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Weiye Loh

Democratic elites don’t seem to care much about equality (sentences to ponder) - 0 views

marginalrevolution.com/...ality-sentences-to-ponder.html

Elite Economics Inequality Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Sep 15
     
    The experimental behaviors of these three subject classes-once again, making real allocations with real money-revealed stark differences between attitudes toward economic justice among ordinary Americans and among the elite. To begin with, the Berkeley and Yale subjects were twice as likely to be selfish as their compatriots in general. In this respect, intermediate and extreme elites stand together with each other, and stand apart from the rest of the country. What's more, elite Americans show a far greater commitment to efficiency over equality than ordinary Americans. And this time, the bias toward efficiency increases with each increment of eliteness. The ALP subjects split roughly evenly between focusing on efficiency and focusing on equality; the Berkeley students favored efficiency over equality by a factor of roughly 3-to-2; and the Yale Law students favored efficiency by a factor of 4-to-1. Yale Law students' overwhelming, indeed almost eccentric, commitment to efficiency over equality is all the more astonishing given that the students self-identified as Democrats rather than Republicans-and thus sided with the party that claims to represent economic equality in partisan politics-by a factor of more than 10-to-1. An elite constituted by highly partisan Democrats thus showed an immensely greater commitment to efficiency over equality than the bipartisan population at large.
Weiye Loh

