My new age husband

There are times that I am so thrilled with my wonderful husband. Times that I'm so grateful that he has daughters to raise and that I am sad that I won't get to see him raise a son. I know it would result in one more male in the world who would fight for women.

While there are times he is a 'typical' male, he does fight for women. One of the appeals of my spouse, when I first met him, was that his two best friends from college were women. Some of his closest friends after college were women (and being that most of the people he knew were either in the Navy or work as civilians for the Navy - it was a unique group he hung out with).

Now, DH is a college professor teaching Chemical Engineering. Our student population (esp in the engineering groups) tends to be filled with women who don't always see their value and capabilities until they graduate and enter the workforce. If he is half as encouraging of their abilities as he was with mine, they are very lucky women.

Over the past 18 months, we have been taking on our winter celebration on campus. Both of us, without knowing the other had done so, contacted our marketing group about the fact that when they publicize the winners of the snow statue event, they highlight the fraternities and all other groups (women's (i.e., sorority), campus groups, and residence halls) are just foot notes. I was told by the director of marketing (who is a female) that it's the fraternity statues that bring in the tourists, so that is why they are highlighted. This year, they did highlight the women's group (but they just updated the format from last year rather than deciding what the 'right' answer should be - it would have been so much easier to highlight the four first place winners and foot note the rest of the winners. (ah, so much for the obvious answer, we need the easy one).

This year, DH has taken on the student group that runs the festival activities. All the various events are awarded points for the winner - and the point values are the same for each 'place' regardless of division, but the statues also have a cash value attached. The prize for the fraternities is the highest, the women's group 200 less, campus groups lower, and residence halls the least. Interestingly, the rational is that there are more fraternities than women's groups who are eligible to compete so that is why the prize is less. DH is fighting that since the women's groups can't compete in the fraternity division, yet the requirements for the statues (height and span limits, etc) are the same, the prizes should be the same. AND that by offering a different prize value, it's discrimination.

I need to get Syd to t-ball, but I love that my husband is willing to fight for the women on this campus (and has even considered making up the difference in first place for two years if they would work toward fixing this. He's not made the offer yet because I pointed out that the second and third place are also different. I think he emailed the group this week, I need to ask what he said.