Friday 9 November 2007

Why do women earn less than men?

According to a Guardian article on Wednesday, women graduates earn on average £1,000 less than male graduates and go into lower paid and skilled positions than men generally in the work place.


Don't we already know this? the survey may be based on new figures but it's a reaction against yet another cultural myth prevailing in society, that women and men have equal access to the work sphere.

In actual fact, despite an equal pay act, women do earn less than men on average, and in equivalent jobs. The well used argument that women gendered jobs are just generally lower paid (childcare, nursing) may well have truth to it, but does not account for the fact that women with equal qualifications and working in equal job roles still get paid less than men.

To blame is partly the fact that employees are not aware of this cultural bias, but the people in charge of the pay roles most definitely are so when are we going to do something about it?

As a culture we are fooled by a few mainstream representations of the cold hearted man hating, post feminist woman, who climbs easily up the career chain using both her brains and beauty to beat men into positions that 50 years ago would be unimaginable. This myth is solely based on the high profiles of a few really successful career women and fueled by the post feminist representation of characters such those in Sex and the City. But in reality it is much harder than that.

Women have to work twice as hard as men to get to equivalent positions, there success is subject to all kinds of pitfalls and conditions, women have to look good, be 'feminine' yet still display 'man like' qualities such as rationality and ruthlessness in the work place and they have to put up with the constant assumption that at any minute they are going to get pregnant and therefore take maternity leave and 'naturally' want to stay at home and raise the baby.

Until we as a society realise what is going on and women force the issue out into the open we are going to continue to suffer this ridiculous inequality.It's not only gender either, all sorts of prejudices still exist in the work place and society in general depending on your age, race and sexual orientation but because of the smoke screen that is post feminism, it is now considered ridiculous to claim that women don't have the same basic rights as men. The woman who claims this is considered a fool and laughed at.

What staggers me is that women are not a minority, we are the majority, so why do we not put more pressure on bosses to pay us what we deserve? The same pay as men based on skills, knowledge and experience, not gender

Wednesday 7 November 2007

Will YouTube be slammed over school shooting?

Like many people, I have become obsessed with YouTube. I think everyone agrees how amazing it is that we now have a platform which enables anyone and everyone who wishes to publish their own videos and film online for everyone else to see.

But what happens when people use this platform for their own sinister motives? I have just got home and turning on the tv seen the horrific news about yet another school shooting in Finland. The facts themselves are disturbing enough, and the images emerging of children running from the school and jumping out of windows to escape are particulalry chilling - although also depressingly familiar following news footage of the attacks on Virginia Tech earlier this year and of course the infamous Columbine cctv footage, among others.

What is even more disturbing is the fact that the shooter himself published his intentions on YouTube and used the site to pedal his warped ideologies on 'social darwinism'. Judging by the massive public discussuion after the video of the Virginia Tech shooter was released, I'm sure the issue will now be revisited in the media again, and I'm guessing YouTube will have some questions to answer.

Tuesday 6 November 2007

Abortion shock tactics

I was shocked to see the Dispatches programme about abortion 'What we need to know'. Having been of the opinion that abortion is every woman's right and having little opposing feelings about the process I watched in horror the footage of an aborted fetus being broken up and pulled from the womb. Naively perhaps, I had no idea that this was what the process entailed.

Seeing the broken up tiny feet and rib cage of a 22 week aborted fetus, truly was disturbing, and I'm sure any one would have a hard time condoning abortion after having seen those images. The gory footage didn't stop there either, seeing the younger fetus literally sucked out of the womb with a vacuum type instrument and hearing the doctor describe the process it suddenly occurred to me that this must be an awful job to have.

The programme certainly lived up to the cultural myth that abortion is inherently traumatising for the woman, which it may well be for many, but which I believe is mostly another cultural tool to restrain women and keep them within the private sphere of the home.

The whole reason women campaigned so hard for abortion rights and for contraceptives was to allow all women to take control of their bodies, to give them a choice to enter the public sphere of the work place and not be constrained to the home. I felt the woman's voice was not heard enough in the film.

What the programme also didn't cover was any discussion of what abortions were like before they were legalised, and although they touched on the subject, the more important issue of the programme I felt was the NHS abortion waiting lists. If they weren't so long then people who really needed them would be able to have abortions earlier and avoid the more disturbing invasive abortion procedure of later pregnancies.

Much was made of the fact that legally babies are aborted at 22-24 weeks when technology now allows doctors to 'save' premature babies also born at this age. Not enough was made however, of the moral and medical debates surrounding keeping babies alive this young. '50% of babies born prematurely at this age survive' we are told, and how many of those have serious health problems? how many live a 'normal' life?


Although I'm sure the programme makers are aware of these debates, and I understand that documentaries can't cover all angles of a story, I think that the woman's voice needs to be heard. This is above all else an issue for and about women and women's bodies, hearing male doctors opinions, well informed as they may be, doesn't represent the issue justly. I think the audience want to hear what women have to say, they want to hear women tell their own stories and voice their own opinions about abortion.


Did the programme change my opinion? After a couple of days reflecting on the disturbing images, I realised that no, horrible as it might be, the images were what they were designed to be, shock tactics. I still believe that abortion is every woman's right and I don't like being made to feel guilty about believing in abortion. No doubt many women watching the programme who had had abortions themselves were made to feel this way and not made to feel that they had taken control of their bodies, exercised their legal rights and made the decision that they felt was right for them.