Oh, sorry, I thought we were actually looking at the problem, not trying to claim there's some vast conspiracy.

Instead, women have their out scutwork jobs that no one really wants - low paid waitressing and grocery store clerks. Not as dirty or dangerous, but still undesirable and slanted the other direction genderwise.

You say that like it's impossible for a female teacher to have biases about what the genders are good at. Reverse it, if you'd like - how many boys with an interest in something typically female may be dissuaded by their own fathers? Personally, I feel lucky in that I had teachers throughout my school career that were encouraging me, telling me that I could do whatever I wanted, in contrast to other women I've met who were discouraged by everyone from their math and science teachers to their own parents.

I remember mistakenly thinking that Radio Shack was the place to go look for an odd conversion cable (I think it was for a laptop to a tv that didn't have the most expected combination of ports) and the person behind the counter looking at me like I was speaking Greek. I wonder if anyone still makes the cool little electronics experiment kits?

There are studies that show that women are less likely to speak up when outnumbered by men. So if the most successful teams were ones where everyone contributed equally, it seems like those groups would tend to either have more women so that women are more willing to speak up, or no women at all (assuming that men are all likely to contribute in that environment).

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/2...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

People make a good point - relative intervals don't tell us much. I'm in my late thirties and picked fifty years - I have the genes for longevity, I think (though not Lazarus Long style), since three of four grandparents lived to their late 80s and one great grandparent even made it to 99.

Look, look, another woman here! :) Anyway, I was considering joking that as an expecting geek mom, that if men's brains get rewired, then perhaps there's a chance that I'll become more maternal. I worry about it.

The rest of your commentary makes sense to me. So far, I haven't been getting much advice that is critical of our plans, except from one person: my very traditional mother, who is probably secretly horrified that my husband is going to stay at home. She's already claimed that my longterm breastfeeding plans will never work out (no, not _that_ longterm, I just mean that I'm not doing formula if I don't have to), that trying to use cloth diapers is silly and my plans to downsize to reduce debt so that we can afford for my husband to not work mean I'll "never live in a house that big again".

Okay, I've gotten it off my chest now.

re: average age of marriage

BS.

The average age of marriage for women during much of the middle ages was in the early twenties, and older for men. That's for the average person, not some member of the royalty that had an alliance marriage made for him/her when they were children, usually by proxy and certainly not consummated until they were of age. The reason for the commoners needing to wait: they needing to actually learn how to do a job, even if that was farming. Mommy and Daddy peasant weren't going to be able to set them up, so they needed to actually have earned some money to have an independent life.

I remember as a child reading BASIC programs out of Compute Magazine for my dad to type in on our TI computer. That likely means I was reading code before I read my first real novel, which is amusing.

I try not to admit at work that I've had to learn VBA for Excel for a tool we use.

There's actually a fairly good (for a media tie in) novel written by Andy Robinson, the actor who played Garak, about his past called A Stitch in Time. The series of novels set in post-series Deep Space Nine have been good overall, but unfortunately they've slowed down (hopefully not stopped!) coming out so they could make room on the release schedule for drek related to the recent movies.

Now, if any flavor of Gauntlet were on the list, it would win for me, so instead of I picked Pinball.

Unfortunately, until someone mentioned it, I wasn't even thinking of dental and eye doctor visits, so that's: twice a year to my GP, once to my OB/GYN, twice to the dentist and once to the eye doctor, minus occasions that something is actually wrong, which isn't often.

My mom spends most of her year in Michigan and then snowbirds down to Arizona for the winter. She refuses to upgrade from dial-up because she doesn't want to pay for a connection in both places, nor do the research to see if there's someone who can provide her with a connection in both for one fee or something similar. I think she's got fed up with her own dial up connection; she was leeching internet from a neighbor before they locked down their router and now goes down to the McDonald's or whichever fast food restaurant she gets wi-fi at.

In fact, I picked 1-10 and I wonder if I should have gone up a category. Mainly, I get things sent to the business he used to run at the house, though it's finally started to taper off recently. I suppose this technically would be misaddressed rather than misdelivered, but close enough.