Post-equality

[Shryke]

Right. The gender gap will not vanish (or be greatly reduced) until older generations retire because the income disparity is far too entrenched. It is a positive sign that among the youngest generation, the income disparity not only vanishes but favors women, as it should because of their greater levels of education.

I think you are missing the point:

The "women making more then men" thing is not a product of a younger generation that will move upwards as they age, but a product of a specific type of worker: young, unmarried, childless.

And in that category, more women then men have post-secondary degrees and thus women make more then men.

It's an issue confined to specific circumstances.

[Lyanna Stark]

I think that when feminists continue to work for greater equality for women, men will benefit in several aspects from this process. For example, talking about men participating in baby groups will not immediately lead to derogatory comments (see the “knitting” post). With regard to other male problems, nothing will happen (for example the procreation issue), and with regard to some problems, the situation for men will become worse. Example: In Germany, you are not allowed to conduct a paternity test anymore as a (supposed) father without the agreement of the mother of the child or the agreement of a judge. This is a development most feminists will probably see in a positive light, most men won’t.

You'll be happy to know then that in Sweden, a country plagued by equality and feminists, dads are not mocked in baby groups and are starting to more and more take equal part in parenting.

In fact, I've seen dads in UK baby groups and they were not mocked when I attended, although perhaps it exists elsewhere.

With more equality also comes greater acceptance that men can take greater responsibility for parenting.

[corbon]

I can't tell from your post what this issue is about. I am gathering that it's about the union rep ostensibly wanting to make that people on the job are strong enough to rescue wayward "smoke divers"?

I can tell you that men on these jobs when surveyed insist on levels of strength that ultimately cannot be justified by the actual tasks performed.

So, here, they should hire some professionals and set some validated minimum standards. It's prefectly simple, people do it all the time. It's just that if you ask the people on the job to say how much strength is necessary and ask what tasks that they need that strength to perform, the objective data regarding the amount of strength needed to do the task doesn't match their self-reported subjective data.

When the shit hits the fan and you have to rely on the person next to you for your life, you do not want someone who 'meets the minimum standards required to do the job'.

You want someone who exceeds those stands by a wide margin and has plenty in reserve.

The actual task requirements are not a suitable relevant standard.

[mormont]

When the shit hits the fan and you have to rely on the person next to you for your life, you do not want someone who 'meets the minimum standards required to do the job'.

You want someone who exceeds those stands by a wide margin and has plenty in reserve.

The actual task requirements are not a suitable relevant standard.

So you're saying that the minimum standard is to exceed the minimum standard? :lol:

[MinDonner]

I think you are missing the point:

The "women making more then men" thing is not a product of a younger generation that will move upwards as they age, but a product of a specific type of worker: young, unmarried, childless.

And in that category, more women then men have post-secondary degrees and thus women make more then men.

It's an issue confined to specific circumstances.

Yes. And I think I made this point back on about page 1. The unequal childcare responsibilities are one of the major causes of the pay gap, so removing that from the equation makes no sense at all.

[Happy Ent]

I can't tell from your post what this issue is about. I am gathering that it's about the union rep ostensibly wanting to make that people on the job are strong enough to rescue wayward "smoke divers"?

No. He’s tired about firemen having to risk their lives by rescuing the wayward firewomen. I can understand why firemen would be upset by being exposed to life-threatening working conditions only to pander to the ideological preferences of a few upper class academic societal engineers.

[Lyanna Stark]

No. He’s tired about firemen having to risk their lives by rescuing the wayward firewomen. I can understand why firemen would be upset by being exposed to life-threatening working conditions only to pander to the ideological preferences of a few upper class academic societal engineers.

HE:

But that is not what is said in the articles. In the Expressen article there is nothing that says the "lost" firemen where women.

In the second article, the union representative is put in "quarantine" for two years since he claims the female firemen are a security risk. He does not specify why that is the case, nor that it is related to the previous incident, where another leading fireman called for stricter physical demands across the board, and not only for women.

