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"La primera mujer en ocupar la administración del Canal"... ok, es cierto ¿y qué con eso?. ¿Todavía es un tabú estas cosas? ¿Era imposible? ¿Había alguna restricción? ¿estamos en los años 1900?

Muchas veces la misma opinión pública (periodistas, abogados, presentadores, etc) se encargan de estigmatizar a la mujer con supuestos halagos y cumplidos, creyendo que con eso están ayudando a una causa.

Hay gente que maquinan una película de que existe una lucha de género, y que la mujer constantemente tiene que estar demostrando de que es tan capaz como un hombre y superarlo...incluso han mencionado esa frase: "las mujeres son tan capaces como un hombre"... detrás de estos supuestos halagos y afirmaciones hay un complejo del que lo dice: Realmente no se lo cree, pero lo dice tantas veces solo para hacer sentir bien a un sector (en su interior reconoce que existe una inferioridad). La comparación en si misma ya crea una brecha, la crea y la perpetúa como si dieran por hecho de que es una batalla entre David y Goliath y que se extenderá hasta el final de los tiempos.

¿No se cansan de todo esto?. Muchas veces no vemos tantas mujeres ejerciendo en puestos especificos smplemente porque a ellas mismas no les interesa, no porque se lo prohiban o porque se haya un plan para que tengan muchos más obstaculos que un hombre.

Esto de la Administradora del Canal debió ser informado como una simple transición más, no haciendo enfásis de que es un logro de género.

In 1229, Ögedei Khan inherited an empire with a serious cash-flow problem. His father's conquests had been enormously destructive but not especially profitable — plunder went to whichever commander captured a city, so almost nothing reached the imperial treasury. By the time Ögedei took the throne, contemporary accounts describe the state warehouses as effectively empty.

A faction at court had a solution that made perfect sense by steppe logic: the recently conquered farmland of northern China was useless to Mongols. Sedentary peasants produced nothing a nomadic army valued. So exterminate the population and convert the whole North China Plain into grazing pasture. Millions of people, reclassified as an inefficient land use.

Yelü Chucai was a Khitan aristocrat descended from the old Liao imperial house, a Confucian-trained administrator who had served the Jin dynasty) before the Mongols took Beijing. He understood exactly what his own court was and was not persuaded by. An appeal to mercy, culture or the value of human life would have marked him as a soft conquered-people's advocate and gotten him ignored, or worse.

So he argued in the only currency that carried weight: revenue.

He told Ögedei that a properly administered tax system in the Central Plains — land tax, commercial tax, plus state monopolies on salt, iron, wine and vinegar — would return roughly 500,000 liang of silver, 80,000 bolts of silk and over 400,000 shi of grain every year. Not once. Every year, forever, while the conquest of the Southern Song still had to be paid for. Dead peasants pay tax exactly once.

Ögedei told him to prove it. Yelü Chucai set up ten regional tax bureaus staffed with Confucian scholars who actually knew how to administer the region. In 1231, he had the year's take laid out in the palace courtyard for the Khan to walk through personally: the silver, the silk, the grain, matching his projection.

He got the job of running taxation in northern China. The pasture plan was never revived.

The fact-check corner: the story comes primarily from his biography in the History of Yuan, the official dynastic history compiled about a century later, plus a memorial written by his contemporary Song Zizhen. Both are sympathetic sources, and some historians think the "turn China into pasture" proposal was never as close to being enacted as the account implies — that it's partly a literary device to make Yelü Chucai the hero of the fiscal reform he genuinely did carry out. The tax figures and the 1231 courtyard display, though, are consistently attested.