I was watching when Rags to Riches won the Belmont by a nose.

Horse racing isn’t something I always pay attention to, but in this case, I was visiting a friend with a lifelong passion for horses. When the underdog R-to-R pulled out of the pack and took on Curlin, the mighty Preakness winner, in the last stretch, my friend jumped to her feet screaming with delight.

It was the first time a filly had been in the race in nearly a decade, and more than 100 years since a girl horse had won. This was a historic moment.

“Hmph,” her husband sniffed afterward. “Five pound weight advantage.”

Later, his brother arrived and was no more enthusiastic. “You guys have got to get over this girl thing,” he said.

The “girl thing” has roused quite a lot of interest in the multimillion dollar racing world. Rags to Riches, with a five-pound handicap but no testosterone, has won five of five races this year. Her next race has a $1 million purse.

All that is beyond most of us, since we are not likely to pay out the $1.9 million that Rags to Riches cost two years ago as a yearling. Our economic interests – mine anyway – are on a far more mundane level.

But what about that “girl thing”? Is it time to give it up? Has the world changed enough that we can simply, with a five-pound handicap thrown in here and there, forget about gender?

Since sex is one of the most powerful driving forces in human life, we’re hardly likely to forget about it. But even after decades of social change, men are more likely to make this suggestion than women.

Women are still earning only about 73 cents on the dollar earned by men.

That’s not women who work part-time, casual jobs compared to men who are CEOs. That’s the difference between what men and women earn for exactly the same or equivalent work.

If you are a single parent, you are five times more likely to be a single mom than a single dad. Your chance of being poor as an adult in this country increases by 39 percent if you are female. If you are elderly and female, it increases by 71 percent, and if you are a single head of household and female, it increases by 86 percent. It’s a case of riches-to-rags, too, that gender gap has increased steadily since the 1960s when this kind of statistic was first kept by the Census Bureau.

These statistics reflect the economic condition of women in the richest nation on earth, not in parts of the world where women are refused an education by law, or where girls are sold into sexual slavery by their impoverished parents, or well, it’s a long story.

But we were talking about Rags to Riches, that 3-year-old filly with the heart and muscle and drive to take on the big boys in one of horse racing’s top events. She won. It’s a girl thing, and we waited 102 years for it. It’s not equality, not yet, but it’s a joy.