An intriguing blog piece from The Independent in February 2013:
Among the most-watched videos we’ve linked to concerning whether women in developing countries were, or are now, oppressed, with specific material on the position of women in Muslim societies, are those by Karen Straughan (‘GirlWritesWhat’) and Zara Faris, a young British Muslim woman:
Our thanks to A for pointing us to this. David Cameron will be interviewed this afternoon by a House of Commons Select Committee about ‘violence against women and girls’, female genital mutilation, and other issues relating to women and girls. The session will be broadcast live on BBC Parliament at 4pm today. We look forward to seeing if he’ll show any concerns for male victims of violence or genital mutilation, which is carried out in NHS hospitals and elsewhere, unregulated, in the UK every day of the week. Don’t hold your breath.
From the BBC website:
Themes
The meeting will focus on the following themes:
The issues likely to be raised include:
Violence against women and girls
Along with an academic from the University of London, I was interviewed by Nicky Campbell this morning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGOBYFHv4HA
Interviewees aren’t generally told how long they’ll be given to speak, which is frustrating, as is contributing to programmes over the phone, rather than in a studio. In the event we had a little over five minutes to cover issues which would have merited at least an hour-long discussion, and I was given barely a minute to make my contribution. Nicky Campbell’s introduction to the piece included this:
More men should be prepared to work part-time. That’s the finding of a new report from the University of London’s Institute of Education, which argues that women will continue to be under-represented and underpaid unless more of their male colleagues are willing to work fewer hours. Dr Tom Schuller led the research…
Dr Schuller’s predictably feminist narrative included this gem:
The gender pay gap is very big and it shows no sign of closing.
Can Dr Schuller really not know that the gender pay gap is 100% attributable to the choices men and women freely make with respect to the world of work – the lines of work they choose, the effort they put into climbing the career ladder, their willingness to work unsocial hours etc.? It seems almost inconceivable even for a leftie academic. I was determined to challenge him strongly on this issue, but wasn’t given the opportunity to do so. You do what you can in the limited time available.
We’ve just been informed of a very interesting paper published in September 2012. It was written by Sonja B Starr of the University of Michigan Law School, and it’s titled, ‘Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal criminal Cases’. A link to the paper online:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002
The first paragraph of the Conclusion:
This study finds dramatic unexplained gender gaps in federal criminal cases. Conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables, men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do. Women are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. There are large unexplained gaps across the sentence distribution, and across a wide variety of specifications, subsamples, and estimation strategies. The data cannot disentangle all possible causes of these gaps, but they do suggest that certain factors (such as childcare and offense roles) are partial but not complete explanations, even combined.
We’re not aware of an equivalent study carried out in the UK, but we doubt the findings would be markedly different. Childcare remains a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card for women. Do women suffer from amnesia when they commit crimes? Do they forget they have children? Or do they simply know how to play the system to their personal advantage, in a way men rarely can? We all know the answer to these questions, don’t we?
We shall be alerting the Fawcett Society to the outrageous gender sentencing gap, and look forward to them campaigning vigorously against it.
Our thanks to the industrious M for tracking down an intriguing article published by The New York Times in March 2013:
The piece starts:
WASHINGTON — The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research.
David H. Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the difference between men and women, at least in part, may have roots in childhood. Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers “appear to fare particularly poorly,” Professor Autor wrote in an analysis for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization.
A powerful new video posted by Tom Golden, prepared with the support of Paul Elam:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/equality-a-step-down-for-women/
We recently posted a piece about female engineering postgraduate students at Brunel University receiving an additional grant of £15,000 p.a. – considerably more than the annual gross income of a person working full-time on the minimum wage – solely on the basis of being women:
Our FoI request resulted in confirmation that male-to-female transsexuals would be eligible for the grant, even while ‘in transition’:
It was clear to us that the grants were in conflict with Brunel University’s Equality and Diversity Statement, so we sent another FoI request, asking how they intended to resolve the matter. The response has just been received:
140113 Brunel University FoI response, ‘positive action’
Predictably, the ‘positive action’ provisions of The Equality Act (2010) have been used ‘to help ensure that female students participate more fully in engineering courses’. As we all know, not only does the UK need more engineers, it specifically needs more female engineers because (as with all professions, most notably medicine) they’re more likely than their male counterparts to quit the profession altogether, refuse to work in challenging environments, work part-time, retire earlier… yes, that’s a prudent use of taxpayers’ money, given men pay 72% of the income tax collected in the UK, and women only 28%.
We’re not aware of even one area where the ‘positive action’ provisions in The Equality Act have been used to advance men who are ‘under-represented’ in the education system, the workplace, or elsewhere. If you know of any such areas, would you please email me mike@j4mb.org.uk with details? Thank you.
When The Independent first launched in 1986 I bought it and carried on doing so for a few years. It’s now a shadow of its former self, having become a trashy Leftie rag which makes the Guardian look intelligent by comparison.
Our thanks to Greg for pointing us to a story in The Independent whining about the lack of female directors of major Hollywood films:
I assumed the writer pf the piece, ‘Charlie Cooper’, is a woman – Charlie being short for Charlotte – but no, it’s a male journalist. He’s a Health Reporter at the paper. His profile:
http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/charlie-cooper
I see his Twitter address is @charliecooper8 and he has over 1,300 followers, most of them of the female persuasion, we must assume. I shall alert him in a moment to the fact he may win a ‘Toady’ as a perpetrator of gender feminist narratives on sexism. Or maybe we need a new award category, ‘Whiny Man of the Month’? Charlie Boy could be the inaugural winner.
We think it’s just terrible that the film many regard as the best ever made, The Shawshank Redemption, didn’t feature any actresses. Shame on the patriarchy.
The legendary American Honey Badger (anti-feminist) Janet Bloomfield (‘JudgyBitch’) wrote the ultimate piece on the gender of major film directors. Click on http://judgybitch.com and search for ‘Sandra Bullock’.
Our thanks to M for this piece.
Ursula von der Leyen, the mother of seven children, became Germany’s first-ever female defence minister last month. This genius has already established that what the German military ‘needs’ is a flexible childcare system:
We recently covered a story about a 58-year-old man with a long criminal history, who first became a father at 16, has existed on benefits for the past 10 years, and who’s escaped a prison sentence (after a conviction for drug dealing) due to wanting to look after his 7-month-old baby. He has 22 children by 11 different women, and suffers from back pain. Perhaps the two matters are related. Our blog piece on the matter:
Ray Barry leads the Equal Parenting Alliance and Real Fathers for Justice, and will be standing as a J4MB candidate at the May 2015 general election. He appears regularly on BBC Radio talking about family-related matters, and recently appeared on BBC Radio Tees talking about the case of the 58-year-old man, and the wider repercussions of people using children as ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ cards. The audio file has just been loaded onto our YouTube channel. At 4:15, after Ray’s interviews, there’s a contribution by the colourful anti-feminist Katie Hopkins, who invariably manages to speak common sense and entertain at the same time. Enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kldujj8n73I
Justice for Men & Boys 