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mcginnisca

Why Sexism at the Office Makes Women Love Hillary Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Younger Democratic women are mostly for Bernie Sanders; older women lean more toward Hillary Clinton.
  • The idealistic but ungrateful naïfs who think sexism is a thing of the past and believe, as Mr. Sanders recently said, that “people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender” are seemingly battling the pantsuited old scolds prattling on about feminism
  • More time in a sexist world, and particularly in the workplace, radicalizes women.
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  • It’s not that young women aren’t feminists, or don’t care about sexism. For college-age women — Mr. Sanders’s female base — sexism tends to be linked to sex.
  • Young women are neither ungrateful to their feminist foremothers nor complacent; rather, they are activists for feminist causes that reflect their needs.
  • College-educated women see only a tiny pay gap in their early- and mid-20s, making 97 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues.
  • That experience starts to change a few more years into the work force. By 35, those same college-educated women are making 15 percent less than their male peers. Women’s earnings peak between ages 35 and 44 and then plateau, while men’s continue to rise.
  • When women have children, they’re penalized: They’re considered less competent, they’re less likely to be hired for a new job and they’re paid less
  • one of the few female partners always seemed to be in charge of ordering lunch
  • For the many women who live at the center of that time crush, Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on the wage gap, paid family leave and universal prekindergarten may be particularly appealing. Mr. Sanders, who also supports paid leave and universal pre-K, takes a different rhetorical tone, usually stressing affordable higher education and universal health care.
  • I watched as men with little or irrelevant experience were hired and promoted, because they had such great ideas, or they fit in better. “We want a woman,” the conclusion seemed to be, “just not this woman.”
  • in the now-common refrain about Hillary Clinton: “I want a woman president, just not this woman president.”
  • a 19-year-old aspiring lawyer who is volunteering for Mr. Sanders today will work for firms with more female partners and live in a world where the wage gap has shrunk. But the trends show that her experience in a decade is unlikely to be that different from mine.
  • Many more women over 25 are in the work force than those under, and women over 25 also do about twice as much unpaid domestic work as their younger counterparts.
  • I listened as some of my male colleagues opined on the need to marry a woman who would stay home with the children — that wasn’t sexist, they insisted, because it wasn’t that they thought only women should stay home; it was just that somebody had to, and the years in which they planned on having children would be crucial ones for their own careers.
  • Child care is just as expensive in many places as sending a kid to public university, but a college kid can get a part-time job. A toddler can’t.”
  • There are many other reasons women in the 30-and-over cohort may lean toward Mrs. Clinton. They’ve already seen promises of revolutionary change fall short. They may prefer a candidate with a progressive ideology but a more restrained, and potentially more effective, strategy for putting that ideology in place.
  • If it’s not this woman, this year, then who and when?
Javier E

'Messages of Shame Are Organized Around Gender' - The Atlantic - 3 views

  • Brown is a bestselling author and research professor who studies "vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame,
  • I recognized the culture she described in which institutionalized, nagging shame can cause people to put on so much emotional armor that they can't connect with others or access their authentic selves. I might have called those repressive forces "fear," or "self-doubt," or "insecurity," but, yeah, "shame" kind of covers all the bases.
  • the antidote to crippling shame is vulnerability. We tend to think of vulnerability as weakness; but in fact, she argues, it is the highest form of courage. To admit fear and pain, to reach out to others for help, to quiet the "gremlins" that tell us to keep our mouths shut and soldier on: this is how we become engaged, make human connections, and live "wholeheartedly."
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  • "messages of shame are organized around gender." For women, she said, there are whole constellations of often contradictory expectations that, if not met, are sources of shame.
  • But for men, the overarching message is that any weakness is shameful. And since vulnerability is often perceived as weakness, it is especially risky for men to practice vulnerability.
  • men's shame is not primarily inflicted by other men. Instead, it is the women in their lives who tend to be repelled when men show the chinks in their armor.
  • Ironically, she explained, men are often pressured to open up and talk about their feelings, and they are criticized for being emotionally walled-off; but if they get too real, they are met with revulsion. She recalled the first time she realized that she had been complicit in the shaming: "Holy Shit!" she said. "I am the patriarchy!"
  • there are three main practices men, in particular, need to engage in. The first is asking for help. The second is setting boundaries; for example, not taking on work or activities that you don't want to do. And the third is apologizing and "owning it" when you are wrong.
Javier E

