Let’s scrap International Women’s Day and celebrate both genders

Why is it that some women feel the need to get out the baseball bats and give us blokes a bashing on International Women’s Day, asks Mike O’Connor.

There should be an International joint Women and Men’s day instead.

As the wind howled and the rain peppered the windows I watched from the sanctuary of the living room as my wife battled her way out on to the balcony and fought to tie down the barbecue.

“What a woman,” I thought as she clung bravely to the barbecue as she was buffeted by another gale force blast. In my defence, I had offered to help but had been brushed aside.

“If you tie the knots they’ll unravel in the first breeze and the barbecue will end up in New South Wales,” she said.

She was right, of course. We’re all good at something but the art of knot tying has ever eluded me.

Much better to defer to her unquestionable logic, swallow my male pride and avoid the prospect of an airborne barbie.

■ Kylie Lang: Pompous, ignorant men are the reason we still need IWD

Women are amazing creatures. They’re better organised than men, smarter than men in so many ways, intuitive, capable of an alarming degree of multi-tasking and over the centuries have developed the art of making men feel much more capable than they are.

We love ’em, we adore ’em, we admire them.

Why is it then that some women feel the need to get out the baseball bats and give us blokes a bashing on International Women’s Day?

Let me say that I regard all “international days” as a complete waste of time. Hands up all those men who get excited about International Men’s Day – it’s on November 25 if you were wondering.

Is International Women's Day too much?

The theme for this year’s IWD was a call for “swift, decisive measures to address systemic barriers and biases affecting women in various spheres.”

Fair enough. Let’s see some swift, decisive measures to address the shocking levels of domestic violence being suffered by women in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, the arranged marriages being forced on young women in some ethnic communities in this country and a ringing denunciation of the rape and mutilation carried out by Hamas terrorists on Israeli women.

Each year the imminence of IWD is a signal for the federal government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency to trot out its carefully massaged statistics purporting to prove that a lot of women don’t get paid as much as men because they are women.

There is a conspiracy, apparently, hatched by nasty misogynistic men to keep women in their place by paying them less than big, hairy chested blokes who are so much better than women at everything and deserve to be paid more because they are males.

Australia enshrined the principle of equal pay for equal work in legislation more than 50 years ago but efforts persist to fan the flames of the battle of the sexes, the embers of which have long since turned to ash.

Its proponents attempt to perpetuate a them-and-us mentality which paints women as victims and which divides society by gender.

Some women earn less than some men because they make different life choices. Some women make a lot more than some men because they are much better than their male colleagues at what they do.

Some of the highest paid executives in the country are women so how did they manage it? I’d take a guess and say it’s because they are smarter than the men who answer to them.

Accompanying the pay conspiracy are demands for quotas, a demand that demeans every woman in the work force with its implicit message that women can’t succeed on their own merit but have to be inserted into roles by way of a quota system.

That this actively discriminates against men by promoting women in roles for which they might not be qualified in order to meet the quotas does not merit consideration.

You could be excused for wondering if the repeated calls for quotas at an executive and board level come from that small, elite group which has profited nicely from them and want to keep the gravy train on the rails.

Let’s scrap International Women’s Day, replace it with International Women’s and Men’s Day and celebrate our collective strengths and the respect in which we hold the opposite gender.

It’s a mutual respect which has helped drive the development and prosperity of the nation since its foundation and those who would seek to erode it do themselves and their fellows no favours.

The barbecue survived Cyclone Alfred, proof if any was needed that in so many ways women are more capable than men.