Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Dear Tulsi Gabbard, Re： The Gender Pay Gap

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 9, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

20:49

Dear Tulsi Gabbard, Re： The Gender Pay Gap

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	I've made this video as a direct message to the last remaining member of the Democratic Party that I respect, and I present this information in the spirit of helping her resist the regressive sophistry of the far left.
	On the 1st of October 2017, Tulsi Gabbard, the member of the US House of Representatives from Hawaii's 2nd District, posted the following tweet to her Twitter account.
	The gender pay gap has lifelong ramifications.
	Guaranteeing equal pay for equal work is the right thing to do.
	The tweet contained a link to a news article from Hawaii News Now entitled, Gender Pay Gap, Other Inequalities Push Up Poverty Rate for Hawaii's Older Women.
	The structure of this title creates a victim class, older Hawaiian women, and places blame on inequality for creating a negative outcome, the poverty rate.
	From this premise, we can extract that a source of the oppression must exist, and as we have already defined a victim, a victimizer must exist.
	And as our victims are women, the implication is that the victimizers must be men.
	Underlying these unspoken implications is the specter of misogyny, sexism, and women's oppression that are called up by the feminist myth that is the gender pay gap.
	Any reader with intact moral sensibilities could not help but see this and find their sense of justice and fair play incensed and should properly demand that this injustice be corrected and rightfully so, if what we have read so far is to be believed.
	The first sentence of the article is a link to a study from the University of Hawaii's Myron B. Thompson School of Social Work.
	This research was done under the auspices of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a think tank that, quote, conducts and communicates research to inspire public dialogue, shape policy and improve lives and opportunities of women of diverse backgrounds, circumstances and experiences.
	The description included on the report is word for word copied from the IWPR website, except for one line.
	We are the leading think tank in the United States, applying quantitative and qualitative analysis of public policy through a gendered lens.
	The gendered lens is the analytical approach of gender theory.
	According to the peer-reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, gender theory is a product of feminist theory that has been expanded to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities.
	It is a postmodern interpretation of the category of gender as a human construct, as instantiated by a vast repetition of social performance.
	This theory was primarily informed by the work of Judith Butler and French postmodernists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, all of which has led to this.
	Basically, it's not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex.
	Postmodernist gender theory rests on the presupposition that human beings begin life as a blank slate upon which beliefs and behaviors are imposed by society with no connection to a biological component, a view which was popularized in its modern conception by English philosopher John Locke and became a cornerstone of anti-racist thinking, which has since been scientifically proven to be incorrect.
	As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said in his 2002 book The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature, the blank slate is an empirical hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and must be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is true.
	The modern sciences of mind, brain, genes and evolution are increasingly showing that it is not true.
	He further describes it as an anti-life, anti-human, theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity, our inherent interests and our individual preferences.
	The blank slate became so entrenched in intellectual life that the prospect of doing without it can be deeply unsettling.
	In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt promotes the view of neuroscientist Gary Marcus, who found through his research that the brain is not so much hardwired as pre-wired, with Marcus describing the human mind as such.
	Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
	Built in does not mean unmalleable.
	It means organized in advance of experience.
	Marcus likens the human brain to a book, upon which the first draft is written by the genes during fetal development.
	No chapter is complete, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in with experience.
	Although we cannot fault John Locke for not having this information in the 17th century, we do have it now.
	The science has been done and we know that tabula rasa is not a theory backed by evidence.
	Therefore, any work done from this perspective will contain the flaws inherent in the theory.
	Now that we understand the weakness of the philosophical underpinnings of the body that performed the study, we can turn our eye to the report itself.
	The paper begins with key findings and then proceeds to explain these in detail.
	In the first section, Economic Security Among Older People in Hawaii, Gender and Racial Ethnic Disparities, it is explained that many of the challenges that older women experience stem from inequalities that women face earlier in life, and that the gender pay gap is linked to the interaction of numerous structural inequalities, including occupational segregation, pay secrecy, the uneven distribution of care work, gender discrimination in education and employment,
	and the lack of a strong work-family policy infrastructure.
	Ensuring that older women in Hawaii are able to achieve economic security and stability, therefore, requires attending not only to the challenges women face later in life, but also to the disparities they encounter at younger ages.
	This is a complex paragraph to unpack, and it contains many specific terms that are easily explained.
	The European Institute for Gender Equality defines structural inequality as the embedded gender differences of social structures, based on institutionalized conceptions of gender differences.
