over at this thread, PV has made a startling pronouncement: women work less than men, therefore, it's ok to pay us less.
when i recovered from my brain bleed, it took me the whole weekend to decompress from the intense discussion of female submission, so i'm just now getting to this little brainbuster.
do we women really work less than men?
i tried to count how many meals my mother planned and cooked for our family between kindergarten and my sophomore year in college: i estimated that was roughly 20,000 meals cooked in a 14-year period. and she had a job for roughly the same period, outside the home. and that still doesn't count the other types of labor she contributed: housecleaning, shopping, food preparation, accounting, household administrative duties, child care/rearing, home repair (my dad was sort of helpless with this), and gardening.
folks, this is all labor. it's work. if it wasn't work, then it would be called fun. since it's not called Fun, then it's Work.
in the april issue of The Economist there are a couple of articles that examine the role of women on economic growth globally in rich nations (i guess we just got rid of that whole First/Third World thing, huh?) and they come up with some interesting ideas:
- in rich countries, we do better in school, are getting more university degrees and are filling most new jobs
- since 1950 men's employment in the US has slipped 12 points to 77% while women's employment rate increased by 1/3 (in America this growth has stalled though there's hope that we can use this market share in new ways in the future, especially as male-dominated industries like manufacturing and manual labor shrink, giving way to jobs requiring more brain power than muscle power)
- women working around the world have contributed more to global GDP growth than new technology or nations like China or India
- women make better investors and make 80% of all consumer decisions
- greater partcipation by women in the workforce could help offset effects of an ageing population and support growth
- the under utilization of women in developing countries stunts economic growth rather than the opposite
- it is untrue that in countries where women work, birthrate shrinks in the long run; rather, in countries where the decline in fertility is high, female unemployment is also high.
needless to say, i think this problematizes at the very least, the idea that wage inequity is ok simply because we 'work less.' the only time my mother 'worked less' was when she got sick and stopped working altogether. and i don't know about you all, but i work my ass off.
ok, discuss! (rules for this discussion: it's not about divorce! in other words, let's try and stay on topic. and if your main source of information is from a guy who could be considered by most academic sources a 'nutjob', i advise using other, less crazy, sources!)
13 comments:
Would like to add that women joining the labor pool in large numbers has actually depressed wages. As we have had almost zero wage increases since 1970.
I attribute that to too many laborers, and not enough jobs to sustain them all, thus wages have decreased.
Story in point, my grandfather in the 40's,50's and 60's, had a job that paid him well, like most men in that era. Thirty percnet of his income went to bills, the other seventy percent was disposable income. He had three cars, two homes and 40 acers of lake front property in Minnasota, near Minneapolis. His wife never had a job, was a home maker.
Now in Modern 2006, things just cost more, the market will charge what the market will bear. Case in point, we now pay 85% of our checks to our bills, the other 15% is our "disposable" income.
Woman may make 80% of the purchases, are they counting the 99 pairs of shoes in her closet that she never wears?
The same elite group of men that profit off the labor of women and depression of real wages, are profiting off empowered women buying things they will never use.
You say well women have businesses now, yes they do, women own or are part owners in 10 million business, but only 250,000 of them earn 500,000 a year. Even less than than that earn over a million. No man is stopping them from becoming the next fortune 500 company. Before Oprah was Oprah, a man, and a white one at that, started her show, but was then bought out by a power hungery Oprah.
Vox Day at his blogspot will tell you all about women joining the work force has actually depressed wages. If 4 men are applying for a job with a wage of 40k a year, then sudden't 40 more men are applying for a job, with an added 40 displaced women, the wage can now be placed down to 20k. Now you can get two, or three for the price of 1 (1950's wages).
voxday.blogspot.com
Will explain it in better detail.
In case you haven't read this post, here it is, from a woman in the past.
"If you women continue to demand your choice to work, you will so upset the economy of this country that the time will come when you will not have a choice.
You will have to work."~ Helen Andelin of Fascinating Womanhood.
(just in case you missed it on my blog)
Why is Warren Farrell a nut job? He was a feminist before he was anything. In the book I have, "Women who make the world worse." by Kate O'brein
She quotes him many times.
do women work less then men? too broad of a statement. there are slackers in both categories to be sure. i can only comment on my experience. . .
i am a stay at home mom thanks to creative financing. we have two little girls (7 & 3) and i am six months pregnant with a boy (woo hoo!). i also homeschool - which is loads of fun. truly. i commented to my husband that perhaps i should get a part-time job so i can contribute financially to the needs of our family. to which he replied, "there are some things you can't put a dollar figure on. the value that you add to our family by raising our children and running an entire household goes far beyond any hourly wage".
our home is a haven from the stresses of the business world for my husband and it's a place of happiness and joy for my children (and for me).
do i work hard? HECK YA! harder than my husband? that would be like comparing apples and palm trees.
that's fabulous. (and i mean that. that's not the life for me but i admire women who can do it.)
but if we *were* to attach a dollar amount to your labor, it would be considerable.
in other words, your work is *not* negligible.
and warren farrell is a nutjob because, despite his earlier writing, he's a commonly known ideologue for the crack pot Men's Rights Movement, his research is flawed and ...
actually that should be enough. flawed research, flawed premise. nutbaggery.
i'm sure Men's Righters think that men are being 'oppressed' all over the place, but until you can quit with the anecdotal BS and actually demonstrate that it's happening in systemic and institutionalized ways, i'll keep calling Warren a nutbag.
check out www.mom.salary.com
and warren farrell is a nutjob because, despite his earlier writing, he's a commonly known ideologue for the crack pot Men's Rights Movement, his research is flawed and ...
