Minor rant - shouldn't watch the telly!

Also I don't know many men who aren't red hot keen on big shopping trips. They are just as susceptible to designer labels, "must have" items and many have very expensive hobbies to boot. The idea that only women shop is ludicrous. Maybe less men get into debt over it because they have higher incomes, rather than to do with an innate superiority in financial matters

I know at least two families where the man has to hand all his wages over to the woman on payday a la the olden days. So they don't piss it all up the wall. Works for them so fine. But it's bollocks to say that women are shit with money and men are great.

Especially when you're talking about pensions, where most young / early middle age people's pensions are through work. So nothing to do with how many shoes people buy and everything to do with why so many less women are accessing their work pensions (or in fact whether they even have them). This is such a complex subject, to see it reduced like that was bizarre. I'm not sure what debt even had to do with the question TBH.

Just watched it again, and whoops it said that for women pensions were "unknown" not "meaningless". A good reason to follow prof layton's advice on writing it yourself!

Maybe we should start our own channel with lots of non anything-ist programming.

No-one would watch it

Since when does AS think that alieneating your entire target audience is a successful result?

Oh is it on iplayer? So people can watch and make their own complaints minds up

I saw the apprentice last night as well. I don't expect anyone to believe me when I say that this is only about the 3rd time I've had the one show on and also don't watch the apprentice, but somehow I managed to take in both last night. And yes what a load of shit that was. When they said the ones who had made the dreadful advert had won I switched over in disgust and ranted at DH. The whole thing was just so appallingly sexist wasn't it. From the man picking the woman for the advert that he fancied and then have her snuggle on the sofa with him, to the whole 50s premise, to just everything. It was awful. And it won. WTF?

Fair enough prof! Just trying to make it easier for people.

Feel free to use it / bits of it, anyone else who wants to complain!

Honestly I was like this

The worst thing is that if they hadn't said the utterly outrageous thing ie that pensions are meaningless to women as they only understand things that are tangible, I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelid. And the rest of it was awful.

Just shows how far away we are from where we want to be

Have sent this:

I was watching The One Show yesterday and they had a piece saying that women's pensions are much lower than men's and double the amount of women as men have no pension provision whatsoever. The content of the report was sexist and offensive.

The report started by saying about how the old idea that women aren't any good with money isn't true but now we've seemingly got equality, how is this happening? (I am not aware of it being common knowledge that women are terrible with money but was willing to let this one go).

So at this point I imagined that the report would talk about some of the following reasons that women have lower pensions than men:

• Women doing lower paid work than men in general
• The gender pay gap (different money for same work)
• The hammering to women's pensions and earning potential if they have children and take more than a nominal time out of work
• The fact that until recently women usually didn't qualify for a full state pension because of not enough NI cont due to time out raising children

Did they talk about any of these things? No.

First they said that women only want to spend money on things that are tangible, and therefore pensions are meaningless to them. Yes that's right. Those were the words they used - so basically women are too stupid to understand concepts like saving, and future, and retirement, and can only understand things which are in front of their noses right now.

We then moved on to the sort of things women do understand, given that things like pensions, retirement, and future are all concepts that are meaningless to them.

Yes next we had a long section about how women fritter all of their money away on frivolities. Talking about women shopping excessively to fill emotional voids in their lives, then talking about women having lots of debt due to frivolous shopping, then they rounded it up by saying that whether the "purses were prada or gucci, women had to remember they held the strings".

My complaints are therefore as follows:

1. It is not a received common wisdom that all women are terrible with money and to present that as fact is to buy into a sexist stereotype (which I wasn't even aware of until yesterday - maybe the show has invented a new one)
2. It is factually incorrect and highly offensive to say that women cannot grasp concepts like pensions, that these concepts are "meaningless" to them.
3. It is offensive to spend a large component of a piece about women's low pensions talking about how the real problem is women spending all their money on shoes and handbags and being incapable of understanding about saving for their old age. When in fact there are a range of reasons that women as a group have poor pensions, none of these reasons have anything to do frivolous spending.

In short I found this piece offensively sexist, using a string of nasty stereotypes and failing to address any of the genuine reasons that women actually have lower pensions than men.