	This includes conceptions of masculinity and femininity, ideas concerning the expectations of women and men, internalized judgments of women and men's actions, prescribed rules about proper behaviour of women and men that are responsible for the organization and persistence of gender inequality in social structures.
	The social and cultural environments, as well as the institutions that structure them and the individuals that operate within and outside these institutions, are engaged in the production and reproduction of gender norms, attitudes and stereotypes.
	Structural inequality is a natural result of the biological differences between the sexes.
	Biological sex is innate, and gender roles are pre-wired into humans, so it is expected that institutions would reflect the cultural makeup of the wider society in this way.
	Occupational segregation, the tendency of some fields to be male-dominated and other fields to be female-dominated, is a corollary of the innate book that comes pre-wired in the human brain for each sex.
	In 2011, a Norwegian documentary called The Gender Equality Paradox sought to examine why.
	During the 2000s, the Norwegian state had attempted to create the most equal work environments in the world, prohibiting all forms of gender discrimination and encouraging the desegregation of certain work environments through affirmative action programs and propaganda campaigns.
	The intellectuals who supported these campaigns believe in tabula rasa.
	Norske kjønnsforskere tror ikke medfødte kjønnsforskjeller er relevant for å forstå hvorfor gutter og jenter er interessert i litt forskjell.
	Hvis man behandlet gutter og jenter likt fra starten, så ville de få like interesser også.
	Ja, det blir jo på en måte implikasjonen av det jeg sier.
	Despite tearing down the perceived barriers that were supposed to prohibit men and women from entering certain professions, like engineering and nursing, that were traditionally associated with a specific gender, The occupational segregation of these professions remained intact.
	There's a big difference.
	Men are much more interested in the thing-oriented occupations.
	Things like being an engineer or mechanic.
	Women, relatively, are much more interested in the people-oriented occupations.
	Could the reason for this pattern be that women all over the world are, you know, they are encouraged to, you know, you're a woman, you know, to communicate, to talk, to be social.
	Well, it's possible, and certainly there's some truth to that, but you would expect it to change somewhat across countries if cultures were a big influence on this.
	It was absolutely consistent across the 53 nations.
	In other words, that was every bit as strong in Norway as it was in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or India or Singapore or Malaysia.
	It was just that's a big difference between men and women, and it seems to be a big difference in all the 53 nations.
	These gender differences manifest in males and females from such an early age that it can be demonstrated that male newborn babies have a tendency to look at things more than they look at faces and female newborns are the opposite.
	We looked at babies who were one day old and again we presented them either with a mechanical object or a face to look at and filmed how long does the baby look at each of these two objects.
	And we find that more boys look longer at the mechanical object and more girls look longer at the face even on the first day of life.
	So this is before toys have been introduced, or various cultural biases or prejudices have been introduced.
	Barron Cowens' fun tyder på at disse interesseforskjellene må ha oppstått før barna ble født, i fosterlivet.
	What we know is that boys and girls are producing different amounts of hormones, but particularly testosterone, that boys are producing twice as much testosterone as girls.
	And this hormone, testosterone, influences the way the brain develops.
	But how does he know that the testosterone levels in the family are making these differences?
	We have measured the testosterone when the baby is in the womb.
	And we have waited until the child is born.
	And we have looked at their behavior.
	And what we found was that the higher the child's testosterone prenatally, the slower they are to develop language when they're a small child, and the less eye contact they make, again at the age of one or two years old.
	So the more testosterone is associated with slower language development, and slower social development.
	So many differences can actually come from a different testosterone level.
	But what happens if a child-foster has a normal amount of testosterone?
	It's a genetic condition where you produce too much testosterone.
	And girls with this condition show a very masculine pattern of toy preferences.
	Testosteron-nivået i fosterlivet ser ut i ulike evner og interesser tidlig i livet, men er det en varig effekt?
	We followed these children.
	They're now about 80 years old, and so we're interested to see how they're turning out.
	And what we find is that as they get older, the children who had higher testosterone have more difficulties with empathy, with recognizing other people's emotions, or taking somebody else's perspective.
	But they also have a much stronger interest in systems.
	...
	In understanding how things work.
	So even if you ignore what sex somebody is and just look at their hormone levels, you can predict their pattern of interests.
	The evidence suggests that human beings are pre-wired by their biological sex to have a socially constructed gender role and that this is a cross-cultural phenomenon.
	Occupational segregation is not a manifestation of the systematic oppression of women and men by the patriarchy, but instead the result of hormone levels present in the body.
	This informs different areas of interest between the genders and results in men and women simply choosing different professions later in life.
	The term occupational segregation implies dominance and control, where the term occupational preference would be a more appropriate and accurate description of what is happening, which also explains the term uneven distribution of care work.
	Nancy Folber is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her work primarily focuses on feminist economics.
