Not sure why they put Melinda's gender as a handicap, it allowed her to get things handed to her on a platter by Bill. She is now loved and famous thanks to spending Bill's money on charity without taking any of the downsides and hate related to starting a company and fiercely clawing yourself to the top like Bill did.
I agree that being a woman is a handicap in many situations, but saying that Melinda had to make more sacrifices to get where she is than Bill is laughable.
> Not sure why they put Melinda's gender as a handicap, it allowed her to get things handed to her on a platter by Bill. She is now loved and famous thanks to spending Bill's money on charity without taking any of the downsides and hate related to starting a company and fiercely clawing yourself to the top like Bill did.
Take that sentiment. Now look at the Foundation, and think: Given that a lot of their charity work was her initiative, how many of the people she has to work with saw things from your perspective of "wife spending husband's money", instead of thinking about her in terms of an entrepreneur with strong financial backing? Overcoming that is part of the gender handicap at work.
People thinking you're spending your husbands billions is not exactly a handicap. At least not one I can take seriously after reading the top couple comments on this link.
To even remotely compare someone starting a company with $0 from the ground up vs. someone spending tens of billions of existing dollars as a non-profit and classify them as the same level of entrepreneur is an insult to anyone who has ever started a company.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to describe somebody who initiates and runs a charity, and who is focused on deploying that gifted money as effectively as possible, as an entrepreneur. You don't need to be profit-driven, you can have a different goal altogether.
Keep in mind the ages of the people this is about. Melinda met Bill while working as a GM at Microsoft. She was working in tech in the mid-late 80's. I don't find it much of a leap to believe the subject of gender came up in her professional life in a negative way.
What a patently absurd take. Implying that the only part of Melinda's experience that matters is how much money she has access to. If you really think she's experienced no negatives due to her gender I ask you to consider what common negative experience would be for women, I'm sure you'll find that status and wealth don't much change the nature of these experiences.
More men are raped as well, both as children and as adults if you count prisons, which as a society we generally don't and that in and of itself is informative.
How so? Is it false? I know I've heard similar things before - more men raped each year, counting prison, than women in the US - and considering the state of our prisons it feels reasonable.
This stat is skewed twice: first, by the larger percentage of men involved in bilateral violent altercations (barfights, gang violence, etc), and second, by the low reporting rates of domestic violence (women are more likely to be the victims, though there are male victims of domestic violence as well).
That doesn't help much from age 25-54 or 65+. Assuming beginning work at 16 and retirement at 65, the man is likely to have the advantage in an arbitrary year of one's working life. The aggregate numbers shift the other way because population growth puts more people in the younger cohorts.
> more men are homeless
Granted.
> more men commit suicide
Granted.
> fewer men go to college
I'm not sure this stat is representative, but I don't feel like doing any more research so I will grant this one.
Your examples seem a bit cherry picked to me. More men are victims of violent crime are in part because men are more likely to have valuables, in part because more men commit violent crime, in general because men are more violent than women. Painting that as demonstrating that men are the victims seems pretty funny to me.
The only inequality left is for the 90% of men who are relegated to lives of farm animals in most Western societies.
Every study that still claims that women have it worse make so many statistical and logical fallacies, they aren't even worth debating. Which is ironic, since feminists refuse to debate or acknowledge them anyway, and instead resort to shaming.
* Wage gap. We all know the reasons. Majoring in whatever you're 'passionate' about is a luxury that apparently only women enjoy in our society. There are no artificial barriers to entry for women in any fields, and instead, as we see in Scandinavia, the more artificial equality used to push women into higher paid and rigorous fields, the less they choose them. And why would they - if I were subsidized to earn as much as the average HN reader regardless of my job, I wouldn't be slinging code all day. Look at the percentage of women in computer science in India vs Sweden, for example.
* Women less represented in the top 0.1% as CEOs, senators, etc: For the 99.9% of men who aren't amongst these elites either, it is irrelevant. I might as well complain about the near zero men who are represented at the top of the super-modeling industry.
* Disproportionate work spent on child rearing: That's a choice women make, and men have no say, as enforced by the state. As men, we have no rights, only the responsibility to pay for children, both individually and societally.
