Stupid Fox article. Couldn't continue reading that blather without lobotomizing myself.

And yet, we do having shifting realities in our society if your paying attention-
- boys are pathologized in grade school and disproportionately targeted with psych meds
- women are now the majority in college and getting degreed
- young men are less and less on any serious career track compared to women.

Just interesting.

Oh and, bo_tox48, congrats on 7.75 per hour.

Maybe. In IT and especially IT Consulting, you go get another offer and then decide what to do before going to "the boss".

How does that work out in government where everyone is on a fixed scale and/or some kind of union deal?

Oh, and bo, you make all of 50 cents more than minimum wage per hour... I guess he gave you $20 more per week ($.50 per hour). I spent that much on lunch at BJ's today. :-)

That said, it is true that it is much more common to get a *substantial* salary bump by changing employers. But when discrimination drives down the wages of a group of people, it is much harder to argue that you're not being paid what you deserve, when your peers at your current employer face the same challenge and the offers you might get from other employers are pushed down by the presence of discriminatory employers.

The other reason Jowry's scheme of employers just hiring all the women who are discriminated against doesn't work, beyond the fact that screening costs are very high when the group is so large, is that, especially today, a lot of non-discriminatory firms probably don't believe there is discrimination, and don't think to look to it. Most businesses aren't like academia (the example Jowry used). Academia, especially economics in the United States, has an extremely well-organized and formal job market process, one that makes it much, much easier to screen candidates than it would be in any private sector endeavor.

But it does happen, at least to a degree. I've heard and read about many managers saying they like hiring women for jobs men would usually do, because they can get them cheaper (I think there may even be a famous quote by Warren Buffet or someone like that to that effect). It is just a slow process when the scale is such a large portion of the workforce.

@Draugnar, in government, there's always a range, which usually varies by more than 10%, within each pay grade. You can argue for what part of the range within your pay grade you ought to be in, and most government positions, you also participate with your manager on your performance evaluation.

I've also spent some time at non-profits, and the ability to advocate for yourself at non-profits is significant. Non-profits work pretty hard to retain workers, because they're often small and each individual staff member represents quite a bit of the workforce. Screening costs are also enormous, so they really don't want to lose anyone good if they can afford not to at all.

Well, at my place of business, all senior level new hires are given the same basic offer. If they want to hold out for more, that is up to them. I help out for an extra $6K, better bonuses ($17.5K not $15) and an extra week's vacation and got it. I know a few who didn't and I know a few whose offers were rescinded cause they wanted *too* ,much more. The difference was not only what was asked for, but experience (not gender). A 30 something asking for what I asked got turned down. He decided not to accept. Another 30 something asked for the pay, but didn't ask for the vacation or bonus and the company accepted and threw in the extra week vacation anyhow. The guy asked too much for 10 years less experience than me but the lady asked for something more reasonable considering her less experience and the actually gave her more than she asked for.

I guess IT is just a very different world.

The one who didn't get it was male, the one who got more was female. Should have made that more clear.

To be clear, I'm not only talking about initial employment offers. I'm talking about salary renegotiations after you've been working somewhere for a period of time (could be long, could be short). I haven't been at this as long as you, but I've got a mix of public/private experience and it's common to do that sort of thing every year or two.

For example, I just left a non-profit, and one of the remaining staff members has been there a few years and is a pretty talented guy who knows every file inside and out (it's a small outfit). It would be a big blow if they lost him. After I left (for a better job, which resulted in a lot of my residual work falling on to him), he negotiated something like a 25% bump - and he was getting raises and bonuses every year he'd been working there as well.

I'm sorry, I still can't get over that incredible display of stupidity, even by FOX News standards...

I mean, granted, this is a news outlet that insists that in the most religious nation in the Western world, where 70-80% or so of the population (to be conservative) identifies as Christian in one form or another, that there is a War on Christianity in America...

But still--

Men as 2nd-class citizens??? REALLY?

Tell that to the Latino immigrants (legal AND illegal) earning minimum wage in grunt-work jobs day in and day out while suffering injustice, abuse, and mockery.

Tell that to African-Americans who are STILL the most-likely, statistically, to be incarcerated at some point in their lifetime.

Tell that to citizens in certain OTHER nations where being second-class can mean anything from not being allowed the right to vote (I'd hasten to add that those affected in such nations are WOMEN and NOT men) to being subjected to that most horrific of oxymorons, "honor rape" (again, WOMEN) to forcibly having their sexual organs mutilated (again, WOMEN...and yes, obviously circumcision occurs with men as well--I'm a Jew, I *know*--but correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that neither Israel nor the US government mandates such practice by law, that is, family members may be free to do this based on their own religious ideology, but it's not a state-mandated practice, if you will) to, well, just being exterminated...

In short--

I have to ask if the author of this article really even knows what "second-class citizen" MEANS.



