Onside or Not

Not everyone wants to progress to management, some people are quite happy to do this. They don't want senior roles, they want to do a job, finish, go home, get paid.

I just don't see how you would expect to progress to senior roles while working part time. It's simply not the culture of work and don't see why it ever will be or why anyone would want that.
I'm not sure that certain businesses work well with part time people, as consumers we do tend to want things on demand. I don't really want say a Solicitor that I can only speak to 9 - 1pm, Tuesday,Thursday, Friday.
If I joined a supermarket, or any job I would not expect progression if I didn't put the hours in regardless of gender. I'm still competing with those that work long hours, can be more flexible.
I just think that this is about 'opportunity cost', of course if we chose one route in life, then we give up another.
The example given is not a fair analogy depending on the situation of the man.

I don't think my friend has any intention of returning to work when the kids are grown. She'll be 50 then. Husband is fully capable of supporting them on his 100K salary. Why does she need to work in that situation?

I don't know any full time SAHMs who have a cleaner. My friends would laugh at that idea. Actually most of them work part-time AND look after the children and keep the home running whilst their husbands work just as hard.

But when the kids are grown and they return to work full time it is they who will be restarting at a lower level. So it's swings and roundabouts. We just have to make our choices and hope they work out.

Perhaps those working the tills could have done better at school, gone to uni, etc, but surely this is more to do with social class and not gender.

enimmead
Precisely! I just can't stand the idea, that as a woman, you can be a feminist or just been blinded by the patriarchy, great.
Surely it's only right that if you want to be a SAHP then you are going to pick a partner who can support a family (be it financially and or emotionally).
We won't all ever have decent paid jobs, at the end of the day someone has to sweep the streets, work on the tills. Of course more women end up in these jobs as they offer part time hours, but then there's not much call for part time unqualified brain surgeons, architects, etc etc.
Perhaps those working the tills could have done better at school, gone to uni, etc, but surely this is more to do with social class and not gender.

Just thinking of a friend who is a SAHM - except the children are teenagers so no real hassles there, she has a cleaner so enjoys her time during the day and only has to make tea. Shopping done online at Ocado. I don't think she is complaining too much about her situation.

Statistically women do more housework than men in married middle-income families, even when they both work. (Can't google for this, on phone, but relatively easy to find).

There are outliers, always, but there are also averages.

"but two rich white/poor black/whichever version people of each gender: who is happier, who is more successful, who is safer from assault, who is more confident, who gets paid more, who has better health, who does the majority of housework?"

Interesting - I can think of some white, middle class women who - looking at some factors - do a lot better than their white, middle class male partners. Get a cleaner to do the housework, send kids off to school, go to the gym / do lunch, meet friends all day whilst partner goes off to work in the city. Partner has a much higher chance of dying earlier from heart attack / stress whilst wife collects pension and life assurance.

Assuming husband doesn't run off with someone younger off course.

I am rather hectic at the moment, BDD and don't have time to educate on the systematic nature of patriarchy, no on feminism as a critique of structures and systems of power. Suffice to say, definitely NOT talking about individuals (and nor was LBJ - he was talking about one race which had been systematically and entirely oppressed by another for hundreds of years).

I think TheDoctrine has said all I need say about kinds of privilege and intersectionality. It's worth noting that you need, always, to compare like with like: not a rich white woman and a poor black man, but two rich white/poor black/whichever version people of each gender: who is happier, who is more successful, who is safer from assault, who is more confident, who gets paid more, who has better health, who does the majority of housework?

Compare like with like, and you will see.

Also I think someone linked you to the Finally Feminism 101 blog, earlier? If not, google it and browse it. It's extremely good.

