The 2012 Presidential Debates: Debate 2

[redhawk23]

Where have you been? It's been talked about and is still talked about even today. Problem is you can only control employers so much.

Yes...let's spend a decade talking about equality...while everything else burns in flames around us.

And a great many of those problems are generated by structural problems within our society.

If you don't see the way various forms of prejudice contribute to poverty, how poverty contributes to problems in health, in education, in violence and how all of these feed into these supposedly "more important" problems, then you are dangerously under informed.

These problems are systemic. If Obama deserves credit for anything in that last debate it is for at least paying lip service to the way these things are connected. As he said "women's issues" are ultimately family issues and and on a larger scale economic issues. The same goes for race and specifically immigration issues.

 

[redhawk23]

Exactly. It's really impossible to say what is really inequality just by how averages work.

Let's take a hypothetical factory where everybody on the floor does the same thing. You have five men and one woman who have been there 10 years making $20 p/h; two men and three woman for 5 years at $15; and three men and four women for 1 year at $11. The men would average $16.30 p/h while the women would average $13.63 p/h, yet everyone is making fair money based on how long they worked there. Should everyone in their first year on the job be making as much as someone who has been there 10 years?

And yet there is the case where women can work the same jobs as men for decades and make significantly less.

Additionally, what people are taking issue with is not individual cases of payscale differences but the aggregate of the whole work force. Individual differences in experience and things drop away. Are you presuming that men are simply in general more qualified to make a significant amount more money than women in general despite fewer men going to college? Are men just generally more hard working? What's at play here?

Also though, we simply still have cultural associations of gender for certain professions. There's also a tendency to devalue "feminine" jobs. There are jobs that require years of education and experience but happen to have a strong feminine association and coincidentally or not the pay scales for those jobs are of lower status an pay grade than jobs of similar education levels that happen to be dominated by men.


All of this has long roots in just our own history, much less the history of the world.

Factories, here in the states, hired women just because they could justify paying them less than men. Over time there were many roles formerly dominated by men became increasingly filled by women and the payscale for those positions as a whole were lowered.

 

[Kelly]

If a equal pay law passes there are some things that friends of mine in the business world, and at top levels are afraid they will lose in order to simply get equal pay.

1. Flexible work week hours to match with family obligations...
2. Onsight daycare, with flexibility to check on their children...
3. Time off when the children are sick, without backlash...

My mom was a Vice President of an insurance company in Dallas, Texas during a time when women did not get equal pay, AND got none of the above...I stayed at home sick, alone many times because my mother could not afford to take off and take care of me....MANY, MANY companies now do this to get top quality women in their offices, that find the things I mentioned above FAR MORE important than equal pay.

Some things need to be thought about before people go willy nilly into a law that could "throw the baby out with the bathwater"

 

[bell110]

And yet there is the case where women can work the same jobs as men for decades and make significantly less.

Additionally, what people are taking issue with is not individual cases of payscale differences but the aggregate of the whole work force. Individual differences in experience and things drop away. Are you presuming that men are simply in general more qualified to make a significant amount more money than women in general despite fewer men going to college? Are men just generally more hard working? What's at play here?

Also though, we simply still have cultural associations of gender for certain professions. There's also a tendency to devalue "feminine" jobs. There are jobs that require years of education and experience but happen to have a strong feminine association and coincidentally or not the pay scales for those jobs are of lower status an pay grade than jobs of similar education levels that happen to be dominated by men.


All of this has long roots in just our own history, much less the history of the world.

Factories, here in the states, hired women just because they could justify paying them less than men. Over time there were many roles formerly dominated by men became increasingly filled by women and the payscale for those positions as a whole were lowered.

Sure, there are cases like that, and that is unfair.

My point is about people showing a simple graph as proof of pay inequalities doesn't cut it for me because there are so many factors at play that can skew averages or medians. Should women be paid more than men to bring their averages up?

 

[ironmaidenrules]

If a equal pay law passes there are some things that friends of mine in the business world, and at top levels are afraid they will lose in order to simply get equal pay.

1. Flexible work week hours to match with family obligations...
2. Onsight daycare, with flexibility to check on their children...
3. Time off when the children are sick, without backlash...

My mom was a Vice President of an insurance company in Dallas, Texas during a time when women did not get equal pay, AND got none of the above...I stayed at home sick, alone many times because my mother could not afford to take off and take care of me....MANY, MANY companies now do this to get top quality women in their offices, that find the things I mentioned above FAR MORE important than equal pay.

Some things need to be thought about before people go willy nilly into a law that could "throw the baby out with the bathwater"

It's sexist to assume only mothers are nurturing parents.

Fathers should receive any work benefits given to mothers

 

[Schlosser85]

I agree with the above. Women are not automatically better parents than men, that's just reverse sexism.

 

[Hotwire]

Racism is the mouse in the room, and it just runs out and scares people when things aren't going the way one campaign thinks they should be going.

I'm just going to assume you're white and not in any kind of interracial relationship.

 

[Anita18]

I agree with the above. Women are not automatically better parents than men, that's just reverse sexism.

I blame the La Leche group. The belief that only mothers can feed their babies leads to the thinking that only mothers can provide for their children properly, full-stop.

Not that many conservative folks would disagree with that notion, to keep women in the home.

 

[SuperT]

And a great many of those problems are generated by structural problems within our society.

If you don't see the way various forms of prejudice contribute to poverty, how poverty contributes to problems in health, in education, in violence and how all of these feed into these supposedly "more important" problems, then you are dangerously under informed.

Thank you! There may not be as much overt racism nowadays, but there most certainly is a more subtle version of rascism - institutional racism. The whole entire US economy and business society is based off of it.

