Women can rise up without dragging men down

I mean the gender pay gap reporting.

It looked terrible.

And I believe has had an effect - I know it has.

Suddenly, in conference calls sometimes with majority women. Bizarre. To me. But good bizarre.

robot I do love it here TBH even when the threads go around and around... Try to carry Dittany's torch but only to like 1/10 of the brightness! I'll never forget her - or any of the old crew TBH.

I switched jobs recently which sorted similar issues to some extent...

I highly recommend it!

I genuinely think that in the industry I work the gender pay gap has had a big effect, it was a massive gap, and all of a sudden women being promoted / hired into all sorts of more senior (but still not top) roles.

Yes the promotions emails going out with sometimes 4 women 1 man are being noticed. The men are not happy. The women perform. What can they do? I mean in a civilised society, obv they could take it all away if they wished - Iran in the 60s pics always get me.

MeAgainAgain - I'm so glad you're still around. I had a hunch you were .

Another day, another round of dealing with mediocre men earning far more than me, in positions for which I would have to jump through hoops. Sigh.

Personally I would quite like a shared maternity/paternity leave model that allowed, say the woman (and man, optional) to take the first few months off to recover physically. After that, I would have liked to have started working a few days a week to keep my hand in and keep everything ticking over, that could be shared with the father also doing the same (eg each doing 2.5 days or 2/3 days) for up to a year.

I completely agree that a year or two out within a 45-50 year career has no reason to have an impact on your career progression. Things don't change that quickly. I went off on mat leave and half my caseload hadn't progressed at all during the 9 months I was off.

So I started a career at 22 and will end working at 68 (in theory) and that’s 46 years of work. I have 2 dcs and took one 8 month and one 9 month maternity leave - that’s 17 months out of 552 months of work or 3% of total working life, but obviously more in proportion when the percentage is taken in my child bearing years. The rest of pt/ time out/ sahp that’s happened with my dc and all dc in general, could be shared between parents and not overly burdened on one parent who is usually the mother.

We live in a world where taking a 8 month maternity leave is seen as a legitimate reason why the vast majority of leaders are male and how it is, is how it should be. We could have onsite childcare, universal income, more recognition and benefits for sahp, more support for pt working, awards for the most accommodating workplaces etc etc and really push the idea the supporting families is good for everyone. Or we could carry on with individual women carrying the burden, taking the hit and being blamed for their own poverty/ lack of success etc etc. If you’re a single parent dervel I’m sure you have your own experiences which will sometimes be the same or sometimes different.

I dunno, people feel their jobs are oh so important and special that if you miss a couple of months you cannot possibly ever recover to their level of amazing-ness at their role. Most of us do stuff that the world could miss, which I appreciate might be hard to accept

Or reduce the impact on women. But it has to be two-pronged. Making it easier for a mother to take a long maternity leave and then work part time has to be in combination with men also placing more focus on their family responsibilities after becoming fathers. And that is actually the trickier part because, just as OP says, for this to happen men as a class must be willing to take responsibility for reproduction and they generally aren't because it suits them to have women take care of this.

No offence taken. I’m just feeling around these issues in my own head. I question what you mean by little for a negligible amount of time? I am of the view that children benefit from hands on parenting for a good crucial first 7 years or so. I’m a single father as well so I promise you I’m not wedded to the idea that it’s necessarily mothers that have to do this.

I’m curious how this feminist utopia would work? Universal Basic Income? Childcare provided on site at workplaces?

Dervel

Yes, female fertility does not last as long as male fertility (although men are more likely to experience problems as they age, which they should perhaps be made more aware of). But this is a complete side issue to the main point, which is that the woman also has to gestate and birth the child, regardless of whether she does so at 21 or 45.

Reproduction has zero physical impact on a man and his contribution to the reproductive labour is like 0.01%. Sure it is less risky for the man to wait until he is middle-aged before he reproduces, but he can also go to work the day after his child is born (or even while it is being born). Meanwhile reproduction has an enormous physical impact on a woman. We can never make this 'fair'.

