Cartoonist MariNaomi, who I’ve been anthologized with, makes an argument that’s popular among feminists.
I think we should stop making this argument, because it’s kind of a cheap shot, and it’s not really true. Scott Alexander, in his pre-Star-Slate-Codex blog, makes a persuasive argument:
Here, let me draw a handy table.
Obviously Reasonable Feminist Beliefs
– Women are not doormats.
– Women should not be forced to stand around in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.
– Women deserve equal civil rights including the right to vote.
– Rape is bad, the victims must be helped, and the perpetrators must be punished.
– Domestic violence is bad, the victims must be helped, and the perpetrators must be punished.
– Women should have equal opportunities and earn equal pay for equal work.
– Etc.Feminist Beliefs Currently Controversial In Our Society
– Abortion rights are important and need stronger protection.
– Current pay gaps are mostly the result of discrimination and should be met with government action.
– Women need better access to contraception, possibly with government support.
– There are no significant biological differences between male and female brains.
– Gender roles are not biologically determined.
– Incidents that look like male oppression of women should be punished more severely, and we should be less willing to accept male excuses that it was innocently-intentioned or misinterpreted.
– Etc.Obviously Unreasonable Feminist Beliefs
– Men are all without exception horrible people.
– Women are biologically superior to men.
– Men can absolutely never be the victims in cases of intersex conflict.
– Everything men do is about rape or phalluses or the patriarchy.
– It is acceptable to use violence to pursue feminist idealsSome people might classify one statement or another under a different heading, but my point is less that everyone must agree with my definition of “obviously” than that some feminist beliefs are much more socially palatable than others.
Which of these three groups most genuinely represents real feminism? Although the correct answer is that the question is meaningless, the practical answer is that the Feminist Beliefs Currently Controversial In Our Society group is what most discussions of feminism are actually about. There aren’t many people arguing for the Obviously Unreasonable Beliefs, there aren’t enough people arguing against the Obviously Reasonable Beliefs, at least not out loud where people can hear them, so most arguments between the people who identify as feminist and the people who don’t are about the Controversial Beliefs – and those are also where feminists are putting the most effort into changing our society. […]
In other words, opponents of feminism use straw men to make feminism look wrong beyond any possibility of controversy. Proponents of feminism use straw men to make feminists look right beyond any possibility of controversy. But they’re both straw-manning the other side and in reality feminism is controversial.
I don’t agree with all the details of Scott’s chart (in particular, “Incidents that look like male oppression of women should be punished more severely” seems like an odd argument that I’m not sure many actual feminists make), but his general argument seems correct to me. If feminism stood for nothing but the abstract principle of equality, then feminism wouldn’t be very controversial, at least in the U.S.. But as Richard pointed out in comments, the policy stances implied by equality, in the feminist view, are a lot more controversial.
Forget about policy–I don’t even think you can get feminists (or most other groups) to agree on general concepts of equality, much less what specific policy things we should do to make those various definitions of equality come to light.
As some examples of difficult questions on equality:
1) How unequally do you think society can ethically treat people (in the short term) with the goal of obtaining equality in the future? Is there an individual maximum, or an average, or…?
1a) Assuming that you will treat some people better/worse than others (either by selective restrictions selective benefits) on what basis can you do it–luck, class membership, bad acts, economics, something else?
1c) To what degree can/should you rely on gross generalizations and class memberships to make your decisions? How will that impact the goal of having people stop making gross generalizations based on class memberships?
1d) Should you use the same processes for selection, evaluation, qualification, etc. for both the benefited class and the losing-benefits class?
2) Assuming that you espouse “equality” and assuming that you also espouse “temporarily unequal treatment to get where we need to be:” How do you know when you get there? What happens to the process if you get there?What are the markers you will use? Who gets to decide what the markers are? Who decides when they have been reached?
3) How will you balance the competing goals of speed, accuracy, and benefits?
4) Since everything has inaccuracy: Do you use the same weight for both overcorrection and undercorrection? IOW, how would you weight (a) failing to sufficiently help an oppressed person; (b) helping a particular oppressed person too much; (c) failing to take enough away from a privileged person; and (d) taking too much away from a particular privileged person?
5) Who gets to implement and enforce the transfer of power from one group to another? Who are the referees? How will each side’s interests be protected? What will be the chances of corruption and rent-seeking?
