Women’s rights have gone ‘too far’, say majority of Gen Z and millennials, study shows

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www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/09/womens-rights-have-gone-far-say-majority-gen-z-millennials-study/

Re the 'having it all'/run ragged issue, I mostly goodness corpore greed and capitalism. 50 years ago, my family would have had à similar standard of living with either one of us (both professionals in decent jobs) working. Now, we both need to work. Everything is priced on having a dual income.

We aren't getting the benefits of being able to share work. In an ideal world, both parents could work 2-3 days a week, and share the childcare, and not be exhausted. OR, double the family income to have more luxuries, but at a cost to free time. Now, it's having to work more for proportionally less.

I have a husband who truly mucks in (at least) equally, we both work (albeit me PT) and have 2 small kids. We are both exhausted. I'm glad that I am able to work, etc, but I'm annoyed that between us we do not hours of work/chores/childcare now, than we should have in the past. For men that don't pull their weight, it must be even more disheartening.

As only 10-20% of applicants were women, we engaged in active sex discrimination, rejecting higher performing male candidates in favour of weaker women to meet the target
Can I ask why that 10-20% of women were weaker than their male counterparts? And in what ways were the males higher performing?

Context?

Lumber jacking perhaps

@justasking111
some ideas that governments could work on to help us toward an equality that is more levelled on differences between men and women:

• complete overhaul of CMS so no mothers are left unsupported
• better childcare funding and provision so to work is easier for mothers
• much much better compulsory maternity leave and payment so you do not lose out financially when you have a baby. Almost everyone does. Why does society put no value on having a baby??? There is value to everyone in carrying on our society into the future and particularly where the birth rate is so dire.
• some type of better value placed on child rearing - a benefit or better tax credits or some type of good and worthwhile recompense so that mothers (and all parents) have an actual choice between working or raising their children that doesn’t remove their ability to put food on the table. I suspect this would boost the birth rate substantially actually.
• Better education for women around the legal implications of getting married. What protection this can offer (or not) and what it means if there are children involved.

And to help men ‘step up’ whatever that means:

• better parental leave for fathers both around birth and during childhood
• more flexible working rights for parents that are actually used and enforceable; particularly for fathers at work to encourage ‘stepping up’ into family life.
• tax credits or similar for fathers who use flexible working to encourage take up.
• better prenatal support for fathers so they are more involved from the start; I think something like preparatory classes for dads would be a great advantage and encourage participation from early on.

I hope one day there will be some good change. I feel we’ve been sold a big fat lie about having it all and it’s bollocks. Just means we work work work work. Even with a nice loving supportive DH. Xx

If you'd bothered to read my post, instead of resorting to cheap women-only insults "hysteria", you'd have seen that's exactly what I said. Your post appeared to suggest that women working was the problem. Perhaps I misunderstood that. I pointed out that the problems that come with women working are part of a much bigger problem regarding cost of living, work expectations etc.

’Women only’ 🥱

The job sector was economics. We needed people with at least 5 years work experience for the role. Historically, it has had one of the worst male/female ratios at university.

In that recruitment round, the male candidate was better because they could explain economics better, did better in the written tests and had more relevant experience. The female candidate needed more prompting in interview, performed weaker in the written tests and had less relevant experience. Because of our gender targets we took a chance and hired her. She has since struggled in the job.

When last did you hear a man's comments referred to as "hysteria".

Honestly, all the "cool women" rhetoric from women who either don't care or don't see the ways in which women have consistently been (and continue to be) discriminated against is exhausting.

As only 10-20% of applicants were women, we engaged in active sex discrimination, rejecting higher performing male candidates in favour of weaker women to meet the target.

You see, I'm actually okay with this to a large extent. Although I'd like to see this sort of approach done throughout an organisation because then, fairly quickly, you'll see an equal number of equally qualified candidates applying for the higher jobs.

Many women are perfectly capable, they just haven't had the same opportunities. So identifying women with the potential is half the battle.

I'd also say that considering for thousands of years men who were LESS qualified were getting the jobs because they were men, it seems a bit ridiculous to now complain that very occasionally, a less qualified woman gets a job because she's a woman.

Hiring a weaker-performing candidate because of their protected characteristics is illegal in the UK. You can use a protected characteristic as a tie-breaker between equally-performing candidates where that group is under represented.

If your company wanted to increase the number of women it hires, a less illegal approach would be to look at ways to increase the number of women applicants by identifying any barriers that prevent suitably qualified candidates from applying. In the longer term, the company could also look to address the imbalance in women taking the necessary qualifications by doing outreach work or by sponsoring organisations that do so already etc etc.

Being told by your HR to take illegal actions is a crass knee jerk response to being told to address the gender imbalance.

The problem with that is that unless you get 50/50 at university level, then setting such a target is just unfair. There is not an equal pool of qualified male/female economists as many more men have economic degrees.

In the example I cited, we took a chance on the less well-performing female candidate and several years later she is still struggling in the job. And I say that as a female economist.

I do not want to reject good performers from my team simply because of their sex. I really do not see how this - however well intentioned - results in a good outcome.

This is very different from outreach activities which encourage applicants from as wide backgrounds as possible but active sex discrimination is not good.

Yes, your company also set a stupid target as well as insisting you take illegal steps to hire people. This is all completely the wrong approach to addressing issues of imbalance.

Has your company improved at all in its business practices, or do they still give you unrealistic targets and instruct you to take illegal actions?

In our surgery our female GPs with young children all work part time. In our primary school teachers with young children work part time. I worked 25 hours a week 9-3 . But I gave good value made lots of money for employers.

Employers demanding full time are missing a trick imo

There is new management so although the targets are there, they are no longer strictly enforced.

I am all for outreach and encouraging applicants, but I disagree with quotas and targets.

