What does (or should) gender equality mean in terms of closing the pay and income?

[Gentlemanjohn]

What is the goal?

1. Communism: all men and women earning a broadly similar wage.

2. Capitalist economic inequality plus gender equality: An equal representation of women and men amongst low earners, middle earners and high earners. In other words, roughly the same number of men and women working in care homes for the same minimum wage; and roughly the same amount of men and women working for investment banks for the same 6 figure salary.

If equal numbers of men and women were working in care for the same shitty wage, would that not be equality in your view? Do you not see the problem?

It's fairer than the current system where many many more women work in care for a shitty wage and we get told they chose it and it's natural.

You rail against your own crappy job yet suggest feminists are wrong to want better than women disproportionately being in those jobs.

How do you think we should improve things for working class women?

I meant 'elite' in the context of my utopia, people doing 'high end' useful stuff. Probably should have used a different word.

How do you think we should improve things for working class women?

Pay them more - perhaps a universal living wage. Create social housing. Re-distribute wealth into the essential social and health services they need. To be achieved by taxing both wealth (land, high end financial transactions, inheritance) and high income.

It's quite obvious. What else do you think we should do to help them?

I know this is the equivalent of asking someone what position they like to have sex in, but is anyone prepared to tell me how much money they earn, after tax?

Market capitalism is a system of violence

Absolutely!! It is not a by-product. Nor an unfortunate outcome. Gaining advantage is the foundation, and while the violence is often now not obvious at the first instance, it is there.

I'm from a working class background, as is my partner, we both took different routes (I worked my way through Uni, he started at the bottom when he was 18 having got fairly useless and pitiful A-levels because the school wanted to keep him because he was good at sport) but we're both now Director level in IT - me freelance, him for various companies over the past few years. My immediate family cover a whole gamut - from working on 0 hours to being in teacher training to career supermarket to professional engineer.

Personally I don't actually see that changing - there always have been, and always will be, a huge demand for relatively unskilled (or learn on the job) positions - retail, cleaning etc. then professional roles - teaching, doctors, lawyers and skilled - programmers, engineers, plumbers.

People talk about jobs being lost to automation, but those were often shit jobs anyway, and when one career winds down (satellite dish installer) another comes into being (solar panel installer) for those who have the will to do it.

I really don't see the doom and gloom that you do John.

Absolutely. You don't see the violence. One thinker compared the global market system to a sphere that one is always inside so that it appears not to be a an authoritarian system but a field of limitless freedom. Whereas in East Germany or Jerusalem you can see the walls, in capitalism the walls are invisible, but they're still there. Indeed, the hidden walls are more impassable than the physical ones.

You can choose between endless products, wear anything you like, sleep with whoever you like, choose from hundreds of TV channels and entertainment services etc etc. But there are some things you are not allowed to do - namely any form of collective action that would change the very (seemingly invisible) system you operate within, along with all its hidden rules. If you are a woman, you can either have the identity of successful career woman, serving the market system in the name of a false freedom, wife, or 'whore' - nothing else. If you are a man, you can either have the identity of meritocratic and sexual victor or permanent adolescent loser - nothing else. This is patriarchy, and it is also the logic of capitalism. It turns the sexes against one another, it degrades women into sex meat or cunningly co-opts them as allies.

If you are a woman, you can either have the identity of successful career woman, serving the market system in the name of a false freedom, wife, or 'whore' - nothing else. If you are a man, you can either have the identity of meritocratic and sexual victor or permanent adolescent loser

This is not the case except in a very black and white, extreme view of society. In real life, this is not the case.

