Born female

by Caroline Bird

The oldest way of classifying people is to divide humans into male and female. The thesis of this work is that the conditions of modern life--especially those related to the birth control pill and the nature of work--render old forms of the sexual division of labor obsolete, even dysfunctional; and the sooner we get rid of them, the better all around. To allow sex to be the defining characteristic for classifying and organizing work is incredibly wasteful to society: wasting talent, ability, and creativity. The crux of her argument, which is documented with a comprehensive collection of statistics, is that the country's prosperity depends on the labor and earnings of women, yet they are consistently underpaid and underprivileged in comparison with men, which is wrong.