The gender gap

[Brian Peacock]

School "dinner ladies are not bin men". Of course. One lot is just women doing women's work, and the others are men doing a man's work - and women's work is just less important and less arduous, less challenging, less skilled, and less responsible than men's, eh?

Why should it matter? If you can't get enough dinner ladies to do the job, you should be free to pay more. If there is a queue for the job, you should pay less.
Same with bin men.
Like my OP says, you could grade the Arsenal men and ladies teams as similar work. Doesn't mean they deserve the same money. That's the reality of the market.
Trouble is, when you abandon the market, it ends up fucked up. And there's no moral reason why you should abandon the market.
It's the Labour Party, and the unions, who are responsible for the current bollocks.

'The Market' isn't like a force of nature, something that just is. It's actually sets of rules, regulations, laws, conventions, and practises which operate within a confluence of social, historical, political and legal contexts. If we compare the employment practises which apply to work which is/has been traditionally undertaken by men and women - like, say, dinner ladies and bin men, or train drivers and nurses - we see a clear historical gender imbalance between skills and responsibilities and remuneration which operated within the broader setting of the 'employment market'. At the same time we currently have laws which, for example, allow people to be employed on a fulltime basis under contracts with no minimum hours and no defined shifts, or which allow under 21s to be paid less than over 21s for the same work. So this idea of 'The Market' as a naturally balanced and self-regulating system which only employs and pays people according to the proportional mix of skills and demand is mostly a fiction.

[mistermack]

The thing here you are trying equate work which is not the same due to physical requirements at this moment in time. You are also describing an unregulated society. Forget top sport. Football teams at club level these days are populated by girls and boys in the same team. There has been a massive transformation over the last 10 years. The numbers of girls entering the sport is unbelievable. The same is true of hockey and rugby. We dont know where things will be in 10 or 20 years. Ever watched female rugby? Some powerful women there.

Powerful for women. That's the point.

But I have no objection to paying women the same, or more than men. If there's an economic case for it.
Women's football might be slower and embarrassingly less skilled than men's. Who cares?
If millions want to watch it, pay them megabucks. If they don't, don't.

If there's a critical shortage of nurses, and a glut of doctors, raise the pay of nurses and freeze the doctors.
The market is the only common sense method of paying for a job.
It works for potatoes, cars, jumbo jets, drugs, jewellery, pigs and cattle, and condoms.

Wherever you interfere you fuck it up, except in the case of monopolies and short-term emergencies.

[Scot Dutchy]

There are no men's or women's jobs anymore. As I have explained we have a regulated labour environment. You get the qualifications you can do the job. Gender, sex and age are not allowed on application forms. There is talk of making them anonymous as well as names give too much information.

[mistermack]

this idea of 'The Market' as a naturally balanced and self-regulating system which only employs and pays people according to the proportional mix of skills and demand is mostly a fiction.

It shouldn't be. That's why it's fucked up.

You can have a free market in employment, so long as your taxation regime stops inequality growing, by taxing the wealthy properly.

Of course, our labour market is fucked up at the bottom end by the huge continual importing of unskilled people with little or no assets. If it wasn't, the market would have sorted out higher wages for the more menial jobs, along with much cheaper housing.

[Scot Dutchy]

The thing here you are trying equate work which is not the same due to physical requirements at this moment in time. You are also describing an unregulated society. Forget top sport. Football teams at club level these days are populated by girls and boys in the same team. There has been a massive transformation over the last 10 years. The numbers of girls entering the sport is unbelievable. The same is true of hockey and rugby. We dont know where things will be in 10 or 20 years. Ever watched female rugby? Some powerful women there.

Powerful for women. That's the point.

But I have no objection to paying women the same, or more than men. If there's an economic case for it.
Women's football might be slower and embarrassingly less skilled than men's. Who cares?
If millions want to watch it, pay them megabucks. If they don't, don't.

If there's a critical shortage of nurses, and a glut of doctors, raise the pay of nurses and freeze the doctors.
The market is the only common sense method of paying for a job.
It works for potatoes, cars, jumbo jets, drugs, jewellery, pigs and cattle, and condoms.

