At what point will gender equality stop

[balky12]

Why are there more stay at home dads now than there were 30 years ago?

Is it because men are becoming more biologically wired to want to look after kids, or is it because the societal norm is changing?

Think probably a bit of both. Social norms are definitely changing and probably the main driver.

Society changing on how it perceives a stay at home dad allows perhaps a biological change to evolve.

Also more and more women are becoming career minded. Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of stay at home dads are so for purely economical reasons!

 

[Tosno]

After the sad demise (permabanning) of one or two of my favourite posters, you're rapidly rising towards the top of my list, Tosno.

I often can't decide if you're a moron or a genius, but i enjoy your shtick either way

My days are numbered too, not even Clarence Mitchell can save me.

 

[Amp34]

That's reasonable but I think it's more beneficial to try different methods and risk failure than to bury our heads in the sand and pretend nothing's wrong.

There are many other ways of doing it though, from more anonymity in hiring, to more "pushing" of certain careers at a younger age. The latter could go both ways, with more information for boys about working in social care/teaching and other female dominated career paths as well as STEM related disciplines for girls.

We should be hitting it before we get to the hiring process ideally, rather than deciding on one candidate over another because, while candidate A is better, candidate B will hit our female/minority/xyz target (unless there is a specific reason for needing that target).

To use an anecdote, there is a fair amount of positive discrimination in my discipline (Geoscience). Go in to most large organisations and look at similar roles to mine and you'll find an approximately equal mix of men and women in the younger staff. Sounds fine, but when you realise only 10-20% of graduates that fit that role are female it becomes fairly obvious it many haven't been picked on merit. It's also a shame for the very good women (which there are plenty of, because they essentially have to prove they were picked because they were good candidates, not because the company needed to hit their diversity target.

What we should be doing is going in to schools and pushing geoscience, for both men and women, meaning more women actually do the courses in the first place. Otherwise you end up with a situation I had at one university where the Geoscience department shared a building with the Geography department. The geoscience floor being 90% male, and the geography department being 90% female. They are broadly similar subjects - but have very different career paths - yet are perhaps some of the most heavily gender specific courses at universities.

If women just aren't picking relevant courses then there is no way we are going to be able to remove the gender imbalance in many industries. Same goes for men in female dominated industries.

It's not going to solve all the issues (one of which being in my discipline it was a very masculine environment, and still is to an extent), but will make a big change in years to come. It already is in fact, as many companies are now realising engaging girls from a young age is one of the best ways of getting them to do a relevant degree, and subsequently apply for a job. That's a positive for everyone, and society, because (going back to a previous comment) you get to use all societies brain power.

 

[StriderX]

The issue is clearly a lag problem, a lag from literally millenia of disinterest (forced and not forced) on females from being taught things other than motherly/wifely roles. (kinda a non-issue in the west at this point, still occurs in pockets... but that's their right is it not?)

Theres the image problem of certain subjects simply appearing more male oriented or female oriented in schools, whereby a lot of your friends would pick such and such a course enmass forcing you to follow the herd. (Easily solved by forcing everyone to learn all the basic subjects in STEM, but then you have another problem... the slow student, slow class).

Currently you are 4 times more likely to be employed as a female in STEM roles, which is i guess fine considering the distinct lack of females at all learning the subjects, however what happens when its about equal... but there is still that same ratio of employment?... because that's not equality.

 

[Amp34]

It absolutely shouldn't.

I think the people in favour of Positive Discrimination (what a disgusting term) would argue that it's needed exactly because people discriminate against women when hiring for a role/promotion, so the only way they can stop this is to set quotas on % of women hired, for example. In an ideal world, the best person for the job would get it.

I don't know what the answer is, but PD is a disgusting way to go about trying to change things.

While I agree with the post in general, there are some reasons why the best person may not be the best suited for a role. For example the company may be aiming for a mixed office as it may help with working atmosphere and as such want a balance between sexes, or want specific experience that only a certain type of person may have (possibly someone newly immigrated to the country from a country you are targeting), although the latter may fall under "best person for the job".

EDIT: To expand on the above point about mixed gender, there are numerous studies pointing to mixed gender teams providing better results than male/female dominated teams, so aiming for a nice mix* isn't a bad thing in itself, even if you end up turning someone "better" down based on their gender. In the same way aiming for a mix of personalities in a team is also beneficial.