Sarah Palin and the Battle for Feminism - 0 views

www.freerepublic.com/...posts

Feminism Sarah Palin Conservative Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Not that the new crowd of right-wing women were ever explicitly hostile to feminism. On the contrary, they often embraced it, and for liberal feminists, that was precisely the problem. Breaking ranks with most of the conservative female political players who had come before, Palin eagerly paid homage to the movement. She gave thanks for being able to “stand . . . on the shoulders of women who had won hard-fought battles for things like equal pay and equal access.” The failed Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell called Gloria Steinem one of her inspirations. Sometimes the Palinistas even indulged in some gentle male-bashing: “For a long time people have seen the parties as good-ole’-boy, male-run institutions,” Rebecca Wales of the Tea Party Patriots said, according to Slate’s Hanna Rosin. “In the Tea Party, women have finally found their voice.”
  • It’s easy to see why liberal feminists were miffed. Because of their efforts, conservative women were now hurrying down congressional corridors. But where were these newcomers back when the struggle was on? They were making Hillary Clinton’s life hell when she declined to discard her maiden name and refused to bake cookies. They were sneering while activists undertook the work, the planning, and the endless organizing to pass antidiscrimination laws and to fight assumptions of female inferiority. Yet now the naysayers and laggards were singing “Kumbaya” with Gloria Steinem. When Rachel Campos-Duffy, wife of Republican congressman-elect Sean Duffy, praised the Capitol’s designated nursing room, where she was able to breast-feed her seven-month-old daughter during new-member festivities, one writer on Slate grumbled that it was “a progressive Democratic woman,” Nancy Pelosi, who “took the initiative to use government funds to better accommodate new mothers and transform Congress into a more family-friendly work environment.” Hypocrisy, thy name is Republican women!
  • The combination of a strong media presence and organizational heft gave feminists the power to define women’s issues in the political sphere. Of course, they had conservative female opponents, some of them formidable. In the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly, a preternaturally energetic mother of six, almost single-handedly blocked the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. “She drove the pro-ERA forces crazy,” Gail Collins writes in When Everything Changed, her history of the women’s movement. “They were used to thinking of themselves as the voice of American women, allied against the enemy: chauvinistic men.” Polls suggested that this presumed feminist mandate was a myth, but that didn’t stop feminists from portraying their conservative opponents as “anti-women” brainwashed by the patriarchy. Feminist media strength ensured that these accusations would not receive the public skepticism that they deserved.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • the arrival of Palin and friends crystallized the movement’s conflicts. For one thing, the Palinites had little interest in women’s issues, conventionally understood. Feminists like to say that they’re a diverse group, and it’s true that there have been areas of dispute in the past (on the subjects of lesbianism and pornography, for example), but overall, it was usually easy to separate those who supported “women’s issues” from those who didn’t. The newcomers, however, weren’t talking about child care, parental leave, equal-pay initiatives, or any other issue on the familiar agenda. They were talking about government debt and patronage, about TARP and bailouts and excessive regulation. In March 2010, a Quinnipiac poll found that 55 percent of Tea Party members were women—including five of the nine national coordinators of the Tea Party Patriots and 15 of the 25 state coordinators. A few months later, veteran newscaster Lesley Stahl probably spoke for a lot of media women during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “I wanted to ask all the gurus here why so many of the Tea Partiers are women,” she said. “I find that just intriguing and don’t quite understand why that has happened.” Indeed. For Stahl and her ilk, real women care about day care, not deficits.
  • Policy aside, the arrivistes were incomprehensible to liberals for cultural reasons. The old guard, consisting mostly of lawyers, writers, journalists, and other media types, tended to cluster on the coasts. The new crowd came from the South, the Midwest, and the West, and a number of them were businesswomen—not surprisingly, given that women are now majority or equal owners in nearly half of American businesses. Some were techies, such as Tea Party organizers Jenny Beth Martin of Georgia, a computer programmer, and Michelle Moore of Missouri, who ran a technology consulting firm. Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s newly elected governor, was an accountant in her previous life. The new congresswoman from South Dakota, Kristi Noem, runs the cattle ranch that she inherited from her family. Tech geeks, businesswomen, and ranchers: not Lesley Stahl feminism, that’s for sure.
  • Further unsettling the feminist framework was the vigorous maternalism of the newcomers. Many heartland women had seen in feminism’s enthusiastic careerism, as well as its resentment of men and domesticity, an implicit criticism of their own lives. Hence their rejection of the feminist label even as they joined the workforce and lived lives that looked, in many respects, consistent with the movement’s principles. Now there appeared on the scene a new model of female success, one in which maternalism and even housewifery were not at odds with wielding power on the public stage. Palin’s name for the female midterm candidates was telling: “Mama Grizzlies.” Dana Loesch, a homeschooling mother of two, “mommy blogger,” and columnist, cofounded the St. Louis Tea Party. Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, who won reelection in November, has taken in 23 foster children over the years. Before the election, some had predicted that 2010 would be another Year of the Woman; it would be closer to the truth to call it the Year of the Mom.
  • maternal feminism is nothing new. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, temperance fighters—and, to a lesser extent, suffragettes—viewed their role as wives and mothers as the source of their moral authority in public debates. But something important sets today’s maternal feminism apart from the earlier strain: it casts budgeting and governance as maternal issues. “From first-hand experience, [women] know you cannot spend your way out of debt at home and they know that philosophy translates to businesses and to the government,” Martin told Politico. Palin put her fiscal conservatism in the homey rhetoric of a PTA president: “I think a whole lot of moms . . . are concerned about government handing our kids the bill.”
  • The Palinites, then, have introduced an unfamiliar thought into American politics: maybe a trillion-dollar deficit is a woman’s issue. But where does that leave expensive, bureaucracy-heavy initiatives like universal pre-K, child care, and parental leave? Consider a recent feminist initiative, the Paycheck Fairness Act, passed in the House but scuttled in November by a few Republican Senate votes. Feminist supporters, saying that it would close loopholes in previous antidiscrimination legislation, didn’t worry about how redundant or bureaucratically tortured it might be or how many lawsuits it might unleash. But chances are that the Grizzlies, in keeping with their frontiersy individualism and their fears about ballooning deficits, would see in the act government run amok. After all, it would come on top of the 1963 Equal Pay Act; Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination; the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; innumerable state and local laws and regulations; and a crowd of watchdogs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. How are liberal feminists to understand the kind of soi-disant feminist who would vote against a Paycheck Fairness Act?
  • But there were liberal feminists who understood that the Grizzlies’ arrival confronted them with a question that they needed to take seriously: What is feminism?
  • Here is the novelist Amy Bloom writing in a Slate powwow on the question: If Sarah Palin explicitly supports equal pay for equal work, subsidized day care, Title IX, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, she’s a feminist. If she understands that she is a product of feminism and is prepared to pursue its goals, I can give her a pass on abortion because there are, apparently, honest-to-God feminists who believe that abortion is murder and even though I think that that’s not true, I have to respect that (I guess). But there is no such thing as free market/anti-legislation/I’ve-got-mine feminism. That definition, of course, would exclude most of the Palinites, who would surely call themselves free marketeers. Other feminists defined their movement in such meaningless generalities as to surrender to the conservatives at the gate. “Feminism to me means equality for all women and regard for women’s choices,” the legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick ventured in the Slate forum. Elsewhere, phrases like “women’s progress,” “women’s interests,” “policies that move women forward,” and “goals that benefit women” also appeared in the public discussion about the meaning of feminism.
  • But the Palinites have drawn big question marks around language like this. What does “equality” mean? Is it equal opportunity, as the newcomers would probably say? Or equal results, as many feminists appear to believe? Does it mean women’s choosing how to run their lives, just as men do? (Grizzlies.) Or does it refer to absolute parity between men and women? (Liberals.) How can both sides claim the feminist mantle with such different understandings of government’s function and of women’s progress?
  • And these divisions don’t begin to address the biggest bone of contention of all: abortion. The writer and movie director Nora Ephron answered the what-is-feminism quiz simply by announcing: “You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.” Many liberals agree. Yet most Grizzlies oppose abortion; Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who lost in November, even rejected it in the cases of rape and incest. Palin has praised young women who carry unintended pregnancies to term as “strong,” “smart,” and “capable.” It seems unlikely that the Grizzlies can successfully recast feminism as antiabortion, but surveys suggest that women have been growing less sympathetic to the proabortion position—so who knows?
  • None of this is proof, of course, that the Palinites “speak for women” any more than feminists do. The midterm election reveals an ambiguous picture about women’s politics. There are a record number of new Republican women in the House of Representatives, in governors’ mansions, and in state legislatures. For the first time since exit polls have been taken, slightly more women voted for Republicans than for Democrats in the congressional election. Nevertheless, according to the Center for American Women in Politics, men were still 7 percentage points likelier than women to vote for a Republican House candidate in 2010. That gender gap is the same size as the one we saw in the 2008 presidential election. To make matters more confusing, a marriage gap also exists: married women were far more likely to vote Republican than single women in 2010. More evidence that feminism is up for grabs.
Weiye Loh

