I think I've established a definitive gender checkpoint,
right here in the Moms Hate Christmas: thread

We were talking mostly about American women joining the WW II workforce, but Brit women, of course, did too.

'Cause everybody knows raising kids and running the household isn't hard work.
http://cellar.org/2015/goodworksister.jpg

But now we're worried, so skedaddle on home, and let us never speak of this again.

Women have always invented stuff, especially poor women trying to make do are forced to adapt, recycle and rube Goldberg new things. A lot of beauty products have been brought to market after being concocted in some woman's kitchen. All this is well known although not always acknowledged, 'cause we don't want y'all to get uppity.

There's a couple other things women have invented, like;
The Apgar Scoring System
Signal Flares
The foot-pedal trash can
The Monopoly Game
The paper bag
The dishwasher
Windshield wipers
The solar house
The circular saw
Kevlar
Just to name a few. ;)

I remember hearing somewhere that the Shakers invented the circular saw blade, so your post and that memory led me to wikipedia, where the topic is far more complicated than anybody wanting for a straightforward answer would like. And it drives home something I've noticed before. We are so used to living in a world with information at our fingertips, that it's easy to forget that it wasn't always this way.

A woman Shaker did invent the circular saw, but it had also been invented numerous other times by others in Europe decades earlier. But they didn't have the internet, or trade journals, or the Sears mail order catalog. People just didn't share information that quickly. So the Shakers didn't know the Germans had already done it. Fast forward a hundred years, and Alexander Graham Bell was working on inventing an airplane because he didn't know the Wright brothers had already invented one. And he succeeded. Many of the inventions we take for granted as being invented by some specific person were actually invented numerous times by many people and they just didn't find out until later that they weren't the first.

It also sort of points to the weird inevitability of progress. No one's going to invent movable type before paper, but once you have paper, it's the next logical step and someone WILL create it. Like how the squid developed an eye independently from our evolutionary line, even though we split off far enough back that neither of us had vision.

The internet wasn't needed for news to travel, there were ships and people traveling back and forth all the time. Guys like Franklin practically commuted, as well as corresponding with smart guys all over Europe. News of longer, lower, wider, ways to improve productivity traveled fast. We'd had water powered mills here for 150 years or more by 1800, and before 1776 a lot of mills here were owned by foreigners. Even if a couple of those foreigners had round blades who's to say a woman didn't think of it. But nobody patented it, so Tabitha wins because she was obviously a witch, being Samantha's kid. :p:

hindsight, 20/20.

How can we tell if this isn't happening still?

only in the future, eh?

It is absolutely happening still. I work in a patent litigation law firm and my livelihood depends on it.

But you have to admit that communication today is faster, so you're not going to have decades go by where news of groundbreaking technology advances isn't shared.

I love this advert. I love (almost) everything about this advert. I like the ordinary dudeness of the player. Very nicely done. I like that they decided it was a good idea to also show a female player.

It's really not so long ago that this would have been pretty much unthinkable in this genre for anything but an indie game (femShep notwithstanding)

That's life, you slay the dragon or something and feel like a hero, then suddenly a chick shoots you down. :lol2:

Now if you do something neat, there's always somebody close by figuring out how to capitalize on it.
Shakers didn't communicate with the outside much. In her mid-teens my grandmother lived with(was used by) a Shaker family.

@Dana: The author of this article was on a tv show this morning.
She finished off her interview with this quote...
As Jenji Kohan, creator of “Orange Is the New Black,” told me:
So l went looking for her entire article... it's long but good.

The Women of Hollywood Speak Out
NY Times - MAUREEN DOWD - NOV. 20, 2015
@Glatt: Yes, I know ... I cherry-picked the quote.

.

ok :right:

Fascinating. This caught my attention:

Another study I read about, though can't recall the details, showed a similar imbalance in the gender of characters in children's tv.

