New gender gaps for the new millennium

I have said about ten million times that there is no more glass ceiling, there is no more salary gap between men and women, and there is no reason to keep bitching about sexual harassment because it's merely a legal issue, not a men-are-evil issue.

Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist favorites, then are there any gender gaps we should be concentrating on? Yes. Here are three:

1. The startup gap. Women need to be compensated at a higher rate than men if they are to give up their personal lives in order to work. Law firms accomplish this by keeping women on partner track even when they're part-time. Corporations do this by offering flex time and other business-bending options for high-performing women who want to take care of kids.

VCs talk endlessly about why there are so few women running venture backed companies, but it's incredulous talk. The reason is that VCs don't pay women more. Here's the bottom line: If you take a man and a woman doing the same office job and the same parenting job, the man will think he's doing a good job at parenting, but not the woman.

This makes genetic sense. The men had to think the kids were fine when they left the cave to hunt. Or else they wouldn't leave and no one would have eaten. The women had to think the kids always needed more attention. Otherwise, the women would say, “This is good enough” and then the kids would starve or get eaten by lions.

How this translates to the VC world is that you need to spend TONS of time away from kids doing a startup. For women to do that, they need to be compensated more than men. Other industries have done it in order to benefit from women’s brains. The VC world should follow suit.

2. The orgasm gap. People who have orgasms do better at work: they earn more, they hang out with higher powered people, they are better at public speaking, and they walk with a more confident gait, which, of course, inspires confidence.

So we need to pay attention to the orgasm gap, which Hannah Seligson reports in the Daily Beast: “Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and even winning Indy-car races. But there’s one area where the gender gap has proved particularly stubborn: The orgasm gap.”

Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, says, “The orgasm gap is an inequity that’s as serious as the pay gap, and it’s producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry.”

Where does this orgasm gap come from? Probably the amount of effort expended in bed”?and who’s expending it. England’s study found that women give oral sex to their male partners in all contexts”?from casual hookups to serious relationships”?at significantly higher rates than men do. (Hat tip: Sepideh)

And if you're wondering how this pans out across generations, things seem to get worse in the younger crowd—Caitlin Flanagan reports in the Atlantic that girls are giving blow jobs just to get the boys to shut up.

3. The fun gap. As soon as men and women start aging, the men are happier. Maybe they have had more training on how to have fun. But life is too difficult for any of us to wait to have fun. So we should all start learning to have some levity early on, and this is the damage of the fun gap.

You can see the gap at the bar. Alcohol makes us have a more broad imagination and do a wider range of things. So why is it more acceptable for professional men than professional women to go out with friends and get drunk? Why is it okay for men to get drunk in order to have an easier time hooking up, but it's not okay for women? This is such a serious problem that New York magazine calls the gap the the last frontier of feminism.

It's clear that women are spending more time following the rules than men, and people who have more fun actually do better in life: their fun snowballs, and the more we enjoy the more we get of what we enjoy.

It starts in kindergarten, where the girls sit in their chairs and pay attention in class, and they socialize in the lunchroom. The boys, on the other hand, have spent the first five years of their lives turning everything into a gun or sword and cannot be contained in a classroom atmosphere.

Yes, these are generalizations, but as the mom of two young boys, I have never heard any parent disagree with these generalizations, (and it’s official that boys are six months behind girls developmentally by kindergarten). I did not buy guns for my sons. I didn't have to. They can use anything. And I remember as a fourth grader thinking, (from the back of the classroom, where all the strong performing girls sit because they don't need help from the teacher) “Wow, the boys sure are doing poorly in school.”

The problem is that the boys are having all the fun. Women are doing better than men in school but school is not what makes kids successful at work. What actually prepares you for life is athletics, aiming high, breaking rules, playing video games. Girls should do those things more. Then, as they grow up, they should spend their time figuring out how to get more orgasms.