The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[Undertoad]

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

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

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

[DanaC]

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.

A recent World Bank survey of 173 countries found that no fewer than 155 still had at least one law impeding women’s economic opportunities. Women face gender-based job restrictions in 100 countries, often confining them to low-paying activities, more often than not in the informal sector. In 18 countries the law gives husbands the right to prohibit their wives from working outside the home.

These legal differences have long-lasting economic and social consequences. Gender based job restrictions tend to be associated with wider wage gaps and lower employment rates for women. And where girls’ future earning potential is limited, families may choose to send their brothers to school instead.

-snip-

And it’s not just about the workplace. Women in several countries face extra documentation hurdles when trying to get a national identity card. Beyond making it tougher to access public services or contracts with others, no proof of ID means no chance of getting a bank loan to start or expand a business. Inheritance and marital property laws affect women’s access to financial institutions – access to property tends to make for greater equality within the household.

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:

The economic cost of gender inequality is staggering. The McKinsey Global Institute recently estimated that if women participated in the economy identically to men, with equal wages and labour force participation, it would add up to $28tn to global GDP by 2025: a 26% increase over business as usual, equivalent to adding a new United States and China to the world economy.
A more modest scenario, under which countries match the gender parity progress of their best-performing regional neighbour, would add $12tn to the global economy – about the collective economic weight of Japan, Germany, and the UK.

The implications are no less revolutionary for individual households. Literate mothers have healthier children. When women earn an income, they spend a higher proportion of it than men do on their children’s health, education and nutrition.

Read the rest here:

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

[Undertoad]

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

[xoxoxoBruce]

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?

[Clodfobble]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

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.

[Clodfobble]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

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

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

She woke up like she did every day: slowly pulling her motorcycle helmet off, then shaking her head slowly back and forth to reveal a long, blonde ponytail. Everyone gasped. “That’s right,” she said, kicking the winning football goal before sliding into a sheer, sexy camisole under a blazer and playing as hard as she worked, “I’ve been a girl this whole time.” One of the guys, the real sexy one, shook his head in slow motion, as if to say “wh-wh-wh-whaaat?” You know the kind. His mouth was kind of open while he did it. He was totally blown away.

[sexobon]

They done did it ...

U.S. military opens all combat roles to women

[xoxoxoBruce]

I saw that on the news.

"Secretary Carter's decision to open all combat positions to women will have a consequential impact on our service members and our military's warfighting capabilities," Senator John McCain and Representative Mac Thornberry said in a statement.

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.

[sexobon]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

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.

[sexobon]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

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