Jordan Peterson Comes to Aspen - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Peterson is traveling the English-speaking world in order to spread the message of this core conviction: that the way to fix what ails Western societies is a psychological project, targeted at helping individuals to get their lives in order, not a sociological project that seeks to improve society through politics, or popular culture, or by focusing on class, racial, or gender identity.
  • the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, was an anomaly in this series of public appearances: a gathering largely populated by people—Democrats and centrist Republicans, corporate leaders, academics, millionaire philanthropists, journalists—invested in the contrary proposition, that the way to fix what ails society is a sociological project, one that effects change by focusing on politics, or changing popular culture, or spurring technological advances, or investing more in diversity and inclusiveness.
  • Many of its attendees, like many journalists, are most interested in Peterson as a political figure at the center of controversies
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  • Peterson deserves a full, appropriately complex accounting of his best and worst arguments; I intend to give him one soon. For now, I can only tell you how the Peterson phenomenon manifested one night in Aspen
  • “For the first time in human history the spoken word has the same reach as the written word, and there are no barriers to entry. That’s a Gutenberg revolution,” he said. “That’s a big deal. This is a game changer. The podcast world is also a Gutenberg moment but it’s even more extensive. The problem with books is that you can’t do anything else while you’re reading. But if you’re listening to a podcast you can be driving a tractor or a long haul truck or doing the dishes. So podcasts free up two hours a day for people to engage in educational activity they otherwise wouldn’t be able to engage in. That’s one-eighth of people’s lives. You’re handing people a lot of time back to engage in high-level intellectual education.
  • that technological revolution has revealed something good that we didn’t know before: “The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are. And people have a real hunger for deep intellectual dialogue.”
  • I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life? What, you stop searching for wisdom when you’re 22? I don’t think so. You don’t even start until you’re like in your mid 20s. So I knew universities were underserving the broader community a long time ago. But there wasn’t a mechanism whereby that could be rectified.
  • Universities are beyond forgiveness, he argued, because due to the growing ranks of administrators, there’s been a radical increase in tuition. “Unsuspecting students are given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s and their 40s, and the universities are enticing them to extend their carefree adolescence for a four year period at the cost of mortgaging their future in a deal that does not allow for escape through bankruptcy,” he complained. “So it’s essentially a form of indentured servitude. There’s no excuse for that … That cripples the economy because the students become overlaid with debt that they’ll never pay off at the time when they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks. That’s absolutely appalling.”
  • A critique I frequently hear from Peterson’s critics is that everything he says is either obvious or wrong. I think that critique fails insofar as I sometimes see some critics calling one of his statements obvious even as others insist it is obviously wrong.
  • a reliable difference among men and women cross-culturally is that men are more aggressive than women. Now what's the evidence for that? Here's one piece of evidence: There are 10 times as many men in prison. Now is that a sociocultural construct? It's like, no, it's not a sociocultural construct. Okay?
  • Here's another piece of data. Women try to commit suicide more than men by a lot, and that's because women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are. And there are reasons for that, and that's cross-cultural as well. Now men are way more likely to actually commit suicide. Why? Because they're more aggressive so they use lethal means. So now the question is how much more aggressive are men than women? The answer is not very much. So the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true. This is where you have to know something about statistics to understand the way the world works, instead of just applying your a priori ideological presuppositions to things that are too complex to fit in that rubric.