	She defines care work or care labor as work that involves connecting to other people, trying to help people meet their needs.
	Things like the work of caring for children, caring for the elderly, caring for sick people or teaching is a form of caring labor.
	As we have already explained, women are biologically predisposed towards social work and men are predisposed towards technical work.
	So we would expect to see an uneven distribution of this care work in a free society and it is not an indication of a problem.
	Pay secrecy is a standard workplace policy across the Western world to protect the privacy of employees.
	And as the laws of the United States ban gender discrimination in the workplace, we can be reasonably certain that while there may be instances of sexism present within the various institutions that are suspect, the system itself is run by good faith actors who work within the bounds of the law and do not wish to discriminate against women.
	We could describe this as a free system, in which participants are not prohibited from advancement because of their gender and are free to excel to the best of their abilities or inclinations.
	Once all of this is understood, the differences in employment between men and women is revealed to be a feminist, postmodernist ideological construct that fails to adequately explain why there might be not only differences of the aggregate success between men and women, but just differences between the genders, and instead reframes them as unjust, which they are not.
	Returning to the IWPR report, ensuring that older women in Hawaii are able to achieve economic security and stability therefore requires attending not only to the challenges women face later in life, but also the disparities they encounter at younger ages.
	We have seen how the disparities that are encountered at younger ages are not the result of discrimination or oppression, but of women making choices in line with their preferences.
	Men generally select for economic success, and women generally select for familial success.
	However, the report gives us even more information with which it can be deconstructed.
	Under the heading marital status, we're informed that women's superior longevity over men has led to an increased disparity.
	With 29% more of the older population being women, and the majority of older women being either separated, divorced, widowed, or never married, means, as the report states, they are not living with a spouse that can provide additional income.
	The report informs us that 13% of older single women in Hawaii live below the poverty line, compared to 4.1% of married older women.
	Being widowed aside, this is not a problem that can be fixed by government intervention, as it is the result of the personal situation of each woman involved.
	What could possible solutions even be?
	Force women to marry and remain married?
	Force unmarried men to subsidize women despite having never been married?
	Implement a maximum age cap for women?
	The solutions would have to be not only ridiculous but unfair and frankly oppressive to men who have worked hard and have either not married or are divorced.
	The concern about women's earnings in this regard is overtly paternal and takes the attitude that women are failing to maximize their earnings despite that being their choice.
	Under the heading social security, we are given a lucid explanation for the economic outcomes between men and women.
	This disparity reflects men and women's differing experiences in the workforce.
	Men are more likely to be employed consistently over time, while women are more likely to exit the workforce or work part-time due to caregiving obligations.
	In addition, men are concentrated in higher paying occupations than women.
	The unequal distribution of domestic and care work leads to women having fewer years of earnings and lower lifetime earnings, reducing the amount of their social security benefits in retirement.
	Not only is the economic difference between men and women to be expected, the economic difference is the consequence of men and women's free choices.
	It is the just outcome of the informed decisions these people made during their lifetimes, and unsurprisingly, the social security payments of older women who are single are higher than those for married women.
	Earning more money during their working life means that older men have a greater income than older women when it comes to pension plans and assets, and older men are more likely to still be in employment than older women.
	The report concludes that the median annual personal incomes for older women and men in Hawaii are higher than the average for the United States.
	And 90.9% of older women and 94.2% of older men are not in poverty, and the ones that are receive social security from the state.
	From a utilitarian perspective, this is a spectacular success rate and should be trumpeted as a virtue instead of promoted as a problem.
	Yet, if we look to the policy recommendations heading, we find the following.
	Although on some indicators of women's status, older women in Hawaii do relatively well compared to women in other states across the nation, women in Hawaii continue to experience inequalities that can prevent them from obtaining economic security at older ages.
	This is false.
	It is not the inequalities that are preventing a small number of women from obtaining economic security.
	It is the decisions of the women themselves that is preventing it.
	The inequality is just a comparative measurement between men and women.
	But it is not the actions of men or the system that are affecting older women's economic status.
	It is the actions of the older women themselves.
	This report calls for commitments from Hawaii policymakers to focus on strategies and programs alleviating age, gender and race-based equalities and poverty across the lifespan.
	Because today's younger woman is tomorrow's older woman, policy changes that improve the status of younger women in Hawaii are also critical to ensuring the well-being of older women in the state.
	The well-being of older women in Hawaii is better than the rest of the United States and probably one of the best in the entire world.
	Save for the actions of a Harrison Bergeron style handicapper general from Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian science fiction story, there is very little that policymakers can actually do,

▲