I'm not onside.
After reading a lot of threads in the topic F/WR I'm appalled by some of the contradictions made by those who class themselves as 'femininists'.
I think to see the world's issues simply split by gender is blinkered to say the least.
I can't help but feel that although feminism is trying to increase equality for women, I doubt a lot of women would agree, so where does that leave femininsm? If it does not represent the views of all women how can it claim to be a collective voice for them?
I can't help but feel that a lot of MN feminist posters are from a certain socio - economic background, and simply cannot empathise with anyone who doesn't share their views.
As to gender privilege, yes I kind of agree that we are in a male dominated world, to some degree women can compete but we are still tied by our biology.
A couple of posters on a previous thread about car insurance premiums rising for women, think it's a good thing, as t shows equality, WTF.
Good for those with their multi car polices and comfortable existence, not so great for single mums struggling to make ends meet.
If we applied this illogical thought process to all areas of female equality I can't help but feel that we are going to make the future even worse for women.
Suppose we put gender aside, not make any reference to it, so a person becoming a parent now has equal rights to parental leave post birth, so forget the emotional and physical strain put on a woman's body during the process, she'll be okay to return to work the week after because after all we're now all equal.
I think the book Freakonimics, gives us great examples of how social poloicy can end up self defeating.

BDD as per my previous post on privilege, it is multi faceted. Obama, Clinton and Romney all have wealth privilege and education privilege. Obama and Romney have male privilege. Clinton and Romney have white privilege. They all have heterosexual privileges.

So you can see that by the standards of the average Joe or Jane, all three are doing pretty well. Nonetheless, Romney is a member of one more class of privilege compared to both Obama and Clinton.

You can do the exercise at the other end of the scale too but you can't say uneducated boys are less privileged then well educated girls and draw a conclusion about sexism from that because you are comparing two different types of privilege.

Of course it can. Just look at the types of toys that are geared towards boys and girls and the kind of skills/occupations they lead to, the horror that some people feel when they see a boy with a girl's toy, the way "don't be a girl" is such a put-down. The hierarchy is evident even then.

Just cos girls slightly outperform boys doesn't mean anything. What's far more worrying is that they work so hard learning the rules, yet end up earning less.

if two men were running a race, he said, but one had his legs bound together in shackles, they could not achieve a fair result by simply removing the shackles.

It may not be fair but does it necessarily mean he won't win the running race. If he's continually told he won't win because he's been shackled, chances are he may not even enter the race and it's lost before he's even tried.

I think there is a fallacy here, in that, of course, we've not seen what happens when a woman says the exact same thing to you that you've said to her.

My understanding of the previous thread was that you didn't really take the point that people were not saying the same things to you that you were saying to them. You'd started a thread which (intentionally or not), took posters to task for a comment none of us made. None of us has, I think, started any thread saying 'why are all the dads like this, huh, isn't it discriminatory and rude?!'.

If we had, despite the obvious points about contexts of oppression, that would be a closer parallel, and you might be justified in being a bit upset (as posters on the other thread were).

I would say as a rule of thumb - if you think you want to tell someone off for not treating everyone equally, it's a good idea to check first whether they're part of a group that is habitually discriminated against. If they are, of course, they may still be prejudiced and discriminatory, and you may be correct that it'd be nice if they stopped. But it's unlikely (maybe impossible?) that it's the discriminated group who's entirely responsible for discriminatory attitudes existing - so it's both more efficient and less, well, rude, to concentrate on someone else.

Feminists aren't responsible for sorting out all the gendered inequalities in the world while everyone else sits back and ticks them off for doing it wrong.

It's hard coming to terms with your privilege, good on you for beginning to explore it.

Remember, context matters. When defending policies designed to support black students and professionals in the years after overturning the segregation laws in the USA, President Johnson said something along the lines of 'if two men were running a race, he said, but one had his legs bound together in shackles, they could not achieve a fair result by simply removing the shackles. Instead, the man who had been in chains should be allowed to make up the missing yards from the time he was bound.'

so your (generally admirable) goal to treat everyone equally ignores the context that everyone has not been treated equally for the past 6000+ years - and indeed, people are still not treated equally.

Individually, we should not discriminate, absolutely. But feminism is about looking at the underlying structures which do discriminate, whether it's the way STEM type toys are marketed to boys and housework type toys are marketed to girls, pay discrimination at work, etc.