There's lots of cultures or historical times where people don't or didn't agree. And on the other hand, you can prove the second part easily, for example by looking at the wage gap. That's why I think it's best to mention both.
There's lots of cultures or historical times where people don't or didn't agree. And on the other hand, you can prove the second part easily, for example by looking at the wage gap. That's why I think it's best to mention both.
The wage gap has been studied to death. Like for like, it doesn't exist (within statistical error). However, women work fewer hours per year and fewer years of their lives than men do; and they tend to emphasize the personal (nonfinancial) rewards of careers more than men do. Men prioritize financial reward over enjoyment or other aspects of the job; and they work more hours and more years. When you adjust for those, the wage gap disappears.
I understand that feminists like to say that women work fewer hours and fewer years because society expects them to take on the primary caregiving roles - like it or not - and there's truth in this. Then again, society expects men to take on the primary breadwinning roles - like it or not, and very often backed up by legal compulsion (unlike the caregiving situation). If that's "patriarchy" then the etymology is all messed up.
Most feminists hate the idea of paying mothers to be mothers.
They want subsidized daycare, not direct tax credits to mothers per child.
They want K-12 education spending, but not vouchers that can be used a a mother desires (including homeschool).
Anyone who said that we should just give money straight to mothers for each child they have and let them decide would be considered an anti-feminist traditionalist.
It's best to think of feminism as a movement that seeks to raise the status and resources of professional women at the expense of everyone else, including women who prefer different lifestyles.
The conventional family structure - woman does not need to work and earn money because husband, or extended family, does so - was supposed to be precisely the compensation you are referring to. The key is "does not need to". But if feminists consider this entire arrangement to be oppressive to women (bizarrely they consider any form of dependence or symbiosis to be oppression), then I can understand why they are up in arms. But the alternative they come up with is that the state should take the place of husband or extended family. But then, where does the state's money come from, if not from people (men plus women who are not raising kids) who work and pay taxes?
Currently the wage gap emerges if you look at a nuclear family and declare that the father makes X and mother makes 0. Instead, if more realistically you distributed that income so that father and mother both make X/2, then your wage gap would completely disappear. Heck, it may even skew the other way, given recent employment trends.
The "conventional family structure" may have made sense - or even been somewhat patriarchal - prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to bear and raise 6-10 children; produce all the knitted clothing and cut and sew all the cloth-based clothing for the household; produce all meals from basic ingredients (having grown many of the vegetables and produced the eggs in her own garden); do laundry using boiling water, lye and a wringer; and keep the house clean and tidy.
The trajectory of productivity has meant that today, in a "traditional" household, the "breadwinner" produces all the family's clothing, brings in all the food with much of it in near-ready-to-eat form, and provides capital equipment that keeps the food fresh and turns laundry (and meal cleanup) into trivial chores; meanwhile the mother produces and raises 1.2 children when they are not at school.
As for spending time with the children themselves, I think I recall that modern breadwinner fathers spend more time with their children than female homemakers did even a few generations ago. So, the trajectory away from the "conventional" structure has not hurt children in that respect.
The "traditional" family structure is something people should, of course, be free to choose; but to claim it's the "right" structure - or one that should be imposed by force on unhappy breadwinners, as we do across the western world - is... debatable.
"prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to.........................."
I'll only quibble with this point. I don't think a single woman was ever expected to do all of this without any support whatsoever. In every culture in the world prior to the 20th century (more so in non-Western cultures but this was the norm in the West too), extended multi-generational families provided a lot of support. And domestic help was far more ubiquitous.
Aside from this, I don't know if we disagree on anything. I believe you misunderstood the point of my earlier comment. I wasn't trying to paint the conventional family structure as the ideal, or advocating that it should be mandatory. I was responding to John Stonehedge's comment about women not getting compensated for their work (which was ample). I was saying that the conventional family structure imposed responsibilities on both men and women as well as "compensated" both of them (because their partners took responsibility for different spheres of activity), but John (and perhaps feminists in general) doesn't see it that way because he only considers the income one makes working in some impersonal capacity as important. In that view, the woman is doing unpaid labor almost like a slave (disregarding the fact that she benefits from her partner's income) whereas the man is having fun and possessing privilege (disregarding the fact that he puts in a lot of hard work, sometimes in drudge work and sometimes in dangerous jobs). I think that is terribly reductive.
In the modern world, if domestic work is not as onerous or rewarding as it traditionally used to be whereas impersonal work and career-building are very fulfilling (as they are to me personally), then there is no problem in people sharing their roles as well as responsibilities for producing incomes as well as domestic work, as you say.
