According to the National Center for Pay Equity, women’s earnings in 2006 were 76.9 percent of men’s, with the median full-time, year-round female employee earning just $32,515, compared to a median male earning of $42,261. But should we be outraged? No. And here’s why.

Women earn less largely because we have the luxury of decisions that men generally can only dream of. We work less hours in the average work week, we are more likely to take time off to have kids or care for aging parents, and we choose lower paying fields requiring less formal education. Oh, and we’re less far less likely to be killed at work, a little detail often neglected at the NCPE.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men are much more likely to suffer fatal workplace injuries than women. According to 2006 BLS statistics, the most recent year available, 428 American women were killed on the job. Compare this with the 5,275 men who lost their lives. The reason: Men take more dangerous, laborious, and physically demanding jobs, and they are compensated heavily for taking such positions. According to the BLS, the most deadly fields for 2006 were those heavily dominated by men, including logging, mining, waste management, law enforcement, construction, and transportation projects.

Conversely, as the BLS statistics demonstrated, the fields with the lowest death rates, including education and social services, are female-dominated. Ultimately, the average man is more willing than the average woman to spend his days inside dark mines to extract coal.Act like a man and you’ll be compensated as one.

Instead of dashing, swashbuckling heroes who can beat up and outshoot any bad guys who come their way, the new breed of action star is more likely to be skinny, awkward and studious-looking.

The problem with this new breed is that you can’t build a film around them. Rather, what plants butts in seats is the logline, gimmick, car, effects, etc… Once upon a time, you went to see a Schwarzenegger film. You went to see an Eastwood film. You went to see a Mel Gibson movie. No more. Producers probably love this sea-change because it keeps them from having to deal with stars throwing their weight around. Emile Hirsch giving you a hard time?

No problem. We got 10 more who look just like him.

Men and women home from the war acknowledge that there are many questions from the old co-ed combat debate still unresolved, despite years of experimentation.

Shock integration happened when the administration decided to wage a war in Iraq on top of an increasingly complex operation in Afghanistan. And now women in unprecedented combat roles have become essential to sustaining force strength overseas. This situation, and all its unacceptable consequences, will only get worse as long as the Bush administration refuses to initiate troop reductions and limit deployments. The candidates contending to replace Bush, meanwhile, offer little prospect of saner policies: the Democratic candidates have been silent on the realities of co-ed combat, while the Republican nominee insists that we may be in Iraq for another century.

America never consciously chose to send women into combat, but they are there now and in some cases are paying a tragic price.  

But despite the prevailing opinions of media commentators, the female vote isn't necessarily a slam-dunk for Hillary. To gain the votes of most women -- the not-so-famous, so to speak -- she'll have to fight for it, just as other candidates, Democratic and Republican, have done since political pundits began pontificating on the "gender gap."

Historically, male and female voting patterns have differed because of competing visions over the proper role of the government. In recent years, a slight majority of women have tended to prefer a larger government with more services -- and therefore have voted for Democrats. Meanwhile, a majority of men have voted Republican, preferring a smaller government with fewer services.

But the gender gap has started to shrink. In 2000, Al Gore won the women's vote by 12 percentage points. By 2004, however, John Kerry won the women's vote by just three percentage points, as President Bush improved his standing among female voters dramatically.The fact is that women are wealthier, healthier and more independent than ever before. And free market policies have much to do with the strides American women have made. 

The male mind doesn't care as much about the inside of the house as the outside. Our noggins are wired for larger spaces, such as the garage, the driveway, the yard. Sure, some men are neat freaks and homebodies and some women are sloppy and couldn't care less about the inside of their homes. But where biology is concerned, the male and female brains are different.

But the housework study isn't so interested in biological truths. It is more interested in one of its key findings: that the institution of marriage appears to change the division of household labor. In married relationships, even if an egalitarian viewpoint is present, men still report doing less housework than their wives, says George Mason sociologist Shannon Davis.

"Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples -- even couples who see men and women as equal," she says. In other words, marriage itself is the reason women are forced to pick up stinky socks and wipe up the slop in the kitchen after dinner.