(Reuters) 3 July 2008:

One of the archetypes of old age is the image of the mad old woman: not that we use that loaded description any more, using instead dementia. Recent studies show that, as with so many stereotypes, there is some truth in the matter.

Amongst those over 90 28 % of the men had dementia of one form or another and 45% of the women did.

Quite why this divide between the sexes is unknown: the researchers have two thoughts on the matter, but neither are proven. The first is that women live longer after a diagnosis of dementia, raising their relative numbers. The second is that so few men live beyond 90 that those who do have to be considered “hardy survivors” and simply less likely to get anything.

A question that clearly requires further research.

(DETROIT FREE PRESS) 22 June 2008:

Well, that’s the headline, although that’s not quite what they mean: the ratio of marriage ceremonies to married couples is still pretty much one to one for both lesbians and gays. What they mean is that women in a committed relationship are more likely to marry than gay men in committed relationships.

Which shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise: we see in heterosexual relationhips that women are more eager to marry than men.

It’s compounded here by the way that lesbian couples are much more likely to have and raise children than gays are (there’s the comparable ease and difficulty of the basic mechanics to consider along with desires), so much so that in states where there is a mechanism to register same sex partnerships (marriages, civil partnerships, whatever) the ration is usually 2:1, lesbian to gay.

An old English euphemism for “gay” was “not the marrying kind”: interesting how that seems still to be true, long past the time that the eupehimism is still in use.

(INDEPENDENT) 19 June 2008:

…well, not quite. In Ireland these days there’s still a gender imbalance in how much of it is done by women and how much is done by men. Women are working on average nearly forty minutes more each day than men (this is including both paid work and work in the home).

Compare that to the cousins over the Irish Sea, the British, where total work is the same for each sex.

In both countries women do more of the houosehold work, men more of the paid outside the home. But in the total amount done the Irish are currently about where the Brits were thirty years ago, which sounds about right. While Ireland has advanced greatly economically in recent years, socially it’s still a conservative place. Divorce was only legalized a few years ago and abortion is still illegal. That there’s still no gender parity in working hours shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise.

(JERUSALEM POST) 18 June 2008:

Brandeis University has released results that are concerninig Jewish leaders. Among the Non-Orthodox Jews, the men are becoming more distanced from the religion than their female contemporaries. The worry comes from the well known point that only those minorities closely identified with their religion are successful in passing that religion (and possibly sense of being a part of that minority) on to their children.

It has to be said though, there’s something a little odd about the concern. For the definition of a Jew in the next generation is one who is born to a female Jew of this generation: the status of the father, their religion, makes no difference in law or custom to the Jewishness of the child. So we’d rather expect the women to be more closely connected with both the religious and cultural aspects, wouldn’t we?

(NEW YORK TIMES) 15 June 2008:

There’s a slightly surprising result from looking at the figures about who does all the work around the house. Yes, the number of hours that both men and women work to keep the home running have been falling as a result of technology. And yes, men have also been doing more than their previous share of what work remains.

However, the huge imbalance in child care hours still remains: women do more than men in a ratio of five to one, very much the same number of hours as their grandmothers.

It’s almost enough to make you think there might be something immutable, biological, about this, isn’t it?

(SCIENCE DAILY) 13 June 2008:

There are some remarkable figures from the UK on the number of people who have body piercings: Fully 10 percent of the adult population have one somewhere other than on their ears.

It isn’t that much of a surprise to find that there are more women than men with such piercings, nor that the most popular site is the belly button.

What will come as more of a surprise is that twice the number of men than women have piercings on their genitals. Something which, given that 25 percent of all piercings experience complications and 1 percent require hospital admission, is still a bit shocking.

Odd lot the British.

(THE PROVINCE) 11 June 2008:

The group that runs high performance driving training courses says that, while many more men than women take their courses, they’re seeing more and more women applying.

As they do they’re also seeing that the two groups take the training very differently. The women are there to learn: to find out what is safe, what are their own limitations and those of the cars. The men, in contrast, seem to be much more interested in demonstrating to the trainers what they already know: to prove, as it were, that they don’t need any more training.

Men showing off, eh? Now there’s a surprise.

(NEWSDAY) 8 June 2008:

Since farms and the transportation industry stopped using horses in the first few decades of last century the horse “industry” has been largely taken over by women. In the “English” disciplines, 85 percent of owners and riders are women, in Western, the number is 60 percent, and the youth equestrian organizations are 90 percent female.

But horse racing itself is still an overwhelmingly male domain. In part this comes from the fact that  racing is dominated by frenzied betting, something which may appeal less to women than it does to men.

All that gambling has another effect though: horse racing is a financially driven industry, rather than one of partnership between horse and rider as the disciplines are. Perhpas it’s that emotional disconnect that women like less and thus they avoid the industry.

(NATIONAL POST) 7 June 2008:

In the ongoing debate about gender equality, the words seem to keep changing their meanings. We all agree with the basic thought of equality, but what does that in itself actually mean?

One meaning is equality of opportunity: that men and women (and those not sure either way) are equal before the law and get the same chances at the joys and opportunities that life has to offer. Another is equality of outcome, the argument that men and women should be the same. That latter rather ignores (often for socio-political reasons) the fact that people might make different decisions about what they want from life and thus end up in different places, despite having the same opportunities.

That much we have known for some decades, but the language is changing again in order to obscure an argument already debated. Equality of opportunity is now defined as “formal equality” and of outcome as “substantive equality.”

Once everyone has worked out that this is in fact the same old argument obviously they’ll have to change the names again.

(THE TIMES) 2 June 2008:

The Australian equivalent of the iconic cowboy is the jackaroo, rough and tumble men who work on ranches the size of a small country in the Australian Outback. For decades, women have been able to join in but until very recently it was still a 90 percent male trade. That’s now changing as nearly 60 percent of the new entrants are now women, or jillaroos.