Things we can do to try to level out the social impact of biological 'unfairness' are things that increase the impact of fatherhood on men. (These things tend to also benefit fathers and/or children).

No. That is making thevassumption that all the 'best' or 'top' positions belong to men by default.

I think the quote is more about a state of mind i.e. you don't need to be a cunt about rising to the top.

dervel no offence but that stuff has been done to death.

We know women have to have dc before the menopause and we know the longer women (and men) leave having dc the greater the risk of complications in pregnancy and for dc. We also know dc are little for a short time and the time needed out of the workplace in a career spanning decades is in the grand scheme of things, negligible.

In my radical feminist utopia, parents would be supported to have work fit round little dc. After all, if we all stop having dc tomorrow, Widget Inc is going to have no customers in the future to buy their widgets or use their services. As Widget Inc currently has a swathe of mediocre men who rely on the mothers of their children to take the career hit, they don’t have to change the workplace to fit round child rearing at all.

Good thread, and as I’ve reflected in it I fear there is a behavioural problem informed by a biological pressure that I’m not sure how to fix.

Consider two equally smart, highly driven and ambitious young professionals. They both prioritise their careers and want to rise to the top. They date/ get married. They both want children. However biology hands the man in the equation the freedom to say “actually my career is more important I want to hold off on having children until I’ve reached the pinnacle of my chosen field” whilst the woman is free to say the same she is rolling a riskier die with her decision.

In fact men have this freedom to eschew settling down almost entirely until they have achieved what they want to achieve, again women can do the same, but there is a greater risk. I think if we got to a point with a sexism factor of zero this fact still frees up more men to focus aggressively on their careers.

How do we socially correct for this? There will always be more men competing for the top spots because they can afford to take greater risks with their fertility?

I think it’s complicated. You do see very good employees stuck low down for spurious reasons, managed by incompetents. Partly I think it’s that people can get on if your face fits, partly luck of being in the right place at the right time, partly gift of the gab and partly in my experience incompetent or morally dubious people are promoted because they can’t or won’t question the status quo and are no threat to the real higher ups.

A teeny proportion of start up funding is given to female led businesses and entrepreneurs. It’s a joke where every aspect of the system is stacked against women in general and yet we are blamed for not rising above it and getting 50% of everything because we like low paid work and staying at home with our dc. Yeah, right.

I don't think the workplace is fair to men either. Mediocre men only get on if they are the right sort of mediocre man. I also do believe that if it were really true that you could get a much better, more intelligent and harder working employee for much less money then corporations would do just that.

Women dominated businesses would be the most effective test bed for all these theories because men otherwise need to consent to being controlled by women, which the evidence suggests they are not happy about.

I think if women were liberated power might look different- I think if we’d not been held back so much, power structures might be less like they are. But who knows what’s genuinely how women would be and what’s a response to years of being artificially held down?

I’d like more mediocre women getting top jobs too Saying that, the women I know generally have more rounded skill sets and more intelligence than men - maybe a mediocre woman is more valuable in the workplace than a top notch man!

I think it’s obvious that lots of men would not step down the ladder as it is and let women rise up whilst they wash the dishes. If it were they would do it tomorrow, there’s nothing real stopping them. As my dh commented - going pt to look after our dc would harm his career. No shit Sherlock. The fact I’d been pt for a few years at this point and my career was fucked (it was fucked when I had dc) seemed to have slipped his mind. And he’s not a full on arsehole and does loads outside of work for the family, but had fallen into sexist views about women/mothers/me in the workplace without even noticing.

I have definitely seen a serious proper study done on this (disclaimer: skimmed the article about it in a magazine), and the conclusion was that mediocre men are the losers when women advance in the workplace. The absolutely top-notch women get the spots the mediocre men would have sauntered into previously. Top-notch men still earn their positions, low performers didn't get anywhere at all usually anyway, mediocre men who were disproportionately favoured lose out.