You're looking at "labor force participation rate" instead of "unemployment rate". The difference is that people who aren't looking for work are "not participating" but not "unemployed".
where the unemployment rates are given: 4.8% for women and 4.9% for men. In a strong economy like we have now, the difference is minor, but in economic down times, the difference is striking. In 2010, the unemployment rates were was 11% for men and 8.4% for women:
> The difference is that people who aren't looking for work are "not participating" but not "unemployed".
If you're a stay-at-home parent then you would fall under the "not participating" category, no? I think that's part of the problem for women in that they are often pressured to raise a family and forego a career.
> If you're a stay-at-home parent then you would fall under the "not participating" category, no?
If you are so by preference, yes. If you are a stay at home parent because you can't, despite actively looking, find work that pays enough to be to be a net gain after daycare, you are unemployed.
You're right, cultural norms work both ways. Work needs to be done on both sides so that both genders are free to choose what they do with their lives.
No, that's just unrelated to the definition of unemployed. Participation = (employed + unemployed) / total people in working age. If someone is not looking for work, then they are not considered unemployed.
Though you might argue even with equal unemployment ratios, this brings the number of unemployed men higher than the number of women.
You're not classed as unemployed if you're a stay-at-home mother. Likely some of those do so because of social norms, not because they don't want a career.
In this case, because context and presentation is important, and I don't do as good of a job of it. It presents a cohesive whole, whereas me simply saying "More women attempt suicide than men, but men choose more violent methods that are more likely to result in death." removes a single point of your post, but not the overall worldview presented in your post.
Have you looked at the percentage of women who have experienced sexual harassment or assault in their life?
Do you understand what it is like to be a woman, to have to look over your shoulder so much of the time, the fear and anxiety that follows you or prevents you from walking alone at night or in a strange place?
How many women have you talked to?
The violent crime you speak of is male on male. The oppressive omnipresent threat of violence against women is by men. The population of male victims of violent crimes has a high degree of overlap with the population of perpetrators of violent crime (i.e. Your statement is like saying men are greater victims of war, when it is fact men exclusively who have perpetrated those very wars).
>Do you understand what it is like to be a woman, to have to look over your shoulder so much of the time, the fear and anxiety that follows you or prevents you from walking alone at night or in a strange place?
I like how women think this uniquely applies to them.
As if all men are just brimming with confidence, completely unafraid and always ready to do battle. As if they can walk past a hooded figure on a dark street and physiologically remaining completely unaffected.
If you can't recognize the difference, you aren't talking with or listening to enough women in your circle about this sort of thing. I would highly encourage you to do so.
Regardless, the parent is not saying that men don't also experience the fear of violence.
The parent said "do you know?" Implying that as a male I had zero knowledge of what it's like to feel that way. Which implies that I have never felt that way. Which implies that whenever I'm in a situation that makes a woman feel that way, it doesn't make me feel that way.
I'm sorry but it does. So,yes I do know.
Is it worse for women? My assumption is at least 2x ~ 3x. The difference being when I walk past a shadowy figure in the street I mutter to myself "please don't kill me" while they think "OMG, please please please don't kill me".
The vectors point in exactly the same direction. The magnitude is what's different.
The original comment implied the vectors didn't even point in the same direction or had zero magnitude for men.
It's best you ask some women you know in person (female colleagues at work, female friends of your friends, your sister(s), your mom), and listen to them in earnest.
You may make some female friends this way. Men who listen to women, who truly listen, are rare.
I'm sorry, all that you said applies to men as well.
Besides, your statement about wars is outright insulting! You've degraded the male victims of war (of whom there are a lot more) entirely by shifting blame for violence on them. In most wars you'd get thrown in jail if you refuse to go and fight!
> Do you understand what it is like to be a woman, to have to look over your shoulder so much of the time, the fear and anxiety that follows you or prevents you from walking alone at night or in a strange place?
Do you understand what it's like to be a man? I was mugged five times as a boy and young man, including at knife point. Police have harassed me.
Are you suggesting it's more pleasant to be threatened with your life as a man than a woman?
If not, then I'll go with the numbers and not imply, as you do, that no man can understand about being a victim of violent crime.
The expression "laughing all the way to the bank" comes to mind. Racism and sexism we probably won't get rid of, but it's inequalities of power that make them matter. Who cares about negativity if it comes without teeth?
Reading the other replies to this comment makes me incredibly sad, though not surprised in the slightest... that so many men in what is supposed to be an exceptionally intelligent community have so little understanding of patriarchy and misogyny, and somehow see men as the disadvantaged group.
