Content aside. One of the reasons podcasts have exploded their audiences while cable news dwindles is that it’s actually just unbearable as a viewer to watch a bunch of people shout over each other instead of fully making their points.
[The] man can’t even complete a sentence before he’s called a transphobe and accused of using a slur with a level of indignation that is unhinged.
Who at CNN likes this and believes it’s serving their audience?
Dennis Prager has said this for years in a memorable quip, S.I.X.H.I.R.B. ~ sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted. Somehow “Transphobia” needs to be added. Maybe, SIXTHIRB, like you have a lisp… lol. Remember Hillary’s version?
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Speaking about the CNN debate, Coleman Hughes notes:
Okay, here is what started out just as the CNN video, but blossomed into this monstrosity. Lol.
Female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to transgender rivals competing against them in women’s sporting categories, an eye-opening United Nations report has revealed.
The study — titled “Violence against women and girls in sports” — stated that more than 600 female athletes have been bested at various events by competitors who were born male.
“According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports,” the report said.
“The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males.”
The wide-ranging report, compiled by Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, was presented to the UN General Assembly earlier this month.
[….]
“Women and girls already have many odds stacked against them that impede their equal and effective participation in sports. In addition, their ability to play sport in conditions of safety, dignity and fairness has been further eroded by the intrusion of males who identify as female in female-only sports and related spaces,”
PRAGER UIf we don’t believe that biological men have a significant advantage over biological women in sports, then why did women’s sports ever need to be created in the first place? Let’s stop fooling ourselves.
I have more posts that include Selina Soule, the girl in the above video:
The Destruction of Women’s Sports No Big Deal… To the Left (March 2019)
Girls’ Civil Rights Violated By Trangender “Athlete” (August 2019)
1995 NIKE AD – From youth sports to collegiate athletics to the Olympics, female athletes in every sport and at every level deserve a safe and fair playing field.
What about this “intersex” charge? Does this then change our position as to being allowed into a female sport? No. XY is still present, as well as high levels of testosterone during puberty giving a life-long advantage over other [genuine] females:
Jessica Gill’s Insights Into “Intersex” | Plus: Poor Mans Podcast Stuff
Just some examples of the Leftist lunacy by people who lecture us about “following the science”
We hit the streets to ask people if they think men can menstruate. The college kids think yes and the streets beg to differ, watch the video to find out why!
This particular update comes by way of PJ-MEDIA, and has an example of a Democrat candidates (plural) running for the 2020 nomination for his party. Here are some examples:
…And yes, it appears that the Menstrual Equity Act is a real thing. H.R. 1882, otherwise known as the Menstrual Equity For All Act of 2019. Apparently Beto thinks women across America have never heard of a pharmacy. Oh but wait, this absurd legislation isn’t just for women! According to GovTrack, this legislation will “increase the availability and affordability of menstrual hygiene products for individuals with limited access, and for other purposes.”
Individuals. Because men have periods too! Duh! Beto may not have gotten that memo, but Cory Booker and Julián Castro did. …
Here is the bit by Julian Castro that got those who love science scratching their heads:
On Wednesday, during the Democratic presidential debate, Julian Castro, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under former President Barack Obama, decided biological men should be given the same rights to an abortion as biological women, stating, “Let’s also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female, is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the right to exercise that right to choose.”
Trans females are biological men who claim identity as women.
Castro’s answer was triggered by NBC News’ Lester Holt, who asked, “Secretary Castro, this one is for you. All of you on stage support a woman’s right to an abortion. You all support some version of a government health care option. Would your plan cover abortion, Mr. Secretary?”
Castro answered, “Yes, it would. I don’t believe only in reproductive freedom, I believe in reproductive justice. And, you know, what that means is that just because a woman — or let’s also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female, is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the right to exercise that right to choose. And so I absolutely would cover the right to have an abortion.”…
One comment from a Facebook post noted the “obvious,” (lol)
Why are MEN advocating for this??? That’s nothing less than gender appropriation! (TM) What’s more, it’s absolutely unacceptable male privilege! (TM) HOW DARE THEY! (sarc)
Here is the earlier post on the topic (posted May 2017)
I had to laugh at this… but it is sad at the same time that (a) people think this is a normal thing, and (b) watching this little girl struggle with the FACT that a man could never menstruate or have periods (cramps, mood swings, headaches, tender breasts, bloating, various food cravings, etc). Apparently she even did a Google search on the topic… how much do you want to bet this household leans progressively left. She seemed truly disappointed there was not a way to make a man menstruate [which will never happen — just like a vagina is not made out of a man’s penis.]
This should be combined with the lunacy exemplified in this recent story:
Brown University’s student body president will be hand-delivering menstrual products to all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students.
The initiative is intended to communicate the message that “pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury,” and that not all people who menstruate are women.
