to think that all the people who have a problem with people using "girls" instead of "women"

[CartwrightMiss]

Should say "womanfriend" instead of "girlfriend"?

[gron]

I think there are plenty of unpleasant jobs women already do. The point I would think of more women working in construction and more men working in caring jobs is that it would make the people who want to do those jobs happier.

The point of getting a broad range of people from different classes, ethnicities, gender and people with disabilities into positions of power is that the influence they have potentially has an impact on millions of people like them because they have a better understanding of those people's lives, particularly if a number of them are doing it together and not just one token individual who is expected to represent women, people with disabilities or whoever.

I would not want to go back to a time when it was difficult to see a woman doctor, or a woman solicitor and I don't think it is in my son's best interests to have only been taught by women in primary school. I don't think it makes that great a difference to decisions made about me or him if cleaners are mostly women and bin men are mostly male.

I think it matters a lot if people going around saying that men do most of the heavy work or dirty work globally, because it is untrue and believing it leads to people making poor decisions about aid, government policy and human rights for the world's poor, who are mostly (70%) female and mostly doing very heavy manual work.

Dirty work done by women, is this, for example:

'The United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UN-HRC), at a 2002 meeting of the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, said, ?Public latrines - some with as many as 400 seats - are cleaned on a daily basis by female workers using a broom and a tin plate. The excrement is piled into baskets which are carried on the head to a location which can be up to four kilometers away from the latrine. At all times, and especially during the rainy season, the contents of the basket will drip onto a scavenger?s hair, clothes and body.?

Making up 98 percent of the majority of manual scavenging workers, these women, also known as ?Valmikis,? come from the very lowest castes in India.

?Removal of bodies and dead animals is the third most common practice of manual scavenging, preceeded by sewerage sweeping, and the carrying of night-soil by basket/bucket or on the head,?

Remembering her childhood in India at the age of seven, Chomar recounts, ?When I was a little child I would often insist on taking a broom from my mother so I could do the scavenging. The disposal of human excreta was the only thought that dominated my mind.?'

I seriously doubt that any of that leads to Indian society seeing women as equal, or that men don't do that job because of their greater strength.

Garlic

I didn't think I said that but anyway. I'm not disputing that women don't do rubbish jobs but there are a vast many that are still male dominated, for whatever reason.

I have no idea how you can qualify that women drive down the status of jobs as you have so can't really take that with any serious consideration without looking it up. However on first reading I would think that statement highly dubious.

But either way, it still does not detract from the fact that the BBC, Fawcet Society and other sources always state FTSE100 companies, parliament and other very high brow roles.

The NAS, before it became the NAS/UWT, requested that teachers be exempted from equal pay legislation, when it came in, on the basis that if female teachers and male teachers were paid on equal scales, teaching salaries of men would become increasingly lower because teaching would be seen as women's work and the teaching profession would no longer be respected.

Freya, thank you for that amazing long post, if not for the nightmares I'm going to have about those poor women walking in the rain with other people's shit running down their heads :(

Techno, I have seen the proof of my statements (I am a data bore) but am not going to find them again now. Google works 24/7, if you're interested.

Both Freya and I - and others, upthread - have said why the positions of influence are important for equality.

I get that, but what about the huge section of society that will never likely get a whiff of lower management, let alone the heady heights of being the next PM, CEO or middle management position in any company?

I get the rationale but have to question the validity of filling a very small number of jobs with high brow females when the vast bulk of society lies with the rest of us who hold ordinary jobs. In this respect I find it difficult to understand how so few females will truly influence change i.e. attitudes of the masses, when what is mostly required is change at ground level.

WRT women lowering the status of jobs. By that rationale, if what you are saying is true, then achieving a 50/50 split of CEO's will cause the role of a CEO to become lower status, or the PM and parliamentary roles to drop also. I very much doubt people will suddenly lose all ambition to become entrepreneurs and directors but that's just IMO.

Also I think you confuse status with aspiration. There are studies that show how one gender will pull away if another tends to overtake in a given field. However, that does not imply that the status has fallen, just that one gender no longer wishes to pursue that role. If one gender still aspires to work in such a field then the status has not changed. Women make up 50% of the population and if women are taking over a field and aspiring to work in it then I fail to see how its status has lowered. Maybe in the eyes of a few men but a few men do not make up the views of society, which by nature is variable anyway.

