Men are still more likely than women to be in paid work. Across the OECD countries some 83% of men of working age are in the labour market, compared with 64% of women. But the share of women at work is still rising. In the Nordic countries the gap between men and women has almost gone and in most of the big rich countries it is only ten or 15 percentage points. In the emerging markets it is much wider, not least because women do a lot of unpaid work in family businesses and farms that do not show up in the figures. However, in China the gap, at about 12 percentage points, is smaller than in many Western countries.
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Female labour markets: The cashier and the carpenter | The Economist - 0 views
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Measured by how many full-time jobs those hours would add up to, the average employment gap between men and women in the OECD widens to around a third. That is because women, particularly if they have children, are much more likely than men to work part-time (see chart 1), and even in full-time jobs they work shorter hours.
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The main reason why women do not put in long hours at their jobs is that they work long hours at home. Housework and child care the world over, but particularly in poor countries, are still seen mainly as a woman’s responsibility, whether or not she also has a formal job.
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Bishops Renew Fight on Abortion and Gay Marriage - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Some liberal Catholic commentators have criticized the bishops’ priorities, saying they are playing into the culture wars. John Gehring, Catholic outreach coordinator with Faith in Public Life, a liberal religious advocacy group in Washington, said, “The bishops speak in hushed tones when it comes to poverty and economic justice issues, and use a big megaphone when it comes to abortion and religious liberty issues.”
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The bishops are struggling to reclaim the role they played in the 1980s and into the '90s as a nationally recognized voice on the moral dimension of public policy issues like economic inequality, workers' rights, immigration and nuclear weapons proliferation. Since then, however, they have reordered their priorities, with abortion and homosexuality eclipsing poverty and economic injustice.
Balderdash: Researching the Rape Culture of America - 0 views
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"There was some pressure-at least I felt pressure-to have rape be as prevalent as possible . . .. I'm a pretty strong feminist, but one of the things I was fighting was that the really avid feminists were trying to get me to say that things were worse than they really are"
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One obvious reason for this inequity is that feminist advocates come largely from the middle class and so exert great pressure to protect their own. To render their claims plausible, they dramatize themselves as victims-survivors or "potential survivors." Another device is to expand the definition of rape...
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The common assumption that rape is a manifestation of misogyny is open to question... American society is exceptionally violent, and the violence is not specifically patriarchal or misogynist... The incidence of rape is many times lower in such countries as Greece, Portugal, or Japan-countries far more overtly patriarchal than ours...
Pink accused of failing the smell test « Yawning Bread on Wordpress - 0 views
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Alfian’s critique may well be spot on. But the implicit assumption behind such a view — that any social movement aimed at objective A must first satisfy the nose test for objective B — is highly problematic. Does one expect an animal rights group to satisfy class-equality standards among all its members, volunteers and supporters? Does one demand that an anti-abortion campaign lean over backwards to ensure gender equality?
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He is not demanding that Pink Dot should be different, at least not in so many words. As he has written, “I don’t deny or dismiss how meaningful [Pink Dot] might be to some people. It’s just that it has a different meaning for me,” and that was why he chose not to attend this year. Nor was he stopping others from attending either.
Nuanced differently is another criticism of his — that Pink Dot “comes across as anxious to colonise and co-opt all the streams that exist out there.”
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A social movement ultimately hinges on one key issue. The supporters it attracts subscribe to the core idea, but beyond that, may not agree on anything else. Nor is participation usually made conditional upon subscription to additional beliefs. There is no test for eligibility outside of the movement’s key aim, and people self-select when they join.
It should hardly be surprising therefore that on other issues, participants bring with them their (differing) biases. Or that they tend to come from certain social strata. To expect a gay-affirmative movement to meet purity standards by other yardsticks — racial views, religious representativeness, age profile, etc — is plain unrealistic.
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Writing on Facebook, playwright and poet Alfian Sa'at said of the gay-affirmative event Pink Dot, "like so many things in Singapore, [it] has ended up reproducing the power structures that it should aim to challenge." He was referring to the way Pink Dot has written all over it the social ascendancy of the English-speaking ethnic-Chinese middle class.