Facepalm moment:

There's a lot in that piece that is heartening. But then there's things like this that make me want to do violence:


and this:

That's not the answer. :headshake

I think the next thought was: "Can you insert a rape scene here "

As a spin-off from women in film more generally, here's an interesting piece about female super heroes. It's a really positive article, about the changing scene. But it also frames the problems well. What stifles development of female characters is often the way in which they have previously been depicted. Films with leading female characters have been made and bombed, and the lesson executives and male film makers have taken from that is not that they were bad films with badly drawn and shallow characters, but that people don't want to see female leads - yet plenty of male-led films bomb and nobody suggests that making a film with a male lead is a risk. Male-led films are judged, and succeed or fail, as films. Female-led films are judged, and succeed or fail as ambassadors for the concept of female-led films. And, as the article Lamp posted points out, films that succeed with a female lead, instead of acting as a proof of that concept are set aside as flukes and forgotten, whilst the next flop gets included in the proof that female-led films are a risk, and remembered as such for decades.

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-ra...male-superhero

That right there is pretty much 100% my problem with the way female super heroes have generally been depicted.


Nicely put ;p

Fame is fleeting.

It's a major award!

It works the other way as well.

In "A Christmas Story", dad delightedly gets a leggy woman by delivery, and displays her in the front window, to the embarrassment of his wife.

The film is improved

In "Aladdin", Young poor Aladdin can't vie for the love of princess Jasmine. So he steals a woman from the Cave of Wonders, which is considered a legendary task. But that's still not good enough, so he rubs the woman a special way, at which point he gets the wishes he needs to transform himself until he can marry Jasmine.

The film is vastly improved

13 women who transformed the world of economics, at the World Economics Forum.

I noticed in this 1925 picture of 6 high school girls, at least 3 of the hairstyles probably wouldn't draw a second look in any decade.

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very, very good,
But when she was bad, she was horrid.

That girl on the right in the front row looks like the kind of woman you might not want to piss off, especially when she's holding a gun. haha

Yes, be careful whom you spurn. :eek:

I was going to post this in the summer, but it got by me and has suddenly popped up on a list of what's currently being read on the site.

One area of life in which women have struggled to achieve much of a presence, and which it is really important for women to achieve some presence is the realm of politics and government. As with the discussion about the number of female characters on screen and the number of female experts and news readers, this is one of those things where we (I think) almost instinctively feel as if there has been an explosion of female presence, to the point where they seem to be everywhere - but when you actually analyse it they've a fraction of the presence of men. We just don't realy notice the number of men, because they are the standard - we notice the presence of women.

One of the ways that sexism manifests in our culture is not just the number of women in politics and government, but how we discuss and understand female politicians. It is worrying to me how little that has changed, in some ways, since I was a child. Any woman in the public eye in any kind of a position of power, influence, or the potential of either gets taken down a peg in the language used to describe her. I don't meangets taken down a peg, as an individual - that happens to all politicians in the media. I mean taken down a peg as a woman. Everything about the way female politicians are discussed, interviewed, described and reported on underscores their femininity in a way that is weakening.

For example, the way a candidate in this year's Labour Party leadership contest was treated by the national political press.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...er-perceptions

We men accept full responsibility for one cause of sexist remarks. As primitive humans we have not yet overcome this obscenity. Please accept our heartfelt apology for the shameful action of dressing our females.

We can't all be Ferengi.

It isn't men, hon. It's people. Unconscious biases affect us all. Women are just as put off voting for other women as men are when this kind of reporting is used. We are also likely to focus on another woman's looks in a way we don't with men.

I noticed it myself with my nieces. As they were growing up I had tomakea conscious effort not to comment on appearance all the time. 'Hi babes - oh you look nice, where did you get that top?' Standard girl-to-girl greeting.

Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, but it has an impact when it becomes the central focus for how we view women even in positions of power and responsibility.

So now you're the uncaring aunt who never even notices how hard they tried to look good. :p:

Hehehehehe. I comment if they've clearly got new clothes or are all dolled up for going out.

The problem is you can't know what someone else is thinking. They may have done something they feel makes them, like totally like different like ya know, but it's such a slight difference it could has been accidental or random. When nobody says anything, they're devastated. Or spent three hours fighting s blackhead or stray wisp of hair, then giving up. When somebody notices they're devastated. To be clear, this is not a female thing, it's a human thing.
I remember Calvin bitching to Hobbes, what good is it to have superhero underwear if nobody comments on it.

True enough. It was more when they were youngsters really. Mum and I realised that the first thing we always said to the girls, in our greetings, was pretty much to the effect that they looked nice. We just tried to be a bit more conscious of stuff and maybe mix it up a bit.

