There is no wage gap? Er, what? Of course there is. It has been proven over and over again. Take a look at the link I posted above for more details.
And the gender pay gap is hardly an insignificant problem, given the fact that most of us have to work for a living. Very few of us, male or female, (less than 1% of the population) will have to worry about being murdered.
On the wage gap:
If you all want to have this debate about the wage gap, then I suggest investigating the following link. Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” recently (March 2015) compiled all the modern studies and surveys on the subject of the wage gap and then drew his own meta-conclusion on how they all balanced out. Some feminist sites have even noticed the study and given him credit for a balanced judgement.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gender-bias-in-the-workplace
If you don’t care for his opinion and/or want to check the data for yourself, just go to the end of the article and see the long list of links to studies–do your own research and draw your own conclusions.
Follow-up point on hiring bias:
Also a lot of older studies on gender bias are being questioned and re-investigated. A CNN article from April 2015:
This is something I’ve wondered about, so I couldn’t help but doing some research. The .77/dollar statistic appears to be bogus.
No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men From the Daily Beast. The author says that when you take into account things like “occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week” the wage gap disappears. She says that the ten most remunerative degrees are overwhelmingly studied by men:
The ten least remunerative degrees are mostly pursued by women:
Now you could argue (and I would agree) that social workers and teachers and students of the arts should be paid more. And frankly, I think all the female majors sound more interesting than the “male” ones, but saying women earn less without looking at what fields they’re in seems disingenuous to me. Don’t get me wrong: I think women (and men) should work in whatever jobs they want. But I suspect that men are choosing boring, but high-paying jobs because there’s so much more pressure on them to be high-earners.
5 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die Time Magazine. This is the 5th of 5 “myths” that she lists, making basically the same points as the author in the Daily Beast.
On Equal Pay Day, key facts about the gender pay gap The Pew Research Center takes a different tack. Eileen Patten says, based on their own research, and without taking into account job, or hours worked or other variables, the gap has shrunk to 84% for all women, and 93% for young women. She goes on to say:
Other sources say the same thing. For example, from CBS Money Watch: The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth
The last two, at least, but I think all of them, are points that have been addressed before where feminists ARE in agreement that the men are being short-changed. Yes, more men are killed in combat, but that’s because women are not allowed to participate in the military (and wars) in the same capacity as men. And the people who dictate that are men, not women.
Similar with men being less likely to be awarded custody. Again this has been mentioned before as something that feminists work against. The idea of women being awarded custody more often stems from a sexist/patriarchal thinking that children do better with moms/women are supposed to handle kids/men are not supposed to do much parenting. This is something that feminists combat.
Which ones?
Mary Daly specifically opposed drafting women.
Now that was back in the early 70’s, when there was a draft.
There’s always a point in these conversations, as like a dozen different feminists say things like “feminists do talk about that, and do care about this,” and the people who aren’t feminists say “who? who? I’ve never seen any” that the whole thing starts to look a little bit Lewis Carroll. If feminists fitting these various descriptions don’t exist, who are you arguing with?
I think one of the top feminist political issues in America should be maternity leave, which is laughably bad compared to other industrial countries, especially Europe. Heck, some countries even have paid paternity leave as well. You can do all sorts of crazy things when you don’t pour a trillion dollars into defense.
What would be next? Maybe the opposite of the thing where you find clever ways of shutting down almost every abortion clinic in the state.
Parental leave is definitely a big deal, and definitely should not be maternal only. Men do not need time to recover from childbirth/surgery, but they need time to bond with their babies, and to adapt to tumultuous new schedules and, in cases where they are in a relationship with the one who did give birth, to support the new mom in her recovery.
We finally agree about something. When we had our daughter, she was bottle-fed, and I did the night feedings. When her mom left for a business trip, three weeks later, I stayed home with her. I stayed with her every time she had a business trip, which was 3-5 times a year. The idea that only women can (or should) take care of babies is bullshit.
LinusK, Miller offered links in this thread, post #116, specifically her first and second link, corresponding with your last two assertions.
This is the third time the link has been posted. Perhaps you’ll finally read it?
Truly, when someone offers you counter cites and you ignore them and go “lalalala can’t read it”, it does not make your position sound and solid.
I’ve already read it, and responded to it.
Well, responded to it, at any rate.
Define “hate.” Your definition must be absolute; it must include every instance of hatred ever perpetrated, and it must exclude everything that is not hate. Your definition is not allowed either false positives or false negatives. Your definition must be in 12 point Times New Roman, and in modern Czech.
You’re just posturing.
I’m happy to respond some more. As I pointed out last time, the article is not about improving the situation for fathers; it’s about silence people who argue fathers don’t have a fair shake in divorce court. The first two paragraphs:
Notice the words “derail” and “supposedly”. In the first two paragraphs, the author’s already described the purpose of the article: to defend against “Men’s Right’s Activists”.
In the fifth paragraph, she sums up the results of her “findings”: “the source of the bias is not in the courts – it’s in the marriage.”
She then has an italisized paragraph, in which she states that by talking about “the unique manifestation of patriarchy in straight marriages between a woman and a man” she does not intend to “erase” gays, lesbians, etc. (which, after all, would be a natural inference. How can you talk about the “the unique manifestation of patriarchy in straight marriages between a woman and a man” without “erasing” gay people?)
She then admits that
So she sees there’s a problem. Now what to do about it?
The answer is to blame men.
On the way to getting there, though, she makes a fundamental mistake about how the law works:
I think what she’s trying to imply here is that men are voluntarily giving up their rights. What she doesn’t understand, or what she doesn’t appear to understand, is that settlements are always conditioned by what the parties think they can expect if they go to trial.
As a simple example: If you’re arrested in a conservative county, that’s known for handing down harsh sentences, and for convicting innocent men (such as Michael Morton, for example) that’s going to influence any plea bargain you decide to take. If you know you’re in a county where the jury pool is filled with conservative Republicans, who need little or no evidence to convict someone, and that the judges pride themselves on handing out maximum sentences, you’re likely to accept a plea bargain you might not accept if the circumstances were different.
The point being that there’s no point in going to trial in a custody case (which may cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars you don’t have) if the judge is going to give custody to the mother anyway.
She then gets to the point: it’s men’s fault they’re not getting custody:
**
**(bolding original)
She goes on to say, “Fathers must create bonds with their children through caregiving and demonstrate a commitment their children in order to defy the unfair gender stereotypes that define their position in the family.”
Which seems strange to me. Typically feminists blame the stereotyper, not the stereotyped. Instead, she’s leaving it up to fathers to change the stereotype. That is a dramatic departure from how feminists typical deal with stereotypes. Imagine a feminist saying, “Women must become better workers, pay more attention to their jobs, and work harder, first, before they can be seen as equal in the workplace.”
Basically, if this is supposed to be an example of a feminist working to get fairer outcomes in custody disputes, it fails.
Why should I? I’m not the one saying “This group is definitely hateful and this group definitely isn’t.”
I think NOW is a slightly larger voice in feminism
1980 NOW announces opposition to the draft, but states that if there is a draft, NOW supports the inclusion of women on the same basis as men.
Thanks, Linus, but I had, also, read the article. You don’t like her conclusions, which is not surprising. But you said “Feminists don’t talk about this.” And you were wrong. They do.
This article is undeniably by a feminist and discusses historical and social dynamics that result in unequal custody decisions. And if you’re really interested in a feminist take on family structures, I recommend Stephanie Coontz, a brilliant historian of the subject.
Couldn’t have said it better.