Following up on yesterday’s post, it is entirely possible that the employers of the patriarchy:
- Were legally permitted to discriminate against women.
- Were socially encouraged to do so.
- Stated that they were paying men more than they paid women for the same work.
- Intended to discriminate against women (believing this to be good for society).
- Believed they were paying women less than men for the same work.
- Were not actually paying women less than men for the same work.
How can 1-5 be true, and #6 also be true? To understand this, you need to consider the mechanism an aspiring woman-shackling patriarch has to use in order to create a society where men are systemically paid more than women for the same value of work. This is very similar to a cartel of producers which agrees to collude to limit production to increase prices. In this case however, the cartel is of consumers (of labor) who agree to collude to overpay for the labor of men for the good of society.
The problem every cartel faces is while the members collectively agree that the plans of the cartel are for the good of the group, individually there is always a temptation to cheat. OPEC’s members may come to agreement on a quota to restrict supply, but individual countries have an incentive to produce more than their agreed quota in order to maximize their own revenue and profit.
In order to overcome the problem of cheating, cartels need to be able to easily spot cheating and they need an effective mechanism to punish it. Without the ability to effectively detect and punish cheating, cartels tend to drift into irrelevancy as each member loudly extols the virtues of the pact while quietly acting in their own best interests. This explains how 1-3, and even #4 could be true while item 6 was also true. Each employer has the incentive to claim they are following the agreement of the cartel, and when they came to the agreement they may have originally intended to honor it.
Bullet 5 (they believed they were paying women less) requires a bit of explanation about labor as an input into production. It is very difficult to pin down exactly what any given person’s labor is worth. Years of schooling or experience don’t always predict productivity and quality. Additionally in order to determine the value of a person’s labor often it isn’t a simple matter of how much an employee will produce and the quality of their product in the next period. Other factors come into play like how the employee influences the team, their hours of availability, and how long they stick around after the employer experiences the sunk cost of hiring and training them. We would expect an individual employer to struggle quite a bit to get this exactly right with each individual employee. However, in the absence of an effective cartel we would expect employers in general to get this at least fairly close to right with the available labor pool over the longer term.
Note that once discrimination was outlawed it became illegal for employers to publicly demonstrate to their fellow cartel members that they were holding the line. Any proof that they were choosing to pay men more would be grounds for legal action. Additionally, any previous forms of social pressure applied to cheating firms were now impossible. The change in the law made it impossible to both detect cheating and to punish it. Any traction the cartel had previously gained would now be impossible.
Based on the fact that in the 17 years following the change in labor laws women’s relative earnings remained flat, it appears that the labor market in general was already extremely close to what was in the best interest of the employers. It wasn’t until feminists could make longer term changes to our culture (and therefore the choices of women) and implement muscular affirmative action that we started to see a real move in the relative earnings of women. From the feminist perspective changing the law may have been a prerequisite for the other changes they eventually made, but by itself it did nothing to close the wage gap.
This had to have been incredibly frustrating for feminists at the time, and as it turns out they had the cheating men of the patriarchy to blame. The woman-shackling patriarchs may well have thought they were keeping the wages of men artificially high, but their actions after the legislature and the courts broke any possible cohesion of the cartel strongly suggests they were in fact failing to do so.
See also: Sex Cartel!
Pingback: The cheating hearts of the patriarchal cartel. | Neoreactive
not to mention that the wage gap is a non-concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM
Pingback: The cheating hearts of the patriarchal cartel. | Manosphere.com
The case of the old wage levels in Australia was based on what was perceived then as being just. The male tannery workers would mostly have had wives and children to support, hence the higher wage. The mother who worked there would persumably had a husband’s wage as well, so was hardly worse off than her male colleagues. If she was unmarried or a widow then the government kicked in with baby bonuses. If the wage levels were different why didnt employers replace men with women? Well they did over time. If a woman could do the exact same work as a man, and you could pay her less, then often women did take over a job from men. In Australia a lot of clerical and secretarial jobs went from male to female occupations under this regime. But in the old days a lot more jobs required substantial physical effort, so the men were kept on, or in some cases employers used younger men (and paid them less than the adult wage). Overall the unions hated all this and pushed for women and young male wages to be shifted up to the adult male wage.
Don’t worry. Someone will be along shortly to accuse you of ‘magical thinking’.
There is a certain type of poster that invariably thinks that because they know some piece of obscure historical knowledge or trivia, this proves their intellectual superiority over others. Never mind whatever conceptual problems they overlook.
Coincidentally, 17 years is approximately the time it takes for a person to work themselves through the education system: K-12+4 years of college. Could it be that the change in goals presented to women in school finally accounted for the increase when those girls started graduating from college, and started choosing differently?
