My goal here is not to attempt a feminist screed, so I have focused this list on gender-specific standards that have largely gone unnoticed.  Right-handed scissors are a good analogy.  My left-handed mother always winced in agony whenever she used scissors, which, in the 1960s, were designed for the comfort of a right-hand dominated world. …

  Some ideas seem so obvious we wonder how we ever lived without them.  I am not talking about technological breakthroughs, like the TV/garage door/coffee maker/fan clicker, but elegant and clever ideas based on nothing more than common sense and an observant mind, the kind of ideas that make you slap your forehead and say,…