Wherever you interfere you fuck it up, except in the case of monopolies and short-term emergencies.

That is the case in unregulated society.

BTW how long have women been playing football? You have an old fashioned mind set and it time to modernise.

[mistermack]

BTW how long have women been playing football? You have an old fashioned mind set and it time to modernise.

Who's objecting to women footballers? I'm just saying that they should be paid what they are worth.
I doubt if any women's football team makes a profit. They are subsidised by the men.
But if the club thinks that it's a worthwhile investment, betting on future profits, or attracting more punters in the long run, then it's their money they are gambling. Nothing wrong with it.

The thing is though, that the slogan is equality, but they don't actually want equality, they want preferential treatment. They don't want to be a bin man, they just want the same money for working in a nice warm kitchen.
That's not equality, it's having your cake and eating it. (Which many of them obviously do)

Real equality would be fine. If women can do the job as well and reliably as a man, the employers will want them.

[laklak]

Women can't be sperm donors. Fact.

[Brian Peacock]

this idea of 'The Market' as a naturally balanced and self-regulating system which only employs and pays people according to the proportional mix of skills and demand is mostly a fiction.

It shouldn't be. That's why it's fucked up.

You can have a free market in employment, so long as your taxation regime stops inequality growing, by taxing the wealthy properly.

Of course, our labour market is fucked up at the bottom end by the huge continual importing of unskilled people with little or no assets. If it wasn't, the market would have sorted out higher wages for the more menial jobs, along with much cheaper housing.

It's not immigrants who have brought about systematic wage deflation (with wage growth at it's lowest rate since the Napoleonic wars) or the current housing crisis (with UK home ownership at it's lowest % of the working age population since 1985 and renters paying on average 75% of their incomes on housing costs) but the deliberate action of elected law makers over quite a period of time. If feels good perhaps to blame the other guy for our woes, the outsider, but really it's our own guys who are responsible for the structure and operation of the jobs and housing markets we currently find ourselves with.

[mistermack]

It's not immigrants who have brought about systematic wage deflation (with wage growth at it's lowest rate since the Napoleonic wars) or the current housing crisis (with UK home ownership at it's lowest % of the working age population since 1985 and renters paying on average 75% of their incomes on housing costs) but the deliberate action of elected law makers over quite a period of time. If feels good perhaps to blame the other guy for our woes, the outsider, but really it's our own guys who are responsible for the structure and operation of the jobs and housing markets we currently find ourselves with.

That's rubbish. Both are subject to supply and demand. There's an oversupply of low skilled labour, and an inflated demand for accommodation.
Both caused by too much immigration.

You appear to be arguing that it's a lack of building that's the problem. Well, it wouldn't be the problem, if our population levels had remained steady.
In fact, without immigration, our population level would be dropping, and it would be a buyers and renters market.
Same in the jobs market. If you think immigration has no effect, you're in a dream world.

[Cunt]

Drivel. The woman just has to get the male labourer to stop playing with himself for a while, so he can move the drums.

Do you never think things through?

When captain, first officer and the entire passenger manifest are all the same person...?

...so this would be a common situation where you come from?

Common enough in bush operations. Certainly a lot of times, they didn't send the small female pilots, because they couldn't handle the drums.

They were handworking, diligent and everything, just couldn't handle some of the heavy loads.

I know we should have lighter loads for humans, but barrels are a size or two, and logistics / fuel caches are what they are in the north.

There are plenty of cases where women should be getting into the jobs more, but they keep choosing not to finish concrete, with their freedom of choice.

While that free choice goes on, do you think we should pay a bit more for the few women (but mostly men) who do that job? Or should they get the same as a womans job?

One of the jobs up here advertised that you should only apply if you can carry 80lbs for 1km over broken ground. Not sexist, not legal maybe, but up here, 80lb things sometimes have to be moved around.

Women generally work better, but they flame out strength-wise pretty early. It's a VERY serious physiological difference, not to be dismissed lightly by folks who never have done hard physical work in their lives.

