Why does it tell us something is wrong? What's wrong with women and men having different priorities in jobs? Or more women wanting to stay at home (say, with the children) and more men wanting to work?
The problem that I have, personally, is that women are getting something like half of the STEM degrees, and maybe 20% of the STEM jobs, and the conclusion people usually draw is:
Women don't like STEM, are ill-suited to it due to physical and emotional weakness, and would rather have babies, which is their natural inclination.
As opposed to what women in STEM will tell you, which is:
The discrimination was so intense that I decided to leave, because I was being sexually harassed to the point where I didn't feel safe coming to work and my skills were being undervalued and there was zero probability of being promoted when guys kept being credited for my work, so I decided to go into a different field despite years and years and years of professional training, because it was
just that bad.
Usually people hear this and think:
Women sure are weak and complain a lot over nothing.
Why?
Well, usually because sexists know how to say this stuff while nobody else is watching, which makes it a real problem because you have to believe what women (who are conniving, manipulative, dishonest, etc.) say about their own lives, rather than listening to somebody more objective, like a man, or perhaps a panel of men.
A man would never leave a job just because he's not going to be promoted and the work environment is toxic, and he could have a better career somewhere else. Right?
But if a woman stays under those career-damaging conditions, then she's making yet another one of those bad decisions women make where they don't take risks, they stick with what's familiar, and so on.
All you need to do is to harass women to the point where it's not rational for them to stay in a rationally intensive career, and you've proven through damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't tactics that they are intrinsically irrational and should stick to babby.
[I'm not saying that anyone here holds this point of view, but I have had this conversation too many times, so I'm reproducing it here.]
I think people think about the pay gap and they're thinking about blue-collar discrimination vs. pink-collar discrimination, but what folks are usually talking about is discrimination within white-collar fields. At any given point, assume you're talking about upper-middle-class white people.
That said, I'm not sure that the massive undervaluing of pink-collar jobs compared to blue-collar jobs is exactly fair. Some blue-collar jobs are more dangerous. Others are not. I think that there is an assumption that pink-collar jobs don't require the development of any particular skills, because women are just
good at that nurturing thing naturally, as opposed to blue-collar jobs, which require the development of
technical proficiencies.
Something to remember is that factory workers used to be overwhelmingly female (or children, or disabled men), and that was before any kind of safety standards appeared. Computer programmers used to be overwhelmingly female.
There's a pattern. First they say "women are unusually suited to these really shitty jobs because they are docile and we wouldn't want to have to hire a man for this terrible work. We'll give them a little extra money here or there to help them support their families." "Programming is as easy as setting your oven!" Then once women start making serious bank and developing their expertise, men come in, push the women out by explaining why women were unsuited to that profession and men ought to be the only ones working it, and the profession becomes male-dominated. Because now it's a profession, not just a shitty job.
Now it's valuable.
This doesn't always happen. But it is a real thing that really happens.
Most recently, this happened with computer science. Programmers used to be something like 80% female and 20% male in the 80s. Now it's the other way around. I don't have the statistics exactly right in my head, but you can look them up online and read the story. It's all over the place.
Also, there is that general expectation that women will just work for free out of the goodness of their heart, which I have experienced
personally in jobs where I had more than 10 years of experience, and needed to volunteer anyway because it would open up job interviews later. And in dudes who within the first couple hours of meeting me asked me to tutor them through The Calculus for free (so they wouldn't have to pay about 10k to get a real professional to teach them). And so on, and so forth. That's the fundamental problem with pink-collar work. "Women are naturally disposed to this kind of labor, so we need not pay them for it because they will do it whether we pay them or not, especially because we will bully the snot out of them if they
don't do it for free."
Saying "women and men are generally suited for different types of work" is one thing, and I really don't feel able to argue that point. I've been declared an "honorary man" so many times that I would feel very weird arguing about it, because I seem to be positioned as an exception to the rule somehow.
But the root belief that women being naturally better at nurturing and men naturally better at physical work
therefore implying that
1. Female labor is intrinsically intuitive and unskilled
2. But male labor is cognitive and professional
3. Yet male rationality is equally intrinsic to them
4. Hence women cannot attain the same achievements, and are not worth teaching as you would a man
5. So feminine
labor is intrinsically inferior
6. Thus women should not be paid equally or considered for promotion
Actually comes direct from the Victorian era's point of view on gender as intrinsic and immutable, in which women are soft little doves given to transports of the imagination and flights of fancy, who must have a little baby of her own in accordance with her Womanly Purpose, fragile and emotional as she is. Women are Animal, Men are Rational. Therefore everything women do is intrinsically, unchangeably Animal, and everything that men do is intrinsically, unchangeably rational. We don't pay animals for being animals, do we? Then why the fuck should we pay women for being animals?