L&T notes this in his post: “The movement in the ‘Trans-‘” world is a bubble. The bubble is a dome of protection that guards you from truth, facts, and anything that makes you feel any slight discomfort.”
Here is the girls video that is attempting to help men with sex-changes to have “periods.” And note this girls struggle to not find anything online saying a man could menstruate, even after the mutilation done to his body.
Women use tampons to — essentially — remove blood in a controlled manner as to not ruin clothes, stay dry, and the like. NOW people will be inserting blood to simulate what my wife tells me is a hassle that allows for the miracle of life.
Like Life & Times, I am a Christian, and so have a religious matrix I view this topic through. But this should be just as black-and-white to the atheist evolutionist. That is, it has taken millions of years of survival-of-the-fittest to hone through natural selection and population growth the ability to procreate… the menstrual cycle being a part of that. Of course I don’t think the irreducible complexity of such a thing could ever be cobbled together by chance. That is another argument for another time. But assuming the sexes and reason for them from a strictly evolutionary and biological viewpoint should be just as perplexing [absolute] to those people.
We hit the streets to ask people if they think Men Can Have Babies. Some think yes and some no, watch the video to find out why!
Originally Posted June 2017 (fixed most links and replaced bad media)
The reason for this page: Below are three posts combined into ONE LONG POST… sorry. In this post you will find all the information to refute and respond to the completely bogus stat Democrats use about the “gender Wage Gap.” This will be a permanent page found tucked away in the “bar” across the top of my blog. IT HAS EVERYTHING for someone who has never heard a counter to this idea, or for someone who “knows it” but is looking for specifics. Enjoy.
Progressive feminists have labeled today “Equal Pay Day” and have allied themselves with the White House and Democratic lawmakers. The whole theory of the “gender wage gap” rests on this study by none other than The Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The study claims that, when considering every median income for all full time annual workers, women make 21.7 percent less, or more popularly worded, 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.
But, the Independent Women’s Forum calls both the day and the gap “fictitious”:
“Feminist groups and Democratic lawmakers call today Equal Pay Day, a fictitious holiday that’s premised on the notion that the workplace is openly hostile toward women. What’s more it’s a Trojan horse for horrible policy. The statistical difference between women and men’s average earnings isn’t driven by widespread sexism, but largely from different choices men and women make throughout our lives. The Administration and its allies know the wage gap statistic is grossly misleading; in fact, last year the White House conceded the figure is flawed, yet continues to regurgitate it again this year,” said Sabrina Schaeffer, Independent Women’s Forum executive director.
‘If I said 77 cents was equal pay for equal work, then I completely misspoke,’ and apologized, ‘I certainly wouldn’t have meant to say that,” says White House official Betsey Stevenson.
“The White House admitted what IWF has stated all along – that when you control for a number of variables that impact pay – the pay gap shrinks considerably, nearly disappearing.
As Mark Twain said, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” The 77 percent number is merely an average that compares the salaries of all men and women with full-time jobs but does not compare similar jobs. It does not take into account, for example, that more men choose to be engineers and more women choose to be social workers. It also doesn’t account for women taking time out of the workforce and men putting in longer hours.
The U.S. Department of Labor found that, when educational and career choices factor into the equation, women make 94 percent of men bring home. Childless urban women actually make more than men in all of these major cities. Pew Research also notes that there is a big gender gap in colleges and with college graduates, favoring women.
President Clinton said that women make .73 cents on every man’s dollar. He used this as a campaign issue to try and smear Republicans. Kerry said that women make .76 cents on every man’s dollar, and likewise used this stat as a political smear. The question then is this, are these two persons correct?
YES! If you compare all men to all women, then yes, there is a disparage. This stat doesn’t take into account a few things. It doesn’t consider the fact that women tend to choose the humanities when entering college and men seem to choose the hard sciences. So by choice women tend to choose professions that pay less. Not only that, when you compare Oranges to Oranges, you get something much different than expected, or that we would expect from the liberal side of things. If a woman and a man have had the same level of education and have been on the same job for an equal amount of time, the woman makes $1,005 while a man makes $1,000, a difference of $5 dollars every thousand dollars a man earns.
So part of the problem — exemplified by this article in THE NEW YORK TIME’S by a woman Medical Doctor — is the amount of time put into the career versus a male counterpart:
…But the productivity of the doctors currently practicing is also an important factor. About 30 percent of doctors in the United States are female, and women received 48 percent of the medical degrees awarded in 2010. But their productivity doesn’t match that of men. In a 2006 survey by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, even full-time female doctors reported working on average 4.5 fewer hours each week and seeing fewer patients than their male colleagues. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that 71 percent of female pediatricians take extended leave at some point — five times higher than the percentage for male pediatricians.
This gap is especially problematic because women are more likely to go into primary care fields — where the doctor shortage is most pronounced — than men are. Today 53 percent of family practice residents, 63 percent of pediatric residents and nearly 80 percent of obstetrics and gynecology residents are female. In the low-income areas that lack primary and prenatal care, there are more emergency room visits, more preventable hospitalizations and more patients who die of treatable conditions. Foreign doctors emigrate to the United States to help fill these positions, but this drains their native countries of desperately needed medical care.