Part of the problem is that this community is so male, so much so that even the men that get it tend to stay silent for fear of being losing status in such a male community.
Every single success I have right now is due to my wife's support. She is my partner in everything. When I worked at a startup, she suffered. When I am successful in something it's because she's there sacrificing with me. The reason that Bill has a flat line in marriage is because of his relationship with his wife.
Do you think he could have taken that hate without her support? Do you think she didn't feel awful because of the change it brought in her husband?
An equal and supportive marriage means that every sacrifice is made together. Don't trivialize how much she took on even though she wasn't the "face" of the company.
You're making marriage into a "competition" and it's not. It's two people working at a team, and no not every marriage is like that, my hope is that Bill and Melinda have that sort of marriage.
The irony of your comment is that the whole point of showing Melinda was to illustrate how she has it relatively easy, and how much more difficult the woman from Sahel has it.
The gender part of that graph wasn’t trying to say Melinda herself has it very hard, it was only saying that Melinda is a woman, and statistically speaking on a global scale, being a woman is an obstacle. Both of those things are true, and the article discusses why.
> statistically speaking on a global scale, being a woman is an obstacle
I think it's important to add the concept of "financial," "independence," or "power" somewhere in here.
AFAICT, these are the only things that matter to people, so it's a pretty big deal to have your sex/gender be an obstacle towards them. But the overall equation of happiness has a bit more variables.
Ultimately, I meet (on average) about the same amount of unhappy men as women, so from a happiness perspective it would appear that neither men nor women are winning and focusing on money and power instead of well-being is short sighted.
Like maybe we should quit arguing which gender gets the most money and try to figure out what makes a human happy.
> maybe we should quit arguing which gender gets the most money and try to figure out what makes a human happy.
That's a bit of a straw man, I didn't argue money primarily, and neither does the article. The article is talking about self-determinism, education, and opportunity for women, not money or power specifically. These things are all well known to be of primary importance to happiness.
From the article: "the average woman spends more than four hours every day doing unpaid work. Men, by comparison, average just over one hour per day."
How do you feel personally about doing unpaid labor?
> I meet (on average) about the same amount of unhappy men as women, so from a happiness perspective it would appear that neither men nor women are winning and focusing on money and power instead of well-being is short sighted.
That's purely anecdotal and has no bearing on what is happening in the world to people outside your class & geographical region. Drawing a global conclusion about gender inequality based on your personal experience is a pretty bad idea.
How do you feel personally about doing unpaid labor?
How much of this is due to gender differences in orderliness and cleanliness? I know plenty of guys who don't care that much about living in a dirty environment. On the other hand, their partners vacuum every day, mop the floor, and sterilize every surface. Perhaps it's out of fear that their kids will get sick, but then you look at the growing rates of allergy and auto immune diseases and you have to question the wisdom of a sterilized home.
Calling this type of unnecessary housework "unpaid household labour" is doing everyone a disservice. You might as well call a man's tinkering with an old hotrod in the garage "unpaid auto mechanic labour."
What evidence is there that there even exist any gender differences in cleanliness? How do you know that very idea isn't rationalizing cultural sexism?
I know lots of people, men and women, who don't care about being dirty. I also know lots of men and women who like things clean. The people I know in the U.S. have almost nothing to say about the cultural expectations on women in India or Turkmenistan.
How many domestic women do you know and talk to who are living in Africa, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea? Do you really think women in Africa are being clean freaks, and that explains the statistical difference in education and income?
> You might as well call a man's tinkering with an old hotrod in the garage "unpaid auto mechanic labour".
That might be true if globally women were culturally pushing the men to tinker with their garage projects to the point that it was expected they don't go to college and instead work on the jalopy for four hours a day, and if lots of men weren't allowed to vote or drive cars or have jobs.
You called it 'unnecessary' housework, based on your own assumptions and biases, having no idea whether it's even housework the article is talking about.
> self-determinism, education, and opportunity for women, not money
Those look a lot more like money and power than happiness. As a counter point, I might list "community" or "the right to express ones thoughts and emotions" if I was going for the happiness > money angle.
> How do you feel personally about doing unpaid labor?
I do quite a bit of community service, and offer help to anyone who's following their dreams. Unpaid labor is an important part of a functional society. Once again, not everything needs to revolve around money.