For example: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826024

This paper reports about a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams and assigned students, conditional on their gender, randomly to teams. We find that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated and female-dominated teams in terms of sales, profits and earnings per share. We explore various mechanisms and find that mutual monitoring is more intense in mixed teams than in homogeneous teams. This partially explains the better results of mixed teams.v

*This may also be one of the reasons the larger companies in my other post do have the fairly equal mix of genders.

 

[Nitefly]

I don't know why so many people feel threatened by this issue. Yes it is over-egged by some but meh.

 

[Caracus2k]

Monkeys show preference for 'gendered' toys based on their sex

See here aswell

A man in 1916 beat the current women's 400 meter running time despite the advancements in nutrition training etc. If women and men competed together in athletic events pretty much no women would make past the heats.

Women make up only a small fraction of the prison population in the UK a pattern repeated across the world

Men successfully commit suicide at a rate over 3 times that of women in the UK and account for around 97% of workplace deaths

Women before typical childbearing age now earn more than men

The above is just a small snipet of interesting stats and facts that together suggest that humans are in fact a species showing a high degree of both physical and behavioral sexual dimorphism and as such you cant expect equality of outcome...

'societal conditioning' may accentuate the trends but clearly does not explain their initial existence


Gender equality can only fairly be strived towards on equality of oppurtunity

 

[Angilion]

So why does society have this preconception of how boys "should" be and how girls "should" be? Did our ancestors all get together at some point in the past and decide "hey everyone, from now on we're all going to all raise our kids like this"? Or perhaps it's because men and women are naturally more disposed to certain roles?* It's not exactly far-fetched considering the huge biological difference when it comes to reproduction...

* Obviously this is a massive generalisation and there will be exceptions on both sides

Nature and nuture...there's no way to tell which is the cause unless one of them is significantly changed while the other isn't.

But we do know that nurture has a huge effect because it has been significantly changed and that has led to significant changes in various things.

We also know that sexed roles are at least partially caused by nurture. Partly because those two have changed significantly and partly because we know that sexed roles were essential for survival of societies for most of the existence of humans (and pre-human hominids). Small groups of people living as hunter-gatherers with stone age technology must enforce specific sexed roles or the group will die out. Existing sexed roles match up with those previously required ones, unsurprisingly.

So we have strong evidence that nurture plays at least a very large role in it. Maybe all of it. Maybe not.

It's a bit of a moot point, anyway. Regardless of how much is nature and how much is nurture, the fairest and most efficient thing to do today (i.e. now we don't live as small groups of hunter-gatherers) is to remove the nurture aspect, i.e. the sexed socialisation. That's true regardless of how much is nature and how much is nurture:

1) Extreme case - it's all nature and that applies to all people. If that's true, the socialisation is irrelevant and removing it will have no effect. Since it has no effect at all and takes up resources, there can be no valid objection to getting rid of it even in this most extreme possible scenario.

2) Extreme case - it's all nurture and that applues to all people. If that's true, the socialisation is completely unfair and wasteful. It has immense drawbacks and absolutely no advantages any more. It is everything bad and nothing good, so it should be got rid of.

3) A more realistic case - there's some degree of a natural trend towards some average differences between men and women in some things. If that's true, the socialisation is extremely unfair and wasteful because it restricts almost everyone to varying extents because only a few people would naturally completely match every sexed thing in every way to exactly the nurtured extent. Since it has huge drawbacks and no longer has any advantages, it should be got rid of.

Regardless of the degrees to which nature and nature contribute to the results, from one extreme to the other and everything in between, the nurture side should be got rid of.

 

[Angilion]

[..]
That's reasonable but I think it's more beneficial to try different methods and risk failure than to bury our heads in the sand and pretend nothing's wrong.

I think it's more beneficial to try for equality rather than enforcing irrational prejudice and discrimination and pretending that's equality.

Unless, of course, the goal is to increase irrational prejudice and discrimination. Because that's what it does - sexism causes sexism, racism causes racism, etc, and pretending that irrational prejudice and discrimination is equality corrupts and destroys the very idea of equality.