He reported a comment from a friend: "Pink Dot is as much a celebration of the LGBT community to love as it is a display of the self-love of Chinese, middle-class, English-educated liberals. What is inclusive in the term 'LGBT' is problematised by the fact that what is supposed to stand for the queer community in Singapore is almost exclusively 'CMEL'!"
Why is feminism still so afraid to focus on its flaws? | Deborah Orr | Comment is free ... - 0 views
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Feminists (and I'm generalising here) tend towards the conclusion that women who don't sign up are simply hostages to the tyranny of the patriarchy, whose feeble personal consciousnesses have refused to be raised.
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The fundamental and rather serious problem is the blunt and somewhat stubborn emphasis on "equality", difficult enough in a society deeply divided by economic inequality generally, even without the added complication that it's the people with care of children, whatever their sex, whose economic freedom is most compromised the world over.
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It has also embraced, then dumped the idea of women who "have it all". The archetypal feminist of the 80s and 90s had a fulfilling and dynamic career, wonderful children, a lovely home and fabulous grooming. Consensus on the impossibility of such a lifestyle for any but the wealthiest has been long-since reached.
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Claws and Flaws « Guardian Watch - 0 views
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Deborah Orr looks at why some women still don’t adopt feminism or call themselves feminists. She starts by saying that there is a myth that women reject feminism simply because it has a bad image. A kind of 80s dyke image. I agree with her point in relation to that myth, that:
‘The very fact that some feminists are so willing to accept that women don’t want the label for such superficial reasons, rather than crediting women with more profound intellectual discomfort, is an indication that even feminist attitudes can sometimes be dismissive of women and their legitimate concerns.’
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Orr writes:
‘The fundamental and rather serious problem is the blunt and somewhat stubborn emphasis on “equality“, difficult enough in a society deeply divided by economic inequality generally, even without the added complication that it’s the people with care of children, whatever their sex, whose economic freedom is most compromised the world over.’ (my emphasis)
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‘Feminists (and I’m generalising here) tend towards the conclusion that women who don’t sign up are simply hostages to the tyranny of the patriarchy, whose feeble personal consciousnesses have refused to be raised.’
And, her belief that women reject feminism for more complex and thought-out reasons than mere ‘false consciousness’.
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Columbia Ideas at Work : Feature : Like+Daughter,+Like+Father - 0 views
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a short time after male CEOs had daughters, women’s wages rose relative to men’s, shrinking the gender wage gap at their firms. The birth of a son, in contrast, had no effect on the wage gap. First daughters who were also the firstborn children of a CEO had a bigger effect than subsequent daughters, decreasing the gap by almost 3 percent. First daughters who were not the firstborn children of the CEOs had a less dramatic but still significant effect, closing the gap by 0.8 percent. The overall reduction in the gender wage gap was 0.5 percent.
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The researchers also found that these effects were strongest at firms with 50 or fewer employees, which they attribute to the fact that CEOs at smaller firms are typically more directly involved in making decisions that affect the pay of individual workers than CEOs at much larger firms.
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The effects were even stronger for employees with more education. “You would expect this given the potential for vicarious identification. Most CEOs went to college and have more formal education than the average person; they also expect their daughters to be educated,” Ross explains. It follows that CEOs may be more apt to see their more educated women employees as resembling a possible future incarnation of their daughters.
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Male CEOs With Daughters Treat Women Better - Ideas Market - WSJ - 0 views
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When a male CEO has a daughter, he moves to close the gender pay gap at his company, a new study finds.
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Three economists drew on remarkably thorough data kept on employees in Denmark’s private sector, examining the salaries of 734,200 workers at 6,320 firms, from 1995 through 2006. The database also included information on CEOs, including the sexes and birth dates of their children.
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Overall in Denmark, there is a gender wage gap of 21.5%, not adjusting for rank or hours worked, the authors said.
But the birth of a daughter to a male CEO caused that gap to close, in his company, that same year, by 0.5 percentage points. Breaking the data down further, the birth of a first daughter caused the gap to close by 0.8 percentage points. If the first daughter was also a first child, the gap closed by 2.8 percentage points (representing 13% of the gap).
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Inequality in the world's poorest countries is considered one of the main barriers to development. But this column points out that the inequality is about much more than the über-rich and the destitute - it is about access to political power. This column looks at political dynasties, where leadership is passed down through family ties, to see if these are a cause of the persistent social and economic divides.