People in positions of power hold, well, power. If there are many female doctors in the NHS, it changes the service in the NHS. It means that a lot of the sexist inspired abuses of women with mental health problems, paternalism towards pregnant women, women being disbelieved when they report symptoms about themselves or their children are reduced. Women being doctors has changed the culture for patients in a way that nurses couldn't do because they have less power. Very few people will become doctors, but the impact they have on everyone's lives is immense

TT, a lot of the theories you are basing your opinions on are academic ones. Academics hold power to influence decisions which filter down to the whole of society. What kind of society do you think we would be living in if all academics, journalists, lawyers, politicians, business leaders, doctors were men? Countries like that still exist, and life is much worse for the majority of women there.

But Garlic made an (allegedly) valid claim that flooding a field with women lowers its status significantly. You then gave us an example backing this up with the teaching profession.

So we are either saying that more women will influence sexist male attitudes in a positive way or male attitudes determine the status of a job lowering its credibility. You can't have it both ways.

question the validity of filling a very small number of jobs with high brow females when the vast bulk of society lies with the rest of us

This is a common criticism of feminist movements, and not without validity imo. There are points of intersectionality (I learned that expression from FWR; I would have said crossovers ) within feminism where it looks weak from the perspective of poor, non-white, under-educated, elderly, disabled and/or lower-class women. All the same, I would say that having one or more of those qualities AND being a woman is a disadvantage and feminism addresses the 'being a woman' part. It can't solve all the problems all the time.

My feminism began in 1972 - I actually remember the occasion! - as a 17-year-old, white, grammar school girl from a working-class family in the industrial Midlands. My first direct action was a walkout at the metalworks where I was a clerk (for equal pay and a decent toilet.) Management did refer to its female employees, most of whom were over 40, as girls. Working class women might not perceive the relevance of feminism in their lives today, but I have seen it and I think they should talk to their grandmothers.

The big point is: changes are effected at the top of the social pyramid. Grassroots change needs thousands or millions of voices from the bottom, shouting upwards. Quicker and more efficient to get people saying the same things from the top.

saying that more women will influence sexist male attitudes in a positive way or male attitudes determine the status of a job lowering its credibility. You can't have it both ways.

No, the problem IS the fact that male attitudes determine the status of the job. This happens because the positions of influence are held by people with male attitudes. Change that, and you can change the whole crapshoot.

Women make up 50% of the population and if women are taking over a field and aspiring to work in it then I fail to see how its status has lowered. Maybe in the eyes of a few men but a few men do not make up the views of society, which by nature is variable anyway.

No, they don't. What you're looking at there is "patriarchy". Patriarchy isn't a cabal of male illuminati sitting in a bunker to plot against women. It's the whole cultural mindset, which values the male above the female - consciously or unconsciously. Patriarchal values made the teachers' unions think women teachers would downgrade the quality of teaching. Patriarchal values make Mumsnetters think Doctor Who can't be female (other thread!) Patriarchal values make people get that riddle about the surgeon's son wrong.

Most people accept the current status quo as "the way things are"; this is not a failing, it's natural in pack animals such as humans. Political movements take on the challenge of effecting deliberate change (or deliberate stasis, which is also a 'change'.) Feminism is a political movement. Feminism wants feminists at the top of the pyramid, because they can change these values faster than the grassroots can.

TT, I think that some fields need to have their level of power reduced. Doctors were held in too high esteem, as were journalists and politicians. Getting more low status people into those professions (be they deemed low status in society by virtue of their ethnicity, class background or gender) could actually be quite a good thing.

Added to that, some of these jobs hold a level of power that is partially intrinsic to the role; it cannot be taken away by entirely by social expectations. A doctor does have the power of life and death; a magistrate does have powers to take away people's freedom. You would have to socially devalue those occupations to the point where there job no longer existed in any meaningful way for them to not have those basic powers.

I also agree there are issues of intersectionality, and that making a small number of women more powerful is not the sole purpose of feminism; it is a small part of feminism. That does not mean that making all occupations roughly 50/50 in terms of men and women doing them is part of feminism at all. The point of feminism should be about improving the lives of all people whose lives are disadvantaged by sexism. The priority should be on the most vulnerable.

So if you look at a situation where men hold power, and they don't value making life better for women - an example would be that of the idea on this thread - pretending that women aren't globally doing twice the work of men for one tenth of the world's income and less than once percent of the world's resources, anyone who can might want to support women made vulnerable by that.

So if I support Water Aid, and they get wells and sanitation put in somewhere, then the people (mainly women) who walk miles carrying heavy containers of water and the people (mainly women) who walk miles carrying baskets of human excrement, don't have to do that anymore.

I think you ILTB are arguing different points. ILTB seemed to be arguing that women didn't deserve equality because men are stronger and women don't do dirty jobs or jobs requiring strength. You seem to be arguing that life would be better for women if men and women split all occupations 50/50. I can see some benefit to that in that it would end a situation in the UK where women are paid less because they are in 'female' occupations, where governments can target certain jobs for redundancy depending on which gender they want to have less income and/or unionised power.

