After my retirement, I have more time to stroll in the shopping in my neighborhood during the “normal work hours”. Last week, I saw something that I expected but had not noticed before.
I was in the Medical Physics profession; it used to be a male dominated field. For the colleagues and friends who were older than me, most of their wives did not work and were housewives. This probably represented the situation for the generation before me. However, the situation has been changing rapidly in the last 10 years. About 20% of my colleagues were female when I retired last month, but already 75% of the trainees were women ( I heard similar figures in other centers), so that simply means that within the next 10 years, the majority in my profession will be female. For the moment, I am not trying to figure out why this is happening (which I will comment in a blog later). I just want to point out something that comes up as a side effect of this.
This Friday morning, on my way to the public library in the mall, I ran into a man pushing a baby on stroller just came out of a clothing shop. I naturally looked the baby, and then looked at him. He was a young man about 30. It was just a casual look for me, which I would do for most mothers pushing strollers that crossed my path in the mall or on the streets, like most people would do. Most mothers would just give me a smile back, being proud of their babies. But this man gave me an uneasy look. I was surprised and wondered why.
In the past several years, I had opportunities to talk to ladies in my profession when they were looking for jobs, such as during interviews. One thing they often mentioned was that their husbands might not be able to find a job in the new town if the wife accepted a new job in a new place, so they would have to make some important family decisions. Sometimes, their husbands were highly educated but in fields with little demand, such as pure physics, mathematics etc, while the wives were in better positions to get good paying jobs in their profession, such as in Medical Physics in hospitals. In many situations of this two career families, the husband had to follow the wives to move to new towns and then could not find jobs there. The wives would then become the bread winners and the husbands had to look after the families.
As a man, I would find this situation a bit uncomfortable. That man I met last Friday pushing a baby stroller could be a Ph.D. physicist, and may be that was why he was very sensitive to my looking at him.
On the wall just outside my office door back in Ottawa before I retired, I put up a sign saying the following:
Factors contributing to a good life in the Chinese philosophy:
(in decreasing order of importance)
Fate
Luck
Feng Shui
Karma
Education.
I hope my ex-colleagues in Ottawa have not taken it down yet.
Traveller's space 