Majorityrights Central > Category: Feminism

Thanks to Michael R for the link to this example of wonderfully wayward feminist politics in Norway.

The new coalition government in Oslo said it was considering introducing a law which would require 40% of boardroom posts to be filled by women.  Norway’s previous government drew up the law, which it threatened to apply if companies failed voluntarily to meet minimum quotas by 1 July this year.  Only a fifth of Norway’s 590 publicly listed firms comply with the quotas.

“It’s not going fast enough,” said Karita Bekkemellem, Norway’s minister for family and children.  “I don’t want to wait 20 or 30 years until sufficiently intelligent men finally appoint women to the boardrooms.”  She added: “I wish to establish, from January 1 2006, a system of sanctions which makes it possible to break up companies.”

... a spokeswoman for Ms Bekkemellem said introducing the law could be the only way to of ensuring equality in the boardroom.  “It is a question of power,” the spokeswoman said, insisting that several surveys had found that companies where both sexes were strongly represented on the board were more profitable.  “For a woman to get in a man must get out.  It is not difficult to find qualified women.”

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Alastair Nicholson was until recently the chief justice of Australia’s Family Court. Soon after he retired, he wrote a newspaper article supporting homosexual marriage. His argument was that traditional marriage, defined as an exclusive union between a man and a woman, was already defunct.

Not only was marriage no longer limited to heterosexuals, in Nicholson’s view it was no longer limited to couples either. “It is difficult to argue that a modern marriage necessarily excludes all others”, he concluded.

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The “longitudinal data researchers” at Essex University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research have claimed (PDF) that married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework.

These extraordinary and, if you are a lazy buzzard around the house like me, extraordinarily welcome findings are reported by Reuters like this:-

Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.

But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or don’t do most of the housework.

“It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men,” Taylor, a labour economist, told Reuters.

“However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores,” said the academic who teaches at the University of Essex.

He said analysis suggests there could be two explanations for the results:

A marriage might allow a husband and wife to focus their activities on tasks to which they are most suited. Traditionally, this would result in the man concentrating on paid work enabling him to increase productivity and in consequence his wages.

Taylor said another explanation could be that marriage may increase the amount of time a man has to hone work-related skills which could trigger higher wages.

Taylor and Bardasi analysed the hourly wages of 3,500 men who have been interviewed annually since 1991 as part of the British Household Panel Survey.

“We looked at all types of jobs from unskilled up to managers and professionals,” Taylor said.

Bliss.  Best excuse I’ve come across in damned nearly thirty years of married life.

The Melbourne Herald Sun this morning carried a large article headed “Dads urged to get maternal”.

They weren’t kidding when they wrote the heading. The article begins by urging men to suckle their babies (for soothing rather than feeding purposes). Why? Because an anthropologist has found a small tribe of African pygmies in which this male suckling happens.

These pygmy men have been declared “World’s Best Dads” by FatherWorld magazine because they’re near their children 47% of the time.

Now, before men rush out to buy their maternity bras a few words of warning. First of all, liberals routinely misuse these kinds of anthropological findings.

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Virginia Haussegger is becoming well-known in Australia as a feminist critic of feminism.

She already had a public profile as a TV journalist when she wrote an explosive newspaper article in 2002, “The sins of our feminist mothers”.

In this article she describes how her generation of women was brought up to believe “We could be and do whatever we pleased”. This is the basic principle of liberalism: that we should be “free” to create who we are and what we do through our own individual choices.

At first things seemed to go well. She writes of a generation of women who “crashed through barriers and carved out good, successful and even some brilliant careers.”

But the story ends unhappily. The feminist mothers forgot “to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships.”

Virginia Haussegger describes very well the incompetent attitude to relationships of women brought up in a culture of liberal individualism:

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“Women now make up over half the workforce and the proportion is growing.”

The deputy chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, Jenny Watson, mystifying her audience at the launch of the “sex & power” report, Who Runs Britain (pdf).

My first reaction to this was regret since, obviously, I don’t.  But then my second was a rush of optimism from the equally obvious fact that the possibly cute but not acute Jenny Watson never will either.

Update

Found her here but decided to leave my post as is.  Erm ... sure there are lots of ways in which she is lovely.  Being a lobbyist and human rights artiste may not be two of them, though.

Further update

Is it possible to be ungallant to a feminist?