This is
not the sexism that we have historically had. This is
not the perception of women that we have historically had. This is not even the perception of women in other cultures with strict gender roles fairly in alignment with our own, like, say, China.
This is, unfortunately, partially the inheritance of the Western Enlightenment era (I am looking at you, Descartes, and your mind/body thing) and of the cult of Pythagoras, which decided that men are women but, like, with souls and brains. Fortunately this point of view upheld the prevailing perception that men could and should fuck young men, but not men of the same age, because treating a man of the same social status like you would treat a woman (i.e. as a semen depository) would be demeaning of his status as a man.
Historical homophobia! It was different from modern homophobia!
This of course led to Nietzsche's argument that women exist solely in order to give birth to men and were otherwise essentially lower animals, because Nietzsche follows every point of view held in western culture to its greatest possible extent.
Women were relatively less burdened during the Dark Ages, were more likely to hold property, more able to participate in social life, and so on... and so forth. That's right: Women are slightly better off under Catholic Sexism than under Greek Wisdom Sexism.
Usually people argue here, "then why have women never done X, Y, or Z? Arguing from statistics, we can demonstrate that therefore women are not capable of doing X, or Y, or Z."
And we are not talking about "weightlifting with your cock" here, we're talking about "drawing" or "killing people" or "cuisine" or "understanding psychology" or "thinking" or literally everything other than Gestating Babies. Literally. Everything. Because that's how the Victorians thought and wrote of us, but not how the medieval writers did--just take a look at Chaucer, for heaven's sake.
(Cuz you know, in the modern era... for any given pink-collar job, you're proooooobably better off hiring a gay dude. Because they're better at "being women" than women.
For a historical argument in a different context, male kabuki actors who portrayed female roles were partially found acceptable because they could teach women how to be feminine more than another woman could. Men were better at everything,
including femininity. Source:
Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan)
Well, often they
have done X Y or Z, but it is shuffled under the rug as "it doesn't count," so nobody told you (like how Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper and Hedy Lamarr don't count and Emmy Noethur doesn't exist and Sophie Germain was just Gauss's Protege and Sonya Kabalevskaya is just plain overrated, and most of these women probably had men engineering their results anyway. Forget that Newton's papers were littered with arguments about "exterminating X's" and his notation fucking sucked, he had a nervous breakdown after college and went home to mother, and he wasted most of his life doing his "real research" on Aryanism, inherited a lot of wisdom from the Middle East (so are his results engineered by Arabs, who deserve the credit?), and finally became a hanging judge at the national mint); and sometimes there just wasn't the opportunity, and people assume that women aren't worth wasting the opportunity
on, so they continue to not furnish the opportunities and we never get to find out whether women are capable of something or not.
And sometimes women do things in different ways than men, and we decide that that means that they didn't Really Do the Thing, and it Wasn't Very Good After All, because it's
female writing or
female art or
female whatever, and it's about the Feminine Condition rather than the Human Condition, which is what the thing is when men do it.
And it's not good unless women do it exactly the same as men (Jane Austen in the company of Homer? Never!), (toy problems? all mathematics must be muscular and seminal!) but it's also not good if women do it exactly the same way as men, because then it's derivative. An inferior copy. It's Adam's Rib, but we wanted the full Adam.
A women speaking about the female experience is pandering, is special interest. A man speaking about the male experience speaks to the quintessential, to the intrinsic, to the human condition. This is because we have already decided that to be human rather than animal is to be rational, and to be male rather than female is also to be rational. Therefore to be male is to be human; to be female is to be animal.
So male genius is masculine greatness, and feminine genius is an unhappy accident contrary to one's true purpose of populating the earth with more men.
Joan of Arc was just one woman, but she was a fourteen-year-old wearing full plate who successfully drove the English out of New Orleans after 100 years of occupation, and I think that that's a reasonable emotional argument that some women can do a man's job when the stars align.
I am no longer an Angry Feminist because I have realized that this viewpoint is so fucking entrenched that it's borderline impossible to just
think your way out of (for me, too). But, it really does seem that people think this way. And if you do think that way deep down, I'm not going to tell you to stop thinking that way because hell, it kind of feels right, but I'd like you to consider what I've said and see if anything new seems right in light of the evidence I've brought up.
And yeah, I've just sketched an argument because TBH I'm going to go study geometry in a few minutes and I'd rather do that, and this is all an argument about income inequality that I've been writing for an hour or so that may be off-topic for this thread now. So fill in the holes, dudes; I didn't mean to say that this was all somehow ironclad. Just, here's a thing to think about. Maybe you agree. Maybe you don't.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1548952 times)