321–330 of 562 posts
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Yeah I (wrongly) figured that HR would do scans of salaries based on gender, race, disability etc to make sure there were no statistically significant differences that could lead to ammo in a lawsuit situation.
Yeah, fuck skill, experience and other factors when all we need is "diversity"
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I fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles. My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far soc…
That argument ignores cultural evolution, which humans have long used to adapt to changing circumstances much more quickly than biological evolution. Just as we evolved culturally to accommodate the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, we will do the same to accommodate our modern post-physical labor society. And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this w…
1) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal opportunity: Bad
2) Gender-biased job preference due to unequal societal expectations: Bad
3) Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits that are influenced by environment/culture: Possibly OK as long as culture has gender-equal expectations and opportunities.
4) Gender-biased job preference due solely to genetically determined traits and inherent job qualities. Ok. (I don't think this exists much as most traits that impact job preference have a significant emergent/environmental components).
I think our "hyper-PC" society agrees with me on 1) and 2) and possibly 4).
I think most of the disagreement happens around 3). Is 3) ever OK? How do we tell if society if sufficiently equal for 3) to be Ok?
My personal stance is that it doesn't make sense to argue that 3) is ok until we have done a much better job of eliminating 1) and 2).
edit: layout/typo
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> We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start). Put another way, we need to upend the idea that hazardous and arduous jobs (often involving hard physical labor) are only the domain of men, and encourage more women to participate in industries like mining, firefighting, weldin…
If you make note of the differences in physiology between the male and female body, you might discover that there is a non-arbitrary reason why industries requiring hard physical labor have traditionally been the domain of men.
As a man, my out-of-shape physiology precludes me from being one - that doesn't mean that my gender should be excluded from it.
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Yes, because, shockingly, both parents caring for babies helps society as a whole. Maybe you should stop being selfish instead of making it hard for others to have families. There have been studies that have shown fathers are far more involved in their kid's lives by taking paternal leave. It also means that the parents will both be far more productive post-leave as they would have developed more balanced responsibil…
Society is helped by having healthy babies, yes. You haven't provided any support for your argument that I , as someone without children, must be made to subsidize the family choices of others. The resources to cover the extended work absence of the parents has to come from somewhere. In many cases, it'll be one past parent covering a new parent, and then vice-versa. But those of us who can't have children (a) don't…
I'm sure I won't change your mind, but as a single person with no kids, that's how I see it. I'm quite happy to make a few sacrifices to make life easier for today's children.
Does anyone have a link to reliable breakdowns of different professions by race and gender? Tech gets slammed particularly hard for being "white male cishet scum" and I'd love to see how it compares to other fields. I can't imagine fields like law or nursing or mining or teaching or policing are much more equal.
Here are BLS numbers on profession by gender and age: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm The legal profession has actually made significant progress in closing the gender gap. Tech has a problem with gender. I'm not sure it's helpful to point out that other fields also have similar or even worse problems.
Only if you make the assumption fewer women are in tech because of sexism.
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If you make note of the differences in physiology between the male and female body, you might discover that there is a non-arbitrary reason why industries requiring hard physical labor have traditionally been the domain of men.
If a particular woman, regardless of her physiology, can pass the physical bar necessary to be a firefighter, why in the world should she not work in this domain? As a man, my out-of-shape physiology precludes me from being one - that doesn't mean that my gender should be excluded from it.
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I understand that people want a different work-life balance, but I do not understand why they expect higher compensation per unit of output while working less. Increasing the number of workers a company will need to achieve the same product will add overhead and a great deal of ancillary costs; if your goal is to get people to spend less time at work, you should be willing to accept a pay cut (at least proportional t…
People who work less and have a better work-life balance can get more done in less time. Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks. I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers…
I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of deficiencies; this secular increase in productivity has been responsible for the improvement in living standards over the last few hundred years.
Increasing demand for desirable and attractive jobs is a laudable end-goal, and I agree that we should pursue system-wide reforms to facilitate this, though we probably disagree on which policies would achieve greater prosperity and better options for workers.
My greatest disagreements with you are that you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less, and that you believe that we can improve total output by reducing total input.
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It's two sides of the same coin – women are pressured to pay more attention to family with the exact same mechanisms (society, older relatives, media etc.) that men are pressured into working long hours and being primary breadwinners. Unfortunately, most comments only mention one side of the problem (that of women being pressured to focus on family), and that leads to reflexive "But what about the pressure on men?" i…
Great point—the context of both roles in a partnership is important to the discussion. Having said that, what about single parents who now must do "both" jobs? Women are at a systematic disadvantage in this scenario. Bottom line for me is that women are doing more unpaid work than men in all cultures. Melinda Gates talks about this at length in their recent letters for 2016[1], and it's a pretty damning picture that…
This is true.
> ...whatever the pressures are on men, women have it systematically worse.
I have no idea how that conclusion is drawn. Men, for example, are significantly more likely to get killed in the course of their work. For example, men accounted for 92% of all workplace fatalities in 2014[1]. To me anyway, getting killed sounds at least as bad as, if not worse than not getting paid for your work.
Overall, my opinion is that men and women face different kind of pressures to conform to traditional gender roles. What addresses one must address the other.
[1] "Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary, 2014" http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm
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That argument ignores cultural evolution, which humans have long used to adapt to changing circumstances much more quickly than biological evolution. Just as we evolved culturally to accommodate the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, we will do the same to accommodate our modern post-physical labor society. And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this w…
> People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race. The validity of that statement is highly location dependent.
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> It is known No, it really isn't. It's just your biased stereotype.
Unless you ask who is a better boss. Then the feminists will happily tell you that women are the better bosses because they have more empathy and so on... (For what it's worth, I don't subscribe to the 'women should take care of children because they are more emotional' theory, but I find it funny how people pick their stereotypes on a whim).
If this is indeed a broader phenomenon, I makes me wonder if the same forces (genetic or environmental) that lead women to be more empathetic (which we might judge to be a good thing) do not also lead to the aforementioned emotions management. Of course, this is all highly speculative.