6) How will you balance the competing equalities of opportunity, process, and outcome?
6a) Will the balance be the same now, during transition, and/or after completion?
6b) What will be the effect of personal choice and ability? What degree of ddisparity in outcomes will you accept?
And yet, legislation in pursuit of two of the “Obviously Reasonable Feminist Beliefs” (equal pay and the violence against women act) is opposed by many Republicans. Moreover, once you take the question of force out of it, many conservatives do believe that a woman’s place is in the home and many also would agree that women should submit to their husbands (although they’d never call that being a “doormat”). Is there anyone in the mainstream who actually believes the so-called “Obviously Unreasonable Feminist Beliefs”? I am really getting sick of false equivalencies.
And, in response to Gin & Wiskey – most feminist policy positions do not require unequal treatment of men, for example:
* equal pay for equal work (the transparency involved in this could also benefit marginalized men)
* access to reproductive healthcare
* equal funding for sports programs in schools
* blind auditions for symphonies and the like
* taking domestic violence seriously
* prosecuting rapists
Insofar as there are policy positions calling for unequal treatment (many have been struck down by courts recently), or unequal treatment may be needed (which it may be), I’d say that, for example, giving a slight preference to women in job hunts should end when studies stop showing that people have irrational bias against women (eg. same resume, male name gets better assessments than female name). Putting more effort and funding into taking care of female victims of domestic violence and rape should stop when women are no longer far more likely to be victims of these crimes. I really don’t think this is hard unless you want it to be.
This seems to be not entirely on point. To obtain the utopian ideal (“equal pay for equal work”) you would have to raise the salaries of women disproportionately to those of men. You would also, perhaps, have to push agendas which are not about “equality” per se, such as “transparency”, and you would have to further restrict general freedom to contract (by removing more and more things from the allowable negotiation points,)
again: you can’t pretend that this doesn’t involve unequal temporary treatment just by saying “we should treat everyone equally!” To use Title 9 as an example, there are–for a ton of reasons–more men who want to play sports and more people who want to attend men’s sporting matches, which means that the Title 9 restrictions generally have a negative effect on men. And that’s OK, but it’s silly to pretend that they don’t.
You may not realize it, but this comment (and the equal pay comment above) involve an interesting governmental stance. Both of them inherently stand for the concept that a third party (usually some government body) can and should decide what a private employer, hiring a private individual, “should want” from the job. IOW, an employer doesn’t get to choose their value structure; you do it for them. I certainly concede that additional governmental control is
Men are the main perps in both of those things. And I certainly agree that we should take DV more seriously, and that (when possible) we should prosecute rapists.* But again: since these are things which functionally result in a benefit to women and a harm to some (criminal) men, it seems strange to ignore that.
Huh. That is odd, since a lot of really really smart people have been debating this kind of stuff forever and we don’t have a solution yet. From my perspective, if the concept of attaining broad social equality seems anything OTHER than hideously complex and difficult, you’re either failing to think about it correctly or you are making a shit-ton of assumptions and calling them logical conclusions.
I don’t want it to be hard. It just is. I would rather have it be hard, though, than trust in the “simple solutions” of people who don’t want to think about it.
*Though I suspect you and I might disagree on the potential changes in rape defendant’s civil rights, and/or in rape laws, which would be required to convict substantially more rapists.
G & W – Do you think that sexual discrimination is actually a problem?
Yeah, I agree with Kate that many of this guy’s “obviously reasonable feminist beliefs” are more controversial than he presents, particularly among Republicans and conservative religious folks whose beliefs often require women to be doormats, who believe women shouldn’t work outside the home, and when you get down to the nitty-gritty actual details don’t actually believe in women’s full equality.
Although, of course, many of these beliefs are sometimes put in more civil-sounding language.
It just seems like the guy who made this argument is maybe living in a different world, or has a different take on reality than I’d bet many feminist, progressive women do.
Who, for instance, is the “our” in “our society.” How many, exactly, constitutes “many people” who supposedly do or do not hold certain beliefs? What basis does he have for knowing what topics “most discussions” about feminism entail?
Mostly, I disagree with his false equivalence that suggests that his “obviously reasonable feminist beliefs” are just as obvious to most people in “our society” as his “obviously unreasonable feminist beliefs.” It seems like he’s arguing from a, dare I say?!, privileged position of “Well, I don’t notice that much gender bias against, women therefore most people in our society probably don’t have it.”