It most certainly does have a direct effect on the economy.

 

[Anita18]

Thank you! There may not be as much overt racism nowadays, but there most certainly is a more subtle version of rascism - institutional racism. The whole entire US economy and business society is based off of it.

It most certainly does have a direct effect on the economy.

It's not so much institutional (as in, official, because that's illegal) but cultural. You see a black man, you automatically distrust him. You see a Hispanic person, you assume that they work in manual labor. You see a woman, you assume she's less capable. Just how it works in this country.

The default white-collar worker in the US is white and male. What the equal pay and other equality measures are for is to try to chip away at that assumption, to break down the old boy's club so that other people can get in. Not to lower the standards so they can reach some diversity quota.

Even in my workgroup (which is a science lab), we have a black man, a Hispanic woman, and a white man. Now, the black guy already has a PhD so nobody is assuming that he's less intelligent than the white guy, but the white guy and the Hispanic woman are both grad students and it's assumed by some professors that he is more intelligent and capable than she is. Which is preposterous, because she's actually closer to graduation.

 

[Kelly]

It's sexist to assume only mothers are nurturing parents.

Fathers should receive any work benefits given to mothers

What is sexist about the majority of single parent households in the US are the mom......

Don't pull that **** on me, it doesn't work.....AND GUESS WHAT, in these companies where the father IS the soul provider of the child....THEY DO. So back up and start over....

 

[Kelly]

I agree with the above. Women are not automatically better parents than men, that's just reverse sexism.

In these companies, THEY DO......but as I'm sure you already know Schlosser, the majority of the single parent households are WOMEN....that is just a fact. If the father is the soul provider....many men work for companies that provide those things...SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE, they provide those things. They do not say, MOTHERS ONLY, BUT......you go with equal pay....those dads will get penalized as well.

I gave my mom as an example, because back during that time, far fewer men were soul providers, and far fewer women were at the top of their company like my mom was.....THAT HAS CHANGED....of course, but STILL TODAY, women are far ahead of men in single parent households....

 

[Thundercrack85]

Women are the more important parent. But that doesn't mean that men are irrelevant.

 

[Anita18]

Women are the more important parent. But that doesn't mean that men are irrelevant.

If you believe that women are inherently better at changing diapers and that children should be only breastfed, sure, then mothers are "more important" than fathers. But it isn't like it's impossible for a man to step up and be a good parent, or even the sole parent. We have things to help, like baby formula and bottles.

It is exceedingly difficult for single dads, though. I have friends who are parents and everyone distrusts fathers when people see them singly with their young kids. Even at a friend's daycare, no single fathers are allowed. I guess it's liability in case he molests the other kids. I mean WTF.

 

[Paradoxium]

Delinquency is significantly lower when you have a father figure. Lot of criminology literature on this. They even have some experiments where they got surrogate fathers for troubled youths, and the results were pretty good.

You hear stories of airline attendants telling guys they are not allowed to sit near a kid, only to learn afterwards, that kid is HIS son or daughter.

 

[Thundercrack85]

I didn't say that. But the baby comes out of the mother, and feeds from the mother. I'd say that by default makes her the more important one.

Of course men can be good parents. But overall, you'll find mothers doing a hell lot more parenting than men.

Not that women are necessarily ideal parents (look at abortion rates for crying out loud). Just the more important, and prevalent of the two.

It is unfair to assume every man is a child molester. But men are themselves at least partially to blame for that stereotype, when they do little to nothing about it (just look how little they do about the pandemic of child molesters in the Church).

 

[Paradoxium]

Obama's intrade is dropping and Gallup poll is not helping. Give until Monday. But it looks like the second debate whether it was a win or tie, did not break the Mitt momentum from the first debate. Best case scenario, Obama won but barely.

I honestly never saw this coming, Mittens winning a debate (first) this badly to create such momentum.

 

[Thundercrack85]

I'm not particularly convinced by poll data.

When you have five contradicting polls every day, changing drastically over the week, it's pretty damn meaningless.

And that's without getting into the specifics of polling (like how the underrepresent certain groups).

 

[Paradoxium]

Obama's intrade bump is halfway back down from the peak to trough. But like I said, wait till Monday.

 

[Kelly]

I'm not particularly convinced by poll data.

When you have five contradicting polls every day, changing drastically over the week, it's pretty damn meaningless.

And that's without getting into the specifics of polling (like how the underrepresent certain groups).

When 1 poll doesn't average over 3 days.....when another poll only polls registered voters, when another poll only polls likely voters, and then another poll, polls 8% more (D) than (R), and ANOTHER POLL polls 4% more (D) than (R)....then yeah, you are probably going to have contradicting polls......

 

[Paradoxium]

Anyone dumping some cash into Obama or Romney for Intrade.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

I'm getting really sick of all the political fighting on fb. I just don't understand how anyone can think their little tirades against the other side are going to change anyone's opinion. I like to come to the Hype to discuss politics because for the most part everyone is pretty informed and is wavy to some discourse. I already voted and I just wish this was over so we can all forget about it. Friggin annoyed with the idiots on fb

 

[Paradoxium]

You really shouldn't talk about politics in real life. Say you don't care or want to talk about it. I manage to get along with hardcore Marxist and Feminists without ever broaching on it.

 

[Anita18]

You really shouldn't talk about politics in real life. Say you don't care or want to talk about it. I manage to get along with hardcore Marxist and Feminists without ever broaching on it.

Yeah, it's just better for everyone's blood pressure.

We talk politics at work because we all agree.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Ya since my fb is for networking for my career I don't talk politics. I'm amazed at how many DJs spout off at the mouth about it. It just alienates potential fans and that is career suicide