Whether those different choices have led to more happiness and contentment in America overall, I leave to others to argue about.
Something happened from the early 1980s onwards which wasn’t happening in the 1970s. Here is my guess. Increased imports, deregulation of transport and energy and increased migration into the construction sector from Latin America, all led to increased competition in private sector which in turn has led to slower wage growth in the private sector. Meanwhile government employment (public services, health and education) has grown and grown and grown. Since the early 1980s the gap between private sector and public sector wage levels has reversed, with public sector workers on average now being paid more. All of this has impacted on the relative level of female and male wage levels.
The whole pay gap/glass ceiling screech is just like the Baltimore fiasco; A knee-jerk cry of racism then you find out that the van driver was black as were three of the six cops involved. The chief of police was a black female and so was the mayor. President too. But the cry of racism was so orgasmic and invigorating that it remained.
Women crying patriarchy/glass ceiling are the same; When you look into it you’ll see that women dominate HR and also the compensation depts. in the corporate world. Remember two things that that corportations do;
-Produce products
-Innovate
Women cannot do either of those two things (that’s not my opinion either, just fact) yet the overall hiring must be more or less balanced in terms of M/F therefore you end up with HR departments the size of the Pentagon. Because where else could you put them?
How, if women do all the hiring, promoting, and salary allocation, can the patriarchy even set foot in their to do all their patriarchy moves? IF there are hiring/salary/promotion issues at all (there aren’t) then it’s just women doing it to themselves anyway.
@harscand
“Whether those different choices have led to more happiness”
Well…
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging − one with higher subjective well-being for men.
Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers. The paradox of declining female happiness. No. w14969. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009.
Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness
Here, let me explain… Women are NEVER happy with what they have, they always want what they don’t have, and when they throw away what they had, since they don’t have it anymore, they want it again, and now lament what they had and “lost” (of course that is how they see it, rather than that they actively destroyed it). Plain and simple. Use it to your advantage, but never waste a second of your time worrying about it. That way lies madness…
Men on the other hand, always figure – “Hell it could be worse.” So they are pretty happy overall..
@MarcusD,
The psychology of happiness is fairly well understood, and happiness doesn’t really increase with more access to resources once basic survival needs are met.
Wise men and philosophers across all kinds of cultures and religions have been studying this stuff for millennia. And any of them would tell you that pursuing higher and higher incomes, more access to resources, and the ability to control more people (in this case, men), will only increase one’s misery.
“Yet she [the woman] will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
How feminist lobbyists were “fixing” US economy after recession (“mancession”):
No Country for Burly Men by Christina Hoff Sommers
Women said they could have it all. They could bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, they don’t need a man. Now they don’t have men and an eating disorder.
Are Liberals Stupid or Evil? Why choose ladies? Have it both ways!
Going back to Slumlord’s comment about the wage gap being “affirmative action” for men because it forced women to earn less than their fair value, don’t we have to acknowledge that many of today’s ladyjobs are what David Graeber described as bullshit jobs in his viral essay from 2013?
If we’re going to talk about what should naturally exist, think of all the female-dominated jobs that only exist in 2015 thanks to regulation and red tape. Feminists always focus on “lean in” type careers that will only be available to the top 10% of women (or men) in ambition.
But the vast middle of the bell curve of office women are feeding off the byproducts of an expensive welfare and regulatory state which they have done much to vote into office and which creates mostly lackluster “jobs” that make little difference and that few can work up the energy to “lean in” to, like “disability benefits claims administrator” insurance paper-pushing, real-estate middlemen, administrative bloat in schools, universities and hospitals with BS titles like “curriculum program manager,” and nontechnical “project manager” roles at IT shops where they just run around and demand status updates.
It’s a low-rent version of Michelle Obama’s racket at the University of Chicago Medical Center where her efforts made not one person outside her family more healthy.
Shouldn’t it be telling that this “affirmative action for men” period was the very time when the economy was dynamically growing and accumulating the wealth that allowed big gov to have so much to feast off of in the first place?
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Nice research Dalrock. I appreciate all the graphs and the data.
Heh, ironic. There are 400 people working in IT at the firm I am currently at, and they have an 8 person project management staff. 7 are women.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268115001316
Well, there is a slight correlation between happiness and socio-economic index: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1vQJnNaHaRo/VYpquhxMu7I/AAAAAAAAAb8/nOCbodxWNBE/s1600/HAPPY%252Bby%252BSEI_recode.png
I don’t want to repeat what I have said on previous threads. I want now to observe that to concentrate on a gap between male and female wages – as opposed to any other factors – draws attention away from the many other grounds used for wage differentials; grounds such as, age, experience, qualifications, the generosity of the company that employs you which includes though is not limited to nepotism.