The General Social Survey provides us access to massive amounts of data. I’m more familiar with race issues, but here’s one question that addresses an issue you raise.
Do you approve or disapprove of a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her?
In 1972: 67.2% Approve | 32.8% Disapprove
In 1998: 82.4% Approve | 17.6% Disapprove
(1998 was the last year they asked that question)
Not sure if this link will take you to the graph I’m looking at, but here it is:
http://www3.norc.org/GSS+Website/Data+Analysis/
Ok, that link won’t reproduce the chart, but it brings you to the program that created it.
Here are the results for same question, but using another tool. I can only do I year at time here, so this is 1998 (they also break it down by gender):
http://sda.berkeley.edu/quicktables/quickoptions.do
edit, that link did’t format either, so here you can reproduce it yourself:
http://sda.berkeley.edu/quicktables/quicksetoptions.do;jsessionid=EFF31F095ED0E514F07CA691650B00CD?reportKey=gss12%3A3
Same question as above, but results divided up by political party:
Results: Approve of Married Women Working BY Political Party (Percents)
Dems APPROVE………81.5%
Dems DISAPPROVE… 18.5%
Repubs APPROVE……..85.9%
Repubs DISAPPROVE…14.1%
Table limited to: 1998
I think this link will show all the data from 1972-1998
Edit: yay…it worked!
Women should not be forced to stand around in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.
So, lets run one more question:
Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men.
AGREE DISAGREE
1972 – –
1973 – –
1974 35.5 64.5
1975 35.6 64.4
1976 – –
1977 38.4 61.6
1978 31.1 68.9
1980 – –
1982 25.5 74.5
1983 23.4 76.6
1984 – –
1985 26.4 73.6
1986 23.3 76.7
1987 – –
1988 20.7 79.3
1989 20.1 79.9
1990 17.7 82.3
1991 18.7 81.3
1993 14.9 85.1
1994 13.4 86.6
1996 16.1 83.9
1998 14.8 85.2
Link
Results: Women Should Take Care of Home Not Country BY Political Party (Percents)
Table limited to: 1998
Democrats
AGREE 15.5
DISAGREE 84.5
Republicans:
AGREE 16.7
DISAGREE 83.3
http://sda.berkeley.edu/quicktables/quicksetoptions.do?reportKey=gss12%3A3
Yes, of course it is: there is obvious inequality in the system, which on average (though not in all circumstances) favors men over women. Just as there is inequality in the system which on average (though not in all circumstances) favors whites over POC. And so on.
But knowing that there is a problem in a general sense is a lot easier than deciding how to fix it. Because as I’ve said many times, fixing inequality logically requires you to treat people in an unequal fashion (you can’t fix an imbalance by adding equal weight to both sides, for hopefully-obvious reasons.)
Even if you were trying to maintain the status quo, it runs you into choices between the three competing equalities (opportunity, process, outcomes) because those three equalities literally cannot all be satisfied at the same time if you have a heterogenous starting group. And of course, if you’re trying to CHANGE the status quo, then you run into the same choices, but more extreme.
Which is interesting, and useful, and a whole lot of other things. But simple it is not, and people who think of it as “simple” or “obvious” scare me a bit especially if they have power to exercise.
gin-and-whiskey:
I agree that sometimes this is true. I disagree that it’s always true. To extend your metaphor, you can fix an imbalance by adding weight, but you can also fix it by taking weight away and leaving it balanced.
For instance, once upon a time most top orchestra performers were men, and there was a pervasive belief in the field that while women could be excellent, if you wanted the real cream of the crop, it was almost always going to be a man. This did not require outright, conscious bigotry; it simply required an unconscious belief that this was generally true. (Malcolm Gladwell discusses this at length in his excellent book, Blink.) This was especially true of certain instruments, like brass winds, where the ability to sustain a note is based almost entirely on actual lung capacity, and, the reasoning went, everyone knows that at the top of the curve, men have a higher lung capacity.
Fortunately in this particular case (and this is not true of all cases), there was a way to remove the weight: blind auditions. And when they did blind auditions, they found that lo!, more of the top instrumentalists in the world turned out to be women than ever had before… even among the horn players.