Of course its flawed when you compare it to 1 in 4 women are raped every year. That would mean there would need to be 90 million rapists.
Femininsts math is of the worst sort.
no. clearly your reasoning skills are not your strength. what it may mean is that one man may rape multiple women. doofus.
much love,
steph
exactly, steph.
he can't believe there could be 90 million men who rape women?
(i don't find that hard to believe at all)
and i think he's assuming a 1:1 relationship between rapist and victim - that for each singular act of rape there is exactly ONE man who commits it against one woman. we know that's not true. just as there can be multiple rapists against one victim there can be multiple victims for one perpetrator.
and if he's thinking about 90 million men raping women who are strangers to them, that's also untrue. most sexual assaults occur between people who know each other.
on an anecdotal level, out of my own social circle, two friends within the past year have come forward about their own sexual assaults - and this doesn't count anything that may have happened to them in the past. we're talking within the last calendar year.
if everyone really looked at their social circle they'd find at least one woman who'd reveal something similar in their past.
it also means that most of us, most likely, know someone who's a perpetrator.
he can't believe there could be 90 million men who rape women?
(i don't find that hard to believe at all)
In America? Did you miss Grade School?
That would mean 25% of all men are rapists. That is where I levy the All feminists are murderer's, due to the fact there have been 52 million abortions, without so much as a whimper from feminists.
If you look deeper there are only 15,000 convictions or rape in America, there are 80,000 accusations. It has the lowest conviction rate of any crime, due too exaggerating women like you.
Here is the list for rYpe.
1. Did you drink too much and pass out? You have been rYped, call police. (Who drank, who knows how she was leading everybody on, as a drunk by choice, false allegations come from this, no witnesses, and a drunk women that cannot remember anything, sounds like an open and shut case.
There is a laundry list of other things. Things you feminists exaggerate.
All feminists have been rYped, molested by their fathers. It has been proven would cry rape for attention, think they have a STD, didn't want their husbands to think they cheated on purpose, when caught cheating, the hate men.
"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience." Vassar College. Assistant Dean of Students – Catherine Comin
1 in 4 women rYped, hardly, that is the amount fornicating.
I think only 3% have been raped.
Did you hear the story about the women that chose the wrong Man from a police line up. 16 years in prison, on a woman's eye witness testimony, and a police line up, where she pointed him out, "Yes, that is him I know it."
There are more women in America that kill their children, than are raped.
Anonymous said...
no. clearly your reasoning skills are not your strength. what it may mean is that one man may rape multiple women. doofus.
much love,
steph
5/05/2006 1:46 PM
So, ladies, I'm amongst such Math Wizards, I can barely contain myself.
With your occasional serial rapist, since most rapes occur to women by somebody they know, they are thus easily brought to trail. Most of the time it is a he said she said battle, a high majority of the time, no witnesses to correlate the story.
Rapists are caught 50 to 85% of the time. Even if 15,000 convicted rapists each year, had raped 4 women, that would only 60,000 victems a year and 1.8 million women victems in the last 30 years. Since I was obviosly absent from every math class in school, shall we learn some proper grammer from Me.
I think stranger rapes, with trauma, cuts, bruises, bound marks, etc. are clearly rape. There have been women known to injure themselves, just to take down the "patriarchy" as they like to call it, but that is really rare. That is a rape.
Not a "I was drunk at a party, like, with the rich guy, and umm like, I want a boob job, and like um, that guy, like raped me."
Meanwhile the only bruises she had was from falling down because of her acute, drunkardness.
In the Muslim world women don't get raped, as often, when they leave the house, they are escorted by a member of that family. The women, that is.
For a woman to cry rape, a witness needs to have seen it, and the witness has to be male. Not a bad system. Cuts down on the false allegations.
Do you women care about the weak men, raped and treated like women in the prison system? Sold like slaves for ciggarettes. Or is that just a man thing, and you could care less about it?
Imagine the soap boxes you ladies would be on, if these men were actually women, who are imprisoned with the strong patriarch men, and forced to go through this.
There is injustice by both genders, and its a shame you feminists use the smokescreen of the bottomless victomhood to further your goals. Abortion, single women, single mothers, divorce, day care, and a host of other evils.
ugh, PV. 90k was *your* number, not mine. you're the one who assumes for each assailant, there's just one victim. your assumption, not mine.
when you define sexual assault to include forcible rape, statutory rape, acquaintance rape or other types of sexual assault, then it's not very hard to imagine that 1 in 4 women could be, at some point in their lives, the victim of coercive, non consensual sexual contact.
if you don't like that estimation (it's an estimate) then check out the FBI numbers for sexual assault (though they only include forcible
rape). those numbers are dire enough.
ah, but what is the point of arguing? based on your own views of gender, why should any of us be surprised at your opinions? you see women as either whore or saint. so if a woman isn't a virgin or married or your chattel, she deserves whatever she's got.
we know you, PV. no need to share anymore. at first we tittered because your ideas were so strange.
but now you've shown yourself for the true vile misogynist you are. your ideas and opinions are repugnant and i've indulged you enough.
don't post here again.
it's betwixt.
and you're still gone.
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