That is actually not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is the state of 'fair' or 'just' does not fall out of the universe of itself. Everything we judge to be fair or unfair is a comparison we make between two states. We take one state one person is in, and we decide that has value X. We look at another state another person is in, and judge that to have value X-2. And we say that we have made a decision those two states should be of equal value so they must be changed.

All of that is fine. We can make those kinds of decisions as a society. There are lots of cases I do so myself - I believe in free education and healthcare for all for example, which is exactly saying that the state of being educated or healthy is of higher value than their opposites and I think 'fairness' should be applied in these cases. But there are no absolutes and therefore you cannot expect the world to arrange itself to make things 'fair' because it won't, because the world has no idea of what we consider 'fair'.

And this is part of the argument that is being made, that group X 'deserves' to have attribute Y because group A already has attribute Y. This is a weak argument. Say Group X deserves to have attribute Y because it means we will all be better off, or because it will mean there is less pain or war. But don't build an argument on an assumption that something needs to be 'fair', because at the fundamental level, 'fair' is something we define for ourselves arbitrarily all the time.


I don't know. Have you asked them all? You're making an assumption. You are assuming that an equal proportion of the female population want and are equipped to be an executive as do the male portion of the population and therefore the only reason they aren't is that something is 'unfair'. Do you have any evidence that this is the case, or is it simply received wisdom? There is a wealth of scientific research that shows that male and female psychology and biology are fundamentally different in all sorts of ways beyond the blindingly obvious. If it does in fact turn out that women simply find company executive jobs less desirable than men do, how are you going to make things 'fair' by the scale you have decided to judge the situation on? Make women take jobs they don't want? That doesn't seem a very smart solution to me.

I am in favour of nobody being held back by anything other than their own individual desires and competences.I am a humanist and liberal by fundamental principle. But I get annoyed by the use of such statistics in a way that effectively says "89% of thing X in the world are men. This is by definition horribly bad because it obviously should be 50%!" without any backup that shows the situation isn't exactly what people, both male and female, generally want it to be. It is incredibly weak thinking, based almost entirely on arbitrary assumptions about people and the almost theological premise that an equal gender distribution is somehow the base entropy state of any situation.

Saying "Studies show roughly equal numbers of men and women want to do Thing A, yet 89% of the people who are doing thing A are men and this implies we need to change something." That's a fine argument. Saying '89% of the people doing thing A are men and by definition this shows there is discrimination" is an utter cobblers argument, because the second half of the statement is not at all proven by the first.

Which is my point about giving up and voting for Farage.
If we perceive something as 'unfair', then we have the marvellous ability to attempt change. What we shouldn't do is say 'Oh well, that must the natural order of the universe and what's the point in trying to change? Sorry Love. Universal given innit?'



I'm not making an assumption, I'm presenting a fact and wondering why that fact is so. There was a question mark and everything.




Which is why I tend toward the former. But again, I refer to you my question - we know the figure, why is it so? Is it because women simply don't want to do those jobs? Seems unlikely. We're not that different.

My entire point is there is no natural order to the universe which means the assertion you use as an example is utterly wrong. All things, both fair and unfair, are so because we choose to see them that way and we can choose them to be however we like. We as a society can decide to set our own rules of fairness. But you can't just assume people will see what you see as a 'fair' as 'fair' and therefore do what you want them to do. You have to explain to and convince people as to why that is. If you can't come up with a reason as to why something should be 'fair' beyond 'It just should be,OK?' then you haven't thought it through enough. Attempting change is absolutely what I'm talking about, by defining our rules of 'fairness' and working towards them. Just assuming things should change is not the same thing as that.


Yes, you're not applying any qualitative judgement to that statistic at all </sarcasm>.


We're very different, in all sorts of ways. I don't know the answer to your question. I suspect honestly nobody does because its a very hard question to answer. But saying 'seems unlikely' suggests you think you do know, or at least you know what you think the answer should be. Which is a poor place to begin investigating something.

So you would agree that if the people who make up ~50% of the people on the planet feel as though they're often subject to discrimination, perhaps there's something worth investigating and then making an adjustment?


Where did you get that from?



I disagree with it being a 'poor' place to start from. It's about testing perceptions. I suspect there probably is a bit of a 'boys together' attitude in the upper echelons; I've spent a bit of time around the work senior management team and the local politicos. Casual sexism is a very genuine thing.
If there was a true gender equality, then we should expect to see women and men in positions of power and authority in roughly equal numbers, given that for the last 30-40 years they've had access to similar levels of education.
I don't see that as a stretch of imagination, merely an observation. There are observable numbers involved, such as the 89% statistic. We can look at pay awarded by gender and level of education/experience. Then you can look at the attitudes and behaviours that might be feeding into that.

I have to say, I'm not quite sure what you're apparent opposition is actually based on, or what it is you're opposing.

Worth investigating, certainly. 'Then making an adjustment' sounds rather like you've already decided what the result of the investigation will be.


See above.


I'm opposed to making judgements based on limited evidence, received wisdom and preconceptions. Stating a bland, almost contextless single statistic and then saying the world at large has to change because of it. I'm basically in favour of evidence based decision making and one statistic and a lot of anecdotes are, as the quote I posted a while back attests, not 'evidence'.