Obviously orchestras are a special case, but this is not a binary space. I think that there are many, many places where selection processes could be made more blind, in our society. For example, if applicants’ résumés were anonymized, people with black-sounding names might make it past the first cut at the same rate as people with WASP-sounding names, which we know currently does not happen. If selection processes, where possible, were made double-blind in this way and other ways, the result would be selection processes which, on average, select a higher grade of applicant.
Why don’t we do this? Because it requires effort, and to expend effort you have to admit that there’s a problem large enough to demand that amount of effort. And people won’t admit there’s a problem. The main barrier is people’s confidence that while, yes, the world is an imperfect place and OTHER people are terribly biased, THEY are capable of complete impartiality. Things like the split-second trustworthiness assessments done on faces of various races show that none of us are free of these sorts of biases.
But there are plenty of places where we could REMOVE weight, rather than ADD weight… if we took our blinders off and admitted that we all, as individuals, are not as downright cool as we would like to think we are.
Grace
Grace, you happen to have hit on one of my absolute favorite ways of correcting imbalance. Blind auditions are the rare way to reduce overall effects of class membership, rather than trying to transfer benefits from one class to another. They simply improve accuracy.Grace, you happen to have hit on one of my absolute favorite ways of correcting imbalance. Blind auditions are the rare way to reduce overall effects of personal bias, rather than simply changing the person who is exercising it. They simply improve accuracy.
Other examples are, say, rape: Better/faster investigations and better/faster processing of rape kits act to increase the %age of rapists who are convicted without increasing the risk of convicting the innocent, because they reduce the overall error.
In essence, those are neutral processes: they don’t mess with opportunity and they don’t concern themselves with outcomes. Nobody is suggesting that an orchestra should “hire more female trombonists” if they can’t play well enough from behind a curtain.
But of course that doesn’t always work, right? Think of some other neutral processes, like the SAT or other written tests. Feminists generally reject those neutral processes because of the outcomes, even though the tests themselves are facially neutral. That’s more of the “hire more female trombonists” meme. And unsurprisingly, people tend to support whichever process will give them the outcome that they happen to want for that situation.
But anyway: in my view the blind-audition thing is still, actually, a transfer of benefits. Without blind auditions, more men will be hired; with them, more of those jobs will (rightfully) to women. Sure, the men who would be hired over more-qualified women don’t deserve it, i.e. they are hired because they are thought to have “big lungs.” (But that is no surprise; if we thought that men DID deserve to be better represented then we would not be trying to “fix” the imbalance in the first place, right?) But so long as you’re taking jobs off the “male” table and putting them on the “female” table then you’re changing the balance of the tables.
I don’t know about double-blind (at some point you have to meet the person you hire, at least in many cases) but I generally agree.
But I think that the issue is one of distrust on both sides.
Feminists might correctly think that right-wingers would claim to use an equal process, but that they would actually discriminate anyway. Which is pretty much par for the course worldwide and not just by right wing people. You can talk the talk without walking the walk. That is pretty much the main issue, of course.
And the right wing might correctly think that feminists would get concessions or make claims on one type of equality but would actually strive for or demand a different type; or that they would deliberately conflate the various types*.
I don’t have much sympathy for the right wing. But as I was trying to point out above, I think that feminist tendencies to flip definitions are not serving their interests well.
*To use another social justice example from a different thread: In a group of 100 people that match U.S. racial makeups, the largest group by far will be white, straight, and cis.
So if you’re running OWS and you decide that you want “equality” in the name of justice, does “equality” mean that every person speaks for the same length of time? After all, “one person, one minute” which is hard to dismiss as “unequal….” but you hear mostly white, straight, cis people talking.
Or does “equality” mean that you pick out the lone gay Inuit and let her speak for a long while, because she will otherwise only get ignored? That is “ensuring that all views get equal time,” which is likewise hard to dismiss as “unequal…” but if you compare a straight cis white dude to the Inuit, they aren’t being treated like she is.
Both of those are valid positions. They illustrate the reality that equality is always a tradeoff.
[Edit made per G&W’s request –Amp]
G & W – Do you think that actions like, symphonies voluntarily doing blind auditions, can end sexual and racial discrimination? Do you think there is any role for government in ending discrimination?