Personally (and I speak here of Law) I have observed that working faster pays less – dragging things out not merely ensures greater fees but makes ones case look more important; that women – contrary to the pay-gap myth – on occasion earn more than men for the same (type of) work and by orders of magnitude; that some women are very hard working (way beyond my limited mental capabilities).
May I also observe that the people who push the pay-gap myth hardest and insult men in the process tend themselves to be men; men who have reached the pinnacle of success. This is thus just men shafting other men in the hope of inducing Gina Tingles; men such as your President or my Prime Minister or the C.E.O. of my local council who even though he is offended by my view on the law, and assertions as to biology and history and who cheer-leads when The Vagina Monologues comes to town can nevertheless be seen in a photo in a recent edition of the local paper being (how can I put it) man-handled as if to say ‘he is mine’ by a middle-aged women clearly not his wife. All men; all hoping for or enjoying extra-curricula pussy or basking in female admiration. If they really believed their rhetoric then why don’t they themselves get off the back of shackled- women and resign in favour of the sex for whom they have a bleeding-heart! – but they don’t, do they.
Opus, what you have observed reminds me of the impression I got some time ago – it is probably obvious to the worldlywise – that powerful men talk up women and promote them because they want more female underlings and fewer men around who might one day be a real threat.
It is on a par with that other observation – which also would probably be commonplace to the realistic and cynical – that it doesn’t matter what a man is like with women personally, so long as he says the right empowering things about them.
Yes, I used to argue with a white male academic who was loudly in favour of affirmative action. I once suggested that he might resign his position in favour of a black woman. I don’t remember being completely convinced by his response.
May I also make a slightly personal observation. There is in East London (though not ‘The East End’) a place known as Dagenham – not that far away from West Ham and close to where David Beckham (not to mention Jimmy Greaves – whose autograph I obtained one Saturday morning when he was in his front garden holding his baby son) Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and Bobby Moore grew up [it was after all West Ham that won The World Cup] – as well as being the place from which film star/composer/pianist/comedian Dudley Moore, barefoot-diva Sandy Shaw, and former Archbishop Carey escaped, (and the place where most if not all of my former Primary School [I think you say Grade School] classmates received their Secondary education – in a school so bad that in 1984 the then new headmaster described the school as violent and depressed – it has since had a name change, which should tell you all you need to know). It is also (this is my point) the home in Great Britain of Ford Motor Company. My ‘shackled’ father used to say that if ever he lost his white-collar job he would get a job at Fords (he meant on the shop floor) – that was he felt all that would then be open to him.
Ford employed women as well as men but at different rates – and in 1968 the women went on strike. This strike is said to have led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970. [My mother would have loved that, her husband reduced to blue-collar work and on the same wages as a woman.] These women are now, like the Suffragettes before them, heroines and in 2010 a laudatory film was made of their exploits which has since been turned into a West End musical.
Ford no longer make cars in either Dagenham or indeed anywhere in Great Britain.
The best way to make a woman miserable is to give her what she says she wants. That’s why I don’t argue no more, I simply agree and amplify.
You want it.. you got it! Sister! What do you mean there are no men to marry?! Oh, you mean men with proper jobs and upwardly mobile careers, oh that, well… yeah. Sorry about that! Haha!
Women really do seem to forget that the only reason men were willing to work so hard and for such long times was due to family. They did it for their wives and children. In the end, they only hurt themselves and destroy entire economies in the process.
By demanding the same wages as men, whilst at the same time, expecting men to support families and pay for everything, destroyed any semblance of responsibility on their part. It doesn’t work, which means, no families, no jobs, no fathers and out of wedlock children. Welcome to the future!
Feminists want to render male choices, to do more dangerous work and more time consuming work, to be futile. They want men to simply do those things without the extra danger pay. In a word, they want the average male to be nothing but a serf. You see, if all pay were made equal than obviously nobody would be willing to do those dangerous and hard jobs. However, since women already command all the jobs in the ‘make work’ sector they can simply not hire men and only hire women, thus forcing the average man to take on the most dangerous of jobs for nothing more than survival pay.
Welcome to the future!
When we eliminated industrial pursuits in the 70s, built a service economy and inflated the educational requirements for service jobs any idiot could do, the way was paved to double the numbers of laborers in the workforce by sending women to college and then to work. This benefited corporations, giving them twice as many workers, cutting wages in half and especially, enriching the educational institutions who of course invented idiotic “Studies” degree programs, ginned-up awarding paper Bachelors degrees, thereby diluting the value of “higher” education. In the process, they indoctrinated the kids, promoting the freak-show perversions of the old and successful system.
