Seeing Gender Equality

ACCORDING TO BEYONCE, gender equality is a "myth". Technically, a "myth" is a widely told story or fact which may or may not be true. Usually myths are untrue. That was Beyonce's meaning. All you had to do was read of couple of sentences written by Beyonce, and her meaning was perfectly clear. Men must step up and insist on equal pay for their female co workers. Fathers and husbands must advocate for the women in their lives to get equal pay and equal respect and treatment from society. No argument there. Case closed. Its easy to look at gender equality, or the lack of it, in terms of men's pay and women's pay across the board nationwide. The facts are there, available to all. Inequality adheres, flat out. And the reason gender equality is a myth, is that there are many people, incredibly, who claim that we have achieved it, even now. There are those who seem to believe that men and women are equal in modern society, modern America. And that's the myth, the untrue myth. There are those who would insist that gender equality is not only a myth, it is an impossibility, and undesirable at that. Men and women are simply different, and unequal, and no man- made law or social custom can overturn the law of nature. Besides, how can you put a price tag, how can you assign value, accurately, to child raising, to motherhood itself? Housewives, raising kids, and doing it well for, say, eighteen years, should probably be the highest paid people on the planet, shouldn't they? Well, maybe women can never be paid what they are worth, which is priceless, but surely we can see our way to pay female cops the same as male cops, and elect female leaders as often as we elect males. Equality and inequality, sometimes, is easy to see.