Further, note the language Mr Union Representative is using. Some of his word choices stand out to me, as they ought to do to anyone.

For the people who don't read Swedish, he is basically calling the Council leadership "A bunch of pussies".

Finally, he says:

– Jag har sagt att man inte kan bortse från säkerhetsfrågan för kvinnorna i vissa arbetssituationer. Men också detta är politik. Man har struntat i LAS. Det har handlat om en kvotering. Det är fegt av ledningen för Malmö Brandkår och Kommunals förbundsstyrelse att inte våga säga att det handlar om kvotering, säger Håkan Ask.

In other words: the guy is talking complete nonsense here. And as a Union rep, he should be 100% knowledgeable about these things.

Translation:

He first mentions safety for female fire fighters as an issue. Then he claims it's all politically achieved and citing a piece of legislation that is completely irrelevant to hiring decisions. Then he says women are getting hired only because men got discriminated against.

He is talking here about the safety for women working as firefighters, but is that the issue, or is it that it's against LAS? He can't seem to decide what the issue is. To make it even weirder, LAS does not regulate hiring people, it regulates how you can let people go, and how it works to resign from a job. As far as I can tell from reading the actual legal test, LAS has nothing to do with hiring decisions, politically motivated or otherwise: http://www.notisum.se/rnp/sls/lag/19820080.HTM

I can agree that Government shouldn't micromanage firefighting on a local level, but from what this guy is spouting, it's really hard to tell whether that is ACTUALLY the issue, or something else is. This man is not coherent enough to actually tell us much of anything.

[TrueMetis]

The thing about firefighting is that if you are using the proper techniques then the strength requirement isn't all that high. But then I don't know what the preferred techniques in Sweden. Just for reference does anyone know if they still use the fireman's carry there?

[Lyanna Stark]

The thing about firefighting is that if you are using the proper techniques then the strength requirement isn't all that high. But then I don't know what the preferred techniques in Sweden. Just for reference does anyone know if they still use the fireman's carry there?

I have no idea. If they don't maybe that is a better suggestion for improvement than the current pointless furore they have going on?

It seems to me that if your employees often end up in really dangerous situations, looking at routines, equipment and training maybe be your first ports of call.

But what do I know? I am not an angry union representative. :P

[TrueMetis]

I have no idea. If they don't maybe that is a better suggestion for improvement than the current pointless furore they have going on?

There are actually much better alternatives to the fireman's carry, because the fireman's carry risks smoke inhalation and it takes a lot more strength than needed to carry someone as opposed to dragging them. (Which is what the fireman around here are trained to do IIRC)

[Guest Raids]

No. He’s tired about firemen having to risk their lives by rescuing the wayward firewomen. I can understand why firemen would be upset by being exposed to life-threatening working conditions only to pander to the ideological preferences of a few upper class academic societal engineers.

I guarantee you that people like my husband are not upper class academic societal engineers. He just determines job qualifications in order to objectively select the best pool of applicants. Doing this gives women a fair chance. The process is really pretty involved - I laid it out after talking to a friend of ours who does a lot of work in this area - police, fireman, etc. in the women in the military thread we had awhile back.

But for example, if a cognitive ability test is called for in order to assess applicants for the job in question, it will be given even though everyone knows it will cause adverse impact to some racial minorities. People do not assume that there is some better cognitive ability test out there that will not show adverse impact, because there isn't. And they don't ask why. They just use it if they need to for the job, and don't if they don't. They are contractors, paid to do a job, not "academic societal engineers."

But these experts are hired because of Title VII anti-discrimination law, which doesn't mandate hiring procedure, but just demands that the need for adverse impact be validated. It's not that onerous of a standard - my husband works within it every day and actually would not want it any other way (even though the "academic social engineers" are somewhat hostile to people like him because they are corporate industry). So I think the whole system works really well.