The result? Adjusted for inflation, Americans make half the money (less, actually), as both husband and wife work longer hours outside the home to make the same living as one under the old system. They work longer hours because the are more workers than jobs. You will slave away or they’ll find someone who will, and quickly. Women in the workplace was ALWAYS a zero-sum game. Every job given to women was a job taken from a man. And women are less likely to move on and demand more money than men, they truly are slaves at work, that’s why corporations LOVE them.
Add to that the fact that we have trillions tied up in education loans for useless liberal arts and communications and “Studies” degree programs that have zero value in the economy and you can see the tremendous disaster institutionalizing feminism in the workplace and education. The cost in the public service for adding feminist doctrine (police, fire, military) is incalculable. Our ships feminized, crewed with single mothers that refuse to deploy because of the children, are idle at the docks, our foreign policy crippled. Our men softened and weak, one only need look at the twelve years it took to replace single-tower WTC vs. the original twin towers that went up in 7, starting from swampy scratch. Or, the year and a half it took to build Empire State.We haven’t men to do the hard service anymore. Further, women are involved in EVERYTHING these days and that obstructs all progress. Their stupid degrees aid no science or engineering, their contributions is catty and obstructionist. Just look at Pelosi, Boxer and all of them up there, no deal is ever possible.
The sheer expense of adding women to the workforce, public service, the military, legislative bodies and education is a disaster and there is no way to claw it back. There will be no way to stop the decline and there will never be a recovery. The American dream and any notions of the United Sates as exceptional is dead. RIP, enjoy the decline best as you can, Gents. Good Luck.
Scott Adams: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gender-bias-in-the-workplace
– Divorce “reform” would be 1969 through about 1975.
– Duke Power is 1972. (Testing for skill is “racist”, which is why degrees became so important)
– 1982 is just after the peak of the Wage/Price Spiral from the 70s.
We’d also need to look at the participation level inside the economy of Women. I remember it went from 20% to about 30% from 1960 to 1970.
I agree with Julian O’Dea. Men are a threat to other men and so one often sees offices being filled with females. It can be a very short-sighted policy; how often have I seen offices effectively taken over by one or other of the employed women who then milk the company for everything they can get – the boss being both oblivious to this and in awe ‘of Sandra who is so wonderful I do not know what we would do without her’, even as behind his back Sandra is giving him the bird. I reached a stage where when I went somewhere the first question I needed an answer to was ‘which of the women here is shagging the boss’ or at least was the apple of his eye – there always was one – for that was the person not to offend and for whom power had gone to her head. I clashed with a lot of these! These men who need a small harem to water their egos are often if not usually what we in the ‘sphere call Manginas; men who can not say boo to the proverbial female goose; men who in Vox Day’s hierarchy are Deltas, clueless white-knights, jealous of my sexual attractiveness and skill with females associated with the organisation, their reprimand being merely dressed-up jealousy.
One other thing to keep in mind about the shift around 1982: Are we missing a set of jobs that might have ceased to exist for Women? We can obviously point to the slow death of Manufacturing for propping up a class of wages for Men, but there is also the possibility that some form of low-wage work that Women used to do vanished.
I can’t come up with anything too easy off the top of my head, but the shift to “Illegal immigrant nanny” would start around this time period. I imagine the ranks of the “domestic help” had been in harsh decline for a long while, given the rise of modern appliances.
Adams wants to have it both ways. He starts by saying that gender bias is definitely present, largely because women claim it is present, and then he shows that such claims are not accurate.
He also goes with the “white males get all the advantages, except when they don’t” theme. Some good points could be pulled out, but his logic shows his own bias.
@BradA:
The saddest part is that Adams openly admits he was explicitly discriminated against — twice! — in his career, admits that this hurts those with less drive than he has, yet he lacks the ability to realize he completely undermines any point he’s going to make about “bias”.
If it requires rampant & intentional discrimination of a class of people to “level” a playing field, then you do not have a bias issue: you have an explicit capability issue.
The saddest part is that Adams openly admits he was explicitly discriminated against — twice! — in his career, admits that this hurts those with less drive than he has, yet he lacks the ability to realize he completely undermines any point he’s going to make about “bias”.
Heh. I just had to sit through a tortuous “sexual assault prevention” class (every bit as misandric as you’d expect), enthusiastically “facilitated” by a guy who, by his own story, was falsely accused of sexual assault by a woman he’d never met, causing him no end of personal and professional grief. Yet, there he was, defending the very system that screwed him.
To butcher Lenin, “The men will sell us the knife we will castrate them with.”
mjazzz3 says:
June 23, 2015 at 10:17 pm
Well said!
Heh, ironic. There are 400 people working in IT at the firm I am currently at, and they have an 8 person project management staff. 7 are women.