If medical training were available in infinite supply, it wouldn’t matter how many doctors worked part time or quit, because there would always be new graduates to fill their spots. But medical schools can only afford to accept a fraction of the students who apply…
Continuing with the medical profession example, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES [partly] correctly pointed out that many women look for these lower paying jobs because they allow for greater (family rearing) flexibility:
…The answer, they speculate, is that women are choosing lower-paying jobs on purpose because they offer greater flexibility in hours and are generally more family-friendly. The researchers acknowledge they don’t have the data to prove that this is the case, but the data they do have is consistent with this theory.
If so, they say, that would be a victory for women (and even men.) Studies show that many doctors are burned out and would rather take jobs that allow them to have a good quality of life. Now — thanks in large part to the growing ranks of female doctors — such jobs are available. They just come with lower salaries.
“Instead of being penalized because of their gender, female physicians may be seeking out employment arrangements that compensate them in other — nonfinancial — ways, and more employers may be beginning to offer such arrangements,” the researchers wrote….
…..Thomas Sowell is the most well written on this subject. In fact, in his book, ECONOMIC FACTS AND FALLACIES, he devotes a whole chapter to this topic. In one area he points the following out, and keep in mind that in most countries mining or other hard-labor jobs are much more the norm than in America:
…various countries’ economies, there are still particular industries today where considerable physical strength remains a requirement. Women are obviously not as likely to work in such fields as men are— and some of these are fields with jobs that pay more than the national average. While women have been 74 percent of what the U.S. Census Bureau classifies as “clerical and kindred workers,” they have been less than 5 percent of “transport equipment operatives.” In other words, women are far more likely to be sitting behind a desk than to be sitting behind the steering wheel of an eighteen-wheel truck. Women are also less than 4 percent of the workers in “construction, extraction, and maintenance.” They are less than 3 percent of construction workers or loggers, less than 2 percent of roofers or masons and less than one percent of the mechanics and technicians who service heavy vehicles arid mobile equipment.
Such occupational distributions have obvious economic implications, since miners earn nearly double the income of office clerks when both work full-time and year-round 20 There is still a premium paid for workers doing heavy physical work, as well as for hazardous work, which often overlaps work requiring physical strength. While men are 54 percent of the labor force, they are 92 percent of the job-related deaths.
He goes on to point out that this volunteerism of choices continues onto Ph.D.s,
Given the asymmetrical effects of career obsolescence on women and men, it is hardly surprising that women tend to work in fields with lower rates of obsolescence— as teachers and librarians, for example, rather than as computer engineers or tax accountants. Even as the proportion of women receiving Ph.D.s rose dramatically from the 1970s on, male-female differences in the fields of specialization remained large. As of 2005, for example, women received more than 60 percent of the doctorates in education but less than 20 percent of the doctorates in engineering.
He then goes on to point out that do to life choices based on being close to family [kids], and choices made around work and family:
The most important reason why women earn less than men is not that they are paid less for doing the very same work but that they are distributed differently among jobs and have fewer hours and less continuity in the labor force. Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked fill-time and were from 40 to 64 years old— that is, beyond the child-bearing years— men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000.30 But, despite the fact that women in this category earned more than men in the same category, gross income differences in favor of men continue to reflect differences in work patterns between the sexes, so that women and men are not in the same categories to the same extent.
Even women who have graduated from top-level universities like Harvard and Yale have not worked full-time, or worked at all, to the same extent that male graduates of these same institutions have. Among Yale alumni in their forties, “only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men,” according to the New York Times. It was much the same story at Harvard:
A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30’s and 40’s.
In fact, as of a few years ago, women make more of the enrollment statistics in college, but will, through life choices, spend less time on the job that they went to school for than their male counterparts. All this brings me full circle to a great article that updates the above via the Wall Street Journal. They point out that much of the emphasis on this are by special interest groups that want to fix the problem — in my mind’s eye — with outdated thinking that no longer fits the evidence. In a recent VIRAL article found at The Atlantic Monthly “WHY WOMEN STILL CAN’T HAVE IT ALL,” Anne-Marie Slaughter talks about the talent businesses lose due to their inflexibility of allowing women to juggle family and work via a work schedule that doesn’t force an “either-or” schedule on them. BECAUSE when forced into an either-or situation, women choose family. Its in their nature. Here she talks a bit about her column:
CAREER OR FAMILY – Anne-Marie Slaughter
Mona Charen, a favorite author of mine, columnist, and part of the Clare Booth Luce Institute (a conservative policy institute for women), comments on Slaughter’s article in her’s, “GROW UP: LIFE HAS TRADE-OFFS,” by agreeing with her that women were sold a lie. Both in the prevailing view by the left that counters women’s nature as well as statistical lies:
…Even with a supportive husband who was willing to “take on the lion’s share of parenting … (while) I was in Washington,” she found that she didn’t want to be away from her two teenaged sons, particularly when one was having trouble in school.