It's hard though - because the pair of them are and always have been drop dead gorgeous.

In truth, it is often one of the first things I say to my bro as well when I see him. Because he is a bit of a style freak (style not fashion, I hasten to add) and likes to look good - he often has new clothes and it is instinctive to me to mention it.

But he isn't surrounded by 24/7 cultural messaging telling him his looks are his most important quality.

This made me smile a lot. These young lads are very impressive.

These young men, having left their communities, travelled and therefore gained wisdom, were given a hearing by their elders. They were asked whether they would marry a girl who had not been cut. Their response was tovow only tomarry girls who had not been cut. Since the parents of girls want most for them to be married - the most eligible and celebrated bachelors of their community refusing to marry girls who have been cut carries serious weight.

Read the rest here:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-de...s-championship

This, on the other hand, did not make me want to smile. This is a piece from the Guardian, about the author's experience of travelling home from a show with her 13 year old daughter.

There's quite a bit more, but one passage really stood out to me:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...in-front-of-me


It's a peculiar experience, being harrassed as a young teen. It can be threatening, it can also make you feel grownup. Often it is a combination of the two. I doubt there are many women who have not experienced some form of harrassment as youngsters. This was a particularly extreme example, but I recall several experiences from when I was around 12 years old, that definitely made men seem a much more dangerous proposition.

It's funny how you learn to navigate it - like any other social landscape, it forms part of how you see the world. I don't mean that it warps you - just that the risk and danger is an ordinary part of the world you are in.

Men, of course, have their own ordinary dangers to which they become accustomed and which they naturally take into account and navigate. But I thought some of the guys in particular might find the insight into a particularly female experience of interest.

Here's a good one, The Thing All Women Do That You Don't Know About.

Excellent article.

I found myself out once with a group of older men I know reasonably well.
I wouldn't call them friends, but we know eachother's names and say Hello in the street, stop to pass the time of day.

One of the men can be quite... irascible.
He'd been challenged by someone on a committee he Chairs and was very grumpy. I was obvious he wanted to kick off.
Now they were drinking (albeit slowly), and I had a soft drink, but there was no hint of violence; they're all retired anyway, not the usual age range for brawling. But I could see that his snapping was bringing the group down and I wanted to stay out a little longer in the warm, the light, some company.

So I did my Princess Diana.
I smiled, paid him attention, lowered my eyes, listened. Slowly diverted his conversation by asking about things I know he likes and enjoys (his caravan FFS!)
It worked. He stopped being sarcastic, got off his high horse, joined in the usual banter.

It wasn't until afterwards I realised what I'd done.
I suppose I was being manipulative. After all I got what I wanted out of it. Another half hour or so stretching out a Diet Pepsi.

And yes, I did feel a bit icky afterwards.

The irascible gent returned to a more equable frame of mind, the others had a negative influence removed from the evening's proceedings and you spent a little while longer in a relaxing atmosphere.

Manipulative? Nah. You poured oil on troubled waters and it didn't catch fire.

I'd enter that in the credit side of life's ledger. :thumb:

How can people still be aking these points ? This is only three years old.




And how is this still a thing?

It isn't, but if Faux news keeps bringing it up, maybe the rare cretin out there will think they aren't alone, maybe there are others, maybe a movement, maybe I can me get a button or bumper sticker.

Faux wouldn't do that to avoid talking about real issues, would they? :yesnod:

Number of people who attended the original speech (est.): 200

Number of viewers of the original speech clip on YouTube: about 10,000 (there are three of the original on Youtube, each with about 3,000 views)

Number of people who have watched this clip, criticizing the original clip: 377,000
Views of a similar criticism video that's 17 minutes long: 328,000

The outrage is now nearly self-feeding. In the near future we won't need the original clip.

The fair minded British were equal opportunity employers before it was cool. ;)

That looks so obscene. What makes it doubly horrible is that the man sitting there in that basket almost certainly subscribed to the view of women as the 'fairer sex' being weaker than men. That woman is not really a proper woman in his view. Not like the fair european women, epitomising civilisation with their grace and fragility. Her race and her class takes away from her humanity. If it didn't, then he'd be shamed by such a picture.


But, I came in here to post an article I just read in the Graudian (Guardian). Since this is the gender equality checkpoint, it's a good place to look at the big picture.


