“The sweetest hours that e’er I spend
Are spent amang the lasses, O”

And who can blame him!

We all know that Rabbie Burns loved the lassies, but he also respected and valued us. He knew that the focus on the Rights of Man was wrong and said:

“The Rights of Woman merit some attention.”

Last time we were together to celebrate the great Rabbie Burns, I think we established very clearly the superiority of the lassies …

• Girls get better exam results at school than you boys
• We make better managers
• Better at science
• Better investors
• Better drivers!

I can feel Burns rejoicing in the achievements of the lassies. We’ve just been celebrating 100 years of some women getting the vote. Without a vote, women were grouped with children and the insane, women were non-people, the property of their husbands. Imagine!

In 1918:

• There were no women in the police
• There were no women MPs
• And women certainly didn’t get the top job as PM
• Oxford and Cambridge didn’t allow women to take degrees and up until 1948 Cambridge awarded women a degree in title only. BA TIT! Thanks boys!
• There were fewer than 500 female doctors in England and Wales
• That left male doctors free to do what they liked. And they did! For instance, they invented Anorexia Scholastica – only affected women; debilitating thinness resulting from too much mental stimulus. If only that were true, I for one would have read so much more!!! They suggested that maths was a particular problem, diverting energy from the reproductive system. And if you were careless enough to get pregnant, you could be fired
• Women could even be refused service for trying to spend their own money in a pub.

100 years later, all that’s changing. in 2018:

• Cressida Dick has the top job in the Metropolitan Police
• 208 women MPs in Westminster
• Love them or hate them, we now have our 2^nd female PM and Nicola Sturgeon is First Minister in Scotland
• 57% of graduates are women
• Nearly half of registered doctors (in England and Wales) are women
• And Anorexia Scholastica has been completely cured!

We’ve come a long way. But there’s still work to do, not least, closing the wretched gender pay gap.

Meanwhile, the laddies aren’t feeling so good:

• 1 in 3 men in the UK think masculinity is in crisis and no one knows what to do about it
• Everything used to be so clear. Be the breadwinner, be the boss, look after your family and be heterosexual. Now, men are expected to be kind, fair and emotionally intelligent. What does that mean?!
• In the confusion, boys are doing worse than girls at school (56% of boys achieved GCSEs grade C and above, compared with 66% of girls). And boys are a third less likely to go to university
• Men in their 20s could find themselves earning the same or less than women in their 20s as the gender pay gap closes among the 20-somethings
• 87% of rough sleepers are men
• Men are experiencing a mental health epidemic, accounting for 3 in 4 suicides
• Men are much more likely to be sent to prison
• In essence, men are now cast as villains and to blame for all that’s wrong in the world, scared of being ‘wrongly’ accused of inappropriate behaviour. And their fear may well be justified given Gillette’s latest ad. A laudable aim to bring a more contemporary vision of masculinity and reinvigorate the 30-year old tagline ‘the best a man can get’. But what we got, was a message that most men are on the wrong track, not good enough, must do better and change!

We don’t really believe that, do we girls?

Has it all gone too far? Should we consider the unthinkable, join forces and work together.

Rabbie urges us to try and empathise a bit:

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,”

And when we empathise, we can see that we’re wired differently and there’s nothing wrong with that. We can complement each other. For instance:

• Women remember everything – larger hippocampus – that’s the bit where we store memories. So we remember every single word of every single argument!
• Women feel, while men take a more fact-based approach. We need both. Real facts are very important, even if it is emotions that swing decisions
• Men are better at negotiating salaries and pay rises and who’d say no to a bit more money?
• We problem-solve differently – girls like to talk things through and then act; men prefer to dive right in and fine tune as they go along.

We’re different and we can complement each other. We are stronger together.

Obviously, to make this work, there will have to be some clear red lines:

• Women have the last word in any argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument
• You need to understand the vocab:

When a woman says “Yes Dear. Fine.” It’s far from fine.

“Go ahead” means “Don’t you dare!”

“Oh you think so” means “think again.”

Men on the other hand have their very own nuanced speak that we girls also need to respect:

• “Can we talk about this later?” … means “I never want to talk about it again!”
• “If you don’t do it the way I’m telling you, you’ll regret it” means “I know best!”
• And then there’s that stunning sense of direction, we know and love. “I know exactly where I am; the GPS isn’t working properly!” means “We’re lost!”

We need to be much more open and supportive of each other. But don’t forget, boys, the huge hippocampus – we girls remember everything!

Let’s move forward together. Ladies and Gentlemen, the toast:

Lift your cup and drain it well,
For these are truths that I do tell.
Without all sexes, teams are lacking,
Girls and boys must get our backing,
Other genders we must heed
Without them, how can we proceed
To make a world that’s right and fair?
Let’s drink to all and their constant care.

Lyn Roseaman

Toast to the Lassies