It's also never-ending. If sexism/racism/etc justifies sexism/racism/etc, then that sexism/racism/etc justifies sexism/racism/etc and that sexism/racism/etc justifies sexism/racism/etc and that sexism/racism/etc justifies sexism/racism/etc...and it never ends unless bigots succeed in completely wiping out their target group.

 

[cheesyboy]

Nature and nuture...there's no way to tell which is the cause unless one of them is significantly changed while the other isn't.

But we do know that nurture has a huge effect because it has been significantly changed and that has led to significant changes in various things.

We also know that sexed roles are at least partially caused by nurture. Partly because those two have changed significantly and partly because we know that sexed roles were essential for survival of societies for most of the existence of humans (and pre-human hominids). Small groups of people living as hunter-gatherers with stone age technology must enforce specific sexed roles or the group will die out. Existing sexed roles match up with those previously required ones, unsurprisingly.

So we have strong evidence that nurture plays at least a very large role in it. Maybe all of it. Maybe not.

It's a bit of a moot point, anyway. Regardless of how much is nature and how much is nurture, the fairest and most efficient thing to do today (i.e. now we don't live as small groups of hunter-gatherers) is to remove the nurture aspect, i.e. the sexed socialisation. That's true regardless of how much is nature and how much is nurture:

1) Extreme case - it's all nature and that applies to all people. If that's true, the socialisation is irrelevant and removing it will have no effect. Since it has no effect at all and takes up resources, there can be no valid objection to getting rid of it even in this most extreme possible scenario.

2) Extreme case - it's all nurture and that applues to all people. If that's true, the socialisation is completely unfair and wasteful. It has immense drawbacks and absolutely no advantages any more. It is everything bad and nothing good, so it should be got rid of.

3) A more realistic case - there's some degree of a natural trend towards some average differences between men and women in some things. If that's true, the socialisation is extremely unfair and wasteful because it restricts almost everyone to varying extents because only a few people would naturally completely match every sexed thing in every way to exactly the nurtured extent. Since it has huge drawbacks and no longer has any advantages, it should be got rid of.

Regardless of the degrees to which nature and nature contribute to the results, from one extreme to the other and everything in between, the nurture side should be got rid of.

There are too many words, so I couldn't concentrate for the whole thing, but I think I agree with all this.

Girls are fed a different set of influences than boys, so it shouldn't be a huge surprise that they get pushed in different directions.

 

[CREATIVE!11]

Excluding modern job changes, it is because more men are becoming beta. They struggle to get a girlfriend, then settle for anything, even if it puts them into roles they never wanted to do.

Most dudes have a collar around their necks and do whatever their girlfriend wants.

The guys that don't are usually chad who has washboard abs and is swimming in vagina.

 

[Efour]

When will it end? Never. Look at this thread. Online testosterone is powerful stuff.
It will end in 30 years when the "yuth" of today grow up and have their own families, all work in media.

 

[Ayahuasca]

The guys that don't are usually chad who has washboard abs and is swimming in vagina.

Don't forget Tyrone and Jemal, gotta keep some equality up in here.

 

[RaohNS]

There are too many words, so I couldn't concentrate for the whole thing, but I think I agree with all this.

Girls are fed a different set of influences than boys, so it shouldn't be a huge surprise that they get pushed in different directions.

Is this because of what girls want? Are editors playing to interests? Boys have as much targeted at them as girls do.

Its like the "ideal women's body" argument that still gets peddled then we have the "This is He-Man" (realistic expectations etc)

Do little boys have better imaginations than girls? I recall someone on these forums (an engineer) who said that men are naturally the more creative sex.

 

[alx]

Is this because of what girls want? Are editors playing to interests? Boys have as much targeted at them as girls do.

Its like the "ideal women's body" argument that still gets peddled then we have the "This is He-Man" (realistic expectations etc)

Do little boys have better imaginations than girls? I recall someone on these forums (an engineer) who said that men are naturally the more creative sex.

People tend to read what is put infront of them, and it tends to snowball from there (same with the news really).

It's surprising how powerful peer pressure/social norms are even if people would have a potential interest in something else.

We should also note that the thing about brains is that they can adapt, just because a male/female brain works in a certain way doesn't mean it can't be trained differently. Case point being how the brains of taxi drivers who undertake 'The Knowledge' adapt. How much of the way male/female brains work/are wired is due to nature/nuture? I'm no expert so happy for people to chip in.