But it seems a massive effort to go to when there are simpler ways of addressing the same issue. Local councils had some kind of policy (or perhaps they were forced to do it) about a decade ago where they had to go through all the occupations and see if they were paying people with similar skills, work demands etc the same pay (including overtime payments, anti social hours payments). The people they were underpaying turned out to be mainly women (pay compared to the relatively large amounts bin men were being paid was a particular issue) and they had to pay them more. It seems far simpler to organise salaries that people with similarly demanding and skilled jobs are paid the same, rather than trying to make every occupation have a balanced number of women, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, people who had working class upbringings etc.

Even if we do that, we still have the issue that women do far more unpaid work than men, and that includes women who work full time. That work has to be done. The only way that can be reduced for women is if men do more of it or if it all becomes paid work, and I don't see it is possible for it to become all paid work.

Sorry for length of post.

But things from the top, if they dont have roots, dont grow properly.

And, as Xenia says, full time workers that are in a balance of 8.5/5.5 male to female, by definition are going to have many more males at the top.

Doing a great job Techno btw.

Actually, that is not quite what Xenia says.
But something a bit like that

That's clearly not true. There are countries where fewer women work than do here and the gender gap in the workplace is smaller than it is here. If women are allowed into an occupation, there isn't a direct correlation between number of women in the workplace and likelihood of women being represented in powerful positions.

The same is true for men from working class, or more widely unprivileged backgrounds. There is no direct correlation between the number of them qualified to be in, or working in a profession and the likelihood they will be evenly represented in positions of power and influence.

What are the reasons for women taking more part-time jobs (which can reduce the rates of pay for part-time jobs, as they're mostly filled by women)?

Doubtless the fact that they do more 'wifework' - house care, child care, shopping, etc - than men, so can't fit in a full-time job as well as their unpaid job at home.

This gives us the reasonable proposition that women do less paid work because they're doing more unpaid work. How should this be addressed?

++ what Freya says (I'm really appreciating your posts, Freya, thanks.) I'm looking at a mainly UK situation but, given that we're in the second decade of the 21st century, it makes sense to look at things globally as well.

My 16 year old has girlfriends, if adults have relationships then people use the term boy and girl friends for want of a better ohrase as partner implies a serious relationship usually living together. that doesn't mean that 40 year olds go out with "boys" or "girls" though.
The girls night out phrase just conjures up hen night hell to me though.

Sorry, I am not sure what it is about Freya's posts, but I dont understand most of them, so am unable to respond to them.

for instance, I dont know what a gender gap is.

garlic I dont know how it should be addressed.

And when you say that is clearly not true, what is clearly not true?

This report says that there is no country in the world that doesn't have a gender gap i.e. inequality between men and women in various areas such as work, education, health, political empowerment etc.

www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf

Main site
www.weforum.org/issues/global-gender-gap

Ilike, according to the latest labour market figures for the UK it is being partially addressed by economic strictures. Growth in part-time jobs is now becoming the norm; they are replacing full-time jobs (at lower rates of pay.) Logic would insist that men, therefore, should be shouldering a greater portion of the unpaid work.

There's no evidence that this is so. It might turn out to be the case but, pardon my scepticism, I doubt that. This sort of thing could fairly easily be addressed by feminists with powers to legislate: they could push through things like compulsory family-friendly workplace policies. In some countries, for example, parental leave must be shared by law on pain of losing both parent entitlements and corporate penalties. Personal tax breaks could be similarly tweaked to encourage more equality of childcare.

Is feminism really about power?

How would feminists get powers to legislate?

ILTB, a gender gap is a gap between genders.

A gender pay gap is a gap between how much men are paid and how much women are paid.

There can also be gender gaps in things like education - boys are not doing as well as girls on average in the UK. There can be gender gaps in number of men and women who reach positions of seniority.

Feminism is about achieving equality for women with men. Women do not currently have this equality, generally speaking. Therefore it's about effecting serious change in our societies. This requires power. So feminism is about the power to effect change.

'Race' equality was and is pursued under the banner "black power". This doesn't mean black supremacy, it means the power to achieve equality. Same with feminism.

Feminists get powers to legislate by getting into the upper-hierarchy positions that have been under discussion here.

'Ilikethebreeze Wed 05-Jun-13 15:12:34
And when you say that is clearly not true, what is clearly not true?'

I meant that this is clearly not true:

'full time workers that are in a balance of 8.5/5.5 male to female, by definition are going to have many more males at the top.'