Yep, that’s my world too. Out of some two dozen female “project leads” in my workspace, not one has any hands-on technical experience with systems engineering or system security engineering, our two largest areas of focus. Even more nauseating is the fact that more than a few of them have graduate degrees in either Computer Science or Electrical Engineering and yet don’t even know how to set an IP address on their computers or connect a power cable to a projector (NOT an exaggeration, this). Oh, and these so-called “experts” are being billed out to credulous clients at consulting rates of up to $200.00 per hour.
Like I said in response to a previous post, these women should be getting billed on paydays.
Oh, and most of these creatures are devoid of any management skills either. Guess who gets to write his current project lead’s monthly status reports for her, since she’s a technical ignoramus who couldn’t even begin to describe in any detail, to her client’s satisfaction, what her project team is doing?
…and nontechnical “project manager” roles at IT shops where they just run around and demand status updates.
Status updates which, if they are of a technical nature, they can’t even begin to understand. You might as well cut and paste a random section of the Kama Sutra or a random stream of XML script.
If women were really paid less for the same work then all employers would have employed only women. The only reason that is not happening signifies that women are not paid less. Rather the time they work or the industries they predominantly work in is commensurate to their wages. Let them take up risky jobs to come to parity in terms of pay.
Thanks
http://www.themalefactor.com
@Looking Glass
In the 1980s, childcare began to be much more heavily regulated. In the 60s, day care centers were often in church basements, and there were many children for each worker. In Texas, the cost of having an infant enrolled in a daycare center is now $1100/month or more, and Texas prices are almost certainly cheaper than the prices in Washington D.C., NYC, San Francisco, etc. The last time I knew anything about it, the standard regulation was that there had to be one worker for each four infants. “Class sizes” could be somewhat larger beginning at 18 months, and by age four, the class size can be pretty big, as that is considered “junior kindergarten.” But with two or more children enrolled, few women earn enough to make working worthwhile.
Since a woman’s earnings net of childcare and other work-related expenses are increasingly negative, I would say that the job class most affected would be any entry-level job category. Despite the extortionate price of childcare, numerous women with small children DO still work fulltime. My guess is that this seemingly irrational behavior is fear-driven. The woman does not believe that she can re-start her career easily if she takes a break for a few years. If the economy suddenly got a lot better, the next cohort of young mommies might make very different decisions.
In the 1950s, something like 50% or more of the black women employed were working as domestic workers. At some point in the 60s, the government began enforcing Social Security laws, minimum wage laws, etc., making it much tougher for people to afford domestic help. And with smaller families, newer houses, more appliances, more preschool, etc., the demand for domestic help dropped as opportunities for black women to work for large corporations and government expanded. Also, there was a big pre-war age cohort of Southern black women with very limited education (left school to help harvest crops, etc.) After the war, the upcoming generation of black women were far more likely to have finished high school. Demand for domestics didn’t pick up again until dirt cheap domestic help from Mexico/Guatemala, etc., began to become available, along with the rise in two-career couples.
Looking Glass, my mom worked in what was essentially a sweat shop in the 70’s. Most of those manufacturing jobs went overseas by the late 70’s/early 80’s in my part of the Midwest.
Made in Japan, bought at K-Mart.
There is an easier refutation of what slumlord espouses:
1) What would happen to society if women were “forced” not to work?
Answer: wages for men go up, children get home schooled, divorce rate drops, quality of food consumed goes up, some restaurants close, consumer spending on frivolous consumption goes down, government size shrinks considerably. You don’t as much in taxes
2) What would happen to society if men were “forced” not to work?
Answer: As the feminist Paligia noted, we descend to the level of grass huts.
So they may or may not be “better” at some jobs, but those jobs are not essential (and I note that Slumlord’s job is not essential. The medical profession is beneficial to an extent but civilization and society has grown without them for the majority of history with doctors being little more than butchers a couple centuries ago,)
What slumlord suffers from is a couple things:
Selection bias and observation bias.
He is a physician (at least I believe he is) he sees a certain cross section of humanity (I believe Dalyrimple observed a similar thing, but made very different observations.)
A physician does not see most men, he sees mostly the bottom men. He does see most women. Women of all economic levels go to the doctor way more than men.
Women overall by comparison look more put together on a daily basis. And he observes that the women are with what he would describe as “losers”
Dalyrimple observed that this is what women “select for” slumlord blames the men. Simple as that.
