Fun fact: My father delivered me. There was no one else handy and fortunately he was an obstetrician by trade, so if we can skip past what I know you’re thinking — that it’s totally gross — I’ll tell you about a puzzling thing he used to say to me. “I’m the first man you ever saw.”

“So what?” I thought at the time. I bet he wouldn’t have said it if I were a boy. He seemed to think it created a loving bond between us, which was fine, but also implied some kind of special relationship between male and female. Yeah, I’d think, like the alleged one between Britain and the U.S., where the Americans still bully that small island.

But that’s the kind of snarky kid I was. And now I’m a skeptical woman. Let me make my case.

I always regretted being born female. True, it has its moments, but it is lesser. This is a weird thing for a feminist to admit, but who better to notice how much glossier life still is for men and who more likely than a woman to brood about that fact and speculate about an impossible reversal of fortune?

The inbuilt failure of womanhood is brought home to me every time a list is published. Recently a digital magazine published a list of the greatest magazine features “of all time.” An American list, it betrayed its insularity by choosing almost all American writers.

This offended several Canadian journalists, but what positively slayed me was that no one noticed there were only about 26 women in a list of 225. We are more than half the population but only 10 per cent of us win, I said. Men looked at me blankly, which proves my point.

Time magazine recently published a list called Best 100 Novels of All Time. There were only 16 women on it.

I always assumed that things would improve, possibly even at the quicksilver speed of technological change, a new woman president or prime minister every year, along with a Nespresso iPhone and an iPad that can change a tire. But they haven’t. Men are still the gold standard and successful women are the deviants, the ones who made it on sufferance. A tiny female anthill.

Every now and then, men rub women’s faces in their irrelevance. What galls me is that even good men don’t notice they’re doing it.

Take Penguin Canada’s recent series of brief biographies entitled Extraordinary Canadians. Of the 17 planned or published, the pompous series editor John Ralston Saul has deemed that only three Canadian women so far are extraordinary — Emily Carr, Nellie McClung and L.M. Montgomery. Worse, only four women were considered to have sufficient gravitas to write the biographies at all. Ralston Saul included some writers I admire, Douglas Coupland for one, but their worth is not the point. It is a male series written by males.

Only 22 per cent of Canada’s MPs are women. There are 35,000 works of art in the Louvre’s collection and only 13 are by women.

In 2002, the Canadian novelist Carol Shields wrote a novel, Unless, her last before her death, about the erasure of women in public life. “But we’ve come so far; that’s the thinking,” she wrote. “Well no, we’ve arrived at the new millennium and we haven’t ‘arrived’ at all. We’ve been sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear.”

I’m pleased to report that the great Michele Landsberg, the journalist I most admire, doesn’t agree with Shields and me. “What a shame,” she told me. “You were born too late to savour the full glory of how far we have come!” She lists a number of horrific things meted out to women, and to her personally, since her birth in 1939 and then she rejoices. “We still have a distance to go, but I think that never in humanity’s history have things been better or fairer for women than they are right here in Canada, right now in 2010.”

She’s right. But all I can think is that if this is the best they’ve ever been, I am doomed.

Yes, I greatly enjoy being a woman, a state that comes with delights that elude men.

It was Jon Stewart of the Daily Show who said we are the only sex that doesn’t look weird naked. So there’s that.

Private domestic life pleases me. My two daughters, now grown, give me such intense joy that when I lie awake at night I sketch them in my head from forehead to toes. I love reading, generally accepted as a female pastime run by a male industry. I have a deep interest in visual pleasure — architecture, everyday design and fashion. Sneering at women’s clothing is a licensed form of misogyny that runs wild today, and I despise anyone who displays it.

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But my earning power would be much higher if I had entered journalism as a man. I would not be constantly assessed on the basis of my face and hair by readers, which is tiring. I’d be competitive rather than fretfully compassionate. Getting dressed in the morning would be cartoonishly simple, for my wife would buy my clothes and oversee the fiddly bits of home life.

I would have what an acute female friend called the eternal “completely unjustified self-confidence of the young, not-very-talented man” who will best you just by being himself. Sounds good to me.

As a man I wouldn’t have to be good-looking. Believe me, women don’t care about this. They like a humane man with a good sense of humour. In a rare moment of sympathy, Erica Jong once wrote that women want men to be “a giant (organ) spouting money.” It’s no longer true.

And there’s sex, which is always good for men in the sense that it always has a good outcome, let’s say. Bruce Springsteen once wrote a song called Reno about a lonely man sodomizing a prostitute. Okay, it wasn’t the best he’d ever had, not even close, a point he made with some gloom, but he got what he came for. Women tend not to.

Here’s the nub. Being born a woman, Shields writes, means that we choose goodness over greatness. She’s dead right.

A woman I admire (big family, big career) tells me she secretly yearns to tell ambitious women to become nurses. Give up on being head nurse. Give up on the hospital board of directors. Just work at a job you love and savour what contentment you can find.

What she means is this: Regard life as a jigsaw puzzle. Men see it as a ladder, always looking up. A jigsaw puzzle, “a simulacrum of meaning, order and design,” as one writer put it, is slowly assembled. It doesn’t contain the possibility of failure.

My friend never does tell women this of course. She doesn’t dare.

Here’s what I always secretly told myself as a child. Should have been a boy. Of course it’s not a secret any more. I just told you.

hmallick@thestar.ca