Why "fun feminism" should be consigned to the rubbish bin

[lumberjack_jeff]

233. That is a generalization that I would not make.

I will say that society is predisposed to protect women from some of the legitimate risks they face; and occasionally to imagine others to show good faith.

This predisposition has resulted in an infrastructure to detect every injustice, real or perceived, and extrapolate it to absurd degrees.

Take "the pay gap". Due to many factors, women tend to gravitate toward lower paying jobs while men gravitate toward riskier ones. This obviously results in a pay (women make 77% of men) and safety (men are 92% of fatalities) disparity between the genders. So we have "equal pay" day. This year it is on April 7th. If men were to have an "equal safety" day, it would fall on December 1st - but I digress.

Reasonable people have inferred from this popular reporting that a female carpenter makes 77% of a male one, a misperception that the organizations are happy to promulgate. In reality, according to the American Association of University Women, once you compare people who work the same hours in the same jobs with the same experience, the gap is 5%. This is easily accounted for by the fact that women tend to not negotiate for salary. So there is no pay gap unless one assumes that all kinds of labor are worth the same money.

At your suggestion, I looked it up. Out of four million childbirths, 500 US women died due to complications in 2009, a one-time fatality rate of 12.5 per 100,000 - that 0.0125% is tragic and inexcusable. However, 4547 people died on the job in 2010, 631 truckers alone. Fishermen have a fatality rate of 203.6, each and every year. Four died 50 miles from here just this week. I find that equally tragic and inexcusable.

"Hopefully not as active firefighters and commercial fishermen"
I strongly disagree. Until women are represented in every profession, we won't see equality of pay and we won't see improvements in safety.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8325685.stm
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cftb0250.pdf