And slum lord is observing the decline of civilization and wants to blame men for it because as Dalrock pointed out “It feels better to attack men”
Dalrock, you might be interested in Laura Lifshitz’ most recent blog post 😦 I’ve been following her since before her divorce (maybe 18 months now), and it has just been heartbreaking. Seeing the ugly details play out when someone makes the choice of frivorce is very eye-opening and tragic. Definitely the opposite of the Eat Pray Love lie.
http://www.yourtango.com/2015276396/i-didnt-properly-grieve-my-divorce-until-i-lost-my-house
Ouch, she be taking her frivorce hard, kinda like she knew she shouldn’t have done it! Whoops.
I can’t believe that he still helps her move, spends an inordinate amount of time with her and then hugs her when he goes…
Just maybe the two should put aside stupidity and keep their vows instead. Nah, too much hard work, better to lose the house and destroy a child’s life. Go team!
Laura Lifshitz’ most recent blog post
She got what she wanted and now she doesn’t like it. What a surprise.
…with doctors being little more than butchers a couple centuries ago
And being little more than glorified drug dealers today.
And being little more than glorified drug dealers today.
My last two check ups, two different doctors, both wanted to give me drugs. Why? Apparently I’m depressed (only I’m not). What’s up with that?
“And being little more than glorified drug dealers today.”
Ah, come on. I’m both a long time lurker and a surgeon, and we do FAR more than that.
Thanks Dragonfly, I love a little reverse divorcee porn. It is hard for me to generate an ounce of sympathy for this woman, Lifshutz is really the perfect name for her. If a woman was not thrown out on the street I just can’t get worked up about it, and even then almost all of those rare breeds were sex denying harpies from the ninth circle of hell. Women are like the Khmer Rouge who killed all the farmers and then couldn’t believe it when they couldn’t feed the population. They have almost ALL wilfully participated in the equalitarian demands, the quotas, the unfair treatment of men, the destruction of marriage, the one sided custody arrangements, the total reproduction freedom for women and the enslavement of men. Lest we forget ALL of them participated in the blue pill indoctrination and the lies men have been told. Yes, even your own mother was in on the game and YOU were just supposed to “just get it.”
Now with the myriad of lies told by ALL women to men, the singular lie of “Eat, Pray, Love” pales in comparison.
Sorry girls, it is really: Eat, pray……Cry.
feeriker @ 12:03 pm:
“Yep, that’s my world too. Out of some two dozen female “project leads” in my workspace, not one has any hands-on technical experience with systems engineering or system security engineering, our two largest areas of focus.”
Me too. Businesses are forced to hire women but women can’t/won’t do the fieldwork or technical work. What they CAN do is have meetings so they get fast-tracked to management past the experienced men who understand how things are done. Begin the fail!
…
ATC @ 2:47 am:
“Shouldn’t it be telling that this “affirmative action for men” period was the very time when the economy was dynamically growing and accumulating the wealth that allowed big gov to have so much to feast off of in the first place?”
Absolutely. Society worked when women were “oppressed”. Equality at the price of civilization is too expensive.
Remind me why equality is important?
…
feeriker @ 2:53 pm:
“And being little more than glorified drug dealers today.”
In fairness to mental health professionals, they don’t have much to work with. Depression is hard to cure when it’s fully justified. It isn’t paranoia when they really are trying to destroy you. And nobody can afford regular office visits anyway. That doesn’t leave many options.
I do have sympathy for her… I really do. If we were friends I would hold her and cry with her and basically urge her to get back with her husband… it would ruin our friendship if she decided to keep going in that direction. I would be gentle with her, but I would let her know that I couldn’t condone what she was doing to her family at all.
I can’t even read her post without crying and feeling heart-broken.
Remind me why equality is important?
Because… Patriarchy!
And SAMMICHES!!!
Dragonfly, that’s an appropriate response for you. Perhaps it would even help.
She wanted this, no matter how many other people got hurt in the process, now she has it and doesn’t like it.
As a man, my response is short and to the point: “You made your bed, now lie in it”. Because some people can only learn the hard way.
I’d be interested to see what has happened to the male/female wage comparison since 2008. My impression was the the stimulus packages around 2008, 2009 tended to boost female wages by aiding government employment at a time when the average male wage collapsed with the fall of the construction industry. Since around 2010 though local and states governments have tended to cut back a bit, and the energy/agriculture sectors have come on, as has construction (or though the latter very slowly).
All of this though takes Dalrock’s original point, that economic and social change is a great deal more important than passing laws.
Of course all this wage comparison is really moot, because Slumlord only brought up the anecdote about his mother being underpaid at a fish cannery as an attempt to support his claim that “women are doing better because they are unshackled”. One anecdote that doesn’t really prove anything need not require a lot of debunking.
Meanwhile Slumlord ignores all the ways in which women are deliberately elevated, and men are deliberately pushed down, in various parts of the Anglosphere. Perhaps because such things would be inconvenient to his claims.
