For much of human history, the ability to produce and raise children was of primary value. It’s only in modern times (thanks to industrialization) that having a dozen kids became a liability rather than an asset.
Now, we can argue about sexism and discrimination, but the argument should start more like “Given that women have an inherent value and advantage that no man has, why…”
Even if there isn’t anyone with whom to make a direct comparison, is there any way you can back up the claim that “I’d be making more if I were male”? Because if so, then you need to have that talk with your boss and/or a judge. Or, for that matter, with a different employer, though right now probably isn’t the best time to pursue that angle.
Quoth dracoi:
And what advantage is that? True, reproduction is impossible without females, but it’s also impossible without males. It’s true that the maximum reproduction rate of a population is more determined by the number of females than the number of males, but that’s because any individual female has to expend more resources on reproduction than any individual male, so the number of females ends up being the bottleneck. That’s not really an advantage for women.
Can you prove that? Studies show that women get paid less because they deserve less - in other words, work is less important to them. They take time off during critical years in the 20s and 30s to raise children when the men don’t. They choose to stay at home with the kids more often than men do, and they consider it more important than their work. Women of any age, on average, have less continuous and total work experience than their male counterparts. A women who is not of child bearing age doing the same work with the same experience and qualifications as a man absolutely deserves the same pay.
A few years back nwfusion did a salary comparison widget for IT based on information it collected on the industry. Putting the exact same information as to job type, experience, training in nearly all cases yielded a result of a lower salary for women. I and a couple others asked them to change their wording, because they said you should expect to be paid some amount. So instead of mentioning the discrepancy or changing the wording, they took away the ability to enter gender into the widget. I don’t buy that IT is the only industry which pays women less for the same work and experience.
If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if you’d been paying attention to the world lately. You’ve never heard of Lilly Ledbetter? It literally took an act of CONGRESS and the President of the United States of America to give women more of the opportunity they deserve, to even challenge their employer when clear pay disparity exists.
Approach? Women’s salaries approach 98% of men’s. Well hallelujah women, we’re there!
That’s because we make less money, so our salaries are easier to do without in the household.
Because that’s what’s expected, and again because we aren’t valued as much in the workforce.
I could go on, but I’m sick of parsing that garbage. I feel dirty just for having read it.
Lemme see. In the US, (at least nowadays) women live longer, are (on average) richer, more women than men attend college, women can stay at home if they have a mind and resources to raise their children, women send their menfolk off to war, but largely fail to go fight themselves. Safe, indoor work is traditionally reserved for women, anything that involves wrestling crazed badger are men’s jobs.
Yeah, the world is rigged against women.
2% is pretty statistically insignificant
Woman make less because of their decisions per my cite. Women aren’t valued in the workforce as much as men because of legitimate reasons like demanding more flexibility in work schedules, time off for children, etc.
Why do you feel dirty? Do you have a cite that contradicts it?
Do you have any idea how fundamentally unjust it is to trot this out as an excuse (not to mention tired as hell.)
When an individual woman leaves her career for years to raise her kids, she shouldn’t expect to be where she was when she left.
When a different individual woman stays with her career, she should be paid and advance identically to a man in her position.
Saying that any given woman is more likely to do something than any given man is not a reason, it’s a pathetic excuse.
But pay inequity is among the least offensive expressions possible of the burdens of being female…it’s like the opposite end of the scale of injustices, the other end being, say, complete genital mutilation by removal of the clitoris and everything nearby, sealing it up so that nothing but blood and urine pass, raping her so severely that she can no longer control her bladder or sometimes even her bowels, then rejecting her as filthy, tainted, and worthless.
And the list goes on and on, all across that spectrum.
How often have you seen a man stoned to death for being raped, Paul? How often a women?
Yeah, women in the US have it better than their sisters in other places. We got more opportunity and a bit of law for us now. We do fine.
But we still don’t do as well as our brothers. Pardon me, but you think CEO is not a safe indoor job? Last I heard, those are not reserved for women.
Those wrestling crazed badger jobs? Well, they come with tasers now, and they pay damned well.
And sending menfolk of to war?
DO. NOT. GO. THERE.
