Its 3014, and we have achieved gender equality…

[Thistledew]

Men and women are seen as true equals. They are equally represented in positions of power; there is no pay gap; there is no differentiation or stigma in terms of job roles, hobbies or in respect of domestic responsibilities. Men and women are seen as equally capable of and responsible for all aspects of child-raising (apart from breast feeding). The way people choose to dress and behave is completely fluid, with things like clothing, personal grooming and wearing of makeup seen as being solely the choice of the individual. Gender based violence is seen as primitive behaviour, beyond which the human race has now evolved.

Do we still have a need for gender designation?

The biological function of reproduction still throws up obvious gender differentials. Assuming that we still largely operate in a pair-bonding system, both expectant parents would have the same rights to take time off work to attend ante-natal appointments, to take time off after the birth to care for the post-natal care, and to flexibility in employment for care for children, the disabled and the elderly.

However, it does not make sense for all employment rights to be equal. For example, the right to be able to avoid heavy lifting, long hours standing up, exposure to chemicals etc only applies to those people who are actually pregnant with the child, and not the non-pregnant partner. Is it still therefore useful to designate people as ‘men’ and ‘women’, as a short hand to saying “women are entitled to additional pregnancy-related employment rights”, or would it be sufficient to say “these employment rights apply to anyone with medical proof of pregnancy”?

Could we do away with male/female designation altogether, on birth certificates, employment records and other official documents?

Is competitive sport the only time at which it would be unfair not to differentiate?

NB I’m not saying that doing away with gender designation would bring about proper equality, which I think has to come first before we can be truly gender neutral. This may be a completely pointless musing, but I thought it might be a fresh way to consider gender and what it actually is.

NB ii. It may be 3014, but we still don’t have hover boards. Sorry.

i've always thought it would be very useful if we could refer to people as "it". obviously it's not culturally acceptable as things stand. at work i often come across names where it's not clear to me whether a person is male or female (i may only have an initial and surname) and there is potential to cause offence if you pick the wrong pronoun, so you have to do clever grammatical things to avoid using pronouns.

Minipie, how would you like men to get children from unwilling women? Popular answers to this condundrum:

1. Rape them.
2. Forced marriage.
3. Forced birth and pregnancy.
4. Slavery.
5. Financial destitution if they don't live with a man.
6. Social disapproval and shaming.
7. Denying social opportunities and excluding fatherless children (no childcare for bastards).
8. Put unmarried mothers in a mental institution.
9. Or a Magdelene laundry.
10. Snatch their babies from the labour ward.

Oh, I agree, it's not a solvable problem almond. Just saying it's not, strictly speaking, equality.

Re the rest of your posts: As I read it, you are essentially saying "women have the babies, therefore women are statistically more likely to end up being the main/sole childcarer or the childcarer with other women, therefore we ought to have a society which reflects this and eg pay women to be childcarers".

My issue with this is that it would seem to cement women in the role of childcarer.

No, I am definitely not saying that we should pay women to be childcarers. We should pay childcarers to be childcarers, and mothers will be among them.

And it is, strictly speaking, equality. I can't swim the channel. Others physically can. Equality is giving people the best possible opportunities taking into account their physical capacities. It is not equality for me to dictate how channel swimmers do or do not swim, or punish them for their capabilities.

It is equality that many women can carry children and should be allowed to do so without punishment or control from men.

Ok, fair points.

But I don't think that saying "if you want help with childcare you need a childcare partner(s) - which will usually but not necessarily be the father" amounts to punishment or control of women by men.

I was thinking the other day, about the abortion thing, I do of course think that a woman should be allowed and able to terminate a pregnancy if she so wishes. But about the question of a man walking away. Currently if a man decides to walk away there is very little that anybody can or will do about it. Yet if he decides on a whim to turn up seven years later and insist on involvement, he can do. And then he can fuck off three years later, if he chooses, again without any consequence at all.

I think that one parent should be allowed to relenquish parenthood, if they so wish, meaning that they are no longer financially responsible for the child, as the child is no longer legally theirs, but that this is in effect until the child is 18 - like adoption. And then seek child support (with actual, decent, free legal enforcement) from any NRP who is considered responsible for their child but is not actually looking after them more than 50% of the time.

Similarly if a parent is found to be abusive it should be possible to just have that child removed from the child's life but not the other (of course if the other parent is enabling the abusive parent to see the child then they would need to be removed for protection.)

In Germany where I live parents are paid to look after their children up to 3 years old. It's not a huge amount (about €100 a week I think) but the mother or father can take it (they can also share paid parental leave with both having a minimum of 2 months and there is another 10 months which can be split) and if both parents want to work they can have it paid in the form of childcare. You can also work part time during the up-to-three-years period, during which time your employer has certain responsibilities (which I forget but they're good)

Minipie, define childcare. Reception class? Nursery class? Care for infants paid for through the childcarecomponent of tax credits? Which one would you like to deny to the children of single mothers?

We no longer live in a society where single mothers are denied free or heavily subsidised childcare, but provision could be improved.

The idea of the heterosexual pair bond for childcare is not universal and is dwindling in our society.