To take the example of the SAT, we have studies showing that there is a measurable “stereotype threat” which reduces the scores of women on the math test and African Americans on the whole test. The effect can be created in white males taking the math test by telling them that Asians generally do better on it. Filling out forms before the test which include questions about sex and race increases this effect. Having students write a couple of paragraphs about what they are most proud of in their lives, or why they decided to go to college reduces the effect. So redesigning the test so that info about sex and race is only entered after the test and staring the test with a self-affirming essay can help. And yet, the test has been totally redesigned since these studies were done in the 1990’s and such adjustments were not made. Given that the testing companies will not redesign the test to make them more fair, what do we do?
Colleges and universities could weight scores to take into consideration the measured stereotype effect, and continue measuring it and adjusting those weights until the effect is eliminated. But again, no one has acted on it yet. Why would we think they might in future?
I simply don’t see a way to even make moderate progress on equality without government action.
Blind auditions avoid process discrimination. They don’t do a thing about opportunity discrimination, so if that exists then the outcomes will not meet the utopian ideal. Besides symphonies are incredibly unusual jobs insofar as they are really only hiring on one single and extraordinarily specialized skill and are selecting between people who are all super focused professionals. It’s not very applicable to most job hiring dynamics, which involve balancing between multiple skills (at multiple levels, and often including interpersonal skills) between people who are usually less qualified overall. There aren’t really that many places where those types of things will work.
Any? Yes, sure.
Well, you could do a lot of things. To use three examples:
1) You could try to work around stereotype threat on your own. If it doesn’t take much then you could do a 15 minute session just before the test started, or could teach classes on it prior to the test. You might decide to do this just for the classes you care about, or for everyone–like, say, boys (who are far from the most successful college students.)
2) You could decide that you wanted to measure performance of people at their closest-to-ideal performance level, and that it was important to do so for the whole test group. Then you would either change the test or go design a new test.
3) You could decide that you wanted to use the test as it is: after all, you will not be following applicants throughout college to ensure that they do not experience stereotype threat, so “as it is” may be the closest measure to applicant’s future performance.
Well, the “nobody has acted on it yet” part is not true, because they are doing it now.
There has been an enormous–HUGE–increase in admits for women, who graduate college at much higher rates than men, especially if they’re not white.
Also, colleges are admitting non-Asian POCs (they usually discriminate against Asians) at rates which equate to a very large increase in applicant desirability due to race, even to a degree which arguably creates problems for the applicants themselves. If colleges actually just looked at SAT scores and grades like you seem to think that they do, the number of non-white, non-Asian, applicants would drop like a rock at the more competitive institutions.
Women remain underrepresented in STEM fields but there are active programs which are aiming to cure that (as a father of girls I’m well aware of those things) and there are also admission pads there as well.
IOW, on average colleges are some of the most gung-ho AA proponents around. And not only have many colleges happily gone along with AA when necessary (and when mandated) but some of them have done so even when mandated to NOT use AA, which is to say that they have been deliberately inventive in finding ways around laws that prohibit consideration of race, in order to consider it in a way that approaches AA.
So I’m not sure where you’re getting the “nobody is doing anything” meme. It just ain’t true.
Perhaps it’s because you aren’t looking in the right place.
Historically, the SAT was deliberately non-neutral:
That Dwyer paper was in the 1970s. Efforts have been made to balance the test better since then, but they haven’t completely succeeded for the SAT, which still has about a 40-point gap in scores for men and women. (The ACT has a much smaller gender gap, by the way, so the SAT gap isn’t entirely something inherent to standardized tests like stereotype threat.)
Sometimes people arguing against AA in college admissions seem think that those decisions were based purely on numbers previously, and consideration of the personal characteristics of the students is something new and scary imposed by feminist and anti-racists (at least once women/nonwhite people were admitted to college at all). But on some level those things have always been considered, explicitly as well as implicitly. (I know this wasn’t an argument you were making, g&w, and it’s not directed at you–I just see it often enough elsewhere to be annoyed by it.)
***
On a related note, I can’t find a citation for this (heard it in a talk at a conference) but if you want a simple tool to get better evaluations of applications, ask all the evaluators to spend 5 minutes with each application. It seems that, for most people, snap or short-term decisions are more affected by implicit biases, and asking for 5 minutes immediately reduces (though doesn’t eliminate) the differences in the evaluation caused by assumptions about the applicant. This works even in situations where blind applications wouldn’t be possible due to the small size of the possible applicant pool, as happens in some academic fields.
