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.

A Vatican reporter last week said John Paul was the perfect pope for the television age, "a man of images." Think of the pictures of him storm-tossed, tempest-tossed, standing somewhere and leaning into a heavy wind, his robes whipping behind him, holding on to his crosier, the staff bearing the image of a crucified Christ, with both hands, for dear life, as if consciously giving Christians a picture of what it is to be alive.

Benedict, the reporter noted, is the perfect pope for the Internet age. He is a man of the word. You download the text of what he said, print it, ponder it.

Now Benedict comes to America, his first trip as pope. The highlight in the Vatican's eyes is his address to the United Nations. No one knows what he will say. He will no doubt call for peace, for that is what popes do, and should do. Beyond that? Perhaps some variation on themes from his famous Regensburg address, in September 2006.

There he traced and limned some of the development of Christianity, but he turned first to Islam. Faith in God does not justify violence, he said. "The right use of reason" prompts us to understand that violence is incompatible with the nature of God, and the nature, therefore, of the soul. God, he quotes an ancient Byzantine ruler, "is not pleased by blood," and "not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature." More: "To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm." This is a message for our time, and a courageous one, too. (The speech was followed by riots and by Osama bin Laden's charge that the pope was starting a new "crusade.")

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. 

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. (Men can tell jokes about what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, but they don't want women doing so.)