It is of course punitive to deny mothers childcare if it denies them job opportunities and pushes them and their children into poverty. It is one of the reasons the global poor are mostly female.

If only they'd all found the right man and married him. That would solve all the problems of the world.

Bertie, I think childcare and parental benefits are improving across Europe. I'd like to see them transferable to any childcare provider. So if a brother wants to look after his nephew under 3 three days a week, he should also have an automatic right to part time work. If agrandmother looks after a child 5 days, childcare tax credits should go to her, and so on.

Buffy, I was very clear from the start that it could be argued that women should be socially conditioned to not want to spend any time whatsoever with the children they have given birth to.

Who gets to bring up children and why would then be decided for other reasons - love comes through care as you have explained would be an example. Clearly you don't need to have been pregnant to really love a child, or even have any kind of biological connection to it.

But I then think you have to explain why women would want to get pregnant at all? What would they be doing it for? Would they be compensated for this activity? What would the risks to them be under this new reproductive system?

It is very clear that there are lots of men prepared to be bio fathers but who do not want to be social fathers - sperm donors, one night stands where the woman maybe getting pregnant matters not one way or the other to the father, absent fathers who have kids by three different women on purpose and no real intention of seeing any of them, men with kids and wives who have another child by another woman that they have never seen and don't plan to. I know all these men. They far outnumber the women who get pregnant and give the baby away (although I know some of them too). Do you really believe the number of bio mothers and fathers who aren't bothered about a relationship with their child is the same?

And as you only need one sperm donor to impregnate hundreds of women, women can have kids without a social father. Any fertile woman can have a baby. Many fertile men who want children cannot have them because no fertile woman will agree to the pregnancy.

It is also surely clear that there are whole societies set up with no heterosexual pair bond in childcare. Children are raised by mother plus others - be that socially her own mother, sister, brother, friend etc. But there is not, as far as I know, any example where mothers as the norm give up newborn babies.

So while it is possible that you could separate mothers from newborns and construct society that way, in our own society you would be coming up against a hugely entrenched belief system. Many people believe the mother newborn dyad is innate, and that it would be cruel and abusive to separate them (indeed that dyad has special protection in universal human rights). I think challenging that belief brings up a lot of fear in many women, and they would rather not be feminists than believe their right to their newborn is under threat. So is it possible or desirable to challenge that belief?

Heteronormativity, on the other hand, I am quite happy to challenge.

it's a cunning trick, isn't it? socialising women into believing that only a defective woman wouldn't want children, and that the difficult/tedious/time-consuming aspects of childrearing should come naturally to her, and yet that men are the ones who need to be coerced or tricked into impregnating women

I think it is absolutely possible for women to not be oppressed. But men need to acknowledge and get over their envy of women's reproductive capacity so that they can stop trying to diminish and control women.

When I look at MRA sites it is absolutely clear (to me at least) that this is what it is all about.

But society seems to want to skirt around the issue by constantly making out that women having kids is an inconvenience to society, rather than society has made motherhood and the very existence of children an inconvenience to society's (men's) aims. And I'm not even sure what these aims are - getting drunk, shuffling bits of papers around, white water rafting? What is it that society thinks it is doing that young children and their care stand in opposition to? I think the Scandinavian countries are going in the right direction on this - all of society becoming more about children and the vulnerable. Not all this huffing and puffing over kids and why can't they just be hidden behind a curtain or something so their parents can get on with important work.

it's inevitable under this particular kind of "short-termist" capitalism isn't it? anything that is not contributing to the bottom line is a cost

i do agree btw

Yes, I think part of it is capitalism. I'm not saying we're going to abolish capitalism, but I think that any future system under which gender equality is going to increase is going to have a much more mixed system of governance, valuing time and resources and types of exchange.

i agree with that too

one of the reasons why i'm struggling in my current job is with the constant measurement - weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual dashboards, forecasting, projections, percentage increases, efficiences etc. i could piss off every single person i come into contact with as long as i met the targets and i would be deemed to have had a successful year come performance review. but that's not a longterm, sustainable way of doing business

sorry, that's another derail from me. a personal frustration!

I don't think it is a derail. Society treats children (the actual way society reproduces itself) as an inconvenience in the reproduction of society.

This has been mirrored in every job I've had. Patients - an inconvenience to the smooth running of health care services and the work of health managers, customers - an inconvenience to shop managers. Students , the public and research - an inconvenience to the administration of universities.

when i was a waitress we used to joke about customers coming and messing up our lovely clean restaurant

is it yes, minister where there is a hospital that fully-staffed administratively but not open to patients and it is the best-run hospital according to measurements (may have misremembered)

I do think those feelings that you mention Buffy are more than conditioning. It makes sense on an animal/evolutionary level for somebody if not everybody to have strong protective urges and an emotional need to be close to small babies. The mother is necessarily going to be around when the baby is born, so it makes sense that she has these urges and needs far more strongly than anybody else, although in general we are programmed to see babies as vulnerable, cute, nice, unthreatening. For the survival of the species we instinctively want our children with us and I think that probably is stronger in women than in men although obviously individuals may vary.