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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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 Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 5:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Sergio Stefanuto wrote: |
To Grimda,
Myself, I just find it sad that women would rather do low-skilled, low-paid drudgery than become mothers. If there was money in mothering (if, say, the state offered women much bigger benefits � like $30,000 per annum) they�d soon change their tunes. |
I suspect many of the women doing this low-skilled work are mothers, and it is the only work they can get that allows them to work part-time so they can still be there to meet the kids at 3.30 pm when school finishes. |
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blaseblasphemener
Joined: 01 Jun 2006
Location: There's a voice, keeps on calling me, down the road, that's where I'll always be
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Sergio Stefanuto wrote: |
To Grimda,
Myself, I just find it sad that women would rather do low-skilled, low-paid drudgery than become mothers. If there was money in mothering (if, say, the state offered women much bigger benefits � like $30,000 per annum) they�d soon change their tunes. |
I suspect many of the women doing this low-skilled work are mothers, and it is the only work they can get that allows them to work part-time so they can still be there to meet the kids at 3.30 pm when school finishes. |
You suspect that eh? So you know of a lot of mothers who are home at 330 to be with their kids? I can't think of any myself. It's called daycare, and women that work use it. Women that stay at home don't have to. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
How is this measured, I wonder? I remember research showing that self-assessments of how much work a man and woman do can be very innaccurate. |
I agree with this, and with the other poster not impressed with the shift in the change.
I don't know why we put any faith in these studies. Measuring happiness? How does one go about that? I think Koveras in the slavery thread himself had a nice missive on the difficulties of measuring the feelings of slaves. Having seen some of the criteria these studies use for measuring happiness, I'm pretty suspect of this study. |
Exactly. This article is written by some tosspot using selective 'information' that he hopes will induce you to buy his new book: Find Your Strongest Life. A load of wank, frankly. |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
I suspect many of the women doing this low-skilled work are mothers, and it is the only work they can get that allows them to work part-time so they can still be there to meet the kids at 3.30 pm when school finishes. |
I've met plenty who are just unemployable, binge-drinking layabouts. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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| blaseblasphemener wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Sergio Stefanuto wrote: |
To Grimda,
Myself, I just find it sad that women would rather do low-skilled, low-paid drudgery than become mothers. If there was money in mothering (if, say, the state offered women much bigger benefits � like $30,000 per annum) they�d soon change their tunes. |
I suspect many of the women doing this low-skilled work are mothers, and it is the only work they can get that allows them to work part-time so they can still be there to meet the kids at 3.30 pm when school finishes. |
You suspect that eh? So you know of a lot of mothers who are home at 330 to be with their kids? I can't think of any myself. It's called daycare, and women that work use it. Women that stay at home don't have to. |
Darling, women on low incomes can't afford daycare. I put my kids in daycare and it costs about 100 American dollars a day. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:09 pm Post subject: |
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| Sergio Stefanuto wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
I suspect many of the women doing this low-skilled work are mothers, and it is the only work they can get that allows them to work part-time so they can still be there to meet the kids at 3.30 pm when school finishes. |
I've met plenty who are just unemployable, binge-drinking layabouts. |
And you would advocate that these unemployable binge-drinking layabouts became mothers? You're making this up as you go along, aren't you dear. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:10 pm Post subject: |
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| blaseblasphemener wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Sergio Stefanuto wrote: |
To Grimda,
Myself, I just find it sad that women would rather do low-skilled, low-paid drudgery than become mothers. If there was money in mothering (if, say, the state offered women much bigger benefits � like $30,000 per annum) they�d soon change their tunes. |
I suspect many of the women doing this low-skilled work are mothers, and it is the only work they can get that allows them to work part-time so they can still be there to meet the kids at 3.30 pm when school finishes. |
You suspect that eh? So you know of a lot of mothers who are home at 330 to be with their kids? I can't think of any myself. It's called daycare, and women that work use it. Women that stay at home don't have to. |
Yes, I know mums who have part-time jobs, say at a cafeteria, where they can get away mid-afternoon to pick up the kids. They've chosen work that fits around their domestic realities. |
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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
And you would advocate that these unemployable binge-drinking layabouts became mothers? You're making this up as you go along, aren't you dear. |
Becoming pregnant will set them on the straight and narrow.  |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:12 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
Darling, women on low incomes can't afford daycare. I put my kids in daycare and it costs about 100 American dollars a day. |
Really? Is it even worth working then?
