(I think this is literally true, but it is intended as sort of humorous observation so maybe imagine there is a winky here and interpret that to mean "look, this is an injoke of sorts!")
I recall we had a comment exchange awhile ago about optimism/pessimism in the parable of The Two Travelers and the Farmer. In this case both the parent commenter and I may have had the exact same score in terms of seconds to an answer, but we both perceived the significance very differently.
I also shared the idea that "it's easier to change ourselves than it is to change the world". I think this might be an example of where that could be applied. (Of course easy for me to say, I haven't lived my life with subtle social cues that told me not to be good at math or spatial reasoning, but there are other areas in life where I get to apply the same lessons).
A) I think it is debatable whether or not it is easier than changing the world.
B) For things like sexism (racism, etc), there comes a point past which the world needs to change if your life is to have any hope of actually improving.
What if the inverse was true and changing the world was easy, and changing yourself was hard?
If somehow you managed to change the world and not change yourself, then the world will be entirely fine, but you yourself will still suffer from the same perceptions as before (this is entirely possible, I've seen many a white male strongly believe that the world is prejudiced against them, and I recall some stats showing an increasing number who believe similarly in polling). In that case, the world is relatively good to them, but the mind creates its own interpretation of reality.
Unless you believe people are un-changable, and changing the world means raising the next generation right and forgetting ours.
Anyways, I'm not advocating to forget about activism, just saying I recommend looking inwards first before helping others. Like on airplane safety directions. And that's not a comment directed at you specifically, just a general observation to those looking outwards before looking in (it sound like you've done your share of introspection).
I don't think anyone at all is claiming that. At most people are claiming that girls are better at verbal and emotional skills, while boys are better at visio-spatial things.
It's little help that women have better verbal and emotional skills if they do not appear to be valued in our society.
Bulk of it is politics. And politics is a ultra-competitive space which it own demands.
You should also not forget that there are values other than monetary. I'm sure most people "value" their midwives or nannies infinitely higher than their plumbers or even bankers.
Soldiers are usually highly valued but earn very little. Monks have often had even higher status and made no money at all. Money lenders were reviled but rich. Etc etc etc.
EDIT: Soldiers do earn little considering the risks they take, and the status of the job. This is still true in countries with modern professional armies, but it was much more true historically. So much so that many higher class people would actually _pay_ for the privilege. They had no shortage of money but wanted the glory that military service could bring.
My father and ex husband were both career military. You are misinformed.
In the US, soldiers get relatively little cash pay because they are provided free room and board, free medical, a free burial, free life insurance, and can access a host of other free amenities for merely flashing their ID card, such as access to free legal services for some purposes. If they serve at least 20 years, they get a retirement check for life. If you join at age 18, as most soldiers do, you can retire as early as age 38 and readily pursue a second career. Unless you were maimed in war, you will still be young and able-bodied.
They can buy a house with no down payment and the federal government will help them pay for college. Military retirees tend to be in quite good financial shape. What the federal government does not give them in cash pay it more than makes up for in countless benefits.
People who say they value what you do but do not want to pay you adequately for the job are basically taking advantage. Women are routinely expected to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, because they care.
I am a woman. I have been homeless for 5.5 years. I am incredibly sick of people acting like "we love what you do!" And then not wanting to pay me anything. I have spent a lot of time deconstructing this problem space and I very much expect to get paid these days. I do a lot less giving it away for free. Because the vast majority of people expecting me to benefit them because I care absolutely do not care that I struggle to get enough to eat every month and I need money to get off the goddamn street and back into housing.
Poverty in the US is overwhelmingly an issue for women and children. If we valued women so much, this travesty should not be true.
This is incorrect. 14% of women are under the poverty line, to 10% of men. That's not "overwhelming". On the flip side, a significant majority of the homeless are men.
The gender difference seen in the poverty statistic is in my estimation due to the fact that women are generally less motivated than men to earn money, and thus less willing to make sacrifices to do so (which is why men overwhelmingly work dangerous jobs, and are 10X more likely to die in a work place accident as a result). This will result in the lower income levels seen in the female demographic, which will extend to more women having income levels that fall under the poverty line.
You explanation is a big fat blame-the-victim position.
I am aware there are more homeless men than women. The reasons for that are complicated. They typically tend to be less pathetic than homeless women. It in no way justifies acting like the difference in poverty rates is small and due to personal laziness on the part of women.
The belief in the superiority of a gender could very well lead to the belief in the superiority of both their abilities and the value of said abilities.
We live in a capitalist society, where both value and power is expressed through money. If you are to tell me that midwives and nannies are worth more than they are paid, what is your explanation for that?
It's all the same thing.
The reason a nanny makes very little is because of supply and demand. On the supply side most young women can become nannies, it requires no special education. Demand wise people would not hire them if their cost approached what the parent that would otherwise stay home makes.
At the same time you entrust your children, that you doubtless value more than anything in the world, to the nanny.
Same with midwives. The "value" they create is infinite, their salaries are not, mostly because it is not _that_ difficult to become one, so if the supply is low you can just raise the salary slightly and demand would catch up. You could even argue that the _economic_ value they create is many times what they earn. Without midwives a significant proportion of children would not survive, and GDP would fall appreciably. Yet they can not bargain with that, since they don't have a monopoly. If they won't deliver children, someone else will. That is not true for olympic sprinters or Fortune 500 CEOs, the supply of talent is so much smaller.
On the other hand you have particle physicists and accomplished poets. The supply of them is also very low, but so is the demand. I also suspect that neither group is very income sensitive, they do what they do because they have to, not because it pays more than something else.
Clearly income and value are very different things.
And something that the current system is completely unable to properly monetarily register and the system just relies on them giving it away for free while getting nothing in return.
That all sounds very convenient. It's also interesting that all of these things seem related to children. Why don't you add childbirth to the mix.
I'm simply explaining why nannies don't earn much. Still, they earn more than monks, who in some societies are seen as pillars of existence in a very literal sense.
My point is again that income is set by supply and demand, not value in some deeper sense. The market "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing"
If you're going to talk about supply and demand, you may want to think about why there's demand for something. Why is there demand for Olympic sprinters? Why is there no demand for Olympic teachers? That's really the question.
At least this is the impression that a large part of the population seems to have, according to what they tell female students of physics.
It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Yeah but that's different, I was replying to someone saying that the general opinion was that girls are not good at anything at all. That is simply not true, almost nobody believes that.
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I was one of the top three graduating students of my high school class. I fully expected to be part of a two career couple. That never happened. Instead, I was a homemaker and full time mom for a lot of years.
So I have spent a LOT of time trying to parse how and why my life got so completely flushed down the toilet and did not turn into what I and so many other people expected of it. (One family friend bluntly told me "We all expected you to be a self made millionaire. What the hell happened?") This involved reading quite a lot of research about how and why the lives of men and women turn out differently.
We may well see it differently, but that sounds to me like a polite way to trivialize my conclusions. My conclusions have not been drawn in a trivial manner. There has been quite a lot of study involved in drawing them.
I don't doubt that you've been compulsive about researching the subject (as have I).