Gay equality helps fight HIV, but don't oversell it « Yawning Bread on Wordpress - 0 views

yawningbread.wordpress.com/...fight-hiv-but-dont-oversell-it

Law Discrimination Homosexuality HIV_AIDS Singapore

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • while anti-gay legislation does indeed have this adverse effect on the health of gay and transgendered communities, a cursory look at the pattern of the HIV epidemic in Commonwealth countries will reveal that most cases are transmitted heterosexually. Kirby did try to enlarge his point by saying that anti-gay laws are just one example of the kinds of laws and policies that marginalise people at risk, e.g. sex workers, or women generally, all blunting efforts at outreach to their respective segments of society, but this mention was so quick in passing, I was afraid people might not have digested it. And that all they were left with was the impression that he had claimed anti-gay laws were the cause of the much higher incidence of HIV in Commonwealth countries. In the general case, that claim does not stand, no matter how pertinent it is to HIV among gay and transgendered people.
  • The reduction of gay equality to a matter of economic benefit troubled me. Even worse were references to the Pink Dollar, with the unstated characterisation of gay people as better off than average (Where’s the evidence? I asked) and mindlessly consumerist.
  • I am uncomfortable with too much focus on the health benefits of repeal. Firstly, the benefits can be limited because there are plenty of other factors that impact on the effectiveness of health services, and secondly, it misses the point. People who favour anti-gay legislation do so not because they primarily want to damage the health of gay people. There are a whole host of other reasons that still need addressing. However difficult, we cannot shirk from the most fundamental reason for repeal of Section 377A and gay equality in general: Equality is a human right, and to impair equality for one group today would undermine the claim to equality for all other groups tomorrow.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Australia, just in case some readers don’t know, does not have anything like our Section 377A that makes “gross indecency between two males” a criminal offence. In that sense, it is free from anti-gay legislation. Still, it is far from paradise. Homophobic groups continue to exist and to exert themselves.
  • Removing anti-gay laws does not remove anti-gay prejudice. But it strengthened his argument many times over in the quick reversal of the decision, and the demonstration by HIV groups and public bodies (Advertising Standards Bureau) of their commitment to equality when carrying out their missions.
Weiye Loh