Citing the "most obvious proof" of men being "second-class citizens" as "male bashing on TV" is a bit like comparing the (alleged) decline of White Privilege to the forced seizure of property and forced relocation of Jews, Armenians, Native Americans and Japanese-Americans.

In short, it's a slip-shod, stupid, and quite frankly not the least bit demeaning and something of a slap in the face to the REAL second-class citizens out there.

Obi, it's Fox News. No one that's actually a "second-class" (socioeconomic) citizen actually reads it. Nobody that knows what that's like reads it either. So no, it's not a slap in the face to anyone. It's just a network preaching to a small choir and making us laugh our asses off in the process.

Hey obi - The terrorist organization that declared war on the US by attacking the WTC was smaller than 1/100th of 1% of the US population. One person cam declare war and ifbthey are influential as the liberals in LaLaLand are, it is a war. Numbers have nothing to do with it.

"It's just a network preaching to a small choir"

...Rupert Murdoch would beg to differ over just how small that choir is...

@Draug:

Is your comment directed towards my "War on Christianity in the US? PUH-LEASE"-style comment?

If so...

Well, I'll make another thread for that, then--this thread's already packed with one FOX-news-supported, insane assertion...and that's one too many, frankly, but two and it'd just get so sidetracked it'd...well, it'd be a typical WebDip thread concerning politics and religion, I suppose, but still, I'll split this off into a separate thread.

Obi - My point is simply that numbers do not determine whether something is a war or not. I am not saying there is or isn't one, just that your stated reason against the concept is faulty at its core.

Stacklbutt, if you are making a claim that women are discriminated against, you need some evidence for this. However, there is simply NO evidence for this; it's not something you can accurately measure. For example, people who score in the 10th percentile for IQ tests, are, on average, paid less than people who score in the 90th percentile for IQ tests. Can you call this discrimination? Of course not. You know that either they are worth less because of their score, they received a low score because they are worth less, or the factors are influenced by a common underlying mechanism(in this case, lower intelligence). Only if you can prove all of those possibilities incorrect, can you call it discrimination. Just to clarify, I am not saying that there is no discrimination against women. But it is important to understand that there is no MEASURABLE discrimination.

I'm starting to think I should have chosen a shorter screen name for this website.

And, sure, I can't prove discrimination exists like I can prove gravity exists. But there's a lot of evidence out there, both that women are pushed out of the workforce or into lower-paying careers and positions, and that women face wage discrimination. I'm not out to reinvent the wheel.

Actually, there is a lot of evidence that WOMEN CHOOSE DIFFERENT CAREER PATHS THAN MEN.

As a result, they often have less experience than men when they are at an advanced age for taking over companies and the person with the 5 to 10 year employment gap gets passed over for being CEO.

There is a LOT of evidence to support the idea that WOMEN ARE NOT AS AGGRESSIVE in the work place, which is most likely a facet of their genetic make-up as much as it is a "social" issue.

There is much evidence to suggest the MEN ARE ABUSED in the overall employment window, being forced by social pressures in to the vilest and most dangerous of jobs, and before women are forced to go against their nature and aggressively forego bearing children and do all they can do to become CEO....BEFORE THEY DO THIS...they need to go work the fishing boats and become long-haul truckers and drive garbage trucks and pick up a gun and become a cop and prison guards and...

Damned fucking sexist women are abusing men.

There is also a lot of evidence that women choose to put their careers on hold and raise families in the 70s and 80s and so the 50 and 60 something women who would be of the same age as a typical CEO, have 10 to 20 years less experience in the workforce as they spent the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s raising their now late 20 and 30 something kids. If you were the head of the board of directors for a major multinational, who would you put in charge? Someone with 20 years experience? Or someone with 40 years experience?

@Draugnar, the only thing I'd question is that it was universally a "choice" made completely freely. In the 70s and 80s, there was real wage discrimination against woman, and a lot of woman "put their careers on hold" because it made sense for someone to stay at home and raise the kids, and their husbands got paid more; not only that, but high-paying fields like engineering, financial services (including M&A, which was really booming those days, but also IB and advisory roles), law, even advertising (we've all watched Mad Men!) were openly hostile to women and women were explicitly discouraged from pursuing those careers when they were in school (we are definitely seeing more young female Wall Street lawyers and broker-dealers, etc., now that there is less of that today).

Without wage discrimination and explicitly denying women careers in these fields, probably more men would have stayed at home because their wives would have earned more money (like we're seeing now).

And yeah, the legacy of this, regardless of the cause, is that there are far fewer experienced women at the top of the corporate ladder today.

But, hey - like I said a couple pages ago, Marissa Mayer is only 38 and she's the CEO of Yahoo. If she'd been born in 1955 instead of 1975, though, it's extremely unlikely she could have had a career in tech.