Now, those are some pretty shocking statistics, but they don't actually spell out the full reasons why this way of organising labour and resources is such a bad idea, particularly when it comes to female participation in the workplace. Not everybody believes that increased female participation in the workplace is a good idea. As evidenced by the recurring themes of working-mother shaming and latch-key kid panic in our media (particularly the conservative media) and the regular bemoaning of a by-gone age when women were wives and mothers first and everything else second, and touting the loss of that world as a corresponding threat to masculinity.

Setting aside questions of fairness - which are complicated by the degree to which an individual believes men and women are just fundamentally different, and that they should retain fundamentally distinct but complimentary roles within society and family - let's look just at the concrete benefits of greater gender equality:


Read the rest here:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-de...e-consequences

this thread shouldn't really be in politics or should it

Isn't it all about using politics to control? Maybe politics reflect culture, thereby becoming a tool of the culture to reinforce itself.

I said before I don't think this thread has developed as Dana envisioned it, but following the time honored tradition of drift(he said guiltily), it has veered back to the track repeatedly.

Dana, I recently read from 2005 to 2012, India created 27 million new jobs, and 55 million new workers. They're now adding 1 million workers a month.
To you think there is any grass roots interest in making it easier for more women to go to work? If they did make it easier, isn't there the danger of household A having 2 employed, living well, and household B destitute, rather than both households having 1 employed and getting by?

The inherent followup to "women work" is not that the same number of jobs are redistributed, but that more gets done, which means greater prosperity on a large scale, but also an individual one. When both people in household A are making money, they have more to spend, which means they're going to want someone from household B to perform a service or create a good for them. If nothing else they'll ask B to clean their nice big house.

Walmart can handle the increase in sales, without adding help, while still killing any entrepreneurs who challenge them.
Not hiring B, if someone from household C will do it cheaper. Such is the flaw in the free market when it comes to helping the poor not be.

Yabbut, if they really didn't want the workforce/customerbase to double, then by that logic Walmart would be even happier if half the population died. I mean, putting twice as many men into the workforce is making things hard, right? Better if we only had half the men. Or half of that. Or half...

I mean transitions have to be eased into, sure. You can't just magically dump all of the women into the workforce overnight. There's economic infrastructure that has to be built. But the bottom line is it's always a good thing to add more people into the economy, right up until the moment the natural resources run out--and then, of course, everyone's fucked. :)

Walmart is reactive, not proactive when it comes to population. At least I hope so.:eek:

Dr Dana, lookie lookie...
A Day In the Life of an Empowered Female Heroine

They done did it ...

U.S. military opens all combat roles to women

I saw that on the news.
Now that's about as non-statement as you can get, neither yea nor nay, as clear as mud but it covers the ground.

What do you think Sexobon, is it smoke and mirrors? Nobody but GI Jane has a chance even with the positions officially open, except for positions that aren't real gung ho macho.

As long as the females concerned can meet existing standards it's not an insurmountable problem. Problems occur when standards are lowered to meet quotas, which inevitably come about, so politicking generals can wear their equal opportunity merit badges.

You've already read about the recent female Ranger course graduates. Few know that Special Forces did an ad hoc feasibility study back in the 1980s by putting a female captain through its qualification course. This was done for reasons mentioned earlier concerning female soldiers' reach to females in indigenous populations. I ran across her in passing at Special Forces Schools where she was assigned to a support position. The word I got was that she acquitted herself well; however, she was only permitted to audit the course and not become SF qualified due to public policy at the time. There are legal ramifications to becoming SF qualified. It would have made her a combatant just as I lost my medical personnel Geneva Convention status when I became a Special Forces medical specialist and I mean my status was actually changed on my military ID card.

There can still be gender segregation in classified organizations. They can be all male; or, all female as missions require. Soldiers in those units are dropped from the roles of the regular Army. If you ask the Army about one of them, the Army will say they never heard of 'em. All civil-military interaction goes through innocuous cover organizations. If they think they need to segregate, they still can albeit on a much smaller scale.

What this is going to do for office romances when the office is a poncho hooch out in the boonies is hard to say.

So you feel the officers on down the line will follow the directive for the most part. I'm sure there will a couple hardasses who will do everything they think they can get away with to disqualify applicants, but they'll get weeded out. Everybody in the military has a boss to answer to.