  • So if you draw two people out of a crowd, one man and one woman, and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the woman, you'd win 40 percent of the time. That's quite a lot. It isn't 50 percent of the time which would be no differences. But it’s a lot. There are lots of women who are more aggressive than lots of men. So the curves overlap a lot. There's way more similarity than difference. And this is along the dimension where there's the most difference. But here's the problem. You can take small differences at the average of a distribution. Then the distributions move off to the side. And then all the action is at the tail. So here's the situation. You don't care about how aggressive the average person is. It's not that relevant. What people care about is who is the most aggressive person out of 100, because that's the person you'd better watch out for.
  • Whenever I'm interviewed by journalists who have the scent of blood in their nose, let's say, they're very willing and able to characterize the situation I find myself in as political. But that's because they can't see the world in any other manner. The political is a tiny fraction of the world. And what I'm doing isn't political. It's psychological or theological. The political element is peripheral. And if people come to the live lectures, let's say, that's absolutely self-evident
  • In a New York Times article titled, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy,” the writer Nellie Bowles quoted her subject as follows:
  • Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married. “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.” Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.
  • Ever since, some Peterson critics have claimed that Peterson wants to force women to have sex with male incels, or something similarly dystopian.
  • ...it's an anthropological truism generated primarily through scholars on the left, just so everybody is clear about it, that societies that use monogamy as a social norm, which by the way is virtually every human society that ever existed, do that in an attempt to control the aggression that goes along with polygamy. It's like ‘Oh my God, how contentious can you get.’ Well, how many of you are in monogamous relationships? A majority. How is that enforced?...
  • If everyone you talk to is boring it’s not them! And so if you're rejected by the opposite sex, if you’re heterosexual, then you're wrong, they're not wrong, and you've got some work to do, man. You've got some difficult work to do. And there isn't anything I've been telling young men that's clearer than that … What I've been telling people is take the responsibility for failure onto yourself. That's a hint that you've got work to do. It could also be a hint that you're young and useless and why the hell would anybody have anything to do with you because you don't have anything to offer. And that's rectifiable. Maturity helps to rectify that.
  • And what's the gender? Men. Because if you go two standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are disjointed, then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the overrepresented group. That's why men are about 10 times more likely to be in prison.  
  • Weiss: You are often characterized, at least in the mainstream press, as being transphobic. If you had a student come to you and say, I was born female, I now identify as male, I want you to call me by male pronouns. Would you say yes to that?
  • Peterson: Well, it would depend on the student and the context and why I thought they were asking me and what I believe their demand actually characterized, and all of that. Because that can be done in a way that is genuine and acceptable, and a way that is manipulative and unacceptable. And if it was genuine and acceptable then I would have no problem with it. And if it was manipulative and unacceptable then not a chance. And you might think, ‘Well, who am I to judge?’ Well, first of all, I am a clinical psychologist, I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours. And I'm responsible for judging how I am going to use my words. I'd judge the same way I judge all my interactions with people, which is to the best of my ability, and characterized by all the errors that I'm prone to. I'm not saying that my judgment would be unerring. I live with the consequences and I'm willing to accept the responsibility.
  • But also to be clear about this, it never happened––I never refused to call anyone by anything they had asked me to call them by, although that's been reported multiple times. It's a complete falsehood. And it had nothing to do with the transgender issue as far as I'm concerned.
  • type one and type two error problem
  • note what his avowed position is: that he has never refused to call a transgender person by their preferred pronoun, that he has done so many times, that he would always try to err on the side of believing a request to be earnest, and that he reserves the right to decline a request he believes to be in bad faith. Whether one finds that to be reasonable or needlessly difficult, it seems irresponsible to tell trans people that a prominent intellectual hates them or is deeply antagonistic to them when the only seeming conflict is utterly hypothetical and ostensibly not even directed against people that Peterson believes to be trans, but only against people whom he does not believe to be trans
sissij