@God is Laughing & Laura:
Those combinations make some sense. Textiles, mostly, or similar work that American women had been doing for 300 years pretty much vanished. Along with a lot of the social-function based jobs.
Which actually suggests that the likeliest result is actually that the economic changes from the 1950s on obliterated “Women’s Work” at a far faster rate than any other, but it’s hard to notice when it was previously only about 25% of the entire workforce (in 1960).
I really need to track down the inflation-adjusted pay details. I say that because I think the high-peak for wages was around 1977, which (if true) could open up the possibility that what actually closed the “wage gap” was actually competition for previously mostly Male-filled jobs. (Plus the rise of many other minor bits that constrain wage growth)
Oh, and something that probably doesn’t come up much: very, very few Women actually work jobs that will be Net Money to the family when they have small children. I think I saw the take-home pay needed was over $65k one time, but I’d need to track that down as well (and I’m heading out for a while).
I read this part of Mrs. Liftshitz’s article:
I felt confident and sure about our decision (we chose to divorce together — one of us didn’t leave the other)
And was immediately reminded of this:
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/inside-ny-hotel-couples-check-married-check-divorced-25935029
I’ve seen a couple divorces where the husband was eager to chuck it and wanted out, and rarely (not ever I don’t think actually) did the husband help the wife move, or hug her when they parted when they had to see each other. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it takes the idea of an amicable split to a level I’ve never seen.
In the clip I linked to above, the husband ultimately gives the wife what she desires and goes along with the divorce idea, but you don’t really feel like he would have chosen it. But hey, I don’t know.
The article just made me sad for a minute.
My last two check ups, two different doctors, both wanted to give me drugs. Why? Apparently I’m depressed (only I’m not). What’s up with that?
Yep, same here. Apparently the blanket assunption is that anyone living in this collapsing, dysfunctional society just has to be depressed. That or, more likely, doctors and/or their employers are getting massive kickbacks from the pharmakillers, the size of the kickback depending on how much of the poison they ram down unsuspecting patients’ throats.
Don’t worry, though. Pretty soon regular soma doses are going to be mandatory for all of us sheeple.
@Looking Glass, for some reason there is no longer a high demand for watch case polishers any more.
The first comment there is a “You Go Grrrlll!” reply. Just wait, the best is still yet to come, even though she ruined her child’s life.
How about being an adult instead?
As a man, my response is short and to the point: “You made your bed, now lie in it”. Because some people can only learn the hard way.
What’s especially sad is that many (most?) people can’t seem to learn from having observed others close to them learning painful life lessons through the school of brutal knocks. I’m betting that many (most?) of Mizz Dipshitz’s female friends and associates will eventually do the same thing she did and suffer the same painful results, despite having had front row seats to her divorce disaster and her life subsequent thereto. After all, “that CAN’T happen to ME.” Right?
Reading the Liftshitz story is just weird. What exactly did she expect? Where I live divorce means a 50-50 split of assets. As most people just own a family house (with mortgage) that usually means the sale of the house, the paying off of the mortgage and a split of whats left over. Obviously both parties are going to struggle after that to get back to where they were. This is all pretty common knowledge, but what did she expect? That should would get to keep everything, or that some richer guy would make up for the loss?
@Elspeth: One of a series of child psychologists that my children were court-ordered to visit told me that the parent who initiates the divorce always thinks that the kids are doing great, while the parent who did NOT want the divorce always thinks that the children have been badly harmed by the divorce.
And I remember reading an article that a marriage counselor wrote one time to the effect that even when the divorce is a “mutual decision,” one person was always pushing for it much harder than the other. Under no fault divorce, once the other spouse says that the marriage is over, you might as well agree, in which case the divorce magically becomes a mutual decision.
My sister once mentioned that all of the rosy-glow post-divorce articles that she ever read featured ex-couples who got along so great you couldn’t imagine why they couldn’t keep the marriage together.
My guess is that the ex-Mrs. Lifshitz was the one who wanted the divorce, but she will have a lot of trouble coping with Mr. Lifshitz remarrying and having additional children with Wife #2. Mr. Lifshitz may have helped with the move in order to ensure that the process of giving the house back to the bank was not compromised by Mrs. Lifshitz failing to move out in a timely manner. That doesn’t mean that he intends to be a free source of labor for his ex-wife in the future.
Movie depiction of American divorcee; “Eat, Pray, Love”
Reality of American divorcees (and most others) “Eat, Eat, Eat”
I think the cartel model is very useful in understanding some things but I don’t see any evidence that there was a cartel against female labor. Employers who paid men more did it with an understanding that it was good for society. They would have understood that this didn’t maximize their profits and thus made them a little less competitive. They also just probably thought that men made better employees anyway. Theoretically anyone who didn’t minimize pay for a job done might go out of business but this sort of thinking didn’t take off until people starting thinking in terms of PE ratios. In a theoretical system of dog eat dog competition you might need to construct such a cartel if you wanted to remove women from the workplace.
