing the mindset of the two genders is like trying to draw a parallel between chalk and cheese. While both need to be successful, they can do it in their own ways. We find many complaining that we don't have enough women pilots, engineers, politicians, racers, nuclear engineers, architects and so on but do we ever complain about their being between women linguists, language teachers, stewardesses and counsellors than men. Many fail to consider the fact that women many simply not choose to be in some fields. I can almost see the feminists throwing up their hands and terming me a pariah, a non - conformer who is supporting the claim used by men for centuries to suppress women. Get me straight I am a 'equality for women' lobbyist but I demand equality in my own terms. I want a women to be able to be what she wants to be. Equal number of male and female pilots doesn't necessarily spell equality to me.

Lets take a look at the following table which shows the percentage of men in some professions.

Occupation                    % Men
Flight Engineer                  100
Racing driver                       99.8
Nuclear Engineer                 98.3
Pilot                                   99.2

In the profession of teaching, it was found that the percentage of men and women was roughly the same. But even there, we find a disparity in the subjects chosen as shown here

Looking at these statistics, we find that men rule the roost in professions where spatial ability plays an important and major role and women are clear winners where communication and emotional intelligence is the dominant factor. We find these disparity right from school age. Little boys are often whizzes at Math while little girls find languages easy to bet. This is not to say that all men are bad speakers or all women bad mathematicians History and lives of many famous personalities proves otherwise. What I mean to say is, taking a sample of the average person, we find more women better at languages than men and more men better at mathematics than women Even at domestic front, we often find men leaving the job of maintaining harmony and relationships within the family to their spouse, while the onus of fixing that fused bulb falls n the man of the house

There is even a distinct difference between the way men and women think about the same thing. Men rationalize, women emotionalize. Often enough when a women asks a question, she has already made up her mind as to what she wants to do, she just finds arguments to strengthen their end result. Which is why many men dread the 'what do I wear to the party tonight' question. They know they can never win unless they become experts at mind reading.

To truly achieve equality, we need to take into consideration what we are. Biologists have been claiming for a long time that the brains of men and women is wired differently which is the reason for many of the discrepancies in their attitudes and outlook. We need to understand this and accept it. Different doesn't necessarily mean either one is superior or inferior. We are just better suited in different roles. Finding a career suited to us in all aspects will just make us better equipped to deal with it and happier in our chosen role in the long run Storming male bastions is not the only way to achieve equality. Equality arrives when each person - male or female- choose his path in life without any hindrance and sticks to it happily.

References
Statistics taken from the book �Why men don�t listen and women cant read maps� by Barbara and Allan Pease which I would recommend as an excellent read.