Just read your newsletter–I can so relate on the loss and damage issues. In the last 4 weeks I’ve had to replace: my desktop computer, my printer, my cell phone, and my refrigerator. Plus I lost my cordless phone in the house and still can’t find it…

On the men and women thing, I believe that anyone with a strong sense of entitlement (as many males have in many arenas–though most don’t even realize it) can make any person look down his/her nose at (or at the chest of) those who do not share such privileges. A colleague once was invited to help TRW figure out why it kept losing its engineers of color and of the female gender. He used his brilliant Inflow software to map communications and it recorded that virtually all exchanges–important and otherwise–were almost exclusively among the white males. Extremely few were communications were ever made with the females and those of color. TRW had its answer–success was out of the question for those who were never admitted to the inner circle, so they simply left.