Milton Friedman had it right, cut equal pay legislation | The Cluster - 0 views

mercercluster.com/ight-cut-equal-pay-legislation

Discrimination Pay Sexism Equality Policy

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Jan 14
     
    "Milton Friedman, an economist, made a very reasonable argument against equal pay legislation. He argued that if you look at employers who hire men over women they have their reasons. These reasons might stem from sexist tendencies, or they may not. But if the offended group offers to receive less in wages to do the same labor, then now the employer bears a cost for this discrimination which is the difference between what he would pay the man versus the woman. The woman has a trump card to fight against discrimination which is that she can offer to work for less. No matter how sexist and chauvinistic the employer might be, he will be forced to recalculate whether his outdated beliefs are worth the cost. Now add equal pay for equal work legislation into the scenario. Now the woman has lost her trump card because the employer is forced to pay the same wage. Now his sexism does not cost him anything and he is free to employ men over women without bearing the cost he would have absent the legislation."
Weiye Loh

Wage Gap Myth Exposed -- By Feminists | Christina Hoff Sommers - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...wage-gap_b_2073804.html

Gender Equality Wage Gap

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Furthermore, the AAUW's 6.6 cents includes some large legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories. For example, its researchers count "social science" as one college major and report that, among such majors, women earned only 83 percent of what men earned. That may sound unfair... until you consider that "social science" includes both economics and sociology majors. Economics majors (66 percent male) have a median income of $70,000; for sociology majors (68 percent female) it is $40,000.
  • Could the gender wage gap turn out to be zero? Probably not. The AAUW correctly notes that there is still evidence of residual bias against women in the workplace. However, with the gap approaching a few cents, there is not a lot of room for discrimination. And as economists frequently remind us, if it were really true that an employer could get away with paying Jill less than Jack for the same work, clever entrepreneurs would fire all their male employees, replace them with females, and enjoy a huge market advantage.
  • Women's groups will counter that even if most of the wage gap can be explained by women's choices, those choices are not truly free. Women who major in sociology rather than economics, or who choose family-friendly jobs over those that pay better but offer less flexibility, may be compelled by cultural stereotypes.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • According to the National Organization for Women (NOW), powerful sexist stereotypes "steer" women and men "toward different education, training, and career paths" and family roles. But are American women really as much in thrall to stereotypes as their feminist protectors claim? Aren't women capable of understanding their real preferences and making decisions for themselves? NOW needs to show, not dogmatically assert, that women's choices are not free. And it needs to explain why, by contrast, the life choices it promotes are the authentic ones -- what women truly want, and what will make them happier and more fulfilled.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 14
     
    "If you believe women suffer systemic wage discrimination, read the new American Association of University Women (AAUW) study Graduating to a Pay Gap. Bypass the verbal sleights of hand and take a hard look at the numbers. Women are close to achieving the goal of equal pay for equal work. They may be there already. How many times have you heard that, for the same work, women receive 77 cents for every dollar a man earns? This alleged unfairness is the basis for the annual Equal Pay Day observed each year about mid-April to symbolize how far into the current year women have to work to catch up with men's earnings from the previous year. If the AAUW is right, Equal Pay Day will now have to be moved to early January."
Weiye Loh