Manju-
Maybe I didn’t articulate myself well or exactly pinpoint my issue with the original article. I wasn’t looking for you or anyone to do Scott’s research for him.
More relevantly, his “obviously reasonable feminist beliefs” are beliefs that used to not be “obviously reasonable” because many people, including those with religious and secular power, held opposing beliefs that they used to oppose women’s equality in tangible ways. For most of US history, the items on his list were not “givens.” Some of the opposing beliefs are still held, in fact, if your 1998 poll is accurate, by millions of people – people who many feminists think we still have to continually counter lest our gains be lost and, in some cases, interact with in our daily lives. These interactions, by the way, constitute both macro- and micro-aggressions.
Meanwhile, the “obviously unreasonable feminist beliefs,” I would argue (although I don’t have a poll to cite) are likely held by less than 1% of actual feminists. They are truly absurd straw arguments, even for one inventing straw arguments on purpose, that have never been held by any feminist with any semblance of real religious or secular power in the US to enact laws restricting male equality or opportunity. These beliefs seem largely like constructions specifically invented, or grossly exaggerated, by anti-feminists to discredit all feminists.
So when Scott says:
The article has a both sides are just as bad at defaming each other tone that just doesn’t ring true to me and is actually quite irritating, especially as it also has a tone of I’m the neutral arbiter just tellin’ it like it is.
To go back to the original post: I think it’s true that asking people to identify as feminist means more than just believing in equality–that there are specific ways of thinking about what that equality means which are more contentious than the bare statement of equality. And I like g&w’s breakdown of the devilish details* in the first comment. But, as kate and fannie said above, those lists seem strange to me…they already covered the problems with the Obviously (Un)reasonable Feminist Beliefs lists, but the Controversial Feminist Beliefs list also has lots of statements that are sort of correct when read literally, and yet seem to carry interpretations that I wouldn’t agree with. (“Gender roles are not biologically determined.” — I mean, there’s probably some biological components there, but 1) those biological differences are swamped by the social environment, and 2) they’re statistical averages and should not be used to dictate the life decisions of individual men and women.)
*That list, compared to the list in the original post, reminded me of one of my favorite quotes: “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”
“If you believe in equality, you’re a feminist” has always been a very shallow and silly argument. It’s time to retire it.
It’s really more that the “uncontroversial” beliefs are more accurately “uncontroversial so long as you allow everyone to define them in their own way.”
Take rape: The concept of punishing rapists has been around forever–rape is one of the old felonies, punishable by death. In that sense “we need to punish rapists” in the abstract is not especially controversial.
But there’s plenty of controversy in the details. First there’s the meta-question “how precise should the answers need to be?” And then there are questions like these: What behavior should be punished as rape? What type of evidence is needed to prove rape? How should rape accusations be tried/judged, and who should do the trying/judging? How should it be investigated and prosecuted? What type of assumptions are appropriate? What limitations do you put on the defendants evidence?
I don’t know why that would be called uncontroversial because frankly I doubt that many feminists would agree among themselves, much less any larger group of people including non-feminists. If anything, folks tend to answer things very generally and strongly resist specifics–which obscures disagreement, albeit in a way that doesn’t get much done.
Or, take “Women should have equal opportunities and earn equal pay for equal work.” I mean that all sounds well and good, but in practice people have radically different ideas of what it actually means.
There’s a biiiiiiig difference, after all, between
“On average, women who are surgeons should earn as much as men who are surgeons, irrespective of specialty, time off, class placement, and so on.” versus
“Women who are at the top of their medical school class and who then become cardiothoracic surgeons and who do not take more than a week off for child care and who work 80 hours/week for ten years should earn as much as men who are at the top of their medical class and who then become cardiothoracic surgeons and who do not take more than a week off for child care and who work 80 hours/week for ten years.”
Even ” Women should not be forced to stand around in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.” I mean, not many people disagree about that statement, if you take it literally. But no feminists actually do take it literally, which is why the followup isn’t “…so please unlock the kitchen door and give women some shoes,” but rather something like “…so we need to increase funding for birth control in poor areas, increase abortion access, and do a better job promoting elementary STEM programs for girls.” And though all of those things are good I can’t claim they’re uncontroversial on a national scale.
