Are Men and Women Equal?

Before answering this question, we must answer the seemingly trivial question of what is meant by equality. Possibly my background as a programmer has poisoned my mind with a mathematical concept of equality, and I can imagine no other kind. I assume the reader is at least sane enough to agree that men and women are not the same -- identical -- congruent. If "equal" means something else, indulge me as I struggle to find its meaning...

Considering the bygone social climate that gave rise to the concept, it makes sense that "equal to" is supposed to mean "as good as". If so, maybe I can shed my silly arithmetical notions of equality. It doesn't get us much closer to answering the question, though. What is meant by "good"? Intelligent? Strong? Fast? Well-behaved? Discarding, for the sake of sanity, the edge cases where a woman can benchpress 400 lbs. or a man can hardly get the unadorned bar off his chest, it is widely agreed that men are stronger than women. If "good" means "strong", then "equal to" means "as strong as", and the answer to the original question is "no". I have no idea whether women are as intelligent as - or more intelligent than - men, statistically speaking. If there is a statistically meaningful difference, I doubt it's as wide as the strength gap. So, if "good" means "intelligent", we can say "OK, sure" to the original question. Fast? Sorry, men are better. There is a reason men and women compete separately in major contests of speed, and that reason should be obvious.

Of course none of this is what is meant when discussing equality, but I still don't know what is meant. We still haven't tackled "well-behaved". Maybe this one has some meaning. On the whole, men are disproportionately represented in most kinds of crime, but let's look into the home. Women are as likely as men to perpetrate spousal abuse. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' report Child Maltreatment 2004, women are twice as likely as men to abuse their children and three times as likely to kill them. From the scant information available, it looks as though men out-cheat their wives, but not by enough to escape the margin of error (Atwood & Schwartz, 2002 - Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy). Men are more likely, with some notable exceptions, to use illegal drugs, but women are more often dependent on prescription drugs. Suicide rates among men are four times as high as among women, but only because men succeed much more often - suicide attempts are four times as common among women.

I've lost all hope of deciphering the meaning of gender equality. The above statistics paint an unfairly negative picture of women and their behavior. They are, in my unscientific opinion, slightly more likely to be decent human beings than men. I mention some of the numbers above because they are surprising, but my purpose is to point out that men and women are simply different. Libraries full of books could be and have been written about statistical, biological, historical, psychological and intellectual differences between men and women. Our time would be better spent debating the equality of apples to oranges.