“Want” is the critical word here. Slaughter made a choice, as adults do. She writes, “I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults.”
Slaughter’s wants mirror those of other women (high-earning and otherwise). A 2007 Pew survey found that among working mothers with children 17 and younger, fully 79 percent said that they would prefer part-time (60 percent) or zero (19 percent) work outside the home. Only 21 percent said they would choose full-time employment while their children were young. This was down from 32 percent who preferred to work full time in 1997.
Despite endless repetition by Democrats and feminists, the idea that women earn less than men for the same work is fiction. Single women without children earn just as much, and sometimes more, than comparably qualified young men. Women earn less (over their whole careers) because they choose to. And they choose to because they place more value on child rearing than on money or status.
A better feminist would applaud women for this and stress the incomparable contribution mothers make to society. Instead, feminists define progress as the “first” woman this or that and the degree to which a woman’s life parallels a man’s. Feminists have been missing what’s best about womanhood for decades…
Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women’s Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.
The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn’t be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.
In a response to a reader in a previous blogpost on this subject, I pointed out that there are physiological differences between the sexes that are undeniable and that promote women making choices to pause a career and build a home life. Here is my response:
You should know that there is a hard wired difference between men and women, whether by evolutionary means or creative means. A most recent example is what wakes the sexes at night:
Psychologist Dr David Lewis said: ‘There is nothing more likely to leave you feeling drained and depressed than disturbed sleep, especially when this happens over several nights.
A graphic explaining the different sounds which will wake men and women
‘As this unique study shows while some sounds, for instance your partner coughing or snoring beside you, disturb men and women equally, other noises such as a howling wind cause men to be more disturbed than women.
‘Women are more likely to be disturbed by a crying baby.
‘These differing sensitivities may represent evolutionary differences that make women sensitive to sounds associated with a potential threat to their children while men are more finely tuned to disturbances posing a possible threat to the whole family.’
I could call my husband lazy, sexist and insensitive but his failure to hear a crying child while he’s sleeping might not be his fault at all. Researchers have actually found that women are hard-wired to wake up to the sound of a sobbing baby. A 2009 study by the British Mindlab sleeping lab found that a baby’s crying is the number one sound most likely to rouse a woman and didn’t even factor into the male top 10. Men were more likely to wake to the sounds of a car alarm, howling wind, or a buzzing fly.
This difference is what the market responds to. The fact that women typically WANT to be at home with their family MORE than the man… AND, women typically CHOOSE jobs that pay less. But free markets is not what the left is about, egalitarianism is.
Below, Michael Medved deals with two issues from President Obama’s recent Executive Order “Payment Fairness Act” push through. He [Medved] deals first with the continuing distortion of Obama’s family history by Obama himself. Then he gets to the meat of the issue (followed by some of the WSJ article mentioned in the clip):
…In its annual report, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2012,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that “In 2012, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings of $691. On average in 2012, women made about 81% of the median earnings of male full-time wage and salary workers ($854).” Give or take a few percentage points, the BLS appears to support the president’s claim.
But every “full-time” worker, as the BLS notes, is not the same: Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings.
Then there is the issue of marriage and children. The BLS reports that single women who have never married earned 96% of men’s earnings in 2012.
The supposed pay gap appears when marriage and children enter the picture. Child care takes mothers out of the labor market, so when they return they have less work experience than similarly-aged males. Many working mothers seek jobs that provide greater flexibility, such as telecommuting or flexible hours. Not all jobs can be flexible, and all other things being equal, those which are will pay less than those that do not.
Education also matters. Even within groups with the same educational attainment, women often choose fields of study, such as sociology, liberal arts or psychology, that pay less in the labor market. Men are more likely to major in finance, accounting or engineering. And as the American Association of University Women reports, men are four times more likely to bargain over salaries once they enter the job market.
Risk is another factor. Nearly all the most dangerous occupations, such as loggers or iron workers, are majority male and 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men. Dangerous jobs tend to pay higher salaries to attract workers. Also: Males are more likely to pursue occupations where compensation is risky from year to year, such as law and finance. Research shows that average pay in such jobs is higher to compensate for that risk.
While the BLS reports that full-time female workers earned 81% of full-time males, that is very different than saying that women earned 81% of what men earned for doing the same jobs, while working the same hours, with the same level of risk, with the same educational background and the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and assuming no gender differences in family roles like child care. In a more comprehensive study that controlled for most of these relevant variables simultaneously—such as that from economists June and Dave O’Neill for the American Enterprise Institute in 2012—nearly all of the 23% raw gender pay gap cited by Mr. Obama can be attributed to factors other than discrimination. The O’Neills conclude that, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all.”…
Again, and again, the Dems from the President on-down spread this lie! I will now add another post dealing with this myth, lie, political tactic. Below will be a few video/audio clips as well as The Wall Street Journal and Powerline posts/articles on the matter.
