To think ignoring our biological disadvantages will mean we never achieve real equality?

[Bumpitybumper]

Off the top of my head I have thought of the following potential disadvantages that arise from our biology:

1. Mensturating including associated PMS, pain and general inconvenience
2. Pregnancy including conditions such as SPD, hypermesis and preeclampsia
3. Childbirth including mental and physical damage plus hormonal aftermath
4. Breastfeeding including pain, sleep deprivation and time consuming nature
5. Contraception to control fertility can cause depression and have other unwanted side effects
6. Menopause, admittedly I'm not 100 percent on impact of this but understand it can be pretty horrific
7. Women tend to be physically weaker so less able to defend themselves or carry out manual tasks

I am struggling to think of any comparative male biological disadvantages. Yet it seems almost all policies and initiatives set up to improve equality completely disregard these differences and seem keen to pretend that if you just encouraged women to behave differently (e g. Go into STEM careers) or got women and men to share childcare/paternity leave etc then women would be able to compete with men successfully without making any real concessions to our different biology and therefore wants and needs.

Basically what I'm saying is why is the emphasis on getting women to fit in and adapt to a male working environment when as a class we are always going to suffer from these enormous disadvantages? Why isn't the emphasis more on adapting the male working environment to make it more female friendly?

Question: should midwives start giving the baby to Dad to hold first instead of the mother? Wouldn't that encourage Dad to play the primary caregiver role? Why should mum get first dibs

Both my babies were given to dh first.

As a society we’re in a massive catch 22.

Women are lower paid and have lesser “careers” because they are expected to have maternity leave/be main caregivers. Time off for school plays, hospital appointments.

Because of that men generally don't need time off for caring responsibilities, their wife will pick up the slack on that front. So employers are less flexible with men and their working hours. Men are also promoted above women and paid more as they’re seen as more comitted. I have seen many man asked what their wife is doing when they’ve asked to leave early or for time off for child related things.

Which means in a couple the wife of childbearing age generally earns less, is promoted less, employers are likely to be more flexible, so it becomes the “common sense” decision for her to become the pt or sahp.

Many midwives already give baby to dh first while they stitch up the mother.

I was thinking the other day, whoever set up so many sports to have all white outfits, and decided that 3 hour exams were a good thing, was not someone who had ever menstruate

^^ This. A million times this

Simon: I thought it was now generally accepted that men's testierone driven competition leads to risky behaviours in all male environments and this was postulated as one reason why stock markets are so fragile and banking collapses happen. Of course I don't suppose anyone has done any real studies.

Fmsfms: it seems you can not understand that the studies you keep Mentioning actually do not prove what you want them to. I have tried to explain the statistics behind this for you before so I won't repeat here but just a note for the benefit of other people that his statements are a theory based on some results for which other alternative theories are more likely.

@midgebabe zzzz

" However, studying sex differences across 55 different cultures, Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, & Allik, came to the opposite conclusion:

With improved national wealth and equality of the sexes, it seems differences between men and women in personality traits do not diminish. On the contrary, the differences become conspicuously larger.

They also made this statement remarking on their own extensive research (emphasis added):

In this study, a collection of eight different gender equality indicators provided a comprehensive set of measures that assess disparity between male and female roles in society. In every case, significant findings suggest that greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.

Gender gaps do not decrease in egalitarian countries. Rather, they increase. According to the authors, this is because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality traits becomes wider” (emphasis added)." quillette.com/2017/07/15/time-stop-worrying-first-world-gender-gaps/

Looks pretty clear for me, you offer no evidence for your claims.

@midgebabe " I thought it was now generally accepted that men's testierone driven competition leads to risky behaviours in all male environments "

What is "testierone"?????

What is "testierone"?????

Oooh, why don't you have a guess?

They did the BFI across 55 different cultures and compared that to wealth and inequality?

Not terribly rigorous is it? I mean the BFI is generally seen as one of those odd things idiot managers do as training excercises.

Love the line in the article that confidently states that the only reason there are no senior female academics is that we don’t apply. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Yeah that’s it....

I might write a grant proposal to administer the quizzes from Cosmo or Smash hits to prove... oh I don’t know. Something.

"Not terribly rigorous is it? I mean the BFI is generally seen as one of those odd things idiot managers do as training excercises. "

Yes, a psycho metric test at a job interview/evaluation is exactly the same as scientific studies conducted by actual psychologists hmm]

I think this is where I tune out - I have no desire to rehash the same arguments with people who refuse to accept anything remotely challenging to their world view

@Gwenhwyfar "Not all white men are privileged though so I suppose some might think that they'll be even more disadvantaged... " but they are! Even if they are poor or uneducated, they can travel to most countries of the world without suspicion that BAME have to experience. They will most likely be given positions of power wherever they are; typical example of this is an exposure of oil rigs in the oil and gas industry etc in Nigeria and Venezuela, nearly all management positions are occupied by white men. Not all of those men are excellent, but their racial privilege provided them access to the positions. Trump is another example of this, he was and still is mediocre (unless I'm mistaken) and yet he still got to the most powerful position in the western world, against an excellent candidate whose gender was one of the disadvantages used against her.

"typical example of this is an exposure of oil rigs in the oil and gas industry etc in Nigeria and Venezuela, nearly all management positions are occupied by white men."

You mean the management positions in Western companies? Funny that, debatable anyway.

Whilst the very top level country leadership roles will be western ex pats there's probably a good number of locals in middle management and adjacent level roles

@fmsfms they're not all western companies, many of those large multinationals such as Shell can only function with smaller contractions companies. They do not do all of the work themselves, in fact they contract out a significant amount. In those same contractor companies, management levels are consistently narrow. Those companies tend to be situated and obtain their valuable upstream oil from Places such as Malaysia, Nigeria, Etc.