> Drawing a global conclusion about gender inequality based on your personal experience is a pretty bad idea.
Yeah, but drawing a conclusion based off data that doesn't equate to happiness is equally meaningless. Nobody is having a great time and we're fighting over breadcrumbs. It's like a bunch of homeless people infighting over panhandling inequality. As if panhandling is the way it should be, it's just not equal enough.
The article isn't talking about good-will volunteer service, and I'm certain you already know that, please don't try to twist words and be intentionally misleading.
I'm struggling to understand what point you're making now. Nobody from here up the thread said everything revolves around money except for you, it's still a straw man argument.
> drawing a conclusion about gender inequality that doesn't equate to happiness is equally meaningless
First, there is no objective measure for happiness, so you're suggesting something that's impossible.
Second, I disagree that failing to boil down to happiness is meaningless, as do many world economists and social researchers. Economic measures absolutely do correlate with happiness at the poor end of the economic spectrum. https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/IWP_2016_23.pdf
More broadly, oppression of women is a global fact of history. It's better now in the U.S. and Europe, and I'm glad it's improving, but I really don't get this argument you're attempting to make that it somehow doesn't exist, or that women are just seeking power and money. It's making your comments seem rather ignorant of history. Gender inequality is well documented, well known and widely agreed to exist, especially in Africa, China, the Middle East, etc.
At no point did I say that the inequality was anything less than awful. I pointed out that it would be very easy for a person to read your initial comment and think that you're implying there exists an obstacle between women and everything that matters in the world. Really, what is true and worth saying is there is an obstacle between women and some of the most coveted forms of power.
I think it's a very important issue, but by not including context is vastly undermines the argument and any empathy you might have incurred. I was suggesting a way to improve your argument, but inevitably I digressed into the fact that the argument is (at best) a squabbling.
I can never help but feel like every form of infighting between the lower and middle classes, races, genders, etc is a waste of time as compared to maybe working together to end our collective oppression under the super rich... so I end up digressing every time.
Also, I know a lot of broke ass artists, and a bunch of tree huggers who are way fucking happier than pretty much everyone I know who really cares about money (no matter how much they make).
I appreciate the discussion, and the attempt to add what context you believe is missing, but to be very honest, the context you're proposing rubs me completely the wrong way, because I believe it's wrong. I very much disagree with the point you're trying to make. By calling it 'coveted' money and power, you're choosing to frame the desire for equality as a negative attribute, painting the quest for equality as something selfish and greedy and unnecessary, which is very far from the truth, most especially considering the actual real-world context.
Do you consider your own high school education to be you striving for coveted money and power over happiness?
By talking about broke artists and tree-huggers and people you know, you're framing this against your personal experience, and not accepting that we're in a completely different world over here than Africa. People in the U.S. or Europe who (statistically) got to go to college, and had a house and stable family and enough food to eat and medical help when they needed it, those people choosing to pursue an art career, and/or choosing to care about the environment over money, those people don't even represent our own poverty, let alone the poverty in the third world and oppressed countries.
Your comments feel like a perfect example of a rich westerner living in a world so distant from the problem you're talking about that you don't have the context or experience to even understand what the problem really is. What makes you think the problems of women in Africa are even comparable in any way to artists and tree-huggers in the western world?
Do you think you'd personally be happy as a woman in Africa or Saudi Arabia or India? Please go read about and try to understand what's actually happening and imagine yourself in the same situation before you presume to summarize it in black and white as infighting between genders or that women need to seek happiness because life is about more than money and power.
I know exactly where you are coming from. But ponder this: what if women's suffering is just a drop in an ocean?
The reason I bring this up is because I'm a very empathetic person, and I know quite a bit about human rights violations, and every bit I learn pushes me further from being able to look at gender/race/nipple color/hair style arguments meaningful. There's no reasoning with it, no point in taking sides. At this point I've boiled it down to this:
Abuse is Bad.
It doesn't have to be about how your gender gets to wah wah wah, and my gender herpa derp doo. Abuse is bad, full stop. Doesn't matter who is doing it, or why, 99.9% of the time abuse is bad.
Every little bit of energy you put into trying to re-balance some shit like this, to try to make it fair, it all just becomes more fuel to the fire.