Google, Microsoft, And Others Commit To Improving Workplaces For LGBT Employeesfastcocr... - 0 views

m.fastcompany.com/...ing-workplaces-for-lgbt-employ

Work Place Equality Sexuality

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Oct 15
     
    The Human Rights Campaign announced a new global coalition of companies at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday committed to making workplaces around the world fair and equal for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees. The founding members of the coalition include Google, IBM, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and AT&T. "We are proud to bring together some of the world's largest companies to advance LGBT equality around the globe," Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin said in a statement. "These corporate leaders, which employ 1.4 million employees worldwide, understand that equality, inclusion, and engagement are pivotal to business success. Today, they are sending a resounding message that LGBT people are valued, they are equal, and they deserve a fair chance to earn a living and provide for their families no matter where they live.
Weiye Loh

Women Earn Less Than Men, Especially at the Top - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...rsists-especially-for-the-rich

Pay Gender Equality Income

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • even though the gap narrows when you control for these factors, it is still large when you look at a subset of the careers PayScale examined: the high earners. In jobs that pay more than $100,000, women earn just 87 percent of what men receive, even after adjusting for outside factors. You can see this in the second chart above — around the $100,000 mark, many more dots start to fall beneath the equal-wage line.
  • jobs in which quality is easier to measure are more likely to be compensated based on merit, so equally qualified men and women are likely to receive equal pay. On the other hand, in jobs where quality measures are more subjective, meritocracy may not rule, and men may be better compensated for reasons other than their qualifications. For example, perhaps men are subconsciously viewed as more competent than women, or are more adept at negotiating for raises.
  • After controlling for outside factors, some of the biggest gender pay gaps are in jobs like chief executive (in which, after PayScale adjusted the data, women earn 71 percent of what men earn), hospital administrator (women earn 77 percent of what equally qualified men earn) and chief operating officer (women earn 80 percent of what equally qualified men earn).In each of these jobs, performance quality is a relatively subjective measure. Compare those jobs to positions like engineers, actuaries or electricians, where the criteria for a job well done might be relatively more concrete or measurable — and where the salaries earned by men and women are roughly equal.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • There are certainly alternative explanations, including factors that PayScale did not control for. For example, Mr. Lee and his team were not able to control for hours worked each week, since they didn’t have that data.
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Sep 11
     
    for most careers the company studied, PayScale found that the pay gap is largely the result of outside factors. Within a specific job, before controlling for outside factors the typical female worker earns pay that is only 90 percent of the typical male worker's pay; after controlling for these variables, she earns 94 percent of the typical male worker's pay. For jobs paying below $100,000, the gap narrows further. The implication is that in most jobs where a wage gap exists, it is probably not due to overt discrimination, with bosses deciding, Mad-Men-style, that women should receive unequal pay for equal work. Rather, in most jobs, the different career choices that men and women make - or perhaps the different career opportunities men and women have available to them - account for big differences in pay, says  Al Lee, PayScale's director of quantitative analysis.
Weiye Loh

Fairness > equality - Marginal REVOLUTION - 0 views

marginalrevolution.com/...fairness-equality.html

Fairness Inequality Social Psychology

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Apr 17
     
    despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.
Weiye Loh

Cruz Breaks With Other Candidates, Slams Drafting Females | The Stream - 0 views

stream.org/didates-slams-drafting-females

Gender Equality Draft Conscription Army United States

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Feb 16
     
     two GOP lawmakers, Reps. Duncan Hunter and Ryan Zinke, introduced legislation that would require women to sign up for the draft. Hunter, a Marine Corps veteran, said although he introduced the legislation, it's so noxious to him personally that he may even vote against it. For Hunter, the point of the bill is to illustrate that an equal draft is an inevitable consequence of equal access to all combat roles. If an equal draft is absurd, then so is opening up all combat positions to women.
Weiye Loh

Divorce laws and the economic behavior of married couples | Microeconomic Insights - 0 views

microeconomicinsights.org/ic-behavior-of-married-couples

Divorce Gender Equality Law Economics

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Feb 16
     
    By regulating when divorce can occur and how resources are divided when it does, divorce laws can affect people's behavior and their wellbeing both during marriage and at divorce. Household survey data from the United States shows that the introduction of unilateral divorce in states that imposed an equal division of property is associated with higher household savings and lower female employment rates among couples that are already married. This paper develops a model of household behavior to account for these effects and study how current laws can affect the wellbeing of different household members. Compared to equal division of property, separate property or prenuptial agreements can reduce distortions and increase equity whenever spouses share consumption equally.
Weiye Loh

