Weird thing today on the local bus. For the first part of my ride (I get on about halfway along the route) I was the only woman in the ten passengers. Then another woman and a man got on...but she got off two stops later while another man got on. So then I was the only woman on a bus of twelve people.

It's not the first time that I've noticed many more men on the bus than women, but this was the most highly disproportionate and noticeable incident. So what's the deal with guys riding the bus in the middle of the day? One guy was pretty old, so maybe he was retired, and two seemed to be students because one was reading a library book without a dustjacket (usually means an academic book) and the other was reading a photocopy of a journal article (biology it looked like), but what about the rest of them?

Am I just perpetuating a sexist stereotype in even wondering about this? Am I wrong in thinking that there still are remnants of a culture that sees men working during the day while women rely on them? (After all, Watertown is a pretty blue collar, conservative community) I certainly don't think it's a good culture - I wouldn't be doing what I am if I thought women should be relying on men, but the biological reality is that women have babies, and when they're part of a heterosexual family, they usually take more time off of work etc. to care for those children than men do. Though, as an aside, employment law here is far less generous than in Canada and you're only guaranteed your job for 3 months of mat leave as opposed to the twelve I'm used to. But there must be a reason why I've seen more men on buses than women on more than one occasion. Do more women think that they're too good for public transit? Or do they take the train instead? Do men just go out more? I've noticed it before in the morning and the evening, though this middle of the day incident was the most unusual one.

Maybe it was just a weird blip in the usual fabric of coincidence, deja vu, statistical probability.... but it was weird.