“Everyone is in favor of free speech… but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.” ― Winston Churchill
Hunter Biden’s laptop turns out to be exactly what the New York Post reported it to be. Exactly what presidential candidate Biden denied it to be.
Accurate, well researched reporting got the NYP blocked on Twitter and Facebook.
But that’s just one recent Prog conspiracy identified. Let us not forget these longer running scams:
Wage gap.
Recycling.
Males Pretending to be Females.
Aannd… Progs argue that this biological male competing athletically with biological females is the only “fair” thing to do. “Lia” has no advantage from having gone through puberty as a male…
You gonna believe us or your lying eyes?
This is a human with male chomosomes and male genitalia who insists on showering with women. Women he forces to use his anti-scientific pronouns. We used to know this by the term “abuse.”
We should regard the “wage gap” canard, all the Green Ordeal virtue signaling, and the chromosome denialists in the same light as Hunter’s laptop.
Since at least 1944, when congresswoman Winifred C. Stanley (R) N.Y., introduced H.R. 5056 (Prohibiting Discrimination in Pay on Account of Sex: PDPAS (in 1944 they weren’t so focused on teasing catchy acronyms out of what Bills were named), feminists have been building a myth that any discrepancy in pay between men and women is based pretty much exclusively on sexual discrimination.
Male congress creatures were slow thinkers since they waited until 1963 to pass the Equal Pay Act. Or maybe they were sufficiently cowed by a huge surge in bra burning; a power of women unmentioned in A Handmaid’s Tale. This initial Federal attempt at rebalancing the compensation universe took nearly two decades.
Then, it took nearly 60 more years before we could run the experiments to determine if such a Bill made sense. But now we know, take home pay differentials aren’t really the problem they’ve been claimed to be.
Lets pay attention to the science. Especially since the current generation of feminists have their panties even more twisted over the patriarchy of heterosexual white men – the updated epithet for ‘male chauvinist pig’.
In the abstracts quoted below, I haven’t bothered to emphasize the critical bits. If they aren’t obvious to you, you aren’t ready for the science.
“Female workers earn $0.89 for each male-worker dollar even in a unionized workplace where tasks, wages, and promotion schedules are identical for men and women by design. We use administrative time card data on bus and train operators to show that the earnings gap can be xplained by female operators taking, on average, 1.5 fewer hours of overtime and 1.3 more hours of unpaid time-off per week than male operators. Female operators, especially those who have dependents, pursue schedule conventionality, predictability, and controllability more than male operators. Analyzing two policy changes, we demonstrate that while reducing schedule controllability can reduce the earnings gap, it can also make workers—particularly female workers—worse off.”
“What contributes to gender-associated differences in preferences such as the willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust? Falk and Hermle studied 80,000 individuals in 76 countries who participated in a Global Preference Survey and compared the data with country-level variables such as gross domestic product and indices of gender inequality. They observed that the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences.”
“The growth of the “gig” economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favor women. We explore this by examining labor supply choices and earnings among more than a million rideshare drivers on Uber in the United States. We document a roughly 7% gender earnings gap amongst drivers. We show that this gap can be entirely attributed to three factors: experience on the platform (learning-by-doing), preferences and constraints over where to work (driven largely by where drivers live and, to a lesser extent, safety), and preferences for driving speed. We do not find that men and women are differentially affected by a taste for specific hours, a return to within-week work intensity, or customer discrimination. Our results suggest that, in a “gig” economy setting with no gender discrimination and highly flexible labor markets, women’s relatively high opportunity cost of non-paid-work time and gender-based differences in preferences and constraints can sustain a gender pay gap.”
“Studies of the gender pay gap are seldom able to simultaneously account for the range of alternative putative mechanisms underlying it. Using CloudResearch, an online microtask platform connecting employers to workers who perform research-related tasks, we examine whether gender pay discrepancies are still evident in a labor market characterized by anonymity, relatively homogeneous work, and flexibility. For 22,271 Mechanical Turk workers who participated in nearly 5 million tasks, we analyze hourly earnings by gender, controlling for key covariates which have been shown previously to lead to differential pay for men and women. On average, women’s hourly earnings were 10.5% lower than men’s. Several factors contributed to the gender pay gap, including the tendency for women to select tasks that have a lower advertised hourly pay. This study provides evidence that gender pay gaps can arise despite the absence of overt discrimination, labor segregation, and inflexible work arrangements, even after experience, education, and other human capital factors are controlled for. Findings highlight the need to examine other possible causes of the gender pay gap. Potential strategies for reducing the pay gap on online labor markets are also discussed.”