I think you are seeing things from a very privileged position. Go to the post-industrial wastelands of the North. In the UK homelessness has increased from 100'000 in 2011 to 150'000. It is set on current trends to increase to 350'00 by 2041. There are now 4 million children living in poverty. Go to Detroit and Wisconsin, where unemployment has risen from 7 to 16% in a decade. Go to almost anywhere in Europe where secure, remunerative employment is disappearing and inequality widening. Go to India. I spoke to an Indian woman recently who works in marketing in Mumbai. She works a sixty hour week for a pittance. She told me here is currently a suicide epidemic amongst the young in India. Commonly, someone will have worked 50 hours straight and then just walks to the window of their office building and jumps. There is such pressure to succeed in the few opportunities that there are that kids who fail their exams are commonly found hanging from ceiling fans.

Then there are the victims of trafficking and organised crime, the money of which is passing through western banks; the third world victims of World bank agricultural projects; the people dying in Africa mining Colltan for our phones. The 1 billion people living in slums.

It is a mess.

Sure I was being bluntly monolithic, but in cultural terms that is basically the size of it.

From a feminist perspective, it is far more important to improve the economic situation of the people at the bottom than to close the pay gap.

If housing is affordable for all, the NHS and education is at a decent standard, appropriate tax credits for part time workers are in place, and the living wage is mandatory and increased, either via tax credits or the employer, than that allows women to be independent and not financially dependent on men.

It doesn't improve the situation of women as a group if there are more women on over 40k.

I agree Sylvia.

And as well as lifting women out of poverty (and allowing her the independence to, for example break free of the man who is beating her up at home or the pimp who keeps her in prostitution), you are also creating a society in which men do not feel they have to compete for dominance in a dog eat dog economy. In other words, a socialistic economy is a more co-operative and less competitive one and therefore will dispel some of male aggression in our society. It will be good for men and women.

This economy, in terms of gender politics, is fucking toxic.

Yes. It's setting men up to behave in increasingly masculine ways, and part of that status building becomes about treatment of women.

Well, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a more equitable society possible and it gets really hard. You can get derailed down the "magic money tree" path. There's the old, "if you raise taxes the "achievers will flee" argument. There is a basic question about whether there is actually enough "stuff" to go around. One of the strongest features of Capitalism is that you don't really have to think too hard.

I think I have found a way to make it work though. Like solving a maze, it is much easier if you start at the end. And we are aided in that a lot of our parameters are set for us.

We know, for instance, that a Sapien requires x amount of calories to survive. We know that without warm clothing and shelter, we will die in the winter. Potable water is a must. It is blindingly simple, then, that if we value human life these things should be made available.

It seems to me this is self-evident - only to be countered by the argument that perhaps some people are not deserving of life. I think that one would have to become "God" to go down that path.

But I truly believe that we have the ability and resources to meet those very basic needs - food, water, shelter, clothing.

And if we move on to other needs, like the need for safety, again I see no logistical reason why we can't make it work. Sustainable transport, properly managed, is not out of our reach at all. Closing the pay gap can be done.

We can continue the list - I feel that mental stimulation is a human requirement, as is recreation and fitness. Medical care. Education. But all of these things can be done. We are doing them already in a half-assed way.

Leaving this planet and colonising space.....there are some very real challenges. Some we will struggle to do.

But these other things can be achieved, and I feel that if we have the ability to make these basics available to all, then we must.

Pay equality can be achieved, if we make it a goal. The logistics are not hard at all.

something like negative income tax, where incomes under a certain amount GET money from the government, instead of paying tax, seems like something that could work.

Isn't that what tax credits do?

I am entirely unconvinced that in the real world with human nature and a global economy, there is a way to redistribute wealth beyond a certain point without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