I have never in my life heard of a mother push her son out of her arms into arms (unless, possibly, the kid was looking at a gang). This war game? I do not know any woman who has pushed her father, husband, or son into it; in my experience, war is some challenge men set for themselves, and abandon their families to go play.
I know plenty of moms and grandmothers juggling to cope with the kids when mom joins up because she can’t get a decent job and is deployed, though.
You don’t want to go to war? Fine. Stay home. Work nine-to-five, take night classes to get ahead, and change the kid’s diapers the nights mom is at school. Your mother, wife, and daughters are not pushing you out the door into the humvee; that would be your …
self.
That’s the best you could do?
By the way, the thread title is not: Women in the US are the niggers of the world.
Overall, throughout history and culture, the human beings with vaginas suffer the majority of the pain, suffering, and abuse that humanity experiences, while at the same time doing the vast majority of the most fundamental work necessary to move the species forward, also known as feeding and educating the next generation.
And if you wanna talk war, how about the war in the Congo, which is being waged almost entirely via rape? Seriously…maurauding bands of fighters blow into an area, rape all the women they can lay hands on, and leave. That’s the way they “wage war”. And the women who are being used this way, are they tenderly cared for by the men in their lives after suffering like that? Of course not, they are shunned, which is one of the reasons “war by rape” is so effective. You can devastate a whole lotta people if, when you rape their women you trigger total rejection of those women, even by their families. Quite the ripple effect.
I am familiar with the John Lennon quote, but I think it’s an unhelpful way to phrase the issue. It makes it look like women vs. black people. I know that this isn’t really what Lennon/the OP meant, but the “N word” is loaded enough to cloud the issue.
Now, here are plenty of times in American history where I as a white woman would have been much better off than a non-white man. (I’d say that in certain respects this is true even today.) A woman like Queen Elizabeth I must have been much better off than nearly every man in her kingdom, and indeed most of the men in the world. So I wouldn’t support a claim that women are always worse off than men.
But in the US, or in any country, there have been few times in history when a woman would not have had lower status and less freedom than a man of the same race/ethnicity/religion/social class. Or to put it another way, if we imagine all the boy/girl fraternal twins who have ever lived anywhere in the world, the girls would very often have been (or still are) at a disadvantage compared to their brothers solely because of legal/social restrictions placed on women. What’s more, most of these women lived or are living with no hope of ever seeing things change. If this is what you’re getting at Stoid, and I think it is, then yeah, I’d consider it resolved.
Right, and female genital mutilation is done by the father, brother, and uncle, not by the mother, sister, and aunt. Get real.
War is a male game? What sort of sexist nonsense is that? From Spartan mothers exhorting their sons to come home with their shields or on them, through Boudicca, through Queen Isabella, through Margaret Thatcher, through Lindy England, women have been intimately involved in waging war since the beginning of history.
Yes, rulers have been overwhelmingly male, and they’ve been overwhelmingly sexist. They’ve overwhelmingly sent their male subjects (not their female subjects) to the sword. As you point out, when women are attacked in war, often–unlike when men are attacked–they’re raped and left alive. When men are the targets of civilian attacks, they’re killed.
Men are overwhelmingly the casualties of war. Women die in large numbers in war, yes–but nothing like the numbers in which men die.
And if you blame individual men for this because men in general are more involved in war, that’s repulsive thinking, far worse than blaming individual women for pay disparities because women in general devote less time to work. Both are bad, but one is blaming someone for their small paycheck, and another is blaming someone for their violent death.
Female genital mutilation is bad. Being conscipted into an army is bad. Some men are indirectly involved in the former. Some women are indirectly involved in the latter. But you know what? We’re all in this together. Assigning blame like this to a gender is obnoxious and stupid and counterproductive, as is looking to play the “who’s got it worse off” game. We’re all in this together; we ALL bear responsibility for righting injustices, no matter who’s the victim of them, no matter whether they’re small paychecks or military conscription.
Daniel
True.
Um, which “average” are you talking about there? Because of the life-expectancy gap, many more of the elderly superrich are female than male, which may make the mean wealth of women greater than that of men (though I’d like to see a cite for that claim). But the median wealth of women is less than that of men: in other words, a typical woman is poorer than a typical man.