Women’s, excuse me, womxn’s, choices (IIRC, choice is a high value for them) are overwhelmingly the cause of the difference in take home pay. Not rates of pay based on sex. Womxn want their choices subsidized. They want equal outcome despite unequal exposure to danger, unequal hours worked, unequal educational choice, unequal working conditions, and unequal occupational choice.
Freedom distributes everything unevenly (diversely). Obviously, Statism does too. The difference is that when the state decrees who should be favored it relies on the opinion of the currently fashionable gang of ‘intellectual’ nannies. They know how we should conduct ourselves. Where we should live; what we can say; how we should eat; the conditions of employment we should desire.
“Female doctors are more likely than their male peers to shift to part-time work or stop working a few years after completing their medical training, according to a recent study published in the journal JAMA Network Open. Women, moreover, are more likely than men to cite family as a consideration in determining their work status…
“It’s very common for people to see this and say some women are just choosing to put family first — which is wonderful and a great choice for anyone who wants to make that. But in reality, what we’re seeing is that often there isn’t choice,” lead study author Elena Frank, the director of the University of Michigan’s Intern Health Study, said in a statement.
“Medicine has a big opportunity and, really, an obligation to set an example for how to support women and families,” she added.
I think this is confusing “medicine’s responsibility” (whatever that is) with feminist politics. That doesn’t mean women’s preferences don’t present a problem, though:
The U.S. is projected to experience a shortage of between 46,900 and 121,900 physicians in both primary care and specialty care by the year 2032…”
Research shows that hospital patients treated by female doctors are less likely than those treated by male doctors to die or be readmitted within a month of being discharged…
You can project a decline in the quality and quantity of available health care, exacerbated by female M.D.s leaving the work force.
How can “medicine” seize this opportunity? The suggested solution is “[W]ork flexibility, paid parental leave and on-site day care” for female doctors. We’re being told that government has to seize the opportunity on behalf of “medicine:” That these policies would keep female M.D.s on the job, though there’s no evidence presented for that, and there is evidence that women might still respond to motherhood the same way they do now.
Even if we apply more resources to support female careers in medicine, work remains attention to other things even while someone else is bonding with/watching your child.
Nonetheless, I’d support Dr. Frank’s options for any woman for whom it would solve the problem. All they have to do is negotiate for it: “Look, I want part-time work where I have significant influence on the specific hours I work. No ‘on-call.’ I want a parental leave savings account matching contribution. And I want you to pay for day care at a nearby provider. I’ll take a salary reduction in order to get that.” That is a choice, but it isn’t the “government as caretaker” idea being promoted. Leadership diversity would not be served.
So, are you surprised women are more likely to cite family? Well, men are more likely to internalize their responsibility – to economically support their family. How, for example, are these female doctors able to quit a lucrative profession they worked hard to get into? Did they marry into the patriarchy?
Even worse, according to Elena Frank, director of the University of Michigan’s Intern Health Study the problems are (emphasis mine) “not just because of the blow to leadership diversity in health care.”
That made me laugh. Sexual-apparatus-based diversity as a leadership credential is more important than health care quality and quantity.
There’s more angst along the same lines. The author proceeds from an assumption that while it may be fine for women doctors to choose family over work, the real problem is that they don’t have a choice because they are forced want to spend time with their children. They are hostages to housewifery and motherhood, lost to the leadership diversity project.
There are some questions we might ask about this. First, “Did Dr. Frank think to search for any female doctors who labor under her recommended conditions?” It’s likely there are some, and would nicely test her hypothesis.
Second, “Assuming approximately the same resources are required to educate each medical student, does that mean women are, on average, a non-optimal use of those investments?” Much of the investment is made by the female medical students, of course, but one can rationally argue that society is worse off because these women later abandon their profession – having occupied a scarce seat in med school.
What to do? Provide “free” female medical school education on the stipulation they must work until they’re at least 60? Somehow I think quality of care might suffer. And why wouldn’t that option be open to males, too?
That’s rhetorical. It wouldn’t promote chromosomal ‘diversity.’ Though now I’m wondering about trans people… First, for which side are they counted, diversity-wise? Anyway…
First, let’s stipulate that women do make different choices than men, including working conditions. See here and here for rigorous proof. In one case there’s a free wheeling entrepreneurial startup from the “woke” era. In the other case there’s a extensive, hidebound rule-set.
It is not arguable that males and females are not treated equally in either case. And they make the same choices.
I know the counter argument will be that the system was set up by males, and so favors a male view of working conditions. But, if you look at the reasons there is a “wage gap” you’ll see it’s just reality that’s in the way, and accommodating women’s choices would require… well, you think about what could be done without dedicating even greater resources exclusively to women.
