That’s a darn good shower thought.

Except by your own pronunciation guide:

w(uh)man to w(ih)men

It’s strangely kind of either/or for the pronunciation if you take a look at the IPA pronunciation of the words.

• woman
• women

I wonder, though, if this lack of difference in pronunciation is behind a question that’s confounded me for years: “why do so many people spell the singular as ‘women’ by accident (e.g. ‘a women’), but I’ve never seen something like ‘a men’)?” I always chalked it up to “a men” looking weird as basically “amen”, but this could be it instead.

English phonetics suck more than any other language ever spoke or tried to learn