People Actually Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...411784

Income Inequality Fairness Philosophy

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • few worry about inequalities between the very rich and the very well off, even though these might be greater, both absolutely and proportionately, than inequalities between the moderately well-off and the poor. A world in which everyone suffered from horrible poverty would be a perfectly equal one, he says, but few would prefer that to the world in which we now live.
  • researchers have found that if you ask children to distribute items to strangers, they are strongly biased towards equal divisions, even in extreme situations.
  • It might seem as though these responses reflect a burning desire for equality, but more likely they reflect a wish for fairness. It is only because Dan and Mark did the same work that they should get the same reward. And so when Shaw and Olson told the children “Dan did more work than Mark,” they were quite comfortable giving three to Dan and two to Mark. In other words, they were fine with inequality, so long as it was fair.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Oct 15
     
    in his just-published book, On Inequality, the philosopher Henry Frankfurt argues that economic equality has no intrinsic value. This is a moral claim, but it's also a psychological one: Frankfurt suggests that if people take the time to reflect, they'll realize that inequality isn't really what's bothering them. People might be troubled by what they see as unjust causes of economic inequality, a perfectly reasonable concern given how much your income and wealth are determined by accidents of birth, including how much money your parents had, your sex, and the color of your skin. We are troubled as well by potential consequences of economic inequality. We may think it corrodes democracy, or increases crime, or diminishes overall happiness. Most of all, people worry about poverty-not that some have less, but rather "that those with less have too little."
Weiye Loh

Poor white boys get 'a worse start in life' says equality report - BBC Newsbeat - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...t-in-life-says-equality-report

Gender Race Equality Poverty

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 May 18 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 25 May 18
     
    "If you're white, male and poor enough to qualify for a free meal at school then you face the toughest challenge when starting out in life. That's what the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said in "the most comprehensive review ever carried out on progress towards greater equality in Britain". The suggestion is because white male poor pupils do worse at school their chances of getting good jobs is reduced."
Weiye Loh

Why I finally got married (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

Marriage Homosexuality Institution Tradition

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Ever since the voters of our state enacted marriage equality in a 2012 referendum, dozens of friends have entered into same-sex marriages. Many had been together for years or even decades but rushed to get the seal of the state on their unions. What has struck me about this boomlet of connubial bliss -- a steady parade of weddings with double white dresses or double tuxedos, and all the traditional trappings and rituals -- is that something very deeply American is happening: We are using progress to conserve an institution. And/or: We are conserving something to make progress.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Sep 14
     
    "They showed us that marriage is different. That "wife" and "husband" are different from "partner" or "girlfriend/boyfriend." That vows spoken publicly are different from assurances whispered privately. That if fear should block us from exercising a right like the right to marry, then we should consider how it'd feel to be denied the right altogether. That the reason this institution is vital is that in the end it's not about rights; it's about responsibility -- of one spouse to the other; of the couple to their people, and vice versa. Opponents of marriage equality have claimed that letting gays and lesbians marry would devalue marriage, subvert its purposes, lead to the collapse of families. In poll after poll, across the country, the anti-equality advocates are losing. More importantly, though, in state after state, they're being proven wrong. Marriage today has a new glow to it, a vibrancy that comes with the entry of all these same-sex newcomers"
Weiye Loh