Professor Christiana Hoff Sommers was recently interviewed by Larry Elder explains this nonsense in an erudite and concise manner:
Powerlinesays that the President is in trouble when it can’t even fool CNN: AEI’s Mark Perry sets out the “analysis” proving pay discrimination at the White House here in a form even the folks at CNN can understand. If Obama can’t fool those who want to believe at CNN with this line, who ya gonna fool? Again, Powerline posts (10-20, 2012)Thomas Sowell’s response to the matter:
At the Hofstra University presidential debate this past Tuesday (I’m working from the WaPo transcript here), Candy Crowley called on Katherine Fenton to ask this groaner of a question: “In what new ways to you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?”
This is such an old canard I thought that Governor Romney might challenge the premise of the question. Equal pay for equal work is the law of the land, Katherine. The proposition that the statistical disparity in pay you mention results from employment discrimination has been examined and disproved many times over. The great Thomas Sowell addressed it in chapter 3 of Economic Facts and Fallacies (summarized in the video below). Katherine, the premise of your question falls into the category of “fallacy.”
What is truly scary is that everyone may know your pay at some point… this may be no-longer private:
The first bill President Obama signed into law was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, but five years later, the White House is still talking about the gender wage-gap.
At a White House briefing on Wednesday, Betsey Stevenson, one of President Obama’s economic advisers, said female employees need to know how much their male colleagues earn, so they can tell if they’re being paid equally.
It pictures two women, one in a pink dress carrying a handbag, the other in an orange dress, and both are wearing oh-so-practical stilettos. This is exactly what working women wear to work every day, right? All those women who are lawyers, and doctors, and cashiers, and investment bankers, and biochemists, and nursing assistants and architects and engineers and cashiers at the Piggly Wiggly? Perhaps this is why Obama was so focused on dry-cleaning bills at the White House signing ceremony? This is just not great messaging or symbolism for a White House that wants to also focus on women in minimum wage jobs. It screams “Sex and the City,” not “9 to 5.”
Ouch!
It didn’t get much better for Senate Democrats. Republicans took a look at their payroll records and found they also have a wage inequality problem.
It turns out President Obama isn’t the only hypocritical Democrat, in fact Senate Democrats have their own problems when it comes to equal pay. We pulled the official payroll records of various offices and calculated the average pay for men and women in each office for the most recent 6 month period available. Since some employees only worked a portion of the six month period, we calculated how much each person was paid per day in order to give an accurate representation. Here’s what we found:
Mark Udall pays women 85 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Mary Landrieu pays women 88 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Mark Begich pays women 82 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Mark Warner pays women 75 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Gary Peters pays women 67 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
That means on average, these five Democrats on the ballot in battleground states pay women in their office 79 cents for every dollar made by a male employee.
Dennis Prager’s FIRESIDE CHAT (found on YOUTUBE as well) discusses the reality of nature (or Nature’s God) on a video series he does. (I say “nature” because whether you believe in a theistic Creator or that millions of years of evolutionary forces and chance has honed the species to survive by being “male and female” by reproduction… then both are objective looks at reality and the Left is #antiscience.) I include – for context – a portion of Steven Crowder’s dealing with the topic Prager mentions in passing (the fuller video of my excerpt can be found here).
FAITHWIRE and LIFESITE NEWS have some decent articles up as well. But this should be a good video to show just how nutty the Left really is… and it is to compliments another audio I am working on.
BTW, unrelated to the topic, I highly recommend buying on AMAZON PRIME or through various creation ministries this movie (like CREATION SUPER STORE, or ANSWERS IN GENESIS, or the maker, GENESIS APOLOGETICS: — where you can watch it for free. But I suggest purchasing it to show support)
MALE/FEMALE DIFFERENCES
Does modern science validate what the Bible says about gender, sex, and marriage? Does living under the Bible’s idea on these topics make an impact on our lives? Our marriages? Our children? Watch this video to the end to find out.
For those new here, some time back, myself as well as some extended family of some gay men or women, and anywhere from 5-to10 gay men and women met almost every month. All were lovers of the Constitution and what brought us together was the website GAY PATRIOT and our admiration of what Bruce Carroll (former Chairman of the gay conservative political action group [and co-founder], and founder of the blog Gay Patriot – now defunct sadly) and other conservative/libertarian gays were doing.
Some of these people I met with and have communicated with over the years said same-sex marriage should not be placed on the same level in society as heterosexual marriage, others would posit that what is not clearly enumerated in the Constitution for the federal government to do should be left for the states. And thus, they would say each state has the right to define marriage themselves.