There might be a slight wage gap that is not accounted for due to the legal liability from hiring a woman who can sue for discrimination or sexual harassment if fired.
The wage gap I'm talking about is taking into account different jobs.
My point is, that even if people perform differently (say a male/female weight lifter or soccer player), they should earn the same if the difference is due to gender. The average woman should earn the same as the average men. In my eyes, women are just as valuable as men. Not that they are literally equal.
In the case of the US national soccer teams, at one time the women's team famously earned less than the men would have, if the men had been equally successful (which they were not). This was not sexism, nor a lack of fan interest: it was because the women, who had been offered the same pay deal as the men, chose an alternative pay structure that offered greater financial security but less upside for winning. An irony - not often noticed - is that not only would the women have earned more if they had picked the pay structure the men chose, but also the men would have earned more if they had picked the pay structure the women chose! This is because the women were very successful, but didn't benefit much from it because they had picked a more secure pay structure; the men, on the other hand, picked a pay structure that gave little security but a big upside for success, but were not very successful.)
I understand, and I believe this is unfair. I believe we should strive for equality. If nature doesn't treat us equally, we should compensate with laws, so that it doesn't matter for a child to be born a boy or a girl.
I value competence. I just think the most competent man should not earn more than the most competent woman. And that goes both ways, of course. Please refrain from attacking me as a person but try to convince me with arguments. We're looking for the truth, right, not simply winning online arguments?
Females can't beat males at sports, so they are incompetent.
Look, I like female sports as ways to teach teamwork and drive to children and teenagers. I don't pretend they are objectively entertaining to anyone but parents.
My point is that it should not matter there's a difference in competence for some things for the different genders, we as a society should compensate for it. Just like you should listen to your boss/teacher/parents even if you're stronger than them.
Free individuals freely compensate people for things they want. That's what got us where we are. The Soviets subsidized sports teams for national glory and they couldn't keep their grocery stores stocked.
There's lots of cultures or historical times where people don't or didn't agree. And on the other hand, you can prove the second part easily, for example by looking at the wage gap. That's why I think it's best to mention both.
The wage gap has been studied to death. Like for like, it doesn't exist (within statistical error). However, women work fewer hours per year and fewer years of their lives than men do; and they tend to emphasize the personal (nonfinancial) rewards of careers more than men do. Men prioritize financial reward over enjoyment or other aspects of the job; and they work more hours and more years. When you adjust for those, the wage gap disappears.
I understand that feminists like to say that women work fewer hours and fewer years because society expects them to take on the primary caregiving roles - like it or not - and there's truth in this. Then again, society expects men to take on the primary breadwinning roles - like it or not, and very often backed up by legal compulsion (unlike the caregiving situation). If that's "patriarchy" then the etymology is all messed up.
Well, biology's unfair too! I think we should compensate for that as a society of enlightened rational beings, that's what I mean by being a feminist.
Most feminists hate the idea of paying mothers to be mothers.
They want subsidized daycare, not direct tax credits to mothers per child.
They want K-12 education spending, but not vouchers that can be used a a mother desires (including homeschool).
Anyone who said that we should just give money straight to mothers for each child they have and let them decide would be considered an anti-feminist traditionalist.
It's best to think of feminism as a movement that seeks to raise the status and resources of professional women at the expense of everyone else, including women who prefer different lifestyles.
The conventional family structure - woman does not need to work and earn money because husband, or extended family, does so - was supposed to be precisely the compensation you are referring to. The key is "does not need to". But if feminists consider this entire arrangement to be oppressive to women (bizarrely they consider any form of dependence or symbiosis to be oppression), then I can understand why they are up in arms. But the alternative they come up with is that the state should take the place of husband or extended family. But then, where does the state's money come from, if not from people (men plus women who are not raising kids) who work and pay taxes?
Currently the wage gap emerges if you look at a nuclear family and declare that the father makes X and mother makes 0. Instead, if more realistically you distributed that income so that father and mother both make X/2, then your wage gap would completely disappear. Heck, it may even skew the other way, given recent employment trends.
The "conventional family structure" may have made sense - or even been somewhat patriarchal - prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to bear and raise 6-10 children; produce all the knitted clothing and cut and sew all the cloth-based clothing for the household; produce all meals from basic ingredients (having grown many of the vegetables and produced the eggs in her own garden); do laundry using boiling water, lye and a wringer; and keep the house clean and tidy.