A working class maybe even poor white lad will not be locked out of societies and networking once he leaves Europe or North America, he will be well respected and greeted. Now would that be the case for a poor or working class 2nd generation Pakistani lad from Burnley? Class is a factor in the uk and America, go to say Germany, Australia or the Netherlands and he can progress as his heart desires, neither his race nor his gender will be a disadvantage. Can a 2/3rd generation girl with Jamaican heritage also progress in to her heart's desire?
The English poor lad, the Pakistani Burnley lad and the Caribbean lass, who by 30-40 will be progressing up management once they move abroad? I wonder? Or who will once again be seen as a lazy foreigner, will have the stigma of 'can't speak the language 'cos they're daft etc',?

"Even if they are poor or uneducated, they can travel to most countries of the world without suspicion that BAME have to experience. "

Well if you're poor, you can't leave your continent, can you? And if you're disabled you might not be able to either.
Even with white privilege, I'm not convinced a 50 year old binman who left school at 16 who looks much older than his real age and who's missing teeth is going to be in charge of an oil rig even if he makes it to the middle east.

@teaaddict235 "A working class maybe even poor white lad will not be locked out of societies and networking once he leaves Europe or North America, he will be well respected and greeted. Now would that be the case for a poor or working class 2nd generation Pakistani lad from Burnley?

@teaaddict235 "A working class maybe even poor white lad will not be locked out of societies and networking once he leaves Europe or North America, he will be well respected and greeted. Now would that be the case for a poor or working class 2nd generation Pakistani lad from Burnley?

@teaaddict235 "A working class maybe even poor white lad will not be locked out of societies and networking once he leaves Europe or North America, he will be well respected and greeted. Now would that be the case for a poor or working class 2nd generation Pakistani lad from Burnley?"

What an absolute failure of a post

If it's any consolation, the society we are living in is changing rapidly and we have a better chance of peacefully rebuilding it than any time since the start of widespread farming.What we need to do,as a group, is take advantage of it. As machines take over more work, the industrial workday is slowly becoming irrelevant. I freelance over the internet, for example, with the potential to earn more in 4 hours than DH can earn in 8. Should we be expected to work such long hours any more, in conventional roles?

What would happen if we actually put the family and our collective family first - and built work around it?

Ironically, caring duties are one of the few things that can't be farmed out to machines and we need to start giving them higher status, from nursing to education.

The old capitalist-industrial set up is going to break: either the internet and blockchain technology will render it irrelevant or it will collapse through the toxic flow of wealth to the 1% and outside pressures such as global warming. Clearly, I would prefer to see a peaceful change, but given what humans are like, I suspect it will be a mix.

Just my musings. But it hit home the other day in the science museum - I am only in my 30s and yet childhood objects, such a cassette tapes, are now muse objects to my son. Imagine what it will be in another 20 years.

Ironically, caring duties are one of the few things that can't be farmed out to machines and we need to start giving them higher status, from nursing to education.
There is a robot exhibition on near where I live that I took the kids to last week and it is claimed than in China they are building a shitloads of robots as the number of actual people to fill in the amount of work that will be required come few years time is impossible. So if thats to be believed, they reckon they can farm out caring to machines too.

Its actually a huge fear of mine, that we build too many machines and they take over, especially now that they are fucking about with AI. The matrix seriously got inside my head when younger and I really can see it, or something similar, happening one of these days.

*as the number of actual nurses

Yes, nurses are people too But just realised the way I put that made not much sense.

Of course you can leave your country or continent if you are poor. Many do so. Buying one ticket at a time and using the gift of the gab get many far.

@fmsfms are you saying then that because a company may have a large western presence, that by racial right, white Men deserve to be in positions of power in all locations across the world? Looks like your post was a failure based on a certain type of mindset.

What a fascinating post. So much great discussion here. Haven’t RTFT yet but want to quickly just echo posters who say many female “disadvantages” are only seen as such because we view the world through a male/masculine lense. For example, if we as a society properly valued the traditionally “feminine” ideals of caring, of closeness to the family and so on, breastfeeding would actually be seen as a massive, massive advantage. Men have no equivalent that has the effect of bringing them so close to their children and have to work harder to bond. But instead of seeing this as something women have over men, it has been twisted into a reason to limit us.

Not that motherhood is for all women. I am not a biological mother myself. I am just thinking of one example.

@teaaddict235

"@fmsfms are you saying then that because a company may have a large western presence, that by racial right, white Men deserve to be in positions of power in all locations across the world?"

How exactly have you come to that conclusion from my post?

What an incredible Cathy Newman esque "so you're saying", dear god, that's like a gold medal winning example. Kudos

@thegoals, that is an interesting point about the Chinese robots. It's being done out of sheer neccesity but it will be interesting to see the standard of care achieved and how the robots interact with their audience.

AI is potentially scary. However, so was cloning, IVF, nuclear power and unmanned rockets. Humans are very good at finding ways to wipe themselves out - and then adapting to the threat. I don't think machines will end up controlling us (aka the matrix), but I can see digital implants and upgrades happening (the borg?).

Are you sure all women's woes are men's fault.
It used to be that men and women married and had children.
Mum looked after the children as she was equipped to do so, while the husband went to work to provide for the family.
This was quite a good system until femanist said we don't want to do that anymore.
So we have ended up with a system where mothers are coerced back to work and the kids are farmed out to strangers.
Hence all the problems family's have now, and it's the children who are coming of the worst.