So please, if you're really trying to help the world, don't focus on what the gender or skin color is. Don't imply that suffering is a group thing, it's not. Don't hold onto grudges, nobody will win. Just focus on who's abusing who right at this moment and point out the fact that abuse is bad. That's all you have to do, and anything more (ie "typically women have faced obstacles") is just undermining the very act of trying to help.
IN CONCLUSION: Helping is really, really, really hard. Like, it's so much easier to make things worse.
> Your comments feel like a perfect example of a rich westerner
Fuck this statement. You're fine, but that statement is bullshit.
> saying that Melinda had to make more sacrifices to get where she is than Bill is laughable
Unless you have actual insights into her life and personality that back up your statement, denying that she had to make more sacrifices could just as well be anything between ignorant, insensitive or plain mean.
According to wikipedia's info on her early career, she graduated as a valedictorian, and holds multiple degrees from universities I would consider prestigious at a glance.
She also conceivably had to work prior to retiring to start her family.
Not sure why you're convinced she had everything handed to her?
As opposed to the platter Bill's father used to hand things to Bill?
William Gates, III was already loaded. He took a leave of absence from Harvard to see if this software thing would work out, but his back up plan was to go back.
I don't think anyone is going to dispute that Bill Gates didn't work hard or isn't intelligent. The man was doing graduate level work as an underclassman.
But his risk for leaving Harvard and starting Microsoft was laughably low.
And I think Bill would recognize the vast amount of privilege he's benefited from in his life. I mean, that's part of what the article is about.
I can't find any references in the report to Melinda as an example of gender inequality, and it seems extremly atypical of the Gates' to say that. Which part are you referring to, exactly?
Hm. I do find that to be in somewhat poor taste, but only because they've drawn her gender-hurdle as being almost the same size as the one for the girl born in Sahel. I'm willing to bet that if you asked the Gates, they would both say that the girl born in Sahel faces a far more considerable gender hurdle than Melinda did.
I'd say they just ran a regression on the variables without any interactions between gender and other variables. It seems more likely than them trying to make an argument about equal struggles.
the visual organization of that graphic is deeply flawed as it suggests that each person overcomes those obstacles in a series of consecutive steps, on their journey
Well, the title of the article is "HOW GEOGRAPHY AND GENDER STACK THE DECK FOR (OR AGAINST) YOU". Yet they don't provide any examples or evidence that your gender works for or against you _except_ in the cases of poor countries. It seems a little underhanded to imply that women are disadvantaged in western countries - if anything, it's the other way around.
Fortune 500 CEO's are also like winning the lottery, but we still use that as a way to say that men are privileged. Can't we do the same thing here? Sure there aren't a lot of women who marry billionaires, but there are plenty who marry millionaires.
Also I don't know of any men who gets to open a charity with his wife's money or influence, but I know a lot of women who do. Even the first lady of USA gets a charity fund and a small crew of people to help her spend it, why do we do that? Because that is what we expect powerful husbands to do for their wives. Shouldn't such things get taken into account when we dole out privilege points?
I mean, men are more likely to earn a lot of money and influence, yes, but women are much more likely to marry into a lot of money and influence. So if your goal is to get a lot of money and influence but don't want to do the sacrifices required for it then you'd rather be a woman.
Or in other words, marrying into wealth and getting to spend said wealth on your pet projects is one of the most privileged roles you can have and the sex ratio for said role is extremely skewed in favor of women. Taking Melinda as an example of a woman who had to struggle due to her gender is very poor taste since she is basically the embodiment of female privilege.
Ok. Let's say that becoming a Fortune 500 CEO is like winning the lottery. Let's give that to you for a second.
It's a lottery that only a small section of the population has access to. Men overwhelmingly that lottery. White men especially. If it were truly a lottery, we'd see statistics that would more closely mirror the general population.
You also note that men are more likely to earn a lot of money and influence. Then try to contrast it with women marrying into that. You then lament that men hardly have the opportunity to marry into money.
You know why?
Because historically women haven't been afforded all the same opportunities men have to do the same. Women don't have the money to marry into.
I was merely pointing out that if the argument is that a given class is underpaid or systemically has less opportunity, finding a single counterexample that became so by essentially pure luck isn't much of a refutation.
I agree that being a woman is a handicap in many situations, but saying that Melinda had to make more sacrifices to get where she is than Bill is laughable.