This is at least partly because the few remaining career paths that provide good wages to workers without a college degree are traditionally male jobs: e.g., unionized trades. Increasingly, spending time and money on a college degree is necessary for a woman to qualify for decent pay or career advancement opportunities. As this article notes,
So can men, if they have a mind to, and if they have the resources. Most men definitely do not want to be full-time unpaid primary caregivers for children, even their own, even if they can afford it.
Considering that the vast majority of politicians and military officers at the war-making level are male, and that women tend to vote against military action more than men do, I think it’s a highly biased exaggeration to say that “women send their menfolk off to war”. Mostly, what happens is that men send other men off to war. (Women, by the way, make up about 15% of the armed forces at present.)
Because dangerous outdoor jobs like badger wrestling (more realistically, being a fighter pilot or oilrig worker) are traditionally well paid, men are in no hurry to relinquish them to women. In risky jobs that are not high-paid or prestigious, such as the meatpacking industry, migrant farm work, and manufacturing, many more women are employed than in the high-paid prestigious jobs, and their risk of injury or disability is at least comparable to men’s.
So basically, of your six assertions attempting to indicate ways in which women are better off than men, only the first (i.e., women’s longer life expectancy) convincingly represents an actual significant benefit for women.
I know its old-fashioned, but I really like effeminate women.
Does that control for women taking time off to have and raise children? Does it take into account continuous work experience? That’s incredibly important and why I think many of these “women make 60/75 cents on the dollar compared to a man” are pretty meaningless. On the surface it looks like wow, women are really getting screwed only making 60 cents on the dollar. But, I can’t find a cite but this is certainly not unreasonable to assume, that most women by age 34 have had at least one child. How much time has been taken off in actually delivering the baby and then for the bonding period and possibly raising the child until its school age? That’s a an important thing to keep in mind and why I thought the NCPA cite I found earlier indicating that when these factors were controlled for women made essentially the same was so interesting.
If we’re going to be getting into women and war, let’s not forget the quite large number of American women in the armed forces who are being raped BY THEIR COMRADES IN ARMS. And said “comrades” are getting away with it in much greater percentages than their civilian rapist counterparts. Quite often with an honorable discharge, and no jail time. I guess it’s just too much to expect that those who are serving their country in the military might have a reasonable expectation that they won’t be savaged by the people they’ve been trained are the only ones they can “trust with their lives.” Well, maybe their lives are safe but vaginas apparently are fair game.
I don’t know, but the significant gender gap in high-school graduate wage levels is present even in entry-level jobs, as this chart (pdf) shows. An entry-level job for a male high-school graduate pays on average $11.79, one for a female $9.45.
This makes sense, when you consider the typical pay differentials for highly gendered jobs that don’t require a college degree, such as plumbers and electricians who are overwhelmingly male, and nurse’s aides and receptionists who are overwhelmingly female. That’s not about childcare or continuous work experience; that simply reflects the fact that “male” jobs are traditionally more likely to be high-paid and/or unionized than “female” jobs. Which, as I said, is one reason that women are more dependent than men on getting a college degree if they want a chance at a middle-class salary.
I can scan the less developed areas of the world and find relatively little social justice for the poor, children, women etc. If you care to peel back the layers of just who is most stringently enforcing and defending gender role conformance for women in these less developed places on an everyday basis, I am pretty confident you will find it is overwhelmingly other women.
While this may come as shock to you men across this planet don’t typically get up in the morning thinking “OK now how oppressive toward women can I be today?” Making social injustice a male vs female issue is lazy and tendentious. It’s a human issue, and more specifically an economic and social development issue. Unusual scenarios like the Saudis aside where the wealth and development are based on mineral assets, poverty and ignorance usually goes hand in hand with injustice.
Working to alleviate world poverty will do 100X more to eliminate gender based injustice than moaning about women being he world’s niggers.
That would make them Uncle Toms, or Mammies. And I think it takes witnessing exactly one abused person or cult member to realize humans are often, from the outside, complicit in their own victimization and all-too-ready to kick the dog, especially if it will move any bame or unwanted attention from themselves.