Last night when DH shouted at the PlayStation and I went down to tell him off

Unsurprisingly, it's poor reporting of the data. It was a global survey. There is a massive difference between responses I different countries, eg compare responses from china and uk So average values are not very helpful.

Also differences in opinions between males and females.

Those are interesting ideas @sjxoxo

The world of work is very much based on male lifecycles and doesn’t always suit female lifecycles (or the lives of those with disabilities).

Tinkering around the edges with anti-discrimination legislation has improved things for women and the disabled in the workforce but, fundamentally, I think we need to reorganise work away from needing/requiring the kind of commitment/time/effort from employees that can be expected of or given by men who have wives to support them by carrying out all the homelife tasks.

Instead, we need to take difference (between men & women, able-bodied & disabled) into consideration and we need to make it easier to fit work in around life (rather than squeezing life in around work).

Some European countries achieve this with better & stronger employee representation in workplaces and with legislation/social policies that attempt to make up for the social/employment disadvantages that occur for women who become mothers. But I don’t think any country has entirely solved the problems because in so many ways our social and work structures were built before women had many rights and are operating with male as the default/prototypical citizen/employee.

"the research found that almost half of Britons (47 per cent) now think equality between men and women will be achieved within their lifetime".

How naive/delusional...

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cph3P_9gCWL/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Also:

"The share of the British public who say they are scared to speak out and advocate for the equal rights of women has doubled since 2017, rising from 14 per cent to 29 per cent. The majority (71 per cent), however, continue to say this does not apply to them."

Which could explain the bit you quoted.

The report is based on 22,500 interviews across the world over 32 countries. That's an average of just over 700 people per country. Hardly rigorous research there, even if it is Ipsos doing it. What gives it away is when you scroll down to the responses from individual countries. "Equality between men and women will be achieved in my lifetime" for example - the top two countries saying they believe that will happen are the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Yeah, right. That's going to happen. Both those countries have a way to go before they get to human rights, never mind women's rights. Take a look at the countries where people think things have gone far enough - Indonesia, China, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Spain, and Columbia, for example. That is a list of countries where almost nothing has happened!

It's clickbait headlines are very misleading, it is a poor piece of research, and I am more interested in what agenda is behind such blatent rubbish.

I have a dream.

What do I want from feminism? I want a female parallel economy that honors and respects my biology.

I do not have a male body and I do not want to work like a man. Men don't have periods like I do, or suffer cramps like I do, or have to wear two pairs of knickers over night time pads and have to take frequent toilet breaks like I do, or suffer anaemia like I do, suffer peri-menopausal symptoms like I do, have the exhaustion of early pregnancy like I do. I therefore don't want to feel I have to reach their targets to fulfill some notion of equality based on what they can do.

I do not want to work the same as a man does in order to 'earn' my equality. I am still equal even if I decide that I want to stay at home all day with my baby and never return to work, or that I just prefer the domestic sphere.

I want an entirely separate healthcare system based on my unique female biology, administered predominantly by women, based on research actually conducted on women's bodies, working within ranges based on women's bodies, not mens. I want birthing experiences to be better and the maternity system overhauled. I want women only spaces in hospitals and men to be the exception in fields like gynaecology.

I want a separate woman based education system with courses tailored for women and girls in every stage of their lives. Courses extended so women don't feel they have to compromise so much of their domestic life in order to reach or further their career goals. I want lectures where women can bring their babies in. Or dial or zoom in. Or females lecturers can zoom in. I want all university libraries open 24/7 for women to study at night if they need with rooms for mothers with children and not just quiet spaces. I want streets around designated areas just for women.

I want children to be seen more. So women don't feel they are somehow less professional for bringing them with them. I want acceptance and acknowledgement that women bloody have children.

I want a welfare system that doesn't discriminate against mothers and punish their children. I want acknowledgement that women have more hygiene and personal care needs and need more money. I want benefits to be more generous for women with children, and acknowledgment of the key role women play in their children's lives as an extension of the bond that formed in the womb and an end to women being forced into work when children hit some magical number that represents independence like 3. I want society to be respectful and appreciative of how having children contributes to the future economy and society and the role women play in that. I want tax credits to women taking career breaks to be far more generous in acknowledgement of this, and careers centered around child raising to be far more accessible down the chain of class.

I want bank accounts for young women that factor in future child care expenses, I want women to have easier access to loans to start businesses. Health insurance for women that caters for the ill health often emerges after menopause.

None of these things are ever going to happen, because feminism in it's current incarnation has marked equality as outcome and keeps focusing on this definition of parity and success. Rather ironically imo, It has ignored what a woman is in favour of how a woman can do what a man does.

It has encouraged women into a pre-existing patriarchal capitalist economic system, that is literally structured for men, and how men work -literally structured for men's bodies - ( which aren't prone to wide hormonal fluctuations in the way womens are, and absorb stress better due to greater levels of testosterone whereas excessive stress can cause pituitary adrenal axis dysfunction in women) and told them to keep up with them and called that equality. Obvious disparities are 'remedied' with a few tweaks. Maternity leave etc, while the system inevitable continues to do what it does unabated. It can't do anything else as it is goal driven.

Keeping pace with men means when women demand things that suit their biology like wanting time off for periods, or earlier retirement for menopause, other women come out against them because, well then, we won't be employable! and we will prove that we're somehow not as good or as capable as men!. No we're just as good, but we're different. With different needs and wants. And maybe, maybe different emphasis on what is important.

Let's cater for that.

www.kcl.ac.uk/news/britons-increasingly-scared-to-speak-out-on-womens-rights-data-shows

I suspect this is about the fact a large amount of (not all, clearly) discrimination comes for women having children. I didn’t think a lot about being female and I don’t think it held me back until I became a mum (and a mum to a disabled child too).