 

[cheesyboy]

Is this because of what girls want? Are editors playing to interests? Boys have as much targeted at them as girls do.

Its like the "ideal women's body" argument that still gets peddled then we have the "This is He-Man" (realistic expectations etc)

Do little boys have better imaginations than girls? I recall someone on these forums (an engineer) who said that men are naturally the more creative sex.

It's less what girls (and boys) want, and more what they can be convinced to buy. Businesses hawking this stuff have no interest on what influences their product has upon girls' or boys' ambitions, tastes, mental health etc, but that doesn't mean that their conduct doesn't have an impact upon those things.

An interesting example is super hero cartoons, discussed here (from Kevin Smith's Fatman on Batman podcast, talking to superhero cartoon producer Paul Dini):
http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317

Superhero cartoon execs don't want a female audience - they see a female audience as a sign the cartoon is failing, because they can (or believe they can) sell more merch to boys (not necessarily because boys want more merch, but perhaps because parents of boys will be willing to buy them more of it - due to their own conditioning, most likely).

 

[RaohNS]

People tend to read what is put infront of them, and it tends to snowball from there (same with the news really).

It's surprising how powerful peer pressure/social norms are even if people would have a potential interest in something else.

We should also note that the thing about brains is that they can adapt, just because a male/female brain works in a certain way doesn't mean it can't be trained differently. Case point being how the brains of taxi drivers who undertake 'The Knowledge' adapt. How much of the way male/female brains work/are wired is due to nature/nuture? I'm no expert so happy for people to chip in.

Peer pressure does play a massive part however studies have shown that boys will have a tendency to go for certain toys. They will do however generally speaking males prefer something around facts, figures rather than emotive writing.

It's less what girls (and boys) want, and more what they can be convinced to buy. Businesses hawking this stuff have no interest on what influences their product has upon girls' or boys' ambitions, tastes, mental health etc, but that doesn't mean that their conduct doesn't have an impact upon those things.

An interesting example is super hero cartoons, discussed here (from Kevin Smith's Fatman on Batman podcast, talking to superhero cartoon producer Paul Dini):
http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317

Superhero cartoon execs don't want a female audience - they see a female audience as a sign the cartoon is failing, because they can (or believe they can) sell more merch to boys (not necessarily because boys want more merch, but perhaps because parents of boys will be willing to buy them more of it - due to their own conditioning, most likely).

I agree to a large extent. There is also something I read about none too long ago about imaginative creation. Fantasy thought. Girls tend to create a mental view of being accepted and being popular - the silubject of conversation etc (drama queens are so called perhaps for a reason). They may imagine themselves as a pop star with an army of followers. Boys tend to gravitate to a fantasy of an all powerful and omnipotent character. Eg they might imagine being a superhero type character or a person who invents or owns something that changes the world and plays parlay with governments etc. Even the wiki article on it was quite interesting.

Its that above example as to why from a brain type thing we can see a significant polarity. Empathic fields are women dominated. Healthcare etc. Logic and creative are generally male.

But the superhero argument I am familiar but again we now have studio execs changing all the rules. That does annoy the men. Rather sadly but in Batman vs Superman I hated how doomsday never managed to land a clean hit on wonder woman and she was the only person able to hurt Doomsday. Yet superman was being pummelled left right and centre. I was not alone in my view and my mate who is a major comic book fan to the point he can give you dates and #34 said it lets the film down.

We get that we want to show strong female characters but society must have better ways of doing it. There was a youtube thing along similar lines misandry on tv or something. That is not a fair stance. Oh lol its also one reason I detest Peppa Pig

 

[Tosno]

Superhero cartoon execs don't want a female audience - they see a female audience as a sign the cartoon is failing.

After female ghostbusters no wonder

 

[Efour]

Its always worth keeping the majority of your male population brainwashed into playing with guns tanks toys etc, because its them that will be sacrificed to protect the profits of your capitalist overlords when the wars come.

A better nonsexist society would give free weapon toys to all children and have some kind of youth based movement, ideally dressing them in brown shirts and instilling national socialist traditions.

 

[RaohNS]

After female ghostbusters no wonder

*puts lid back on can of worms