Nicholsclan.com : a dimension of mind...

Are Women Essential to Survival?

Well sure, in the biological "men are just one uterus short of perfection" sense, of course they are. At least until we get that whole test tube and cloning thing perfected. But that's not really the question I intended. It's more like, how frelled up would your life be if we removed the women? Well fear not, the British have got you covered.

Reality TV in the UK has taken a new twist. They are conducting a non-scientific "experiment" to see if a village can survive without its women for one week. An experiment which hopefully will sell lots of advertising. On the one hand, this is just good fun, and I'm sure many of the uterus-laden population will tune in to watch the men blunder about. Especially since it is the blunderers who will get all the air time. But no harm done there. Our hairy skin is thicker than that.

But if you think into this scenario a bit, the question really begins to examine the typical role that women play. If the women's lib agenda were in full swing, women would be indistinguishable from men with regard to the roles they play in society. Therefore, removing the women would be equivalent to removing 50% of all the people at random. And that scenario is pretty survivable. It is unlikely that a random sampling would remove all the grade school teachers, all the plumbers, or all the farmers. A reasonably uniform sampling of people with all skills would remain. But we all know that this is not what's going to happen in this sleepy little village when all the women go on holiday.

Women typically play a disproportionate share of "short cycle" roles. That is, things that need to occur frequently. These include everything from laundry, cooking, and child wrangling to roles like nurses, grade school teachers, supermarket checkers and bank tellers. These are all roles that don't cope well with being gone for a few days. The work stacks up quickly and noticeably. Of course, that's what makes for good TV.

On the flip, men tend to take on more of the "long cycle" roles. These are jobs which require more time to finish, and must be started less often. These include lawn care and home maintenance through to construction, defense, engineering, surgery, and even management. Think about it. Does anyone believe that if they took all the men out for a week that the women would have a problem?

However, the difference is not that one sex is more vital than the other. The difference is the cycle time. Remove the men for a month or a year, then see how the women do. I expect there will be just as many blunderers in that scenario.

Of course, in either scenario, should the one sex be removed long enough, adaptation occurs and the other fills in the gap. At least in the case of missing men, this has occurred many times during a protracted war where most of the men are removed. The women compensate and fill the void. I'm sure the same would occur if the women were gone. People in general are resilient and adaptive.

But all this just begs a deeper question. Why do women gravitate to short cycle tasks and men to long cycle ones? I suspect it's the whole uterus thing. Women, by virtue of their biology, have and care for infants. By definition, infants are short cycle tasks. If you are doing one short cycle task, it's easier to interleave other short cycle tasks than to tackle a long cycle task. After all, when you are up to your arse (keeping with the British theme) in alligators, it's hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp. But one more alligator is hardly an issue (it might even be shoes!). Using the adaptive "nature abhors a vacuum" reasoning above, men filled in the voids - the long cycle tasks.

So for you women who want to know why men can't do 65 things at once or seem to remember to feed the kids... it's because we don't have a uterus.