But, back to female M.D.’s plight. Let’s look at some other possible fixes in order to grant women (for whom a medical career is only temporarily most important) Dr. Frank’s prescription. Can we give them incentives to consider that initial choice more carefully? Or, can we establish disincentives to following their own later anti-leadership diversity choices?
1- We could have the government insist female M.D.s must never marry, or must promise only to become married to a lower earning spouse. This might lock them into their chosen profession, making it sort of equal to most men, who are typically willing to work longer hours in more dangerous and uncomfortable occupations. Choice. For family.
2- Alternatively, I suppose, we could psychologically screen female Med school applicants. We could reject those most likely to care about children (though feminine empathy and compassion probably get lost, too), or we could find those women who will insist their husband be the primary caregiver, or women who agree to sterilization. This isn’t optimal, but it’s surely cheaper than mandating paid leave, on-site daycare, and employee selected work hours. In total, it’s no more or less coercive than making everyone, including the childless, pay for female M.D.s post-partum guilt.
After all, whoever is a stay at home parent gets continual compensated leave, intimately directed day-care, and work hours only constrained by the children’s needs – which seems to cover the whole objective.
3- Or, maybe these potential leadership diversity exemplars could work part time, and/or save up so they can take leave, and/or get together and fund their own day care close by their workplace. Doctors can afford these perks without outside support. Giving female doctors extra money to accomplish this is like requiring taxpayers to pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control pills.
Taking leave and working part time don’t help so much with the doctor shortage, of course, and I have a suspicion that what’s meant by “work flexibility” (since part time work is readily available already) is fewer hours for the same salary.
None of these remedies solve the economic problem: female doctors not only are a riskier initial investment than male doctors, but would end up costing more for maintenance. If I were a feminist, I wouldn’t be advertising it.
As a species, we might prefer a biological imperative which didn’t require trade offs based on sex. One where men didn’t die from work-related accidents 10 times as often as women, for example, though I’m sure we’d just be exchanging the current trade-offs for other (maybe worse) inequities.
I find this, A Victory for Female Athletes Everywhere, a compelling, thoughtful (fairly long) article from a person highly qualified to comment (emphasis mine):
“As an academic, I appreciate the value of intellectual inquiry that challenges our socially constructed defaults. As someone born into a mixed-race family steeped in the civil rights movement—my father was black and my mother was white—I was nurtured to recognize the harm that social constructions about race and sex can do to subordinated individuals, groups and societies. As the wife of a black man and the mother of two black sons, my radar for both explicit and implied racism is finely tuned. As a woman, a feminist and a lawyer, I have an abiding commitment to anti-discrimination norms, and to race and sex discrimination laws in particular. As a humanist, I believe that each one of us has the right to self-identify.”
She doesn’t even mention her pioneering, elite athletic background. She is highly likely to vote Progressive (‘socially constructed’, ‘implied racism’, ‘subordinated individuals’), so the usual SJW ad hominem counter arguments are blunted – and she deals with them, IAC.
I am struck by the implications for the core political debate about what the word “equality” implies. There’s a faction insisting it means equality of opportunity and a faction insisting it means equality of outcome. Gender feminists have been in the latter group, claiming different outcomes ipso facto prove discrimination based on sex. However, there is some tension (you might say cognitive dissonance) for that subset of those gender feminists (the so-called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) who want to preserve a traditional definition of the word “female” in the face of trans-sexual attack. And attack is the right word… If anyone can decide, moment to moment, that they are female without reference to biology – what’s the point of “Women’s Studies.”
It turns out, in the case of female athletics (a proxy for the ‘real world’), that you can’t even approach equality of outcome without equality of opportunity. No XX has the opportunity if XY is allowed to directly compete, so the outcome is no females on the podium for one definition of “female.”
It’s delicious watching them hoist by their own petard. If they stumble upon a bit of introspection, maybe they’ll apply the lesson to their prattle about the “wage gap.”
There are a couple of ways to look at this. The logical way is that we can agree on “equal pay for work of equal value.” If women’s soccer provides paying customers with value equal to men’s soccer, arguments for higher pay could be put to the customers.
Oh, wait. Those arguments have already been put. Case closed.
The other way is a lot more fun: Men who identify as women should be encouraged to play women’s soccer. Maybe they could get that group of 15 year old boys who trounced the US Women’s National soccer squad to defect, gender-wise. (There was a similar result in Australia.) This would raise the quality of “women’s” soccer, though it wouldn’t do much to increase actual women‘s pay.
Alternately, women soccer players could decide to identify as men and compete in the men’s league. We would see how many get hired.
