How to achieve gender balance without discriminating against the majority gender?

Permabear wrote: »

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This isn't really true, the practice, especially in rural Ireland, is to give principalships to men. It's the local parish priest making all those kinds of decisions. I've know what goes on from having family in teaching in grural Ireland. I've seen a young male teacher, with very little experience promoted to principal over women who had decades of experience.

Primary school teaching is far more dominated by women these days not by accident. Which I think you could sum up as women dealing with discrimination against them by bullying men out of the profession.

Speedwell wrote: »

If there is a majority in a given situation, and that majority has now and/or has had a history of privilege in that situation, it is nonsense to talk about "discriminating against" that majority. Reflect that even a member of the privileged majority can have other issues that make them individually disadvantaged in that situation.

In Ireland women are in fact the majority gender. This is largely due to manual occupations occupied by women in Ireland; washing dishes, and changing nappies, though being far more onerous than manual occupations dominated by Irish men, accrue lower fatality rates.

This is nothing to do with male dominated occupations being more hazardous, more that women are superior at anything they do. I once knew a man who loaded a dishwasher to please his wife. He was sucked into the mechanism and shredded. Washing machines are as equally hazardous. All those ads on television, where the man can't figure out the machine. I blame that on the fact all washing machines are designed by women, and the women designers neglected the fact that men are not technically minded, and are more dependent on their interpersonal skills and their nurturing instinct. The way women design these machines...the radical idea, that men are people too, never crosses their minds. That there other people in the world, who might navigate through life with their emotions and building relationships, rather than borderline autistic engineering skills. How many men must die, leaning too far into tumble dryers, and getting tumbled to death, before women tumble dryer designers realise that #MensLivesMatter.

#menzlivesmatter

Pat Mustard wrote: »

Labarbapostiza, the use of irony clouds your message to the extent that it is difficult to discern your point. Could you just make the point plainly?

It's a debating technique. To expose logical inconsistencies and fallacies through exaggerated agreement. It's not to everyone's taste.


What actually happens in the work place. It depends. In the middle-class world of corporate bureaucracies, the "work" is mostly social grooming. In a typical company whose business is in the STEM field, the people with the hard skills are generally at the bottom, and all the layers to the top are occupied by "soft" skills people. The HR department is nearly exclusively women, and it's in fact rare to find a woman working in HR with actual qualifications in HR (even though the subject is bogus). They use their wimmin's intuition. They're usually horrific people by any standard, let alone gender.

What's been happening all over the western world for decades is pretty young women have been far more employable in "soft" skills fields, than young men. The much heralded out performance by young women in education over men, has been due to their success at "soft" subjects, like literature. This isn't even because they have better insights into literature, it's that Charlotte Bronte's Emma, is an absolute work of torture, that could only appeal to twee upper-middle-class girls. It's a 19th century trash romance novel. It's not about any "skill". If you have Emma in the leaving cert and you score a high mark, it's either that you have the heart and soul of a twee deeply cherished middle-class girl, or you are a twee deeply cherished middle-class girl. A corollary to that fact, you're probably quite thick. But that's a good thing; you don't want your "soft" skills turning "hard".

I'll get back to the over all point in a second but first I need to explode a popular gender myth; Men are more task orientated, they solve problems by attacking them, women solve problems by building relationships, and they have much greater interpersonal skills. It's a myth, but it describes the world of "soft" skills. Men in "soft" skills jobs, by building relationships and through interpersonal skills. They do exactly as the women do; maybe in a slightly different style dependent on culture. What are these interpersonal skills, they're grooming, bullying, exclusion and inclusion, lying, and simply; social class. Management is not approached in the sense of developing concrete efficient processes and tasks. More, on feelings. A system of heuristics; if it feels good, it is good, if it feels bad, it is bad. They fire people because they feel they no longer feel right in the office.

Back to the main point. Young women in the soft skills world, find themselves initially more employable, also more rapidly promoted then young men, then a funny kind of thing happens, they either find themselves permanently stalled or even fired.

Polly Toynbee, Guardian journalist and long time feminist activist has a good take on this. In her article No Women Over 50 allowed

She has a quote from Harriet Harman that says something not only about women, but the "soft" skills environment in general.

There are, says Harman, three ages: men have three primes, as young thrusters, as virile fathers, then valued for age and experience. But young women are treated as ditsy decoration, mothers too distracted to be reliable and finally after 50, they're past it – so when exactly is their moment?


You'll have to pardon me here, as I need to use some of the French language.

The Young Thruster, you know the type; gelled hair, sharp clothes, likes sport, gets on great with the "lads" (the other Young Thrusters), a little conservative, not too bright but compensates with their "thrusting", and "interpersonal" skills. Invariably an unbearable wanker. (there goes the French).

