Minor rant - shouldn't watch the telly!

[ISNT]

The one show

Just had a thing saying that women's pensions are much lower than men's and double the amount of women as men have no pension provision whatsoever.

Report started by saying about how the old idea that women aren't any good with money (not heard that one but anyway) isn't true but now we've seemingly got equality, how is this happening?

Aha, I thought, they will obviously talk about

• 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 3 seconds 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 that? Oh no. First they said that women only want to spend money on things that are tangible. So pensions are meaningless to them.

Then I missed two mins while I looked at a gossip thread so they may have said all the above in that section... but... I doubt it as when I tuned back in they were talking about women shopping excessively to fill emotional voids in their lives, then they talked 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".

How will we ever get anywhere, when lazy gender stereotypes are propogated in this way, and the real deep problems are not even mentioned???

Oh I'm so glad you posted this. I was livid! You didn't miss anything, your summary was exactly how I would have summarised it. I was shouting at the TV!

I should emphasise part of that post more.

The first point they made was that pensions are meaningless to women as they only understand spending money on tangible things that they can touch and see. They said that, I haven't interpreted or added anything. So women are unable to understand concepts such as the future, and saving, and retirement, and can only grasp things which are in front of their noses now and they can see. And presumably the sparklier the better.

It's just all such a load of shit.

Can you imagine if they said that shit about black people? Can you imagine?

wtf is going on with our world?

never mind the pay gap, cheer yourself up with a new handbag love

How depressing

Yeah I heard a bit of that but switched my ears off as too busy to start crying in rage.

I know - if they'd given some lazy stereotype like "British Asians spend all their money on curry ingredients" or "black people spend all their money on medallions" I would hope they would be hauled out of the BBC so fast their feet didn't touch the ground. Should be the case here. Shall we complain? It is atrocious, mendacious and just fucking bog standard sexism. That editor/producer needs to know this shit isn't acceptable any more.

To tell the nation that women are living in poverty in their own old age because they're thick and greedy basically. FFS.

I've certainly noticed how women have no concept of paying for intangible things: higher education for instance. Oh what's that? More women that men going to university? Eek well that's put a hole in my theory.

This is unbelievable, it's been proved time and again that giving women control of money results in more of it being spent on the children/family, and the standard of living increasing. That's why most micro-finance schemes start off women-only.

Anecdotes like this make me very glad that we ditched our TV once and for all last month and won't be buying a new one... I'll download the occasional show from BBC iplayer from now on and it will be carefully selected to avoid rage-inducing rubbish like this...

It's been proven time and time again that women are actually better at handling long-term financial planning than men are, women have been shown in surveys to be better at buying insurance, saving and avoiding excessive risk compared to men. Personally, I don't think there is that much difference between the sexes naturally but the fact that more women than men end up as carers for children or other vulnerable people would surely make them much more aware of the need to save for the future- I don't know anyone who lives in this frivolous handbag-driven world these TV people talk about

I don't know if I am becoming more aware as I get older or if the media is becoming more sexist. It certainly isn't getting any better for women out there. I worry for my daughter.

it's getting worse. I complained about things back in the 90s that wouldn't even register on my radar now!

There was something also yesterday that really riled me. On the Today programme, in that little section where they just briefly mention some kind of minor story, usually a bit frivolous or funny, they mentioned some study that said that women had 4 different shaped bottoms, all linked to fruit IIRC. Why?! Why that bit of research? Why is that important to report? The male presenter reported it with a slightly smutty tone, accompanied by the laughing of the female presenter, as if to show it 'it's OK guys, she laughed'. It's like we need to be reminded just how we're seen before we head off to work. Chip, chip, chip...

I have complained (link to make a complaint). We can't just keep quiet about this sort of thing or it multiplies even further.

oh my goodness
How can this crap just be accepted by the majority of women??

just an aside, I am reading a cheap thriller at the moment, written by a woman and it's utterly dreadful, full of pretty bimbos, clever, hard working women that are almost as good as men, men calling women whores, women calling other women sluts (by a female writer).

oh and inevitably the clever hard working women are 'plain'

What did you say in your complaint proflayton?

Me too Prof. We have to challenge this shit

Did they not also say that 60% of the population are not saving enough for retirement? Of which the vast majority are MEN?????????

ISNT I said quite a lot that was in your first message. That I expected to see a discussion of issues you listed and some others, instead saw 2 elements you mentioned and handbags reference. Acknowledged that it is a representation of some research, but there is a need for balancing that with contrary research and wider issues.

I didn't actually sit here and copy your message, although it may look like that . You did summarise perfectly what I was ranting when I saw it. Hence why I'm referring to your post.

Don't recall Miggsie but I do recall a lot of the stats were things like 36% and they they were saying 'this is what women do'. Sod the other 64% eh!

I was just wondering whether it needed to be "poshed up" IYKWIM.

I was like this so will complain as well I think. If nothing else happens it will presumably be fed back to the people who wrote the piece, and they might keep it in mind in the future.

I reworded most of what you'd said as you had it nicely organised (didn't cut and paste as you don't want lots of identikit complaints but I covered the same general points, bringing in what InMyPrime said about research showing that women were statistically better at long-term financial planning).

I poshed it up a bit. Thb I've stopped poshing things up too much. I write for a living, and found I was obsessing about every word on things like that, and then realised that however eloquent my argument it would end up on the same pile, so I toned down the poshing. Quantity over poshing.

LOL Alice, so true; you spend ages composing a brilliant and irrefutable argument and they just reply (if they even bother to reply) 'Naah, you're wrong because we say you are.'

but you just keep on keeping on in the hope that one day someone will notice that the BBC gets 100000000000000 complaints about sexism every year and it's not good enough!

The thing that made me keep complaining about stuff despite the 'Naah, you're wrong because we say you are.' was something I read about how one of the justifications for that response is that they are reflecting 'public opinion'. So public opinion doesn't think whatever is sexist therefore that are just reflecting that. But if people keep complaining, then we can potentially shift this nebulous public opinion. Not quick and easy but a potential route.

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.