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In the UK, women's rights have blocked social mobility for men. What about Ireland?
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12-09-2011 12:00pm#1Way back in April , David Willets the UK Universities Minister controvercially put forward the view that feminism has blocked social mobility for men.
In other words, feminism has triumphed over egalitarianism.
A few extracts from a BBC magazine piece are below and there is a summary of the arguments there to from the links.
I am interested in this from the perspective of UK policies we may copy for here and of course for the new wave of Irish emigrants.Feminism provided an obstacle to social mobility for working-class men, Cabinet minister David Willetts has controversially argued. But is he right?
They were meant to welcome a new era of fairness and opportunity for all. Instead, a minister's remarks have prompted debate over the effect of women's entry into higher education and the professions.
In a briefing to journalists ahead of the government's social mobility strategy, David Willetts, the universities minister, appeared to suggest that feminism had made it harder for working-class men to get ahead in life.
Asked what was to blame for a lack of social mobility, the Daily Telegraph quoted him saying: "The feminist revolution in its first-round effects was probably the key factor.
"Feminism trumped egalitarianism. It is not that I am against feminism, it's just that is probably the single biggest factor."
His remarks sparked a wave of criticism, and Mr Willetts made it clear that he supported the move of women into the workplace and higher education. But to some the notion that more jobs for females equals fewer opportunities for males will be a convincing one.
Continue reading the main story
According to the government's own social mobility strategy, the proportion of males born in 1958, with parents who were in the bottom fifth of earners, moving upwards was 70%. For those born in 1970, the figure was 62%.
In 2008-09, 51% of young women entered higher education, according to figures released earlier this year by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, compared with 40% of young men.
It was the first time more than half of women went on to higher education - 20 years previously, only about one in five young women went into higher education and a decade prior to that it was about one in 10.
It is figures like these that may have led Mr Willetts to conclude that greater opportunities for women have resulted in fewer for men.
Continue reading the main story Mind the gap- The 2010 gender pay divide, which was the closest since figures started in 1997, showed UK men took home 10% more pay than their female counterparts
- The Office for National Statistics data shows that, in April 2010, the UK workforce was made up of 12.7 million men and 12.3 million women.
- However, work patterns were vastly different between the sexes. Some 88% of men worked full-time, but only 58% of women worked full-time
- Women tended to have lower hourly rates of pay in general, the figures show
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14855167
Amongst his detractors are
Rod Liddle, the son of a train driver who has risen to become a prominent journalist, says he does not like the manner in which the minister made his point. And Liddle insists the move of women into the workplace was just and correct.
But he says such statistics demonstrate that the arrival of middle-class women in large numbers into the universities and professions has restricted the prospects for men with working-class backgrounds.
"The move of women into the workplace is absolutely right - it should be guaranteed," he says.
"But what Willetts said in down-the-line, factual terms is right. It annoys me when the left refuse to accept that it's harder for men or that the process has had an effect on the family. That doesn't mean it was wrong."
Of course, the number of job opportunities on offer and the nature of the labour market did not stand still as women began to make up a greater proportion of the labour force.
As a result, many academics regard such an interpretation of the data as simplistic.
Men used to achieve social mobility by rising through the factory ranks
Karen Mumford, professor of economics at the University of York, says it is "woolly-minded" to assume that the number of job opportunities has remained static.
In the days before feminism, she says, those working-class men who achieved upward social mobility tended to do so by moving through the ranks at their workplace.
Others say the statistics tend to support him.An economist's view
Alan Manning, professor of economics, LSE
"The expansion of university education was faster among women - they went from being a minority of students to a majority.
"But it's not true that if one group takes something, there's automatically less for the other.
"The deterioration in employment opportunities among young men was primarily the consequence of the decline in manufacturing.
"It's not the case that all these apprenticeships were suddenly taken by lots of young women. It's that the manufacturing jobs just weren't there anymore."
Certainly, there is no question that the number of female workers in the UK has increased significantly over the past four decades.
Labour Force Survey estimates suggest that the employment rate for women aged 16 to 59 rose from 56% in 1971 to 73% in 2004.
Whereas in 1971 there were nine million women over the age of 16 in work, by 2004 that figure stood at 13 million.
At the same time, social mobility for men appears to have fallen back over the same period.
So what about Ireland .
Ireland never really had a manufacturing industry - we had mass emigration - so Ireland and the UK is not really comparing like with like.
I read recently that functional illiteracy amongst Irish adult males is 27% -men that may emigrate without trades to become unskilled workers or homeless or to end up in jail.
Ireland and the UK have never been the same with our sectarian and colonial past making us a peasant society and while Britain enjoyed the Industrial Revoulution in the 19th Century Ireland had the poorest peasants in Europe - worse conditions than the Balkan serfs.