As an aside, we met at Sizzler in Hollywood or the Outback in Burbank on Mondays. Why? Those two CEOs gave to Mitt Romney’s campaign. And on Mondays because the L.A. City Council asked people not to eat meat on Mondays to help the planet.
I was waiting for the wife to be done in the bathroom this morning, as to not rile her up by getting in her way…. this early. So I was just kicking back on the bed watching some media… the following being one:
WATCH: Congresswoman Amy Klobuchar REFUSES to answer Evita Duffy’s question on whether Klobuchar’s recent bill banning “health misinformation” on social media will include a ban on saying there are two sexes—male and female. @evitaduffy_1pic.twitter.com/xeVzTfkNTo
— The Chicago Thinker (@ThinkerChicago) April 8, 2022
As Amy Klobuchar was spinning her tale, the wife and I met eyes as she was walking out of the bathroom (brushing teeth, hair, etc) and we both had a skeptical look and I said “politicians”. To which the wife said “that guys ‘spin’ is amazing.” [Note – “guy”] To which I responded without missing a beat: “You are right when you said ‘guy,’ because even though this is a female Senator, really, ‘what is a woman’?” (See HEREand HERE)
I got my wife to laugh ANDI didn’t get in her way.
TO WIT….
Take note that when the gay guy brought up discrimination against blacks. The white lesbo gal took that argument away by noting just because something is legal (or illegal) doesn’t “ipso facto” make it right, healthy, or moral for a society. I am reading between the lines a bit…. but that is the gist of HISpoint. Very entertaining.
(First and foremost I must thank Dave Rubin for an excellent interview and channel. The original file can be found HERE) This will serve as the follow-up clip to the first: “Part 1: Jews are the Most Religious People (Secular or Religious)“. This is the very next part of the excerpted discussion/interview of Dennis Prager by Dave Rubin.
This video is worth teaming up with my previous posts:
It is worth clipping a portion from that 1st linked post to further Crowders point:
✂️ SNIP ✂️
…And yes, it appears that the Menstrual Equity Act is a real thing. H.R. 1882, otherwise known as the Menstrual Equity For All Act of 2019. Apparently Beto thinks women across America have never heard of a pharmacy. Oh but wait, this absurd legislation isn’t just for women! According to GovTrack, this legislation will “increase the availability and affordability of menstrual hygiene products for individuals with limited access, and for other purposes.”
Individuals. Because men have periods too! Duh! Beto may not have gotten that memo, but Cory Booker and Julián Castro did. …
Here is the bit by Julian Castro that got those who love science scratching their heads:
On Wednesday, during the Democratic presidential debate, Julian Castro, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under former President Barack Obama, decided biological men should be given the same rights to an abortion as biological women, stating, “Let’s also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female, is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the right to exercise that right to choose.”
Trans females are biological men who claim identity as women.
Castro’s answer was triggered by NBC News’ Lester Holt, who asked, “Secretary Castro, this one is for you. All of you on stage support a woman’s right to an abortion. You all support some version of a government health care option. Would your plan cover abortion, Mr. Secretary?”
Castro answered, “Yes, it would. I don’t believe only in reproductive freedom, I believe in reproductive justice. And, you know, what that means is that just because a woman — or let’s also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female, is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the right to exercise that right to choose. And so I absolutely would cover the right to have an abortion.”…
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, marriage rates in our country are plummeting to historic lows. This is partly due to the fact that the modern dating scene is a miserable, despair-inducing trainwreck. We’ll try to sift through the rubble today and figure out what has gone so wrong. Also, protesters across the world marched against vaccine mandates on Sunday. And more people on the center-left are finally coming out against draconian COVID policies. Is it too little too late, or should we welcome these converts with open arms? Plus, is war with Russia on the horizon? And in our daily cancellation, we’ll discuss the democratic lawmaker who tried to dunk on pro-lifers, only to have it backfire in hilarious fashion.
These Physiological and Chemical Differences are Real!
(NYTs) In a female mouse’s brain, a left-to-right pattern in the silencing of the X chromosome. These patterns may influence how individual brains function…. In some brains, for example, a mother’s X chromosome was seen dominating the left side, while the father’s dominated the right. Entire organs can be skewed toward one parent. Dr. Nathans and his colleagues found that in some mice, one eye was dominated by the father and the other by the mother. The diversity even extended to the entire mouse. In some animals, almost all the X chromosomes from one parent were shut; in others, the opposite was true…. Dr. Nathans speculates that using chromosomes from both parents is especially useful in the nervous system. It could create more ways to process information. “Diversity in the brain is the name of the game,” he said. ~ h/t Uncommon Design
Are there physiological differences between the sexes that would naturally (or by design) cause one sex to excel in one aspect and not in another? In this short presentation, one lie of 12, you will see an exposing of how politically-correct feminists have undermined what otherwise is common sense.