The trajectory of productivity has meant that today, in a "traditional" household, the "breadwinner" produces all the family's clothing, brings in all the food with much of it in near-ready-to-eat form, and provides capital equipment that keeps the food fresh and turns laundry (and meal cleanup) into trivial chores; meanwhile the mother produces and raises 1.2 children when they are not at school.
As for spending time with the children themselves, I think I recall that modern breadwinner fathers spend more time with their children than female homemakers did even a few generations ago. So, the trajectory away from the "conventional" structure has not hurt children in that respect.
The "traditional" family structure is something people should, of course, be free to choose; but to claim it's the "right" structure - or one that should be imposed by force on unhappy breadwinners, as we do across the western world - is... debatable.
"prior to 1850 or so, when a woman could expect to.........................."
I'll only quibble with this point. I don't think a single woman was ever expected to do all of this without any support whatsoever. In every culture in the world prior to the 20th century (more so in non-Western cultures but this was the norm in the West too), extended multi-generational families provided a lot of support. And domestic help was far more ubiquitous.
Aside from this, I don't know if we disagree on anything. I believe you misunderstood the point of my earlier comment. I wasn't trying to paint the conventional family structure as the ideal, or advocating that it should be mandatory. I was responding to John Stonehedge's comment about women not getting compensated for their work (which was ample). I was saying that the conventional family structure imposed responsibilities on both men and women as well as "compensated" both of them (because their partners took responsibility for different spheres of activity), but John (and perhaps feminists in general) doesn't see it that way because he only considers the income one makes working in some impersonal capacity as important. In that view, the woman is doing unpaid labor almost like a slave (disregarding the fact that she benefits from her partner's income) whereas the man is having fun and possessing privilege (disregarding the fact that he puts in a lot of hard work, sometimes in drudge work and sometimes in dangerous jobs). I think that is terribly reductive.
In the modern world, if domestic work is not as onerous or rewarding as it traditionally used to be whereas impersonal work and career-building are very fulfilling (as they are to me personally), then there is no problem in people sharing their roles as well as responsibilities for producing incomes as well as domestic work, as you say.
There might be a slight wage gap that is not accounted for due to the legal liability from hiring a woman who can sue for discrimination or sexual harassment if fired.
The wage gap I'm talking about is taking into account different jobs.
My point is, that even if people perform differently (say a male/female weight lifter or soccer player), they should earn the same if the difference is due to gender. The average woman should earn the same as the average men. In my eyes, women are just as valuable as men. Not that they are literally equal.
The reason female soccer players dont make as much as male players is that there isn't the same level of fan interest.
For tennis, I think they make basically the same. Because the fan interest is basically the same.
I would bet the same is true for weight lifter...neither make much of anything because there is no fan interest (maybe endorsements?).
That parenthetical is why Anna Kournikova made more money than you would expect for her ranking.
All of which says that it is a lot more complicated than talent. Or talent and sex.
In the case of the US national soccer teams, at one time the women's team famously earned less than the men would have, if the men had been equally successful (which they were not). This was not sexism, nor a lack of fan interest: it was because the women, who had been offered the same pay deal as the men, chose an alternative pay structure that offered greater financial security but less upside for winning. An irony - not often noticed - is that not only would the women have earned more if they had picked the pay structure the men chose, but also the men would have earned more if they had picked the pay structure the women chose! This is because the women were very successful, but didn't benefit much from it because they had picked a more secure pay structure; the men, on the other hand, picked a pay structure that gave little security but a big upside for success, but were not very successful.)
I understand, and I believe this is unfair. I believe we should strive for equality. If nature doesn't treat us equally, we should compensate with laws, so that it doesn't matter for a child to be born a boy or a girl.
The market isn't fair its an efficient arbiter of human preferences.
Such unfairness gave us modernity.
I value competence. I just think the most competent man should not earn more than the most competent woman. And that goes both ways, of course. Please refrain from attacking me as a person but try to convince me with arguments. We're looking for the truth, right, not simply winning online arguments?
Females can't beat males at sports, so they are incompetent.
Look, I like female sports as ways to teach teamwork and drive to children and teenagers. I don't pretend they are objectively entertaining to anyone but parents.
My point is that it should not matter there's a difference in competence for some things for the different genders, we as a society should compensate for it. Just like you should listen to your boss/teacher/parents even if you're stronger than them.
"we as a society should compensate for it"
No way comrade!
Free individuals freely compensate people for things they want. That's what got us where we are. The Soviets subsidized sports teams for national glory and they couldn't keep their grocery stores stocked.
I was hoping for a more rational discussion instead of name calling... Even if we don't agree.