I'm a misogynist, patriarchical bigot

I watched the movie Three Colours Blue last night. It's a French film starring Juliette Binoche (the lady from Chocolat). It categorically sucked, big time. It required a huge investment of patience and attention, and paid no dividends of coolness.

I also opened myself up to being called a sexist bastard in a seminar today because I said that pay-gap statistics were the crappiest measure possible for inequality between men and women. Let me illustrate why (although no-one understood me in class, and I merely ended up being assaulted with poorly understood, dogmatic opinions, regurgitated from comment pieces in newspapers.): The statistic we were presented with today was this - men earn 17% more than women, or the pay gap between men and women is 17%. This obviously sounds unacceptable, and rightly so. However, there are problems with statistics, and this is what I was trying to show my classmates, although they were too dumb to think for themselves.

The problem with this statistic is this: it is obtained by simply taking the average salary of all men and comparing it to the average salary of all women, which again sounds fine, but please suspend your outrage for one more second. Because in the UK the nuclear family model still prevails (heterosexual couple with a mail breadwinner), more men occupy positions of full-time employment than women, and women are more likely to work part-time menial jobs. In this type of situation a pay-gap of zero would actually indicate unequal pay towards men.

By focusing on this particular statistic, which most media studies do, the likely policy outcomes are many times facile solutions like positive-discrimination, which ends up only benefiting rich yuppie families, while poor nuclear-style families actually slip further into poverty. What we end up with is the current position where women don't merely have the chance of equal employment opportunities, they must work full-time, and their partners also, in order provide a decent life for their children.

What I think is necessary is a better solution that actually ensures women (and men for that matter) the greatest possible freedom of action and opportunity in work and family life so that if they want to work, they can achieve their career goals (and have child care provided if that's what they prefer), but if they don't want to be in the workplace, they will have sufficient means to stay home and tend to their family (if that's what they prefer.) This would involve a substantial restructuring of welfare and education, not just a simple act of positive discrimination.

For saying these things (although my voice was almost drowned by the outrage of my classmates) I was termed a sexist-bigot who wanted to chain women to stoves and roll back the clock to the stone-age. Perhaps sometimes it's better just to let people hold their cherished dogmas and avoid the holy wrath of morons.

Peace