At the end of the day, "wealth" is a relative term anyway. A pound coin or a rupee is only a "promise" (other than it's value when melted down). Is it even possible to increase the "wealth" of everyone? Surely, all we can do is re-distribute wealth to even it out more. Planet Earth is a closed economy, so it's ultimate "value" must be fixed. If we want to increase the "wealth" of an entire continent, then it must be that we have to reduce the "wealth" of the other continents. That's exactly what has happened throughout history as entire countries, continents, dynasties & empires have gone through the boom/bust cycle. At the moment, the "West" is losing value and the "East" is gaining, due to Middle Eastern Oil, Far Eastern Mass production, etc. We have to accept that on a global scale, we can't increase everyone's wealth - we, in the West, are going to be poorer, on average, than our parents/grandparents whereas those in the East, on average, are going to be richer than there's. Once we accept that, we then need to revise our planning etc to enable ourselves to compete against the emerging economies, i.e. through education, new skills, infrastructure planning for the next generation etc. We need to regard computers and robots as our future, and not be frightened of them and try to hold on to the old way of doing things. We need to be proactive - like the poster above, instead of sitting back and whingeing that we've loads of redundant sky dish installers, we should be educating and training the next generation of solar panel installers! We can't keep relying on others to look after us - we need to take responsibility for ourselves, on a personal level, on a family/society level and on a governmental level. Otherwise, we'll be the next collapsed economy and we'll all be poor (but then again, some would appear happy if we were all at the bottom on the heap!).

I am entirely unconvinced that in the real world with human nature and a global economy, there is a way to redistribute wealth beyond a certain point without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs

Well again, it is daunting. It really is.

But imagine going back in time time to a manor in say 1150. And you spoke with this Norman Lord on a turret. And you said to him, "One day, very soon really in the grand scale of things, these little people scrambling around out there will be able to vote and choose the government, and in fact your direct descendent will work for the descendent of that guy over there in the pig enclosure" - he might laugh, or perhaps have your tongue pulled out.

We have not reached stasis, nor solved everything. And things will change.

Given that, and that we are at a point where we can't consider world conflict, would it not make sense to try and create conditions which allow for improvement?

I am entirely unconvinced that in the real world with human nature and a global economy, there is a way to redistribute wealth beyond a certain point without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Well there is, and there have been. From 1945 until somewhere in the mid-1970's European economies - and even the US - were social democracies with almost full employment and, compared to now, a very low level of inequality.They had state owned infrastructure along with thriving, but regulated and unionised, private sectors. In the UK in the 1960's levels of homelessness was so low that sociologists predicted that it would have all but died out by now.

Now these societies were not utopias. There was terrible prejudice, gender and racial inequality - but they were economically very just.

Then in the 1980's came the neoliberal revolution led by Thatcher and Reagan. This was based on the philosophy of some American economists who believed economic markets function according to abstract laws. If not interfered with by government, markets would self-regulate, efficiently allocating resources and delivering prosperity to all as everyone pursued their own iself-interest. So they privatised, they smashed unions, they sold off national assets - they completely dismantled the politics of the New Deal and post-war welfare state basically.

And the consequences have been disastrous.

My point, made in a comment above, is that the geese are no longer laying the golden eggs. Or they are, but they're just keeping the eggs for themselves. Today's capitalists aren't creating jobs and spreading wealth like the Henry Ford's did. They're parasites.

Planet Earth is a closed economy

I was just listening to a talk by cosmochemist Dr Natalie Starkey on this subject. It may be that we will be able to, in the very near future "mine" enormous amounts of materials from passing asteroids.

She made an interesting point that while the technological requirements are tough, it is do-able. The problem becomes one of economics and politics. Flooding the market with precious materials would cause great turbulence in the world order.

Again many of our problems are those of our own making, and thus can be corrected if we choose to view the world differently.

If not interfered with by government, markets would self-regulate, efficiently allocating resources and delivering prosperity to all as everyone pursued their own iself-interest

If I could add, the idea that "free-markets" exist is disingenuous. Are these great City hedge funds laissez faire champions if they require public bailouts when the invisible hand turns on them?

Absolutely makeourfuture. They don't even exist.

Equal pay for equal work would be my suggestion,

Is it even possible to increase the "wealth" of everyone?

Yes! Through the use of intelligence and (appropriate) technology. Think how much more 'wealthy' we are in terms of health simply because we have a sewerage system. Thats before you get to medicine... more efficient agriculture... education...

The first one.