Military Life: Memoirs of a Conscript in the Lion City: All animals are equal, but some... - 0 views

military-life.blogspot.com/...re-equal-but-some-animals.html

Conscription Nation Gender Equality

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Minister was further reported by the Straits Times, "Dr Ng also said national service is based on the three fundamental principles: National security and survival, universality and equity. And to impose conscription unnecessarily on a large segment of the population would dilute its purpose."
  • I am amazed at how the Minister can claim mandatory conscription as being equal and universal when it only applies to male citizens and second generation male permanent residents (PR)? Female citizens and permanent residents as well as first generation male permanent residents are not subject to national service. Can we say something is equal when it is not applied universally regardless of sex and to some extent, nationality or residency status?
  • Second Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen said there were no operational needs to justify drafting women for National Service. THE Singapore Armed Forces will not draft women for national service because there are no operational needs to justify doing so, said Second Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen yesterday. Dr Ng also said national service is based on the three fundamental principles: National security and survival, universality and equity. And to impose conscription unnecessarily on a large segment of the population would dilute its purpose.
Weiye Loh

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...s-are-smarter-than-others.html

Teamwork Diversity Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Groupthink CmC FtF Computer-Mediated Communication Face-to-Face

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Jan 15
     
    the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics. First, their members contributed more equally to the team's discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.
Weiye Loh

The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Educat... - 0 views

journals.sagepub.com/...0956797617741719

Gender Equality STEM

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Feb 18
     
    "Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (N = 472,242), we showed that girls performed similarly to or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys' science achievement and girls' reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls' and women's engagement with STEM subjects."
Weiye Loh

I was Jordan Peterson's strongest supporter. Now I think he's dangerous | The Star - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html

Academic Politics Freedom of Speech Social Order Social Justice Religion Psychology

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 May 18
     
    "Jordan has a complex relationship to freedom of speech. He wants to effectively silence those left-wing professors by keeping students away from their courses because the students may one day become "anarchical social revolutionaries" who may bring upon us disruption and violence. At the same time he was advocating cutting funds to universities that did not protect free speech on their campuses. He defended the rights of "alt right" voices to speak at universities even though their presence has given rise to disruption and violence. For Jordan, it appears, not all speech is equal, and not all disruption and violence are equal, either. If Jordan is not a true free speech warrior, then what is he? The email sent through his wife's account described Bill 28, the parenting bill, as part of the "transgender agenda" and claimed it was "misleadingly" called "All Families are Equal." Misleading? What same-sex families and transgender people have in common is their upset of the social order. In Maps of Meaning, Jordan's first book, he is exercised by the breakdown of the social order and the chaos that he believes would result. Jordan is fighting to maintain the status quo to keep chaos at bay, or so he believes. He is not a free speech warrior. He is a social order warrior."
Weiye Loh

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." - 0 views

theboeskool.com/...equality-feels-like-oppression

Privilege Equality Fairness

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 16
     
    "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." And things started making a little more sense to me. All this anger we see from people screaming "All Lives Matter" in response to black protesters at rallies… All this anger we see from people insisting that THEIR "religious freedom" is being infringed because a gay couple wants to get married… All these people angry about immigrants, angry about Muslims, angry about "Happy Holidays," angry about not being able to say bigoted things without being called a bigot… They all basically boil down to people who have grown accustomed to walking straight at other folks, and expecting THEM to move. So when "those people" in their path DON'T move… When those people start wondering, "Why am I always moving out of this guy's way?" When those people start asking themselves, "What if I didn't move? What if I just kept walking too?" When those people start believing that they have every bit as much right to that aisle as anyone else… It can seem like THEIR rights are being taken away.
Weiye Loh

Hiring Women and the Moral Inversion of Economics - 0 views

feedproxy.google.com/...al-inversion-of-economics.html

Economics Gender Equality Gender Stereotype Sexism

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Sep 14
     
    For his comments, Thornley's was labelled a sexist and loudly denounced, especially so by furious women. Strange? Not according to the intention heuristic which judges self-interested actions as bad. If we judge actions by consequences, however, Thornley should be encouraged, perhaps even praised. Accepting for the sake of argument the truth of the story, it's Thornley who has overcome prejudice (his or his society's), recognized the truth of equality and taken entrepreneurial action to do well while doing good. It's Thornley who is broadcasting the fact of equality to the world and encouraging others to do likewise. Most importantly, the consequence of Thornley's actions are to increase the demand for women executives thereby increasing their wages.
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