In thinking about this more, I think I have stumbled upon a probable hypothesis.
1. I have no doubt that in the past some companies paid women less. The bigger the company, the more likely this was true.
2. I do not believe it was out of civic duty to bolster men, nor to ensure that men could provide for their families.
3. I do not believe there was an “employer cartel”; either overt or covert. The bigger the company, the more likely bolstering family men were not considerations. (Exceptions existed, of course.)
3. I believe companies paid women less because (a) women would accept it (b) women make every mixed-sex job more difficult, complicated, and emotional in comparison to men-only jobs.
4. I believe that there ARE “cartels” involved in the pay-for-labor equation, but they are on the opposite side, and that they are called “unions”. Unions, being mobs, will throw any brick in a riot, and equal pay was a big brick. It brought in a lot of emotional content. And it was a bit of jiu-jitsu against the proclivities of the elite classes to which big business executives belonged. How many police want to knock-down and drag-out a female protester? How many cops want to do that 200 times?
5. While federal laws regarding “equal pay” were legislated in 1963, I suspect that the most industrial states (the states with the most and largest industry and companies) had “equal pay” laws on the books before the federal legislation was passed. It is one of many examples where law is meant to codify the culture change already accomplished; which made it necessary for the conservative-minded to claim as their own.
6. This would explain how it could be true that in the past women were paid less, and also why there was no change in the “wage gap” in 1963. The change had already happened. By 1963 so many workers were already in “equal-pay”
cartelsunions that the change in the industrial sector was insignificant. Wages in the mom-and-pop businesses were probably already equal, and where they weren’t it was not very significant across the workforce.7. As well, 1963 is at the end of the industrialization of America. The service and information ages were just around the corner. ages where women could easily retain their femininity at work…at least in the sense of working in women’s clothes, make-up, heels, etc.
8. The sexual revolution happened at the same time. Men could now surround themselves with women in dresses, make-up, heels, etc., and feel free to enjoy the swaddle of sexiness.
9. There was just a lot of wealth in America because America never stopped working during WWII. American factories churned out goods needed by other western countries while those countries were rebuilt their own factories. It seemed easier to pay the unions and women what they wanted than to fight with them because they could not see the end where business models would change.
10. The resulting atomization of households to two-worker-units doubled the workforce. This drove down the wages of men, but because the
cartelsunions were already entrenched, and “equal pay” laws were already enforced, the pay floor was immovable. That meant the ceiling had to come down. That probably took a generation to happen; about 20 years.Re: Laura Lifshitz’ most recent article:
When many women are unhappy post-divorce, if asked, “Was divorcing your husband the right thing to do?”, almost all of them will say, “Yes. Absolutely”. They will then go into a long soliloquy about how sad and lonely they are and how it didn’t turn out as expected. Many of them, as well as their children, have a look about them that says that they have died internally, almost like their soul, or spirit, has departed.
Ms Lifshitz is no different. I suspect that they have to adopt this way of thinking, – an absolute,”dig deep on denial” about divorce being the “right decision” because the pain that they feel has to be rationalised somehow. It also helps the whole “”rebuild my life…” rationales.
Caldo is right.
THIS is the ONLY REASON why women may have ever been paid “less” for the same job. THIS is the ONLY REASON why women may continue to be paid “less” for the same job. There are no other reasons.
Women “accept it.” If she didn’t want to be paid “less” she would do what men do, that is, get another job. I have been paid “less” that others at the same company for the same job. I did NOT run to government to be made whole by legislation. I did NOT lawyer up. I did NOT run to HR. I found another job that paid “more.” And when I submitted my resignation (and calmly explained why) I was NEVER treated with anything other than contempt and anger from my now former employer who felt “betrayed” that I “left them” because they needed me. They grew to “expect” that I would continue to be paid “less” and now, they are screwed because all the work I was doing had to be done by someone else and they could not pay that next person “less.” So what goes around, comes around to bite them in the @ss. But in the end, I kept my pride and dignity and walked out with my head held high and the free market for jobs and compensation, worked.
That is all women need to do. That is all they EVER needed to do. But they don’t. They run to HR. They lawyer up. They run to government. That is because that is what feminism tells them to do.
Pingback: This Week in Reaction (2015/06/28) | The Reactivity Place
Pingback: Entropy and the pumps. | Dalrock
Pingback: John Zmirak is mostly right. | Dalrock