What Are You Refusing to See in Front of Your Face?

October 7th
JEWS MURDERED, GANG RAPED, &
BEHEADED.
The canary in the coal mine screams:
It can happen to you too!
ALL people have suffered
Whether they realize it,
Or not.
Guilty as charged if you think
It happened to them,
It has nothing to do with me.
Warnings leading up to October 7th
Was the worst example of
Gender dismissal, mansplaining, and
Gaslighting I’ve heard of.
It makes my 70’s, Women’s Lib
Heart bleed with pain.
So many lives could have been saved,
No Hostages kidnapped from home,
Heartache avoided.
Israel’s existence has hung
Dangling In the balance ever since.
Antisemitism has slithered from the
EVIL depths of society
To be the new 2025 version
No shame, & blame the Jews.
A World-wide
Preposterous Gender Gap.
There, there sweeties, it’s going to be ok.
You don’t understand what you are seeing,
You are just emotional beings,
Complying with your mandatory
Military service. EXPLETIVE!!
This slow leak in common sense
Needs to be permanently patched.
No one imagined the dire
Consequences of the gender gap
Would be death & torture
For not treating women equal to men!
Nor the myriad tragic actions
that have followed.
It did make me ponder…
What are we refusing to see
That’s in front of our faces?
May You Live in Peace, שלום and سلام.

(L-R) Captivity survivors Naama Levy, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Liri Albag and Daniella Gilboa watch a concert in their honor at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, February 4, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

I was reading another article about how Agam Berger, Liri Albag, Naama Levy, and Karina Ariev, four of the released Hamas hostages who were surveillance soldiers, met with Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi who apologized to them for their warnings not being treated seriously. Halevi will resign from the military on March 5 over the military’s failure to prevent Hamas’s October 7, 2023 onslaught.

The surveillance soldiers were made up of young women and women commanders. Did their male superiors think periods caused visual hallucinations?

My blood began to boil. Don’t worry, it’s just an expression, but really. At least he apologized, but too little, too late.

I spoke about the young female surveillance soldiers who were reporting suspicious activity for months prior to October 7th in May 2024. On October 7th and since then…

20 people were killed during the attack on the Nahal Oz base, including 15 surveillance soldiers. Seven IDF female surveillance soldiers were abducted. Besides these four, Daniella Gilboa was not present at the meeting. Ori Megidish was rescued alive, and Noa Marciano, was murdered in captivity. May her memory be a blessing.

Ilustrative: Soldiers are seen monitoring surveillance cameras at a command center at the IDF’s Re’im camp in southern Israel, November 5, 2023 (Israel Defense Forces)

What is a surveillance soldier? It was their job to monitor the border and report suspicious activity to prevent attacks. They did their job and repeatedly reported unusual movement for months such as they observed and documented signs of Hamas operatives conducting training sessions, digging holes, and placing explosives. These training sessions were several times a day! There was increased daily drone activity flying up to the border.

I think the least subtle indication was reported by a surveillance soldier, “A month and a half before the war, we saw that in one of the Hamas training camps they had built an exact, scaled model of an observer’s position, like the one we operate. They started training there with drones to hit the [machine gun] shooter,” Ilana (not her real name) said.

Clockwise, from top left: Daniella Gilboa, Karina Ariev, Naama Levy, Agam Berger and Liri Albag, who were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)

Their reward for following orders was death or kidnapping, torture, and being held for fifteen months in captivity. While being held hostage, “they faced threats, poor hygiene conditions, and psychological trauma. They were forced to watch torture videos of male hostages and lived in constant fear for their lives.” Additionally, one of the hostages reported that if they had been released two months prior, they would have looked emaciated like the men too. Knowing that they would be released, Hamas began to give them a bit more food.

Their repeated warnings were ignored by higher level supervisors and intelligence officials (and I cringe at using the word intelligence), who dismissed the information as unimportant. Afterall, the women were doing their jobs, reporting what they saw, and the determining factor was that they had different genitals, so they couldn’t be correct? ARRRRRGGH!

Women and men not being treated equal is a long-tenured problem. In the corporate world as I rose in positions in management, we thought we were knocking down walls. Decades later, it’s gotten better, but still is unacceptable.

Our crystal ball was foggy, we are still astonishingly behind and regarding “My Body, My Choice,” we’ve taken a huge step backward. I think it’s too crowded in my gynecologist’s office when Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence are telling my doctor what she can do with my body. Ok, maybe not my body, but a young woman’s body. Anyway, the image gives me the creeps, how about you?

Below are some key facts about the gender gap in 2024. It’s a worldwide problem, what happened in Israel just screams pay attention! The following statistics are from the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report 2024.