There tends to be very little accurate knowledge about this in the public realm and I am not certain why this is so.

[Tempra]

I think you are missing the point:

The "women making more then men" thing is not a product of a younger generation that will move upwards as they age, but a product of a specific type of worker: young, unmarried, childless.

And in that category, more women then men have post-secondary degrees and thus women make more then men.

It's an issue confined to specific circumstances.

And what evidence do you have that the the pay gap favoring women will not only return but revert back to favoring men when this generation marries and ages? Pointing to older generations does not make this point for you.

I do think it is likely that this paygap will likely shrink as women have children, but that opens up a whole different can of issues (equal pay for equal work, blah blah). It makes the most sense, IMO, to compare apples to apples, and that is what this study did. That's not to say that discrimination does not still exist, i'm sure it does, but, for this youngest generation, the societal wide discrimination against women regarding pay appears to have vanished.

[Lyanna Stark]

There are actually much better alternatives to the fireman's carry, because the fireman's carry risks smoke inhalation and it takes a lot more strength than needed to carry someone as opposed to dragging them. (Which is what the fireman around here are trained to do IIRC)

Sorry I think I misunderstood you. My point was more that if they can make improvements like the one you suggest here, investigating that and similar changes in techniqie, training etc is a better idea than uniformly claiming women suck as firefighters.

[TrueMetis]

Sorry I think I misunderstood you. My point was more that if they can make improvements like the one you suggest here, investigating that and similar changes in techniqie, training etc is a better idea than uniformly claiming women suck as firefighters.

Agreed. (I should have realized most people would still think firemen use the fireman's carry, sorry)

[MinDonner]

And round and round we go again.

"Equal pay for equal work" (or the lack of) is only ONE of the historical reasons for the pay gap. Just because that is now showing a negligible effect on a certain group of workers does not mean there are no other issues to be addressed. Such as, for example, the way that having a family negatively affects women's earning potential much more than it does men's. For reasons including the unequal share of maternity/paternity leave, etc etc, which is where the thread started.

[kungtotte]

There's also the uneven gender distribution in occupations to consider. Women make up a significant portion of the child care, health care and education sectors, and guess which sectors suffer greatly from being underpaid in general? Male nurses make as little as female nurses, and the problem here is that nurses are underpaid.

I guess you could argue that these occupations are underpaid because they are traditionally female jobs.

[Guest Raids]

Yes I suppose we could....Really, it makes a lot of sense. At first, women did not have very many options in the labor market. Nursing was one of them. So, market forces would just dictate that nursing would not pay well, because you didn't have to pay women well to attract good female candidates. And here we are. So, yes, nurses are underpaid because it's a position that has historically been filled by women.

(Am I wrong, or have nursing salaries really gone up over the last decade or so, by the way? When I was looking at the bureau of labor statistics data, they didn't look particularly underpaid.)

Another well-documented case that is harder to explain are veterinarians. This position has become less well-paid as more and more women have gone into this area of practice. Hard to figure that one out, unless it's just that so many people are choosing this career option that market forces have resulted in a general deflation of earnings.

In some ways, we're still adjusting to the wide-scale entry of women into the labor market.

[Galactus]

^ There's (at least in sweden) a huge difference between nurses (sjuksköterska) and sub-nurses (undersköterska) the former isn't relay underpaid (although often overworked) the latter is both.

[Happy Ent]

[...] is a better idea than uniformly claiming women suck as firefighters.

But who would say such a thing? You seem to be deliberately mischaracterising the opposition, which is a sure techique to derail a thread.

[Lyanna Stark]

But who would say such a thing? You seem to be deliberately mischaracterising the opposition, which is a sure techique to derail a thread.

Mr Union Representave, who was the main participant in your examples above. He clearly objects to women being firefighters, based on thinking that they are 1. only possibly to hire when men are not considered for the post and 2. that they are a security risk and 3. that they are only possible to hire while completely disregarding existing legislation.