Same Sex Restrooms are OK With Me

Yingluck Shinawatra was designated as the next Prime Minister of Thailand following elections this week. That's her at the left. Yep. She is a she. Angela Merkel announced this week she's ready to run for another term as Germany's Chancellor. In the USA this month, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was reintroduced into Congress by Carolyn Maloney of New York's 14th District.

I work within an academic department of the university here whose professors rank among the highest paid in the university. Our faculty right now is about one-tenth women, which isn't bad, for our department, which isn't bad for its field. If you look a little lower, to non-tenure track teaching staff, the ones who reliably teach the gigantic and rarely rewarding principles courses that are the meat and potatoes on an international smorgasbord, the proportion rises even more than my eyebrows, which is to say very significantly. Among our vast body of undergraduate majors, the proportion is a little better; there we can consistently show any wandering Affirmative Action officers that we have 26 percent female students. Our subject, by the way, is economics. Lest you're tempted to any facile riposte like, "Well, that ain't brain surgery," I'd like to point out that even over in Neurology, the percentage of women is much higher, and the number of women graduating from med school nationwide is just about to top the number of men. Over in the Law School, the number of women earning their JJD diploma long since eclipsed their male counterparts.

But economics is really what matters. The numbers say it all. So what do charts and figures about the income gap in American society have to do with the number of female economists in my department, the number of heads of state elsewhere that are not replicated here, the recent reintroduction of the ERA into Congress? Women here still have no constitutional backing for our entreaties that we are the match or the better of men in every field. It is not just that we bake a better cake; we present a better case. It's not just that we somehow manage to cope with the masks demanded of devout Muslim women, we excell at wearing surgical masks, our eyes serious on our patients, our hands steady enough pull a sliver from a child's finger, thread a wire up the artery from your leg all the way to your brain. Our prospects are unlimited.

It is seriously time for the ERA. Maloney and her contemporaries, including my own Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, have reintroduced. They did so right on the heels of the Supreme Court denying that the women workers employed by Wal-Mart have a right to present a class action suit as workers who have been discriminated against for salaries and advancement. Because really, how can you discriminate against a group of people who are not your equals? This is the argument.

It's very simple, and it's time to pass it, once and for all. "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." It may be the most elegant, to-the-point legislation introduced into Congress in decades. Don't let it be done-in again by whining about idiotic inoperables like same sex bathrooms. Think about how many times you saw the line in the women's room queuing out the door while the men were in and out in minutes from their room. This is not Separate But Equal: This is inequal.  Don't let anyone dismiss it again by relying on lies like "Women are already free." We are not free until we are equal. Period. It has to be put in writing. In that document we respect about all others. The Constitution. When someone, anyone, tells you its unimportant, look at them straight in the eyes with that surgical steel gaze of yours and say, "Like water is unimportant. Like breath."