Gloria Steinem: Women Have 'Chick Flicks.' What About Men? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As the flight attendant read the choices aloud, a young man across the aisle said, “I don’t watch chick flicks!”
  • I wasn’t challenging his preference, but I did question the logic of his term.
  • especially if it had been written by women.
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  • Think about it: If “Anna Karenina" had been by Leah Tolstoy, or “The Scarlet Letter” by Nancy Hawthorne or “A Doll’s House” by Henrietta Ibsen — if “The Invisible Man” had been “The Invisible Woman” — would they have been hailed as classics?
  • Indeed, as long as men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women are not taken seriously when writing about ourselves, much less about men and public affairs
  • His “chick flick” label might help him avoid certain movies, but shouldn’t he have a label to guide him toward movies he actually liked?
  • Bias is, as always, unfair to everyone.
  •  
    I think this is gender stereotyping. People tend to make the assumption that women are more limited than men because they appear so emotional and irrational. However, in brain science, there is no real difference between male and female. The logic fallacies and flaws in reasoning stay true for everybody, not a specific gender. We also tends to label things to simplify. However, there are always exceptions to labels, as we learned in science. Labeling may filter out some really good stuff just based on our imprecise impression. -Sissi (3/4/2017)
cvanderloo

Culture matters a lot in successfully managing a pandemic - and many countries that did... - 0 views

  • Culture matters more than a leader’s gender in how a nation survives a global pandemic, according to a study I conducted on gender and COVID-19 management, which was published in December in the journal PLOS ONE.
  • We identified no statistically significant differences in deaths based on the gender of the country’s leader.
  • Instead, we found that pandemic outcomes hinged primarily on how egalitarian a country is.
    • cvanderloo
       
      egalitarian: relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities
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  • We identified two cultural variables with a statistically significant effect on death rate: individualism and “power distance”
  • Leaders do have important power during a crisis. They can institute emergency policies – from mask requirements to stay-at-home orders – to halt the virus’s spread. But it takes everyone’s cooperation to make these measures work.
  • Egalitarian countries also tend to reject traditional gender roles, so are more likely to elect women leaders. All 16 women-led countries in our study rated as “egalitarian.”
  • Women leaders enjoyed rare latitude during COVID-19 that allowed them to do everything in their power to manage it.
lucieperloff

Opinion | Why the Latest Republican Assault on L.G.B.T.Q. Rights Is Different - The New... - 0 views

  • Last month, Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed into law a discriminatory bill to prevent transgender people from using restrooms aligning with their gender identity at any business or place of public accommodation.
  • hese new laws are the latest in a series of unprecedented legislative assaults aimed at trans people that have swept state houses t
  • are not simply living in a state of emergency; we are living in many states of imminent danger
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  • Anti-equality extremists are clearly targeting transgender people again to score political points by demonizing marginalized communities and mischaracterizing movements like Black Lives Matter.
  • We need to take action now to prove the anti-trans arguments are wrong and unjust, and to draw maximum attention to what Republican leaders in these states are trying to do.
  • there simply is not a sudden population explosion of trans people, nor any sort of demand for special or new rights. This is about fairness and equal treatment.
  • t has significant health and safety consequences, especially for trans youth.
  • This includes laws like those in Arkansas, where legislators have banned critical, gender-affirming medical care for transgender children,
  • Active resistance is needed from administrators within the education system who are tasked with enforcing discriminatory trans sports bans, which isolate and prevent trans students from playing sports on teams consistent with their gender identity.
  • which requires businesses with “formal or informal” policies of allowing transgender people to use the appropriate restroom to post offensive and humiliating signage
  • So far in 2021, we are on track to exceed the number of trans and gender-nonconforming people murdered in 2020
  • extremist legislators continue advancing measures at a breakneck pace
  • Sometimes we have to make uncomfortable decisions because we are pushed to the fringes.
Javier E

Girls Outnumbered in New York's Elite Public Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the gap at the elite schools could be as elemental as their perception as havens for science, technology, engineering or math, making them a natural magnet for boys, just as girls might gravitate to schools known for humanities.
  • Mr. Finn, who, with Jessica A. Hockett, wrote the recent book, “Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.” “I think you’re looking at habit, culture, perceptions, tradition and curricular emphasis.”
  • enrollment in highly competitive high schools is 55 percent female. “The big gender-related chasm in American education these days is how much worse boys are doing, than girls,”
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  • Of the 3,060 students who applied to his school this year, 44 percent were boys. To help rank the candidates, he said, he simply adjusted the focus of student interviews to more effectively draw boys out in describing their own strengths. This year he offered seats to 136 boys and 134 girls. “Are we worried about getting unqualified boys?” asked Dr. Lerner. “No not at all.”
carolinewren

