<Until women all over the world are paid the same money per hour of work for the same job, then there will continue to be gender inequality in the workplace.>

Suzieonline.

Does that mean it doesn't matter that for example a male teacher in another country is paid less than the Australian equivalent?

Mind you if every country paid to same rate, businesses would have no incentive to go off shore for cheaper wages or production costs.

Here is a link to a very good article on research, mind you it talks specifically about medical research. But if medical research can be so flawed, then what about other soft sciences. How flawed can they be?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269

<To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously.>

Poirot, your story seems to have neglected to mention what the women did to reproduce...

Suzeonline, I note you haven't answered James's excellent question.

JamesH:"while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter."

Too true. One has only to look at the output of Australian gender "research" to see as many examples as one wishes.

Medical research at least has to stand up to rigorous scrutiny by competitive and qualified peers. The esubstitute for such rigour in gender agenda research is "you go grrrl, you rock" and reproduction of the headline in as many places as possibl;e, while the actual "research" is quietly hidden away and no one mentions any flaws. After all, "her heart's in the right place"...

"The ultimate test of a fair society is whether or not accidents of birth make a significant different to one's life chances. One way to test that proposition is to simply count. Look at the distribution of the prison population, look at the distribution of people on welfare, look at the incomes of people. Look at all the things that we can use as a metric of people's ability to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them. If these various sub-populations reflect the sort of distribution that we see in society at large then we know that society is probably as fair as it could be; at the very least we can say with some confidence that it is unlikely that accidents of birth make a significant difference.

But when we find for example that people from Aboriginal backgrounds dominate our prison populations but are a small segment of our total population then we have to ask questions about how fair our society is.

If we find that women's income remains below that of men then clearly gender still does make a difference."

Gee I wonder if anybody has ever done any research into gender differences in life expectancy, rate of imprisonment, suicide rates and any other stuff we can count which probably mean a lot more than the income received from paid employment?

Given that those issues don't seem to get on the radar for those writing about gender equality there must either be no research on those topics or the outcomes must be gender neutral.

Whilst paid income is an issue there are so many factors that can impact on it and mitigate it that it does not seem to be the key factor we should be using to look at social fairness.

Perhaps I should try Google sometime and see if there are any other countable factors which might give a better view of how the genders do.

R0bert

@Robert You will be struggling to get much joy from google. The problem is that what we choose to count or not count is basically informed by public policy. For example you will get accurate figures about the number of skilled migrants recruited into Australia. What you will not get (apart from anecdotal evidence) is the numbers of skilled migrants who were employed in their area of expertise, who are currently unemployed and who returned to their country of origin. With respect to employment statistics the problem is identical - you know the numbers of people who are unemployed but you do not know how that can be broken down in terms of qualifications - the government policy is that if you are unemployed you must get a job, any job. This leads to the absurd situation of highly qualified middle managers competing for unskilled jobs - a situation which is fair to no-one.
Social fairness is not confined to gender but gender is but one indicator.
There will be those in thread who argue that it is impossible to create a perfectly fair society - however that is not the issue. It is a bit like an athlete wanting to improve their times - no athlete believes that it is possible to run the 100 meters in one second but every athlete wants to improve on whatever the current world record is. If we take that same attitude to fairness what we would be doing is setting a benchmark where all people regardless of the circumstances of their birth had the same life chances as everyone else once we have that as our benchmark we would be testing public policy to see how close it comes to meeting that benchmark.

I think Suzieonline's comment about who things would be equal if women all over the world were paid the same rate for the same work, is very telling.

She failed to mention the other 50% odd percent of the working population, who do get paid different rates all over the world.

Now either feminism is about equality or it isn't. Such comments show that it is not!

Western women are the most privileged women in history and still western feminists must look to third world countries to show how bad it is for all women.

Basically by saying that women in the third world are oppressed etc, and taking those examples, they then extrapolate that to their own privileged existance.

I think that they must make certain rationalizations in order to justify their own beliefs, when their own experiences do not match the experiences of women who actually do live in third world countries.

The only problem is that once missionaries destroy another cultures beliefs and cultural practises, they actually make things worse, instead of better.

Just look at our own aboriginal culture or that of the eskimos, the american indian.