In Ireland , I often feel that the discussions on gender issues refer to elites and but the policies do make a difference.
Are the theories too off beam for Ireland . ? How practical are our policies, for example, and should FAS have Pre -Emigration courses in reading & writting ?.
What should we be looking at ?0
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I never said it was a good thingIckle Magoo wrote: »And yet it couldn't be further from mine...go figure.
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Funnily enough we don't see discussions like this for Ireland and even things like farming incomes being half the average industrial wage is not discussed.
The Great (Male) Stagnation
by Alex Tabarrok on June 8, 2011 at 7:25 am in Data Source, Economics | Permalink
You have probably seen something like the following graph which shows real GDP per capita and median male income since 1947. Typically, the graph is shown with family or household income but to avoid family-size effects I use male income. It’s evident that real gdp per capita and median male income became disconnected in the early 1970s. Why? Explanations include rising inequality (mean male income does track real gdp per capita somewhat more closely), Tyler speculates that the nature of technological advances has changed, other people have speculated about rising corporate profits. Definitive answers are hard to come by.
Here is another set of data that most people have not incorporated into their analysis:
Median female income tracks real GDP per capita much more closely than does median male income. It’s unclear which, if any, of the above explanations are consistent with this finding. Increasing inequality, for example, predicts an increasing divergence in real GDP per capita and female median income but we don’t see this in the graph (there is a slight increase in the absolute difference but the ratios don’t increase). Similarly, we would expect changes in technology and corporate profits to affect both male and female median income equally but in fact the trends are very different.
One can, of course, do the Ptolemaic move and add an epicycle for differences in male and female inequality and so forth. Not necessarily wrong but not that satisfying either.
The big difference between female and males as far as jobs, of course, has been labor force participation rates, increasing strongly for the former and decreasing somewhat for the latter. Most of the female change, however, was over by the mid to late 1980s, and the (structural) male change has been gradual. Other differences are that female education levels have increased dramatically and male levels have been relatively flat. Females are also more predominant in services and males in manufacturing: plumbers, car mechanics, carpenters, construction workers, electricians, and firefighters, for example are still 95%+ male. Putting these together points to a skills and sectoral story, probably amplified by follow-on changes in labor force participation rates.
Thinking about the story this way also reminds us that the median male or female is not a person but a place in a distribution. The median male in 1970 can get rich by 1990 even though median male income is flat.
Again, no definitive answers, but the raw patterns are striking.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/the-great-male-stagnation.html
How can we know what type of society we are in or what our kids lives will be like of we do not keep an eye on it.
Do we understand our economy and the skills us or our kids will need to stay or to emigrate successfullyThursday, March 10, 2011
Ireland: GDP or GNP? Which is the better measure of economic performance?
Ireland's national statistics office, the CSO, says Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product (GNP) are closely related measures. GDP measures the total output of the economy in a period i.e. the value of work done by employees, companies and self-employed persons.
This work generates incomes but not all of the incomes earned in the economy remain the property of residents (and residents may earn some income abroad). The total income remaining with Irish residents is the GNP and it differs from GDP by the net amount of incomes sent to or received from abroad.
In Ireland's case, for many years past, the amount belonging to persons abroad has exceeded the amount received from abroad, due mainly to the profits of foreign-owned companies, and our GNP is, therefore, less than our GDP.
State agency Forfás said last year that GNP is a better measure than GDP of the value added accruing to residents of the country. In Ireland, GNP is now considerably lower than GDP because of income flows to non-residents, especially profits and dividends of foreign direct investment enterprises. In 1970, the reverse was the case with GNP higher, because of income flows to Irish residents from abroad.
As a result of this turnaround, GNP growth has been somewhat slower than GDP growth. Since 1970, real GNP has increased about four times. In the year 2008, GNP decreased by 2.8% while in the five years (2003-2008) it increased by an average annual rate of 3.8%.
The growth in exports has been especially noticeable. Since 1970, the value of exports has increased over twenty times in real terms. The other demand components making up GDP have increased to a lesser extent over the same period, e.g. personal consumption over four times, public expenditure about four times and investment about five times.
Some of the growth during the bubble resulted from increasing numbers at work. While GNP at constant prices increased by 19% between 2003 and 2008, the increase per person in employment was much less at 1.3%.
GNP was until recent times about 82% of the value of GDP. however, the National Recovery Plan 2010-2014 forecasts a level of 73%.
During the boom, the per capita GDP data did not chime with reality.
Even allowing for inequality, it just wasn't credible that we were among Europe's wealthiest and when Bank of Ireland had us as runners up to Japan as the wealthiest on earth it seemed more bizarre - - Japan had at the time about 35% of its workforce as temps, earning less than the Irish minimum wage.