US bringing up the middle on gender-science stereotyping - 0 views

  • Gender stereotyping in which men are more strongly associated with science than women has been found in some unlikely countries, with the Netherlands leading the list and the United States in the middle at 38th, according to research that surveyed more than 350,000 people in 66 countries through a website called Project Implicit.
  • asked those surveyed how much they associated science with men or women and how quickly they associated words like "math" or "physics" with words like "woman" or "man." But they were not asked whether men or women were more competent at science.
  • "Educators should present examples beyond Marie Curie to help shape students' beliefs about who pursues science," said Linn. "Students reconsider who pursues science when they can compare examples of female scientists and reflect on their beliefs."
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  • only 26.6 percent of U.S. scientists are women, the 10th worst showing below No. 1 Japan with 12 percent women scientists.
  • Latvia, at No. 58, had the highest proportion, with 51.8 percent women scientists.
  • But change is on the way
  • Iran had the best showing in this category, at No. 60, with women representing 67.3 percent of college science majors.
johnsonma23

Women Describe Their Struggles With Gender Roles in Military - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “My male counterparts were deemed competent and capable until they proved otherwise, where on the other hand it was often assumed that I was incompetent until I proved I was not.”
  • Because we are female, a lot of respect slips through the cracks and we are treated as though we aren’t worth as much as a male
  • “I learned to blend in with the guys. I changed the way I talk and eliminated many so-called feminine characteristics so as not to draw attention to myself.
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  • “At one point, my supervisor was so concerned that he suggested that I wear my belt backward so that a rapist would have more difficulty pulling down my pants.
Emilio Ergueta

Nietzsche on Love | Issue 104 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

  • What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose.
  • Even during these times, between physical suffering and intense periods of writing, he pursued the company of learned women. Moreover, Nietzsche grew up in a family of women, turned to women for friendship, and witnessed his friends courtin
  • By calling our attention to the base, vulgar and selfish qualities of (heterosexual) erotic or sexual love, Nietzsche aims to strip love of its privileged status and demonstrate that what we conceive to be its opposites, such as egoism and greed, are in many instances inextricably bound up in the experience of love.
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  • In doing so, Nietzsche disassociates love from its other-worldly Christian-Platonic heritage, and so asserts his ethical claims concerning the value of the Earth over the other-worldly, and the truth of the body over the sacred.
  • Nietzsche speaks critically about the possessive or tyrannical qualities of masculine love alongside its fictionalising tendencies, stating that the natural functions of a woman’s body disgust men because they prevent him having complete access to her as a possession; they also encroach upon the conceptual perfection of love. He writes, “‘The human being under the skin’ is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.”
  • In other words, the experiences of both greed and love are the same drive or instinct, but depending upon the level of satisfaction one has achieved, this drive will be alternatively named ‘greed’ or ‘love’: satisfied people who feel their possessions (their lover for example) threatened by others will name other’s instinct for gain greed or avarice, whereas those who are still searching out something new to desire will impose a positive evaluation on that instinct and call it ‘love’.
  • Nietzsche pointedly distinguishes masculine from feminine love by the notions of devotion and fidelity. Whereas women want to surrender completely to love, to approach it as a faith, “to be taken and accepted as a possession” (363), Nietzsche claims male love hinges upon the possessive thirst to acquire more from the lover, and states that men who are inclined towards complete devotion are “not men.”
  • He proposes that love is close to greed and the lust for possession. Love is an instinctual force related to our biological and cultural drives, and as such, cannot be considered a moral good (GS 363).
  • In order to be successful in love, he counsels women to “simulate a lack of love” and to enact the roles that men find attractive. Nietzsche finds love comedic because it does not consist in some attempt to know the other deeply, but rather in the confirmation of male fantasies in which women perform their constructed gender roles.
  • Nietzsche’s writings on love have not surprisingly been influential on many feminist reflections on sex/gender. Although he is not making moralising claims about how one should love, his discussion of the difficult impact erotic and romantic relationships have on women, as well as his commentary on the ironies both sexes face in love, force his readers of both sexes to examine the roles that they play in love. It is difficult when reading him not to question one’s own performances in romantic relationships.
Javier E

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them
  • Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.
Javier E

The Bad News on 'Good' Girls - The New York Times - 2 views

  • What girls like us didn’t realize — what too often our own parents didn’t realize — is that the entrenched and often invisible gender biases of the adults around us would indelibly shape our paths and often set us on a different (harder, less fruitful) course than the boys in our orbit.
  • Girls today receive two conflicting messages: Be mighty and be good.
  • Girls are taught to protect themselves from predation, and they internalize the message that they are inherently vulnerable; boys move through the world not nearly as encumbered and certainly not seeing their own bodies as sources of weakness or objects for others’ desires.
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  • While girls are being told to protect themselves, too many boys are growing into the men they need to be protected from.
knudsenlu