G & W. – On your “Take Rape” – all of those points are true for murder, theft – really almost any crime.
Kate, I certainly think that women and men should have equal access to reproductive healthcare.
The problem is that I think access means “no legal or physical barriers to the purchase of” rather than “if you can’t afford it, the taxpayer pays for it”. And I think that “reproductive healthcare” does not include elective abortion. So if I saw “Do you believe in equal access to reproductive healthcare?” on a questionnaire I’d check “Yes”.
Kind of like how I say I believe in immigration reform. But the word “reform” means “to improve or make better”, and what I think would improve immigration laws and policies are rather different than what most of the people on this blog think.
By equal access, I mean that if insurance and government programs cover men’s reproductive healthcare, they should also cover women’s reproductive health care. Women being “allowed” to pay out of pocket, while men are covered by insurance, medicaid, medicare, and the VA is not equal.
All pregnancies involve serious health risks. The risk of death in bringing a pregnancy to term is 14 times greater than the risk of death with a legal abortion. Pregnancy is even more risky for teenagers, people over 35 and people with a wide array of health conditions. Deciding how to manage those risks, and if bringing a pregnancy to term is in a person’s best interest is a healthcare decision. Reproductive healthcare for people who can become pregnant includes abortion.
What? Preeclampsia? Pshaw! So says my friend who came close to the edge during her 8 weeks in the hospital with her recent pregnancy. So says her nurses when telling about a recent patient who didn’t survive her preeclampsia (nor did her fetus).
Are there people advocating that D students should get paid the same as A students? That people at top university hospitals should get paid the same as small town doctors? That women who work 40 hours per week should get paid the same as men who work 80*? That seems like a straw man to me. The fact that ob/gyn’s and pediatricians (both areas dominated by women) get paid less than specialists in areas requiring similar complexity, but dominated by men, is sexist. I would like to see disparities like that corrected somehow. However, my understanding is that we’re still fighting to get the second kind of equal pay.
* In fact, surgeons working 80 hours per week just sounds f**king dangerous to me. The 40 hour work week and two day weekend weren’t just pulled out of the labour movement’s collective a**. Studies in the early 20th century showed that workers are most productive given these hours. Most people can push more for short periods, but regularly working 60 hour weeks does not result higher productivity, just more fatigue; and working much more than 60 results in less productivity than 40, because people have to spend so much time fixing mistakes that they wouldn’t have made if they weren’t exhausted.
No, not really. At least not in practice. Our national sense of what “murder” is and our national sense of “what should happen to people who murder other people” is not a single point, but it’s a much much much smaller circle than for rape.
What do you think the pay disparity is, in the studies which have attempted to control for the most variables?
Issues of race, stand your ground, when a police officer pulls the trigger…I think that there is a pretty big circle with murder too – and the hole tends to surround marginalized victims and privileged perpetrators. Funny that.
This isn’t going to be one of those one-sided “I won’t answer questions” conversations, is it?
It doesn’t appear to be one, so far. Am I missing something? Why do you think it might become one?
It varies widely based on what type of job we’re talking about.
file:///C:/Users/HN%20Broadway/Downloads/C350a_4.25.2011update.pdf
I think the file kate tried to link to can be found here (PDF).
Yes. The IWPR study you linked is an example. It compares weekly pay of everyone who works 35+ hrs.
Ah. So, IIRC that study looks at median weekly wage.
But of course that isn’t necessarily a measure of “equal work,” for the obvious reason that there’s a big difference between 35 hours/week and 55 hours/week. Men tend to work more hours.
In fact, if you granulate it much further, and you include professions and specializations and time on the job and time off and the like, you find that the imbalance starts to rapidly decrease. Some studies suggest it approaches zero. Which is to say that it’s not so much “women are getting paid a ton less than men for doing the exact same thing,” but rather “on average women are usually doing slightly different things and as a result they tend to get paid less on average.”
Now, I’m not foolish enough to think that “women are usually doing slightly different things” is just random change. You might reasonably argue something like “women tend to work fewer hours because of societal pressures regarding childcare and housecleaning” or “women should not be penalized for taking 9 months off for childcare” or whatever.
And those things could be true. But true though they may be, they’re not really in the “equal pay for equal work” arena.