Studies show pretty conclusively that the male and female brain are neurally wired different:
Neural Wiring
The participants were split into three age groups, aged eight to 13, 13 and four months to 16, and 17 to 22. The youngest group’s brains showed far less difference than those of the older two.
In one of the largest studies looking at the “connectomes” of the sexes, Ragini Verma, PhD, an associate professor in the department of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting their brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the wiring goes between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate communication between the analytical and intuition.
“These maps show us a stark difference–and complementarity–in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Verma.
For instance, on average, men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group. They have a mentalistic approach, so to speak.
Past studies have shown sex differences in the brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions across the whole brain that have been tied to such cognitive skills has never been fully shown in a large population.
Dennis Prager point out that “many in the university are not even intellectually open in the natural sciences if an idea may clash with Left-wing opinion.” He continues,
In a talk before fellow economists, the same Lawrence Summers, when he was president of Harvard University (he had been secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton), addressed the issue of why there were so many fewer women than men in some areas of science, in math, and in engineering. He suggested that among other reasons, one might be that women’s brains are less suited to these subjects than men’s brains. More than one hundred Harvard professors signed a petition against President Summers, Left-wing alumni threatened not to give any more money to Harvard, and the vast majority of Harvard’s professors kept a cowardly silence while their colleagues sought to suppress completely respectable intellectual inquiry. Consequently, President Summers felt forced to apologize. In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced by the then-dominant Catholic Church to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University, an institution whose motto is Veritas (“Truth”), was forced by the now-dominant Left to recant observable facts about men and women.
Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 102-103.
NARRATIVES -or – Social Engineering’s History Why say men and women are the same when they are clearly different – Some Thoughts:
Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.
Unlike most religious fundamentalists, these feminists were pursuing a careerist, self-serving agenda. This cause can put money in their pockets.
Summers’s suggestion—now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies—was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only possible explanations for gender imbalances in the math-science area. He noted that high school boys have many more of the highest math scores than girls, and suggested that this might reflect genetic differences. He also stressed the need for further research into all three possible explanations.
The foul brute may as well have rapped that women are “hos,” or declared that they should be kept barefoot and pregnant. The most remarkable feminist exercise in self-parody was that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who famously told reporters that she “felt I was going to be sick,” that “my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” that “I just couldn’t breathe, because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” and that she had to flee the room because otherwise “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”
Such fatuous feminist fulminations have been good fun, as have the eviscerations of Hopkins as a latter-day “Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, [who] suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines,” in the words of George Will. (More on Hopkins below.) But most of the commentary has glossed over one important point:
For all its foolishness and irrationality, the feminist hysteria about Summers furthers the career agendas of feminists who seek thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends. Such preferences are most easily justified as a remedy for male bias. And bias can more easily be blamed for gender imbalances if the possibility that more men than women are gifted with math-science brilliance is banished from public discourse.
This feminist-careerist agenda is conveniently ignored by the less hysterical critics of Summers, who make no claim that he said anything inaccurate but nonetheless reproach him for what a Los Angeles Times editorial portrayed as a gratuitous and insensitive ego trip. To the contrary, until his disgraceful capitulation to the power of political correctness, Summers was making a much-needed effort to break the self-serving feminist-careerist stranglehold on honest discussion of gender imbalances….
Recent studies highlight a long-held suspicion about the brains of males and females. They’re not the same. So how does the brain of a female look and function differently from a male’s brain, and what accounts for these differences?
Disparities Start Early in Life
Scientists now know that sex hormones begin to exert their influence during development of the fetus. A recent study by Israeli researchers that examined male and female brains found distinct differences in the developing fetus at just 26 weeks of pregnancy. The disparities could be seen when using an ultrasound scanner. The corpus callosum — the bridge of nerve tissue that connects the right and left sides of the brain — had a thicker measurement in female fetuses than in male fetuses.
Observations of adult brains show that this area may remain stronger in females. “Females seem to have language functioning in both sides of the brain,” says Martha Bridge Denckla, PhD, a research scientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute.
Consider these recent findings. Researchers, using brain imaging technology that captures blood flow to “working” parts of the brain, analyzed how men and women process language. All subjects listened to a novel. When males listened, only the left hemisphere of their brains was activated. The brains of female subjects, however, showed activity on both the left and right hemispheres.
This activity across both hemispheres of the brain may result in the strong language skills typically displayed by females. “If there’s more area dedicated to a set of skills, it follows that the skills will be more refined,” says David Geary, PhD, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri.
As a whole, girls outperform boys in the use of language and fine motor skills until puberty, notes Denckla. Boys also fall prey to learning disabilities more frequently than girls. “Clinics see a preponderance of boys with dyslexia,” Denckla tells WebMD. ADHD also strikes more boys than girls. The symptoms displayed by girls and boys with ADHD differ, too. Girls with ADHD usually exhibit inattention, while affected boys are prone to lack of impulse control. But not all differences favor girls.