Both of those solutions should easily be approved, since sports organizers are already letting males wrestle, run track, and lift weights in competition with females.
When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
Now, that’s a blockbuster, right? Feminists should be rejoicing. They aren’t. They are still whining, and the goalposts are being adjusted as you read this.
From Google’s point of view these results are a happy thing. If you wanted to spike some private suits, fire a shot across the bow of crazed employees, and stick a finger in the eye of the Labor Department all at once… you might want a study just like this.
For example:
The Labor Department is investigating whether the company systematically underpays women. It has been sued by former employees who claim they were paid less than men with the same qualifications.
However, according to critics, it isn’t enough that Google has been paying women more for equivalent work – they were started at lower salaries.
Google’s critics say it doesn’t come close to matching what a woman would make if she had been assigned to the appropriate pay grade in the first place…
This is a strange objection, because the data imply the opposite: Either men are started at lower salaries than they should be, or women get more substantial raises more quickly. Otherwise, how is it that men at Google are more likely to be underpaid?
Men disproportionately received raises and bonuses. Google apparently found that it’s men who are hired at lower than “equitable” salaries. Italics mine:
The company has done the study every year since 2012. At the end of 2017, it adjusted 228 employees’ salaries by a combined total of about $270,000. This year, new hires were included in the analysis for the first time, which Google said probably explained the big change in numbers.
Those who don’t get that relationship are probably not good candidates for high level software engineering jobs. They do better at diversity consulting.
Joelle Emerson, CEO of a company which profits by convincing its clients ‘increasing diversity’ is so hard it can’t be done without ‘woke’ consultants, explains:
Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity. That is not the same as addressing “equity,” she said, which would involve examining the structural hurdles that women face as engineers.
Google, “by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work” is doing it wrong. It needs to hire Ms. Emerson’s consultants.
You have to admit this is a nice twist on planned obsolescence. The “structural hurdles” will never be exhausted in the search for equality of outcome and the righteous battle to prevent diversity of thought.
A good example of Ms. Emerson’s definition of diversity would appear to be equal pay outcomes for those who can’t code, but only if they are female, or members of some other identity group not white or male.
“Equity” is a code word for equal outcome. In the ’60s, it was equal opportunity that drew sensible people to support changes in how women were treated. That’s all gone.
In countries with little to no institutional barriers to employment on the basis of identity, men and women often make choices (involving their own family and vocational priorities) that result in asymmetries in workplace representation and earnings (whether among Uber drivers or graduatesof prestigious MBA programs).
Men overwhelmingly outnumber women in the most dangerous jobs. This also doesn’t indicate that discrimination has taken place.
While unequal treatment before the law and corruption should not be tolerated, different career and family choices (as well as preferences and aptitudes) that result in asymmetries in workplace representation and earnings neither result from conspiracies nor from oppression.
King Arthur or Jay Gatsby?
Don Quixote or Humbert Humbert?
Howard Roarke or Ellsworth Toohey?
In writing Magnanimous millennial males it occurred to me that some millennial males claim to value selflessness, openness, and empathy over physical strength, competitiveness, and independence because they think it improves their chances of getting laid. If so, they’re apparently going to be disappointed.
Men frequently complain about being “friendzoned,” the idea being that men who are respectful toward their female interests get placed into the role of friend, rather than potential boyfriend…
These are complex, highly politicized dynamics that foster conflicts and finger pointing between the genders. Unfortunately, research suggests that women do in fact find sexist men attractive.
That quote benefits from a little parsing. First, are women more attracted to men they respect? I’d be interested in that answer. Second, what exactly is meant by “respectful” here? At one time opening a door for a woman was considered respectful by both parties.
And why “unfortunately?” Wouldn’t that depend on the meaning of sexist and sexier (and respect)? Oh, I know “sexism” carries heavy, despised bags. This implication is so obviously true to the author he doesn’t even examine it. But he does recognize something called “benevolent sexism.”
Maybe chivalry is a better term. But, chivalry, of course, is sexist. A man might get an earful if he opens a door for certain women. One assumes certain women don’t respect men who would open a door for them, but who knows? It’s a “highly politicized dynamic.”
One perhaps overly simple way to define sexism is, “treating women differently from men,” and it’s the definition Feminists use when they decry the non-existent “wage gap.” It doesn’t matter how dangerous the job, how many hours are worked, level of education, length of job experience, etc.: If women aren’t paid the same amount across the board, it’s because of sexism.
What definition is in use often depends on what point a Feminist is trying to make.
Since women are different from men, perhaps there’s a benefit to sexism. For both sexes. As Tom Lehrer was wont to say, “When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.”
