Foot in mouth on Womans Hour

[Ramblingnamechanger]

Did anybody else hear Nuala in a discussion about protected characteristics , actually declare that women were not a protected minority? She quickly corrected herself to say, rather unnecessarily, that women are not a minority. But it seemed like she spoke what she thinks, that women really shouldn’t be protected…

Are women a minority? I thought gender, sex, maternity & pregnancy are protected, which covers anyone being discriminated against due to sex or pregnancy. I’m not sure she was wrong?

Yeah men are as protected from discrimination as women are. Since there are slightly less men than women I guess men are the protected minority. But really our system is based around characteristics not groups. If there are more examples of the EA being used to counteract discrimination against women than against men it's because women are still more likely to be discriminated on the basis of their sex than men. Not that they are specifically more protected (though I guess the pregnancy bit does only apply to women by default).

So if men and women are PC, and disabled people are PC, and race and religion are PC, and sexual orientation is PC, who's left to not be PC. 🤔

Women aren't a protected characteristic. Sex is a protected characteristic. Everyone who has a sex is protected under the Equality Act. So everyone is indeed protected. It's written to be like that. The same for the other characteristics. White people are as protected from discrimination on the basis of their race as black people.

Great everyone's a protected characteristic, and everyone's a human, so everyone has human rights as well, so why isn't everyone happy.

A question for the ages.
Ask the people trying to abolish the EA (Reform) or advocating ignoring it (Stonewall).

Technically, when no sex selection is happening, women are the majority because even though more boys are born they tend to die off faster and sooner. The world is 51% female and 49% male. I don’t think she meant women don’t need protections, I think she was speaking about demographics.

We usually associate a need for protection with minority groups demographically speaking, but in many societies it is and has been a small minority oppressing a larger majority. So you can be part of a majority and oppressed.

The clearest European examples that come to mind are

• Slave plantations - the Black slaves far outnumbered the white European slave owners
• Aristocracy- serfs/peasants far outnumbered the titled aristos that ruled them

Gender is not a protected characteristic Gender reassignment is, they are not the same thing

In Europe there were very few black slaves e.g. Greeks enslaved mostly other Greeks, Romans enslaved whoever lost a battle with them, the caliphs of Al Andulus (Spain c. 700s to 1492) enslaved white people (preference for blonde, blue-eyed women as concubines), black slaves mostly confined to North Africa (slave trade from Sub-Saharan Africa from c. 700 AD). Black slaves as a majority compared to (mostly) white owners only applies to North America until c. 1861, and does not include Native Americans who also held black slaves (some were taken on the Vale of Tears) as well as white slaves and slaves from other tribes. The US is not Europe (though it was at the time being colonized by various European populations).
From the point of view of oppression women count as a minority as they historically and in the present have been and are treated as sub-human, less than men, property etc.

Everyone is not happy because the hurty feelz of men who think they are women are not protected in law and they object to the point of offering violence to esp women but also gay men.

Specifically with sex, some people are not happy with which category they are in, so they want the categories changed (preferred opition) or abolished (last resort).

The fact that changing how the categories are defined or abolishing protections on the basis of that category altogether massively (and negatively) impacts those who really need those protections doesn’t matter to them at all.

One issue with ‘protected characteristics’ is that in reality there’s often a discrepancy in how that plays out in practice - whose rights are actually respected and upheld vs those who still do suffer discrimination.

Women’s sex based rights are still not being properly upheld despite the law.

Yes, I thought it was crystal clear I was referring to the modern history of European colonies in the Americas (north, south, central and Caribbean) when I mentioned slave plantations. Greeks/Romans and so on from ancient to early medieval isn’t what I was referring to at all.

The Americas were part of the British, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires who did indeed establish slave plantations. The slave plantations there existed fully 3/4ths of the time under European direct rule and owners. The US (and other countries in the Americas) who won independence from their European motherlands inherited the legacy of slave plantations and within a century or two had abolished them. I do not think it is responsible to pretend that this particular episode of slavery was not race based. Slavery amongst the native Americans was in exponentially fewer numbers, often a temporary status and not passed down the generations.

The reason I limited my examples to European modern history was because that is history most readers are familiar with and they were to illustrate a very simple concept of an oppressed majority.

I can’t agree with the illogic of saying women count as a minority because the fact is oppression, being subhuman, property etc is not mutually exclusive from being a majority in demographics. It is utter nonsense to say a majority is a minority because you are having cognitive dissonance at the concept that minorities can oppress and have all through history oppressed majorities.