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[Reelya]

Put in a 30% female quota, and a 15% racial diversity quota. That way every board of directors is going to end up with about 15% of their board being African-American women to meet both quotas at once. And a career-boost for African-American women will without a shadow of a doubt shave more off the gender gap than promoting more upper middle-class white women.

I've been reading some black feminist sites, and they make a good point that it's a small minority of extremely affluent white feminists who set the agenda about what we talk about. Breaking glass ceilings etc is a topic that is close to the heart of extremely wealthy and highly educated feminists, but does almost jack shit for the lives of 99% of regular women. So this fixation could be a quick and dirty fix for the politicians to look like they're doing something.

Black feminists refer to it as "trickle down feminism". The idea that if you reward the richest women in the world, then every other woman benefits.

[Willfor]

set the agenda about what we talk about.

To be honest, this shit almost never actually comes up when I am talking to feminists. Gender quotas I mean. Because there's no one set of feminists, and the ones I talk to on a regular basis are just your average people. The movement as a whole is about as far removed from a monolithic entity as you can get, especially since the advent of the internet. So whenever I see "feminists say" I cringe inside, just as much as much as I cringe when I see "christians say," to which I would reply, "which denomination?"

[Loud Whispers]

Okay, so let's transition this topic to proposals about what will actually work as an effective measure, as there don't seem to be many proposed fixes that don't include quotas.

Don't fix what's not broken m8

[quote author=Willfor link=topic=155510.msg6743235#msg6743235
Personally, I am for publicly shaming any company without at least 30% women in top roles, legislating that they have to include an image of poop somewhere in their logo until they meet this criteria.
[/quote]
Get ready for "vital community managers"

[Willfor]

Okay, so let's transition this topic to proposals about what will actually work as an effective measure, as there don't seem to be many proposed fixes that don't include quotas.

Don't fix what's not broken m8

Personally, I am for publicly shaming any company without at least 30% women in top roles, legislating that they have to include an image of poop somewhere in their logo until they meet this criteria.

Get ready for "vital community managers"

Look, I don't quote your shitposts as if you're being serious, bro. Common courtesy is DEAD.

[Reelya]

Due to anti-discrimination laws, the poop-law you propose will also have to apply to companies with less than 30% of men in top positions.

I'm not being snarky here. It's just an observation. Either we stand behind anti-discriminatory practices 100% or we don't pretend to be unbiased. It's really not the way forward to say "my biases are good, your biases are evil".

Once you've undermined anti-discrimination on the basis of a "good end result", you open up the legal floodgates for any sort of discriminatory practice someone wants to impose where they can justify that it has a "good end result".

[Reelya]

Heightism is a measurable bias, so we can start sanctioning companies that don't promote short people. And before you laugh, consider that heightism impacts on both gender and race.

[Willfor]

I am wondering if anyone realizes my poop law was a joke to help break the ice in proposing solutions. Because it feels like maybe people think I was being serious.

C'mon Bay12, where is your pride in being the forum that gets shit done.

[Reelya]

There were proposals that can be proven to be effective.

Sweden's paternity leave system is probably the biggest thing that would help working women to reduce the pay gap/promotion gap.

Which is what I've been saying for a while, child-care is the #1 impact on the wage gap, by a huge margin over the next cause. Paternity leave (not maternity leave) addresses this issue, which I'd say is the #1 issue.

[Loud Whispers]

Look, I don't quote your shitposts as if you're being serious, bro. Common courtesy is DEAD.

How do you know my intent, that's awful presumptive of a shitlord's shitposts

C'mon Bay12, where is your pride in being the forum that gets shit done.

Lost and never found

[Reelya]

Well, i was reading some discussion about maternity leave considered from a supply/demand point of view, and I'm even more convinced now that equalizing maternity leave and paternity leave is a precondition for sustainable equal wages, unless you want to go full Soviet Union.

Maternity leave is an employee benefit. It costs money to implement benefits, oddly enough. And companies that have more costs are less competitive, oddly enough.

So, even if all companies are gender-blind, don't discriminate, and pay the same wage for identical work to start with, but you have gender-skewed mandatory benefits towards women, then companies with more women have naturally higher operating costs, and thus must either raise prices and downsize staff (disproportionately driving women out of the industry) or they must lower wages (disproportionately driving down the wages of women).

Even if the effect is pretty small, a small effect driving out women and driving their wages down over decades is going to be a big effect. This could be part of the "unexplained" wage gap actually: companies paying more for employee leave end up less competitive.

[MrRoboto75]

Okay, so let's transition this topic to proposals about what will actually work as an effective measure, as there don't seem to be many proposed fixes that don't include quotas.

Personally, I am for publicly shaming any company without at least 30% women in top roles, legislating that they have to include an image of poop somewhere in their logo until they meet this criteria.

You said you weren't serious, but isn't your example a form of quota?

"You need at least X amount of women, if you don't you suffer the penalty of Y" seems to me to be what a quota is.