The Brutal Math of Gender Inequality in Hollywood - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Lady Bird won the award for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, but its writer and director Greta Gerwig was curiously not nominated for Best Director. That category’s five nominees were all male. In fact, only one woman has ever won a Golden Globe for directing: Barbra Streisand, in 1984, for Yentl. At the time, Gerwig was six months old, and her film’s lead actress had not yet been born. Hollywood remains an industry where women are more likely to be celebrated for speaking out in front of a camera than for holding one.
  • Finally, actresses are vulnerable, not only because men dominate powerful occupations, but also because women are cast to portray the very quality of vulnerability
  • Altogether, these surveys and studies suggest something quite simple: The ratio of women in an industry (like film) or in an occupation within that industry (like directing) shapes how women are treated. While more than 80 percent of women say they have been harassed at work, they are 50 percent more likely to say so in male-dominated industries.
katherineharron

Women at Citi earn 27% less than men - CNN - 0 views

  • Citigroup is making progress toward shrinking its gender pay gap. But it still has some work to do.
  • Globally, the bank's female employees earned 27% less than men did, according to a new report from the company. That's a slight improvement over the 29% gender pay gap Citigroup reported for 2018. This year's analysis also found that the median income for minority workers in the US was 6% less than the median income for non-minorities, down from 7% last year.
  • When adjusted to account for job titles, seniority and location, women at Citigroup (C) earned 1% less than their male counterparts, according to the report. Citigroup said that following a review of its global pay, it made pay adjustments as part of this year's compensation cycle according to the blog post.The company also said it has committed to increasing representation at the assistant vice president through managing director levels to at least 40% for women globally and 8% for black employees in the US by the end of 2021.
Javier E

Is sanity returning to the trans debate? | The Spectator - 0 views

  • Mermaids, the UK charity for, in their own words, ‘gender variant and transgender children’ is under the spotlight. Following investigations by the Telegraph and Mail newspapers, as well as demands from critics concerned about child safeguarding, the Charity Commission has launched a regulatory compliance case and have said that they have written to the organisation’s trustees
  • The investigations found that Mermaids has been offering breast binders to girls reportedly as young as 13, and despite children saying their parents opposed the practice. Binding can often cause breathing difficulties, back pain and broken ribs. It was also uncovered that kids have been ‘congratulated’ online for identifying as transgender by staff and volunteers on the charity’s online help centre, with teenagers being advised that puberty blockers are safe and ‘totally reversible’.
  • Mermaids has been given half a million pounds in total from the National Lottery, and lauded by the likes of Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil and even Harry and Meghan. In other words, the charity has had powerful supporters and been like Teflon for a very long time. Starbucks did a fundraiser for them, more than 40 schools invited them in to educate teachers and kids about ‘gender identity’, and a number of corporates sponsor the charity.
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  • There is no such thing as a trans child. Mermaids passionately advocates for the availability of puberty blockers for kids, despite the growing bank of evidence that they can cause a multitude of harms. The vast majority of those prescribed blockers go to take cross-sex hormones further down the line.
  • In the dim and distant past, lobotomies were performed on those with mental illness and psychosis, and today distressed children are being fed the line that they are trapped in the wrong body and that drugs and surgery is the solution. When and how did it become acceptable to pump kids full of harmful hormones and remove healthy body parts as opposed to offering them therapy?
  • I was in court during the cross examination of Mermaids and its supporter, and heard loud and clear its dismissal of the fact that sex is immutable. As far as Mermaids and its lackeys are concerned, all that is necessary to identify and live as the opposite sex is an inner ‘feeling’ of gender identity. The witnesses declared that trans men are men, and trans women, women. They were seemingly unconcerned when presented with the fact that there has been a 4000-plus per cent increase in girls presenting at clinics such as the Tavistock GIDS, claiming to be trans boys.
  • A recent interim report on the Tavistock GIDs recommended that it be closed down in due course, and that much of the ‘treatment’ at the clinic was focused solely on affirming a child’s trans identity and not scrutinising related issues such as mental health issues, autistic disorders, and abuse within the family home.
  • I first contacted Mermaids in 2003, when investigating the notion of ‘trans children’ and was given the cold shoulder. Many other individuals and organisations that have grave concerns about its practices have spoken out, and as a result have been labelled bigots and transphobes. That we are now about to be validated is little comfort, bearing in mind the number of lives ruined by irreversible medical intervention on children who, if supported therapeutically, would likely have grown up to be lesbian or gay.
  • As a result of its spiteful attempt to discredit LGB Alliance, it seems the practice and ideology of Mermaids is now being exposed. In my view it is an organisation led by dangerous ideology that promotes medical intervention to kids that simply need to be supported in who they are and in the bodies they were born with. I believe it deserves to be shut down.
Javier E