Anyway, you should take me and cornfed up on the offer to mind your kids a couple times a week, just so they get a balanced perspective.  We won't even charge you!
Last edited by bacasper on Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:15 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:13 pm Post subject: |
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| bacasper wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
Darling, women on low incomes can't afford daycare. I put my kids in daycare and it costs about 100 American dollars a day. |
Really? Is it even worth working then? |
This is the dilemma. Many women complain it actually costs them as much, and sometimes more, to work, than if they just stayed at home. That's why so many grandmothers end up shouldering the burden of childcare. Ask my poor mum!  |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:15 pm Post subject: |
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| Sergio Stefanuto wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
And you would advocate that these unemployable binge-drinking layabouts became mothers? You're making this up as you go along, aren't you dear. |
Becoming pregnant will set them on the straight and narrow. |
I'm sure you'd be delighted to oblige them.  |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2009 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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This article is relates to this thread
Are Women Getting Sadder?
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Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.
On Slate's DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos... and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: "[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach... [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."
But it's a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's mood.
For starters, happiness is an inherently slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend, so what am I really? |
for the rest of it, click on the link above |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2009 6:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
How is this measured, I wonder? I remember research showing that self-assessments of how much work a man and woman do can be very innaccurate. |
I agree with this, and with the other poster not impressed with the shift in the change.
I don't know why we put any faith in these studies. Measuring happiness? How does one go about that? I think Koveras in the slavery thread himself had a nice missive on the difficulties of measuring the feelings of slaves. Having seen some of the criteria these studies use for measuring happiness, I'm pretty suspect of this study. |
In support of what you said:
| Quote: |
As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates," do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.
Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report -- somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine -- "contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006]." Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple. |
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22880 |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2009 6:51 pm Post subject: |
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and for mises
| mises wrote: |
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| Here's a question back at you. What's the difference between a man who doesn't want to marry and have kids and a woman who doesn't want to marry and have kids? |
Both will be less happy than they would be had they obeyed their biology. Probably.
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Hoho
| Quote: |
But let's assume the study is sound and that (white) women have become less happy relative to men since 1972. Does that mean that feminism ruined their lives?
Not according to Stevenson and Wolfers, who find that "the relative decline in women's well-being... holds for both working and stay-at-home mothers, for those married and divorced, for the old and the young, and across the education distribution" -- as well as for both mothers and the childless. If feminism were the problem, you might expect divorced women to be less happy than married ones and employed women to be less happy than stay-at-homes. As for having children, the presumed premier source of female fulfillment: They actually make women less happy.
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http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22880 |
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Kepler
Joined: 24 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 12:57 am Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
How is this measured, I wonder? I remember research showing that self-assessments of how much work a man and woman do can be very innaccurate. |
I agree with this, and with the other poster not impressed with the shift in the change.
I don't know why we put any faith in these studies. Measuring happiness? How does one go about that? I think Koveras in the slavery thread himself had a nice missive on the difficulties of measuring the feelings of slaves. Having seen some of the criteria these studies use for measuring happiness, I'm pretty suspect of this study. |
In support of what you said:
| Quote: |
As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates," do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.
Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report -- somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine -- "contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006]." Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple. |
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22880 |
What Barbara Ehrenreich refers to as "an occult statistical manipulation" is actually "an appropriate statistical technique for dealing with ordered responses (like 'very happy,' 'pretty happy,' or 'not too happy.')"
Ehrenreich mentions the change in the "not too happy" category but fails to mention the change in the "very happy" category:
"Women begin the sample 4 percentage points more likely than men to report that they are very happy, and end the sample 1 percentage point less likely." Ehrenreich appears to not fully understand what she criticizes and may have an agenda- promoting her own book about happiness.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/nickeled-and-dimed-by-barbara-ehrenreich/
I wouldn't think that suicide is necessarily an objective measure of unhappiness. Women actually attempt suicide more often but a suicide attempt by a man is more likely to succeed.
"In the U.S., women attempt suicide more often than men. But four times as many men as women die from their attempts."
http://www.myoptumhealth.com/portal/Information/item/Q_and_A:+Men+Need+Help+for+Depression?archiveChannel=Home%2FArticle&clicked=true |
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