Memo
Memo
Re: Gender Differences and Bathroom System Optimization
To: Women
From: Jack
Date: 08/03/2004
I have this friend named Alice. Now, Alice is pretty awesome in her own fuzzy-haired way; she’s smart, she hits people with swords, and she’s got shitloads of moxie. Plus her mom is equally awesome. But Alice has this one problem, the same problem a number of women have: Alice thinks that men should have to put the toilet seat down when they are through pissing. She has, on occasion, insisted that the seat is “broken” when it’s up (half joking, I’m sure, but no more than half), and made a man “fix” it for her by putting it down.
I put together a little Excel spreadsheet to analyze the state of the toilet seat and determine the optimal way to go about achieving maximum toilet seat-movement efficiency. The results should startle no man.
The first column contains some assumptions with switches. Among assumptions in this sheet are that women and men use the toilet equal amounts, men piss standing up roughly 2/3rd of the time they use the toilet, and sit down the other 1/3rd times and that women always sit down (I think that one’s safe).
The model is built assuming that one movement of the toilet seat is one “unit” of work, regardless of who is moving it. I incorporated 1000 lines of data which are either random, or variable based on random numbers, and put the summary numbers at the top.
The column “who’s using the toilet” is just a 50/50 split, where if the random number immediately to the left is greater than or equal to .5, it’s male, and otherwise a female. The model then determines whether the person is standing or sitting, where if it’s a woman it’s always sitting and if it’s a man it’s sitting 33% of the time. Then, it splits into two scenarios. In the first, the person who uses the toilet leaves the seat in whatever position they used it. The model counts a unit of work if the person about to use the toilet needed to adjust the seat before they did so. The second scenario is where the male puts the seat up if he needs to and down when he’s done. Therefore, every time a male needs to stand, he accumulates two units of work.
The next columns over show the percentage of total work done by males in each scenario (the compliment, work done by females, is easily derived by subtracting).
The model is clear. Having whoever needs to adjust the seat adjust it themselves and not adjust it after they are done serves both the goal of equality and that of efficiency. In the second scenario, it is obvious that males are required to do 100% of the work, clearly not fair to us. In the first, we still average out around 60%+ of the work, but we don’t mind, ladies, we’ll take that extra ten percent for you. And the overall work count is drastically reduced from 625-700 to 415-500 on average in the first scenario; even if you weren’t concerned about gender equity it’s still less aggregate work. This plan serves everyone’s common goals of efficiency and equality, Alices of the world, so learn to live with it.
please note that this entry is not meant to portray Alice in a negative light; as I noted above, she does, in fact, ROCK
Re: Gender Differences and Bathroom System Optimization
To: Women
From: Jack
Date: 08/03/2004
I have this friend named Alice. Now, Alice is pretty awesome in her own fuzzy-haired way; she’s smart, she hits people with swords, and she’s got shitloads of moxie. Plus her mom is equally awesome. But Alice has this one problem, the same problem a number of women have: Alice thinks that men should have to put the toilet seat down when they are through pissing. She has, on occasion, insisted that the seat is “broken” when it’s up (half joking, I’m sure, but no more than half), and made a man “fix” it for her by putting it down.
I put together a little Excel spreadsheet to analyze the state of the toilet seat and determine the optimal way to go about achieving maximum toilet seat-movement efficiency. The results should startle no man.
The first column contains some assumptions with switches. Among assumptions in this sheet are that women and men use the toilet equal amounts, men piss standing up roughly 2/3rd of the time they use the toilet, and sit down the other 1/3rd times and that women always sit down (I think that one’s safe).
The model is built assuming that one movement of the toilet seat is one “unit” of work, regardless of who is moving it. I incorporated 1000 lines of data which are either random, or variable based on random numbers, and put the summary numbers at the top.
The column “who’s using the toilet” is just a 50/50 split, where if the random number immediately to the left is greater than or equal to .5, it’s male, and otherwise a female. The model then determines whether the person is standing or sitting, where if it’s a woman it’s always sitting and if it’s a man it’s sitting 33% of the time. Then, it splits into two scenarios. In the first, the person who uses the toilet leaves the seat in whatever position they used it. The model counts a unit of work if the person about to use the toilet needed to adjust the seat before they did so. The second scenario is where the male puts the seat up if he needs to and down when he’s done. Therefore, every time a male needs to stand, he accumulates two units of work.
The next columns over show the percentage of total work done by males in each scenario (the compliment, work done by females, is easily derived by subtracting).
The model is clear. Having whoever needs to adjust the seat adjust it themselves and not adjust it after they are done serves both the goal of equality and that of efficiency. In the second scenario, it is obvious that males are required to do 100% of the work, clearly not fair to us. In the first, we still average out around 60%+ of the work, but we don’t mind, ladies, we’ll take that extra ten percent for you. And the overall work count is drastically reduced from 625-700 to 415-500 on average in the first scenario; even if you weren’t concerned about gender equity it’s still less aggregate work. This plan serves everyone’s common goals of efficiency and equality, Alices of the world, so learn to live with it.
please note that this entry is not meant to portray Alice in a negative light; as I noted above, she does, in fact, ROCK