@Satckle - I agree, but we can';t change their choices of the past, no matter how coerced they were, and we can't punish those at the top now for the past. Instead, we have to let capitalism run it's course and evolve as it has been doing. Ms. Mayer is a perfect example of the fact that it is changing. Trying to speed up that change solidifies resistance to it. Letting it happen and mildly encouraging it from behind the scenes is the better approach.

I'd agree, although I'm not sure we're talking about "letting capitalism run its course" - capitalism only exists in a framework of laws, and a lot of the changes we've seen have been the result of laws - like laws against discrimination, sexual harrassment, etc.

But broadly, I'm mostly of the mind that we should just try to reduce barriers where we can identify them and avoid creating new ones or reinforcing old ones.

So sounds like we are more in agreement than disagreement. I'm not a denier of the glass ceiling or even of historical repression, but the recent influx of more females in STEM programs and the executive and technical positions in the workforce show progress and that progress will continue as long as we have laws to protect them from discrimination, laws whihc already exist.

Salaries are a rpoblematic thing, however, in that each person is different and their demonstrable skills and history of successes determine offers of salaries.

But I can speak from experience when I say that there have been and are instances where informal affirmative action with its good intents (whether it be race or gender) can actually do more harm. I have worked for places where women were promoted ahead of men to make things "fair" and the comanies lost very talented individuals because lesser talented individuals were getting the promotions strictly cause they were the promotable gender (female). I left when an incompetent individual got promoted over me despite the fact that I had done singificantly more for the project and had a proven track record of success and she had actually screwed up a financial module so severely that the company had been fined by the SEC and *I* had to fix it quickly because the fine was a daily thing. But she was a female so she got the promotion (or maybe they figures they would promote her out of the way so she wouldn't be coding and fucking things up, who knows). Anyhow, I left and told senior management off on my last day there. I heard that the project was since redesigned by an entire new group and that group dissovled.

Stackelberg, do you also believe that the total male domination of social groups in animal species like gorillas and lions is also the result of socially imposed gender roles, and has nothing to do with biology?

I do think more needs to be done, don't get me wrong - almost every country in the world takes maternity/parental leave more seriously in the United States, and the selection of countries with support for daycare has shown very promising results. And it is far too difficult to make any sort of claim of discrimination in the United States and actually receive a remedy. I stand by the policy recommendations I made a page or two back.

But I do absolutely agree that informal affirmative action like you described does far more damage to the cause those doing it support than does overt acts of sexism against women. I think management is far less likely to make those mistakes when their company is in a country that is committed to reducing inequality and has made steps to do so.

@Tolstoy, the only remaining mammal that exists in "social" habitats like humans, living among many, unrelated (i.e. not family) members of their own species and interacting with them on a daily basis, is the gibbon. Gibbon "society" enjoys basically absolutely parity between male and female members. This is partly because physical differences are smaller; male gorillas are way bigger than female gorillas, for example. But it's also because social animals do tend to more egalitarian roles.

"the only remaining mammal that exists in "social" habitats... is the gibbon"

Huh? What about baboons? Mole rats? Macaques? Vampire bats?

"But it's also because social animals do tend to more egalitarian roles."

Someone needs to tell that to the ants and termites. The more socialized a species (or society, for that matter) is, the *less* egalitarian it becomes as divisions of labor improve overall efficiency but increase inequality.

Should have written "primate," my bad.

Basically, you can usually explain these differences through sexual dimorphism. Obviously there are massive physical (and sexual) differences between male and female insects. And among primates, male gorillas are on average about twice as large as female gorillas, and live in an environment where size really is a huge factor. Same goes for many primates.

But male and female gibbons are basically the same size, and while I can't comment on whether or not divisions of labour have resulted in a rich-poor gap among the gibbon population, I can say that these differences are not gendered.

Obviously, among humans, men are larger than women, and tend to have more muscle mass, etc., somewhere in the neighbourhood of a 10-30% difference on average for most physical characteristics. But these days, those aren't the most important characteristics. It's a pretty disputed area of research these days whether or not men and women have different aptitudes (a lot of this is research in the 1970s that is now pretty discredited, but there's some current research, far from conclusive, which suggests women may be more likely to have higher social and/or spatial intelligence), but we do know that on overall intelligence, there is no evidence of any significant difference between men and women.

Baboons are primates, stack.

I'm pretty sure vampire bats aren't, though.

Tolstoy is right that baboons do live in large groups, although not exactly like gibbons do (whose habits are much closer to humans); I was just trying to say that gibbons have the closest social structure to humans of other primates.

And baboons do make my point. They have a patriarchal social structure and exhibit massive sexual dimorphism. Male baboons in some species weigh about twice as much as female baboons on average, and often have much more dangerous teeth and very different colouring on their fur. We understand the biological differences that lead to different social structures fairly well.