I was talking to a neighbour the other day and she was telling me a story about her son and giving him a pep talk.  He had been crying and she said to him that he was crying like a little baby girl and needed to man up.   I wasn’t about to get into the semantics of what she had said to her son with her, but the content of what she said bothered me.  Being a girl or girl-like was negative and being a man or man-like was positive.  It is such an insidious message and a pervasive one as well.  To many it is a truism, “Woman are the weaker sex”. What is weakness?  Physical strength? Emotionality?  What is giving birth?  What is caring for an infant, a young family, aging parents?  What is competing for gender biased jobs?  What is having jobs that are essentially thankless, but are fundamental to society?  What is being under valued, undermined, under paid and getting up every day and facing it all again?