The Virile Father. Even more conservative, drives a luxury family salon, has a lovely wife. Knows his status; he is "successful", has achieved in life, and more success lies ahead...Another unbearable wanker.

Mr Age and Experience. This guy is so conservative, you'd need a power hose to unblock his rectum. And this is where attending an "elite" private school like Blackrock comes in handy. He's meant to call his pals in similar positions in other companies, and arrange reciprocal purchase agreements, which aren't anything to do with real profitably business but shams to bloat balance sheets. I needn't employ la langue Francais here, as there's no reason to over labour the point.

The Ditzy Decoration. A young woman, could be in HR, if they're exceptionally pleasant they're always introduced to clients. I even worked at a come where we had a whole team of these ditzies to act as a buffer between our clients and our engineers. They had incredibly little work to do, and they weren't even that good at that. Their "interpersonal" skills were just to good, lying to both our engineers and our the clients, because they were too flaky to do the two little tasks they were employed to do; pass messages accurately, and sweet talk the client, mostly male (undoubtedly Young Thrusters), when there were delays in delivery.

These people are all loathsome individuals. They are hell on earth to deal with. There's a class dimension to this too; upper-middle-class men often do light clerical work for very high wages, that could be done by a school leaver for minimum wage. That's not really their job, their job is the occasional meeting with other upper-middle-class men, who are clients, and make business decisions on heuristics; This Virile Father, is same class as myself, my Theory of Mind tells me they're just like me, and I'm fantastic, so they must be fantastic, and a safe pair of hands for my business. That's how it works. The guy is likely a cretin, making production decisions and enforcing them on the basis of like how little dogs like to widdle out their territory. "Hard" skills people lower in the hierarchy find themselves under constant stress to deal with the widdle that's all over everything but they can't clean off.

The whole premise of any equality movement is that invidious discrimination, on gender, race, etc, is not a good thing or fair, and for a better world should be eliminated. But you must be joking, if women who firmly believe in invidious discrimination on grounds of class, etc, ask for support in their struggle for "equality". I have personally taken great pleasure in following up the careers of revolting HR women I've had to deal with. Many do get turfed out as the approach their 40s. It is ultimately ironic, they eventually fall victim to the unfair dismissals they spend their careers engineering and facilitating. How could anyone have anything more than disgust and hatred, for people who'll sack you on a flimsy whim, or block your way to employment because they don't like the way you look in the office, or don't think you're the right "fit", or assist in engineering a "managing out" campaign, to get rid of someone who is faultless in their execution of their job, but because of some foible or scapegoating has to be fired. Bullies, snobs, selfish, evil clowns. These people are the reasons we have things like racism and gender discrimination in the first place.

So, when Ditzy the decoration, is no longer all that decorative, and gets thrown in the bin, it's a bit rich to attempt to elicit sympathy and make a case for social justice.

If a woman thinks women are oppressed because they have to wash a few dishes in the sink, or that by changing a nappies (which is only something, that unless they belting out a child a year for their entire fertile life, is something they'll only have to do for a short few years at most.) Personally having had jobs where I've literally had to shovel tons of excrement, by comparison the changing of a nappy, all two minutes of it, is a nearly pleasant exercise. You will find women who do shovel dirt, but they're a rare exception. If a woman complains of the torture of washing dishes, she's probably kind more comfortable pottering around and office in a black trouser suit; smoking fags and chivying the clean ladies, growing bitter and obese through the sedentary nature of their occupation, and being a little to scary for her male superiors to fire.

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

If there is anyone who is unqualified to talk about equality, it's the trendy, Guardian feministas.

Polly has been around a very long time. She started writing when there were actual legal discriminations against women. So, she's in a completely different class to the Guardian feministas, who hysterically cry oppression every time Matell launch a new Barbie. You don't like the skinny barbie, we give you a fat one, you don't like that either, you complain that Barbie isn't realistic, but she's made of plastic, and the dolly tea parties little girls have with their Barbies aren't all that realistic either. Teddy bears only bear a passing resemblance to real bears.

Or my other favourite they do; bras are so uncomfortable because they've been designed by men.....Does that even make the slightest bit of sense...the idea that bras remain uncomfortable through the years because, the men designing them, shoe away the seamstresses, when they come with little suggestions on how to make them more comfortable.

But it's falling to a completely new low. Any criticism or challenging of soi dissant spokespersons for all women, on logical and general inconsitencies, is harassment. Hate speech even.

It's gone all loonie tunes. Going from a reasonable argument for not punishing women who make false rape allegations too severely, to giving them complete Carte Blanche. They gave space to Lucy DeCoutere recently to repeat lies, after she has been found by the Canadian courts to be a liar. Ghian Ghoomeshi was facing decades in prison, in something reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. Very similar in hyperventilating and embittered women dishonestly conspiring to have an innocent man hanged, except not with shrill cries of witchcraft, but rapist.