Opinion | Transgender biology debates should focus on the brain, not the body - The Was... - 0 views

  • what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?
  • Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.
  • It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.
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  • What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.
  • But what does that mean, a male brain, or a female brain, or even a transgender one?
  • It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics, rather than a binary classification of either/or
  • yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology
  • The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender.
  • t there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.
  • trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans — to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can only be considered successful if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.
  • All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.
  • No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it.
  • what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred, but love.
  • the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.
Javier E

Opinion | The Question of Transgender Care - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.
  • Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.
  • Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being
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  • a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.
  • As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”
  • The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.
  • he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”
  • She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.
  • her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.
  • In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.
  • “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote
  • A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
  • Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence
  • Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.
Javier E

Gender-Reveal Parties and Cultural Despair : The New Yorker - 1 views

  • the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism
  • At bottom, the invented rituals that proliferate in our culture signify a disenchantment with modernity. If, like millions of Americans, you’re secular and the traditions of a church or temple have no hold on you, or if you’re assimilated and ethnic identity has faded away, then what is there to sustain you on the lonely path through a turbulent, rootless, uncertain world?
  • Science might not be enough, which is why so many educated people have turned against it and adopted hostile theories about childhood vaccination. This is the same disenchantment that has produced religious revivalism through much of the world.
Javier E

How Boys Teach Each Other to Be Boys - Noah Berlatsky - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • Judy Y. Chu reports on her two-year study in which she followed a group of boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade.
  • She concluded that most of what we think of as "boy" behavior isn't natural or authentic to boys, but is something they learn to perform. Boys aren't stoic or aggressive or hierarchical; they aren't bad at forming relationships or unable to express themselves. They pick up all these traditional traits of masculinity by adapting to a culture that expects and demands that they do so.
  • it seems like they become boys through learning from other boys; it's boys teaching themselves to be boys. So where do you see the inauthenticity or unnaturalness there?
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  • It's not as though they're arriving in their interactions having come from an isolated place. They're hearing messages from older siblings, from media, or some of the boys' parents
  • They're creating a culture for themselves based on the bits and pieces they've gotten elsewhere.
  • it's more that distinction between compromise and over-compromise, in which they're so focused on setting up a particular image that they believe will get them what they want—acceptance and popularity and success—and realizing that that comes at a cost.
  • they need to have at least one place or one relationship where they can do those things.
  • when you take the whole range of human capabilities and qualities, and you say one half is masculine, and one half is feminine, and only boys can be masculine, and only girls can be feminine, then everybody loses, because you're asking e
  • we live in a culture and a society where we are perceived in our bodies, and people respond to us accordingly. So boys and girls do grow up in a gendered society
  • infant studies show us that both boys and girls are born with a capacity for and a fundamental desire for relationships—to be close and to be connected. And if anything they find that boy babies need more help regulating themselves. When they are upset they need their primary caregiver to help them regulate and come back to a feeling of contentment.
  • then at these later reports when they get to adolescence where boys are reporting fewer close relationships, lower levels of intimacy within their close relationships, then that kind of suggests that for boys, their socialization and development are associated with a move out of relationships. They start out wanting and thriving in relationships, and then they are moved away from those protective relationships, and there's a cost.
  • the single best protector during adolescence, against psychological risks like low self-esteem and depression, and against social risks like unintended pregnancy, was having access to at least one close, confiding relationship. And that could be with a parent or a mentor or a friend or a sibling or whoever. The kids who had at least one close relationship were protected against all of those risks, and were better off for it.  
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