
My eyes roll.
If you want systems, go ask a woman who works in the home about systems.
It has occurred to me that men just can't think in systems. My husband has been carrying the housework load for a little while for us and he just can't get his head around the idea of multitasking - a concept so fundamental to women who manage a household. My husband is a super smart guy, he has a PhD in astrophysics, but he just doesn't manage multitasking when it comes to solving housework problems. Although he is getting better.
My guess is he has learned the importance of optimizing time with the multitude of tasks that need to be performed.
I know I have read these accounts of emotional labor and men's helplessness when it comes to doing housework. Perhaps some of it is men feeling annoyed they have to contribute during what they thought would be their downtime, housework is beneath them - besides there is a really interesting game on TV and here he is in the laundry, so they put the clothes in the washer and never turn the machine on... then he can say he put the clothes in the washing machine (literally. Of course that'd be extremely passive aggressive if it's intentional. But my husband is nothing like this)... I think it's more likely men just do not understand the problem.
Men seem to have a really hard time managing systems. Whereas women think men can do systems as well as they can because hey - all she is doing is housework... anyone can do this - right?
Well I think we've bought the lie that women have to live up to men's ability and standards. We think men can do all the things, and women have to prove they can.
The idea that computer software must have a bug in it is based on men writing the code for a system and the problem is men just can't do systems. I have written heaps of bug-less code. And I am talking about telephone systems and neural networks, symbol translators, code that writes other code... all completely bug-less, easy to maintain and upgrade.
This realization came to me when I saw on brain-games a segment about men having better spatial reasoning, that they can pack a car trunk for an outing more quickly and efficiently than women can in general. And perhaps that's true - if you don't mind the diaper pail next to lunch. Perhaps the women on the segment were solving the real problem - if you are going to access food during the journey, perhaps you don't want to have to pull out everything to get to a squashed lunch, to get to the diaper pail, or to find where the clean diapers were stored in the first place.
In my opinion, men are basically peacocks who love showing off, and tell how wonderful they are at showing off. In general, women prefer to just get the job done and hopefully get some recognition for it. Perhaps our assumption is wrong, that men cannot do everything as well as women can.