Rum, I believe everything you say about your experience working with females. It mirrors mine, and neither of us old individuals matter as much as the plain statistics. Women are outperforming in every scholastic area, for much the same reasons, and are absolutely more successful afterward because of it.

But tell me this - how many times have you supervised a crew doing hard labour?

It is VERY different. Weaklings shirk their duties, causing everyone not doing so to treat them differently. Women are WAY more often those weaklings. It's physiological, not some made-up thing.

Look at powerlifting records. Nowhere does the physical difference show so clearly. Men are stronger - by a LOT - than women.

That's why we (who were raised in the 70's and before) aren't supposed to hit women.

[Scot Dutchy]

Women can't be sperm donors. Fact.

Men cant have their eggs frozen. Fact.

[Rum]

Rum, I believe everything you say about your experience working with females. It mirrors mine, and neither of us old individuals matter as much as the plain statistics. Women are outperforming in every scholastic area, for much the same reasons, and are absolutely more successful afterward because of it.

But tell me this - how many times have you supervised a crew doing hard labour?

It is VERY different. Weaklings shirk their duties, causing everyone not doing so to treat them differently. Women are WAY more often those weaklings. It's physiological, not some made-up thing.

Look at powerlifting records. Nowhere does the physical difference show so clearly. Men are stronger - by a LOT - than women.

That's why we (who were raised in the 70's and before) aren't supposed to hit women.

I'm not sure what your point is. I have never supervised men or people doing manual labour. I did work for a little short of a year in my 20s on a road building gang - well our job was to collect samples of concrete, asphault and the like, take them to a lab and test them - the job involved a lot of digging, lifting and such as well as lots of fun driving 4 wheel drive vehicles over road building sites...but never mind all that.

I do recall now that you mention is that most, if not all of the guys would skive and take time off and be generally as lazy as they could get away with. If you weren't and tried to do the job properly you were thought of as a wimp and an arse licker.

But they were different times of course and there wasn't a woman to be seen on that whole stretch of the M% going past Cardiff - which was the road we were building.

[Brian Peacock]

It's not immigrants who have brought about systematic wage deflation (with wage growth at it's lowest rate since the Napoleonic wars) or the current housing crisis (with UK home ownership at it's lowest % of the working age population since 1985 and renters paying on average 75% of their incomes on housing costs) but the deliberate action of elected law makers over quite a period of time. If feels good perhaps to blame the other guy for our woes, the outsider, but really it's our own guys who are responsible for the structure and operation of the jobs and housing markets we currently find ourselves with.

That's rubbish. Both are subject to supply and demand. There's an oversupply of low skilled labour, and an inflated demand for accommodation.
Both caused by too much immigration.

You appear to be arguing that it's a lack of building that's the problem. Well, it wouldn't be the problem, if our population levels had remained steady.
In fact, without immigration, our population level would be dropping, and it would be a buyers and renters market.
Same in the jobs market. If you think immigration has no effect, you're in a dream world.

It's not rubbish. Yes wages and housing are subject to the economic forces of supply and demand, but those forces are applied within the context of structured, regulated markets. The inherent problems in these markets are are therefore structural, the amelioration of which requires structural reform rather than the magical palliative of pointing fingers at those with no influence over market implementation and operation.

[Forty Two]

School "dinner ladies are not bin men". Of course. One lot is just women doing women's work, and the others are men doing a man's work - and women's work is just less important and less arduous, less challenging, less skilled, and less responsible than men's, eh?

The pay has nothing to do with the sex of the workers. It's the value of the work to the employer, and supply and demand of workers. I'd suggest that there is a smaller pool of willing bin men than dinner ladies, because it's much dirtier and labor intensive work. If an employer can get a cheaper worker, it will.

[Forty Two]

I couldn't move fuel drums around and I am a proper man, but I know proper women who could. I guess it is rather a matter of the individual than the reproductive organs who can be a bush pilot.

Of course, but there statistical tendencies.