Power ultimately requires control, women cannot control men, if they could none of this would be an issue.

I often think all female organisations would be the answer, but they would no doubt come unstuck because of the very rules designed to help women in the first place.

Yeh it's like a bad joke isn't it GoldenWonderwall. How do we get women into 50% of the positions of power without giving up any of our power - easy, half of us can just claim to be female. BAM, instant equality and not a drop of actual power shed. You've got to hand it to them, it's fucking genius.

I'm sorry but I really don't see a lot of men throwing up their hands in glee at the thought of having their salaries cut, on the grounds that it now frees them up to wash dishes, change nappies, care for elderly relatives, and take orders from women. When women say they want a better work life balance, what they tend to mean is that they're trying to fit 48 hours worth of paid and unpaid work into a 24 hour day, and reducing time in paid work lets them spend more time on drudge. When men say they want a better work-life balance, what they generally mean is that they want to come home early and sit on their pampered arses all evening being bought dinner and drinks, without having to take a pay cut. The fact is that it isn't enough for more women to be doctors - we also need more men to be nurses. We need more women to be CEOs, but we also need more men to be secretaries. More and more women are choosing to WATH, and most men are OK with that - as long as it doesn't increase the work they have to do around the house. Men are OK with women stepping up but they will not step down lightly. We'll see men campaigning to have two CEOs in every work place before we see men gladly taking jobs as secretaries to the CEO. "Sure you can be the boss, as long as I can be the boss too and all the crap low paid work is still done by women."

That’s it though isn’t it - misogyny in action. We don’t want women to have anything but we don’t want to look sexist, so we’ll redefine woman to mean something else then we can have all the bits we’ve decided we like and destroy everything we do not like and we can do it in plain sight whilst getting a pat on the back. Women who have not been redefined can get back in the kitchen/ brothel/ nursery depending on what the men have decided they’re good for.

Ah but you forget

Latest news is there is no difference between men and women in terms of size strength etc

We start to make gains
Golaposts get moved

So many advances of women have been reversed / spoiled by men. They turn everyhting to their advantage. As a group. Because they can.

bumpity is it though? Is it finite? We all know companies and political parties that create jobs for the boys/cronies, we see it happen all the time. Why couldn’t we have jobs for the girls that have power and influence in a different way? However earning the most money/making the most widgets/ being the most powerful person is destroying our societies and our planet - more of that is not the answer imho.

I hope we can go Star Trek instead of 1984 or nuclear apocalypse but we’ll have to see. I have a dd so would very much like her to grow up into a world where she’s not treated like a 2nd class citizen because she can bear children and is on average a bit smaller and weaker. We usually call bigger people who pick on smaller people shitty bullies and as society in general we call that behaviour out. But the list of excuses of when men do it to women is so long and vast and ingrained it’s like we don’t see it anymore for what it is.

If it was good for men we would have it.

On PP

I am pessimistic.

I wonder if the freedom & etc allowed to women in what is a small part of the western world

Is a blip

There have been other blips in other parts of the world

Men are bigger and stronger than us and because of pregnancy etc we are vulberable.

Womens rights are being rolled back as fast as gained when you look at the world.

Pics of Iran in the 60s are always sobering, or Afghanistan before the Taleban got hold.

I would like to think that most men would "do the right thing" given the choice but I have a horrible suspicion they would not.

Porn is 60% of the internet and most of it is vile. There is a market, which OK drives itself to more extreme things, but bottom line is, most men are pretty comfy with their position, relative to women in the same group.

It's not just about work / money though,

Men benefit in a myriad of ways

eg all men benefit from the violent few, as it means most women/girls are polite and careful when rejecting them rather than saying what they want, which quite often, is fuck off.

There's a host of stuff.