If I were to give a solution, I would avoid quotas and negative reinforcement, instead give benefits to those who do hire women.  For example, say any firm in the STEM fields that employs X amount of women in a job of at least Z level, then that firm gets a tax break of Y.  Of course, you'd need some sort of official to determine if those hired women are actually employed and not just on the payroll for the benefits, but you would also have needed one to check the quotas anyway.

[LordBucket]

what will actually work as an effective measure

Redesign the system such that the whole question becomes irrelevant.

I don't see anyone championing for "equality" in undesirable arenas. The example was given previously, most garbage workers are men. Feminists don't usually complain about the unfairness of that because it's typically regarded as undesirable work. More often they complain about lack of women in executive positions, for example, because those are typically regarded as desirable positions. They not really interested in equality. They're using perceptions of inequality as a tool to manipulate people into giving them what they want.

Well, having what you want is basically reasonable.

So, I propose we redesign society so that people can generally have want they want. You're generally less likely to be unhappy about "inequality" or that somebody else has something better or more, if you have what you want.

Men and women competing with each other for positions/resources/etc that are perceived as scarce is wholly an unhealthy situation. So, solve the scarcity problem. Stop worrying about gender issues. Redesign society so that women are never in the position of having to put up with a husband they  don't want in order to keep their children fed. Redesign society so that men are never afraid of marriage because they stand to lose half of their possessions. Redesign society so that people simply don't care whether more men or more women are sitting in executive boardrooms.

Stop trying to address the symptoms rather than the cause. The cause is not most of what people are complaining about. The root cause is scarcity. Solve scarcity. Automate all the undesirable work. Automate the production of most things. Automate all the service work and delivery work and cleaning work and menial work, and have the fruits of that automation so abundant that nobody is very inconvenienced by survival and procurement issues. Sure, people will still compete over positions of prestige. Being able to say you're a corporate attorney or on the board of a fortune 100 company will have value to some people. And people might still compete for those limited positions.

But you'll solve most of the problem if money is no longer a driving force in society and the whole question of which group has the greater portion of high paying positions becomes a non sequitor because anybody can pretty much have any material thing they want without having to dedicate their lives to procuring it.

[Loud Whispers]

So all we need to do is create utopia

It's not going to be easy, but I like this

[nullBolt]

what will actually work as an effective measure

Redesign the system such that the whole question becomes irrelevant.

I don't see anyone championing for "equality" in undesirable arenas. The example was given previously, most garbage workers are men. Feminists don't usually complain about the unfairness of that because it's typically regarded as undesirable work. More often they complain about lack of women in executive positions, for example, because those are typically regarded as desirable positions. They not really interested in equality. They're using perceptions of inequality as a tool to manipulate people into giving them what they want.

Well, having what you want is basically reasonable.

So, I propose we redesign society so that people can generally have want they want. You're generally less likely to be unhappy about "inequality" or that somebody else has something better or more, if you have what you want.

Men and women competing with each other for positions/resources/etc that are perceived as scarce is wholly an unhealthy situation. So, solve the scarcity problem. Stop worrying about gender issues. Redesign society so that women are never in the position of having to put up with a husband they  don't want in order to keep their children fed. Redesign society so that men are never afraid of marriage because they stand to lose half of their possessions. Redesign society so that people simply don't care whether more men or more women are sitting in executive boardrooms.

Stop trying to address the symptoms rather than the cause. The cause is not most of what people are complaining about. The root cause is scarcity. Solve scarcity. Automate all the undesirable work. Automate the production of most things. Automate all the service work and delivery work and cleaning work and menial work, and have the fruits of that automation so abundant that nobody is very inconvenienced by survival and procurement issues. Sure, people will still compete over positions of prestige. Being able to say you're a corporate attorney or on the board of a fortune 100 company will have value to some people. And people might still compete for those limited positions.

But you'll solve most of the problem if money is no longer a driving force in society and the whole question of which group has the greater portion of high paying positions becomes a non sequitor because anybody can pretty much have any material thing they want without having to dedicate their lives to procuring it.

So all we need to do is create utopia

It's not going to be easy, but I like this

One of the big problems in society is that the world fundamentally changes within a few years but none of our systems of law, culture or economics have even begun to catch up.

The example of automation is a good one. We, essentially, live in a post labour-scarcity society and yet there's no real automation within the Western hemisphere (there are reasons for this that involve stuff probably better constrained to the EU thread). The reality is that the big boys who control the politicians and the media and the status quo are scared of changed that they won't be able to control, like the onset of almost pure automation.

[Willfor]

I don't see anyone championing for "equality" in undesirable arenas. The example was given previously, most garbage workers are men. Feminists don't usually complain about the unfairness of that because it's typically regarded as undesirable work. More often they complain about lack of women in executive positions, for example, because those are typically regarded as desirable positions. They not really interested in equality. They're using perceptions of inequality as a tool to manipulate people into giving them what they want.

See, I am really tired of hearing this crock of garbage that keeps getting tossed around because it sounds good, because it's a lie that a simple google search could fix.

How about

I google that

for you

a little.

The women fighting for equality in blue collar work has a 100+ year history. It's out there for literally anyone to see with a simple search to find out if what they're saying is actually true, or whether it's an anti-feminist meme that's been going around for years.