The problem won't be so much with some trying to disqualify females as it will be that after qualification females will get shuffled into lesser priority positions within the higher priority units. In Special Forces for example, it's long been said that it takes 6 years after the initial qualification course to make a good Special Forces soldier. There's mandatory cross-training in a second SF specialty (cross-training in a third SF specialty for SF warrant officers), training in one or more foreign languages, military free fall, scuba, various survival courses, SERE, SOT ... etc. On top of all that, Special Forces teams are area specialists who've done country studies and are continuously updating them with concentration on their specific area of operation.

How do you replace someone with all those capabilities and specialized knowledge if you have to deploy an SF team; but, one of them is pregnant? You don't. You may be able to put another warm body with the basic qualification on that team but it won't be as effective and they all know their lives depend on that effectiveness: they're not a sports team. It used to be up to chance that someone might become non-deployable because of something like an accidental injury. Now they have to plan on it being a deliberate act.

It doesn't cost them anything in terms of deployability to put females through a qualification course; so, I think where they'll be getting really creative is in how they assign females afterwards even to the point of creating low priority teams around them depending on the individuals they have to accommodate.

Thanks for the insight, I can see where Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance takes a lot of practice and trust.

How do you replace someone with all those capabilities and specialized knowledge if you have to deploy an SF team; but, one of them has an ACL tear?

SHIT SHIT SHIT WE DIDN'T THINK OF THAT! "MAN DOWN" OR WHATEVER THEY SAY

ABORT MISSION!! AH SHIT SHIT DON'T SAY ABORT

Did you all realize how terribly FRAGILE the SF are? Fuck, they can't even plan their way out of simple personnel issues that are understood and can be planned (it's 2015 and they have pills and devices to prevent pregnancy now!) and known about for MONTHS in advance! WHAT TOTAL PUSSIES! One of 'em goes down for 6 months and it's like, ah, mission cancelled I guess. Beginning to understand why it took a decade to get bin Laden.*

Do we really need these people or can they be replaced with drones already. Could have bombed that site in Allottabad just as easily. Might have not risked guys and expensive elite copters to do it.





*i know that was the seals, point remains

So, special forces are, like, soccer players?????

I see UT is on the rag. I'm tempted to do a Lamplighter and twist UT's words, "(it's 2015 and they have pills and devices to prevent pregnancy now!)", into his inferring the military should impose birth control on female soldiers. Sorry these changes didn't come about early enough for you to get into SF UT. You would've made a fine PUSSIES OF ONE. :p:

More like world championship playoff game soccer players only if you lose, you die. These teams can be required to operate at the limits of human performance. Take a member off the team when there's insufficient time to fully integrate a replacement and they're not world champions anymore; although, they can still play soccer. Question is, with lives at stake, who wants to be on that team when it goes to the playoff? Who wants to send it there in the first place? It doesn't matter why a member was taken off the team (e.g. torn ACL or pregnancy), the affects are the same.

When something like that happens in the military, the team gets an uninitiated replacement and assigned to lesser missions; or, it goes into a training cycle. The individual who couldn't perform may be put into individual training commensurate with their capabilities (e.g. sitting on their keister in language school); or, given a desk job depending on how much advance notice the command has and what options are available at the time. Males who are repeatedly non-deployable due to injuries resulting from their choices in personal activities can be reassigned to other units. Will they do the same with females who want to have several children? Individuals who are going to be out for more than 6 months can be reassigned out of high priority units. Will they do the same with females having post partum complications? All those who are going to be out for more than a year can already be medically discharged from the military.

Neither those who volunteer for high priority units nor their chains of command aspire to be held back by anyone. The military will now have to give equal treatment to non-deployable males that it will be giving to non-deployable females. It forces them to lower standards; or, create redundancies that taxpayers will pay for. We the people ... have chosen the latter. The military will be getting more creative about assignments within high priority units until the taxpayers pony up. :)

We the people have no say in the matter. The few who own the politicians decide how much to give the Pentagon, and they decide how many high priority special forces units, how many bombs, and how many golf courses.

There's no difference between a soldier who shoots himself in the foot and a soldier who is pregnant. It's a choice that would keep them from doing their job... your fired.