Take an example from above - the quote



(and I'm not picking on anyone intentionally, that's just a relevant example). We could all accept that is true, and do something about it. But as it happened it turned out that it wasn't universally accepted to be true, so we'd probably be better to go off and do some proper research and find out if it was generally true before we did anything about it. At least if we were smart people we would. We could just plow on and make the change without checking first, but that doesn't seem smart to me.

Equally, as you say, '89% of CEO's are men, despite 50% (approx) of the population being female'. I don't think anyone is arguing that statistic is wrong or untrue. It's just not anything approaching the full story, and therefore making a legislative decision based purely on that seems to be an unwise way to behave to me. There are myriad of possible reason why women do not become CEOs and some of them may actually be because lots of women make empowered choices to do other things. I don't know that. You don't know that. But you are plainly implying that this situation should be changed. I'm saying let's find out if it is actually due to discrimination first (and no, I don't accept that discrimination is the only logical explanation or that because some women say it's due to discrimination then it has to be) and if it is, then do something about it.

So, you'd dismiss, in their entirety, the voices of the people who feel discriminated against because personal experience doesn't matter?
So where then, is your tipping point? What's the point where you would you stop and think 'Hang on, something's going on'?




I'll leave this 2014 report from the EU on gender equality in Europe for you to read. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/files/annual_reports/150304_annual_report_2014_web_en.pdf
Moving beyond the plush and well appointed confines of the EU, let's consider the following:
At least 20.9 million adults and children are bought and sold worldwide into commercial sexual servitude, forced labor and bonded labor.
Of those, 60% were trafficked as sexual commodities.
Of that 60%, 98% were women. Or to put a rough number to it, ~12,289,200 women.
(Figures from International Labour Organization, ILO global estimate of forced labour: results and methodology (2012) p. 13.,
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, 2012, p. 7.,
International Labour Organization, Minimum Estimate of Forced Labour in the World (April 2005) p. 6.)

A study by the Fawcett Society found that 51% of women and men from middle management to director level identify stereotyping as the major hurdle facing women at work.
Up to 30,000 women are sacked each year simply for being pregnant and each year an estimated 440,000 women lose out on pay or promotion as a result of pregnancy.
26% of trade union branches have received enquiries from members who have been exposed to the sex industry – including pornography – at work.
Only 1 in 4 MPs is a woman and women from minority ethnic groups make up only 1.2% of MPs yet comprise 4% of the UK population.
Just 34.7% of senior civil servants are women.
Locally, just 35% of elected councillors are women and only 13% of local authority council leaders are women.
Women make up 17.3% of FTSE 100 board directors.
Approximately 70% of people in national minimum wage jobs are women.
"Men now earn 17.5 per cent more than women on average per hour... When full-time work is taken in isolation, women earn 9.4 per cent less than men, down from 10 per cent in 2013. It means the gap between men and women’s full-time earnings has now almost halved since records began in 1997." source

So, simply put, taking into consideration the above information, do you still feel that we should ignore the thoughts and experiences of those affected, or maybe they're onto something?
My personal position, based on the figures and the experiences of the people I've come into contact with, is that yes, there probably is discrimination and what's worse is that a lot of us don't even recognise it or excuse it with a sort of 'boys will be boys' mentality.
I would be interested in any sort of study that set out that discrimination doesn't take place and it's all in our heads.

No. As we've agreed, the opinion is the thing that causes the investigation to happen. Without that opinion you get no investigation. All I'm saying is don't act on the opinion, act on evidence.


Properly conducted conclusive research. Not a website that accepts unverified public submissions.


I never said we should, simply that we shouldn't act on that alone. You've provided properly researched, thorough, peer reviewed analysis to back up the opinions and thoughts of those affected. So you're actually doing exactly what I was asking for. So I don't really see how you've disproved my point.


I never said it was.

Which, for me, doesn't sit with:





Well, apart from the bit when you dismissed the voices of those who have experienced sexism daily - both on these boards, in their personal lives, and on a website with over 7,700 entries (I stopped clicking at page 550, 14 entries a page). (For the sake of fun, let's assume 50% of those entries are from women with some misandric axe to grind - it's still over 3,850 individual instance of sexism by women who can be bothered to report it.)
This goes in tandem with the bare facts of the matter. Women end up with the [LIFTED] end of the stick in society, all over the world.


And where do you stand on the matter now?
Was my apparent qualitative judgement earlier misplaced?

You're confused. I was never of the opinion discrimination was all in people's heads therefore trying to change my mind is a quixotic act at best. I simply stated the opinion that we should define society (through the action of legislation and policy) based on proper valid research, rather than anecdote - and it doesn't matter how many you bundle together, anecdotes are always simply anecdotes, not evidence. Anecdotal observation leads to investigation, which can produce evidence, which can lead to policy/legislation which can and should lead to change. It's actually quite simple. You seem unable to grasp that you should go through all the stages, not leap straight from observation to legislation.

You also seem to be of the opinion that not immediately accepting your premise 'simply because' means I am automatically against it. That would be incorrect. It's a very 'internet' attitude - black and white and nothing in between! - but it's certainly not the way we should run society.