In recent times, we have seen pharmaceutical exports jump without any impact on jobs and we know that the MNCs have profits of sales from Ireland inflated to maximise the benefit of the low corporate tax rate.
We have about 500 employed in the leasing sector and we manage over 3,000 aircraft from Ireland; in 2004, the 2 biggest companies by revenue were owned by Microsoft and were operating from the offices of a Dublin law firm. They still operate to channel patent and other income from other overseas Microsoft units to Ireland. They now have unlimited status and their results are not publicly available.
A leasing company with 20 people can have huge revenues but it does not reflect economic activity in Ireland.
The other side of the coin are Irish companies earning income abroad.
CRH for example, is only Irish because its headquarters are in Ireland and because of its background -- up to 90% of its shareholdings are held by non-Irish and only about 2,000 of its 80,000 staff are based in Ireland.
On paper the outward stock of foreign direct investment is greater than the total for inward investment.
Danny McCoy, the director general of the business lobby group IBEC, told his conference last November: "However, what we see is the extent to which Irish-owned assets are working for us overseas and creating that €50bn in wealth that flows back into Ireland.
Ireland's stock of direct investment overseas (ODI) in other words, Irish owned assets abroad was just shy of €190bn. The stock of FDI assets here in Ireland was just below €170bn.
Ireland therefore has a net Direct Investment asset position of €20bn.
This number shows the growing impact of large Irish multinationals many of them represented here today operating in the international sphere: companies like CRH, Smurfit Kappa Group, Glen Dimplex, Kerry Group, Glanbia, Paddy Power, Creganna-Tactx and Greencore indigenous companies growing their international reach and acquiring new businesses overseas."
This is of course another example where the bragging/bull**** does not chime with reality.
Foreign firms are responsible for more than 90% of our tradeable exports.
The American management consultants, Accenture, moved their hq to Ireland from Bermuda and I would think that some of the €50bn referred to by McCoy includes profit from activities in for example the US that shouldn't affect Irish national accounts data.
GDP and GNP for most countries are at similar levels. However, Ireland is exceptional for its dependence on FDI (foreign direct investment).
The difference between the 2 measures has widened during the recession.
I would think that the GNP level is more a reflection of reality today.
Employment in the FDI sector is back to 1997 levels when the workforce was 25% smaller.
This issue of GDP v GNP was raised by economist Michael Taft in a blog comment response to a Finfacts article on Wednesday.
Richest EU countries have the highest taxes; Irish tax burden will be as high as Denmark's by 2014
http://www.finfacts-blog.com/2011/03/ireland-gdp-or-gnp-which-is-better.html
Do we look at these issues
Irish emigration worse than 1980s
Families are sending remittance payments home, says one 26-year-old who emigrated to Australia
Bondi beach, Australia. Irish immigrants are set to flood to these shores in the coming years. Photograph: Getty
Kerry is the home of Gaelic football (GAA) and local businessman Jimmy Banbury runs one of five local teams in the Dingle Peninsula. He usually has no problem producing players sufficiently good to make the selection for the county senior team.
But this year he will struggle.
Unemployment levels are so high that men in their late teens and early twenties can't afford to hang around. GAA, although played like a professional sport, is amateur. And the chance of national football glory in Croke Park is no substitute for a living.
"Eight of our best players have emigrated and more of them are going after Christmas either to Australia to Britain," Banbury told me before Christmas.
For him the return of the dark days of emigration, which Ireland does in regular cycles, is leaving another indelible mark on the community.
"Only eight boys started in junior infants this year. In a 10 year period that has dropped 50 per cent," he says. Dingle is a substantial town but relies on tourism for business and the downturn is evidently driving away those with young families.
Banbury, like everyone else in Ireland, will be unsurprised by today's news that emigration is now running at levels higher than the 1980s.
While Fianna Fáil waste time playing deckchairs on the Titanic, the rest of the country is hanging its head in despair and anyone who has a chance - mainly single men and women - are getting out in the latest wave of emigration.
Today it was predicted that emigration in Ireland this year will be worse than the 1980s.
The Economic and Social Research Institute predicts 100,000 Irish will be emigrating in the next two years – 50,000 this year and 50,000 in 2012.
It means more Irish people will emigrate this year than 1989, when emigration last peaked and 44,000 left Ireland.
The figure is tethered to another timebomb - unemployment .
As ESRI's Dr Alan Barrett says the figures are of course uncertain but "If migration is lower unemployment will be higher". That's Hobson's choice for young graduates and for thousands of twenty and thirty-somethings who haven't left the country already.
Ireland has reared a lost generation
The figure confirms what every family in Ireland knows, the country has reared a "lost generation" of twenty something semi-skilled workers and graduates who have no choice but to leave to find a job.