Boys generally demonstrate superiority over female peers in areas of the brain involved in math and geometry. These areas of the brain mature about four years earlier in boys than in girls, according to a recent study that measured brain development in more than 500 children. Researchers concluded that when it comes to math, the brain of a 12-year-old girl resembles that of an 8-year-old boy. Conversely, the same researchers found that areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys…
[….]
Geary suggests that women use language skills to their advantage. “Females use language more when they compete. They gossip, manipulate information,” he says. Geary suggests that this behavior, referred to as relational aggression, may have given females a survival advantage long ago. “If the ability to use language to organize relationships was of benefit during evolutionary history, and used more frequently by women, we would expect language differences to become exaggerated,” he tells WebMD. Women also use language to build relationships, theorizes Geary. “Women pause more, allow the other friend to speak more, offer facilitative gestures,” he says.
When it comes to performing activities that require spatial skills, like navigating directions, men generally do better. “Women use the cerebral cortex for solving problems that require navigational skills. Men use an entirely different area, mainly the left hippocampus — a nucleus deep inside the brain that’s not activated in the women’s brains during navigational tasks,” Geary tells WebMD. The hippocampus, he explains, automatically codes where you are in space. As a result, Geary says: “Women are more likely to rely on landmark cues: they might suggest you turn at the 7-11 and make a right at the church, whereas men are more likely to navigate via depth reckoning — go east, then west, etc.”….
…The female and male brain is different and the two brains process information differently. The good news is that with some conscious effort communication can be enhanced between the brains and frustrations lowered.
In general, female brains tend to employ both sides of their brain to process information while male brains tend to rely primarily on their dominant or language side to process. As the dominant hemisphere tends to be analytic, problem solving, task oriented, detailed, and verbal this helps to explain male behavior. A female brain can also process in this manner, but the non-dominant hemisphere that can process emotion, meaning without words, empathy, tone, and disposition is also engaged by the female.
Perhaps this helps to explain why females enjoy shopping while most men view it as a chore, women vote differently than males, men and women struggle communicating with each other, and men do not understand psychotherapy. Men tend to be more isolative, less talkative, and focused on solution. Women tend to be more group oriented, more talkative, and focused on the means and not necessarily the ends. This gets played out in the U.S. at this time as women and men tend to view the same debate between candidates differently (men tend to focus on content and women both content and style)…
Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, was once associated with the feminist movement. Then he changed his views. “I don’t agree with the part of feminism that says, ‘Men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed,'” Farrell tells Maxim Lott, a senior producer of Stossel on Reason.
For example, men die five years earlier than women, have more dangerous jobs, and are often passed over for custody. Boys are two times more likely than girls to commit suicide. Boys are 29 percent less likely to get a college degree than girls.
So why do men earn more and have more influence in government and business? A big reason, Farrell argues, is that men are filling social expectations to become the family breadwinner.
“Our dads and our grandpas, they made sacrifices…to make more money, and then the feminist movement turned all of that sacrifice on the part of men against men,” Farrell says.
Both sexes struggle, but Farrell thinks the feminist movement’s single-sided focus on women’s inequalities has led to an atmosphere that harms boys. A dramatic increase in fatherless households—which Farrell believes is largely responsible for boys’ problems—goes ignored.
Study after study finds that having both a mother and father is best, at least for straight families. (Gay families may do just as well; Farrell notes that the overall evidence is inconclusive.) “Even when we control for the amount of money a father and mother earn, children with dads still do much better,” Farrell notes.
The rate of fatherless households has increased partly because of welfare programs that “tear the family apart by giving the money to mothers when fathers are absent,” Farrell argues, “and not giving money to mothers when fathers are present.”
Why would fatherless households hurt boys more than girls? “Boys tend to not have as many skills at developing friendships, at developing emotional connections,” Farrell says. “So when the family connection breaks apart, it affects them more profoundly than it does their sisters.”
Farrell says fathers are critical for several non-intuitive reasons. One is roughhousing, which teaches kids boundaries. Fathers roughhouse more than mothers, and when they do, “the father is creating a bond with the child, so the children don’t mind discipline….The discipline is the price they pay for more fun with dad.”
Many people think that mothers tend to be better parents because women are, on average, more empathetic and pay more attention to a child’s needs. But Farrell says this by itself is not enough, because “an empathetic parent does not create an empathetic child. An empathetic parent is someone who’s always thinking of the children’s needs, which teaches the children to always have his or her needs thought of.”
Requiring a child to think of others’ needs is what actually build empathy, Farrell says.
Finally, Farrell says that mothers are more likely to express their love for a child by doing things like homework for the kid. They’re more likely to engage in “helicopter parenting,” which leads to overly dependent kids.
What’s the solution to “the Boy Crisis”? Farrell says that society should offer more respect to men who focus on fathering rather than career success. He wishes there were more men in classrooms, and that schools would bring back things like recess.
The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel, his independent production company, Stossel Productions, and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