1. Gender Pay Gap: Forbes says, on average, women in the United States earn 84% of what men do. This gap is wider for Black and Hispanic women, who earn less than 70% and 60% of what men do, respectively.

Pew says there are slightly more men in the workforce in the U.S. (53%) than women (47)%. Women are more college-educated (47%) vs. men (37%). So, who thinks because the women are more educated, that it’s insignificant? I would have thought that made the women more eligible for promotion. Hmm, what possibly could be the reason?

A 19-year study “Are Many Sex/Gender Differences Really Power Differences?” presented by Columbia Business School Professor Adam Galinsky found that positions of power play a major role in explaining sex/gender differences. Well, if it took 19 years for college professors to study and posit that men with power have more of a leg-up on the gender gap, well, perhaps my prejudice toward education is ill-founded. It makes me think of Voltaire’s old saying from 1764, “Common sense is not common.” It seems after 261 years, the problem still exists.

Just when Black and Hispanic women have the highest statistics where they are heads of households, they earn 30% and 40% less. These figures impact all our society. The future leaders of our country are financially impeded by these facts. We need to make it easier for people to improve their financial circumstances beyond morality, we will soon be dependent upon their decisions.

2. Global Gender Gap Index: The global gender gap score stands at 68.6% closed. This means that, on average, 68.6% of the gender gap has been closed but not eliminated, across 146 economies.

According to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum, it will take approximately 134 years to close the gender gap completely at the current rate of progress.

This seems outrageous. Would you want to tell your daughters, sorry, you won’t live long enough to get gender equity, but maybe your daughter will toward the end of her career?

The 2024 Global Gender Gap Report shows that Europe has seven of the top 10 countries that have come closest to closing the gender gap. Iceland is at the top! I’ve gotten spoiled by growing up in the West. I’m averse to climate challenges, I won’t be moving there anytime soon.

European economies occupy seven spots out of the top 10 globally. Eastern Asia and the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa are also in the top 10.

1. Iceland (93%)
2. Finland (87.5%)
3. Norway (87.5%)
4. New Zealand, (83.5%),
5. Sweden (81.6%)
6. Nicaragua 81.1%)
7. Germany (81%)
8. Namibia (80.5%)
9. Ireland (80.2%)
10. Spain (79.7%).

Where is the United States ranked? 24th (72%)! How does it make you feel when Namibia is so far ahead of our advanced country?

3. Economic Participation: Women continue to face significant barriers in economic participation and opportunity. The finance and insurance sector has the largest wage gap, with women earning 61.3% of what men do. Aren’t insurance companies supposed to protect people? It made me wonder how many of their company mission statements were abandoned regarding their own employees.

4. Educational Attainment: While progress has been made, disparities still exist in educational attainment. Women have higher levels of education than ever before (including more than men), but this has not fully translated into equal pay, nor position. Just because women are more educated, it doesn’t mean they are compensated for their efforts. This fact is not likely to be on any marquee promoting obtaining a college education.

5. Political Empowerment: Women are underrepresented in political leadership roles worldwide.

The population of men and women in the U.S. is about 50/50. However, in 2025 in the U.S. Senate there are 26% women (16D, 10R) out of 100 seats. In the House there are 28.7% women (94D, 31R).

In the Ballard Brief entitled, “Lack of Women in Federal Level Politics in the United States,” the reason for this was attributed to societal expectations, inadequate candidate recruitment, and a lack of interest in political leadership. Obviously, the elephant in the room is also that women are historically responsible for the children in the family which impacts all employment opportunities trying to balance work and family.

6. Health and Survival: Gender disparities in health and survival have improved, but challenges remain, especially in regions with limited access to healthcare and education.

These disparities can include differences in life expectancy, prevalence of certain diseases, and access to medical care.

The report states, “women may face barriers to accessing healthcare due to cultural norms, economic factors, or lack of resources. Additionally, women may experience different health challenges related to reproductive health, maternal health, and gender-based violence.”

Beyond the gender gap there also is a racial gap. For instance I was appalled to learn that the mortality rate for black women during child birth is 55.9 per 100,000 births compared to white women at 18.1 in the United States. The reasons as stated for this disparity include: lack of access to health and prenatal care, a higher rate of pre-term births and the broader social and economic inequities rooted in racism and discrimination. I believe this is a travesty in 2025.

The bottom line to all of this is that if we consider ourselves more advanced as a world, why do these disparities continue without an immediacy to make corrections?

Finally, using the cataclysmic results of inaction by the Israeli military on October 7th as a warning about how important it is to correct these societal inconsistencies, it did make me pause and wonder, what is it that I’m not seeing in my own life that may be apparent to everyone except me? Does the Empress have no clothes? Oy.

May You Live in Peace, שלום and سلام.