Australia is one of the most popular for the Irish and earlier this week I spoke to the authorities in Sydney and to one 26 year old who had already made the move to Oz.
There are two types of émigrés – those who are making a permanent move to the country with their families, and younger 20-somethings who are going on working holiday visas which, provided they work for three months in a rural area, can last for two years.
Five years ago, the department of immigration says, the numbers of Irish on this holiday visa stood at 12,500.
23,000 Irish arrived in Australia in 2009
This steadily rose year on year and peaked in 2008/9 when 23,000 arrived in Australia seeking a break in fortune.
Last year numbers fell slighty, back to 15,000 – although the figures are recorded from June to June, so we don't know yet how many arrived in Australia for the second half of 2010.
Migrants with certain types of skills, carpenters, electricians, nurses and other medical workers are the lucky ones. They can get permanent visas.
The numbers here have swelled from 1,700 in 2005/2006 to 3,000 in 2009/10.
A further 2,000 "temporary visas" were granted to workers with these skill sets who got sponsors.
"If you look at the trends, 2,000 is not an insubstantial number. It's an increase of 65 per cent on the same numbers in 2009 when there were 700. The carpenters, electricians, resident medical officers – these are not trades or professions that any country would like to lose," said Sandi Logan, communications manager with the department of immigration and citizenship.
'It's like the famine remittance days'
Richie Bohan, 26, left for Australia in November 2009. He couldn't get a job so decided to take a year out.
I caught up with him last night and he told me he had no intention of coming back.
His dad, a painter, hasn't had work since November and is about to close his business after 43 years.
"I try not to think about what's happening at home too much. It's funny, when I was leaving my dad was screaming at me not to go and now he's screaming at me not to come back."
"My dad will be alright. I remember when I was about nine he sat me and my siblings down - there are six of us - and told us we would have to move into our gran's, but the boom came along and we never did. He will find something.
But it's almost sort of coming back to the days of the famine remittance when those who left sent money home," says Bohan
So when we talk to politicians do we ask them where there policies come from.0 -
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Here are the emigration figures - puts it in context.Massive rise in emigration as 40,000 left Ireland in 2010
New statistics show its at highest levels since the Famine
By CATHAL DERVAN,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer
Published Friday, September 16, 2011, 7:31 AM
Updated Friday, September 16, 2011, 3:49 PM
48digg
Over 40,000 Irish citizens emigrated last year
Irish emigration is now at its highest level since before the Famine with 111 quitting Ireland each and every day according to official figures.
The government’s Central Statistics office has confirmed that emigration has more than doubled in the past two years with over four thousand people seeking a new life in America alone in the period covered.
The vast majority of those emigrating are aged between 15 and 44 with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand their likely destinations.
“You’d have to go back to the 1800s to get levels like that,” said CSO spokesperson Deirdre Cullen.
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Massive-rise-in-emigration-as-40000-left-Ireland-in-2010-129942668.html0 -
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Aren't women doing far better in terms of literacy and numeracy leaving school though? One of the most socially damaging impacts of the construction bubble of the past 10 years, imho, is the level of young men who abandoned education for the lure of the high wages available for relatively unskilled work in that industry.
Both those are fairly recent phenomena, in terms of the educational levels of the general populous which the stats and reports cover but yes, there are more and more men who have successfully earned a living working in unskilled jobs who now find themselves without the basic literacy or ICT skills to even produce a CV, never mind fulfill the requirements of a basic data entry clerk or call-centre staff. We now live in a very technically driven and literate dependant world.
Would I be right in guessing that men make up the minority of the adult learners Ickle, or that demographically speaking, a higher percentage of the illiterate women seek to do something about the shortcoming in their education?
Not in my experience no - but that is, of course, both limited and geographically precise.It's just a hunch, but I'm assuming that the traditional "male pride" (which to be fair, we encourage socially in this country) holds many men back from getting help with their illiteracy.
Actually as the assumed wage earner there seems to be greater motivation and/or less social/familial barriers to attending adult education as a male...but yes; pride, shame, even being seen entering and leaving the education centre are still huge barriers to both genders seeking help. It's well acknowledged that the most trying aspect of adult education is just getting people to come in and admit they have literacy issues - once they come in and are assessed and start classes they usually stay for many years climbing the ladder and even encourage friends and family members to also come in.0 -
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You are right, in UK the women's rights have blocked social mobility for men. Women around the world are more likely to live in poverty, simply because they are women. I really wondered about the women rights uk, so that the last week i have also completed a research about this specific subject. Women’s unequal position in society means they have less power, money, protection from violence and access to education and health care.
Anyway UK or Ireland, we need equality in all the way...
Have a good day
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