BAYGON, on the issues I mentioned I'd have a lot of success. Gender disparity on issues such as rates of imprisonment, life expectancy, suicide rates etc are fairly well publicised. I was being somewhat tongue in cheek.

Wages income on it's own is not a particularly good indicator of real access to money. Compared to a number of other factors it does not tell us a great deal about the important stuff.

I was having a dig at an author who appears to realise that rates of imprisonment amongst indigenous people compared to the broader population should raise some questions but who does not appear to see the need for similar questions because men are imprisoned at far higher rates than women.

Wages are a factor but I think that there are a lot of other factors which might give a more telling perspective on how the genders are travelling when it comes to equality. The same factors used to identify disadvantaged groups are a good starting place.

BTW that does make it all a feminist conspiracy or the fault of women. Rather it points to some stuff we may be doing wrong as a society.

R0bert

correction "BTW that does not make it all a feminist conspiracy or the fault of women."

I wish we had an edit facility here.

R0bert

@robert I keep forgetting that people do not identify Baygon with John T - we are both one and the same persons.
With respect to imprisonment when I said you would be struggling to get accurate figures I was speaking from experience - for example apart from gender very little detail is recorded about the prison population - I did some research on this about 15 years ago and was told that they did not record ethnic background, socio economic status or level of schooling - this may have changed but to the best of my knowledge there is a reluctance to gather such data.
This also creates a problem in assessing the reasons for disparity in incomes between females and males - all we can say with any confidence that both the average and mean incomes of males are higher to those of females.
The question that I was raising both in the article and in subsequent posts as baygon is that if our social and political institutions are weighted so as to give some people a better chance in life then those institutions are unfair and need to reformed or abolished.
I certainly did not want to create the impression that I believed that all men are advantaged by the current system.
I used to ask my students to look at the problem this way: imagine you are about to be born and you are invited to choose your gender and the sort of family you are born into and the country of your birth what would you choose. Little surprise that most chose to be born as males in a white upper middle class family in most instances they were happy to be born in Australia although some chose to the USA. If our institutions were truly just they would have argued that it really did not make much difference; it was far more important to be able to select one's skills and abilities but as one of my student observed - it much better to be a rich moron that a poor mensa member.

John thank's for clearing up the identity issue, I've probably seen it before but did not pick up on it.

You are correct that often the stats don't give the right detail to be able to do the analysis. There are so many variables around the impact of wages income and gender that for it to have any meaning a whole lot of other factors would need to come into it.

Perhaps the value of the home a person lives in (and their share of the ownership).
The discretionary spending available to a person.
The likelihood that they can partner upwards financially.
The weight we give to spending time doing something you like vs income eg someone who really want's kids and does not participate much in the paid workforce is getting something that most wage slaves don't get even if the wage slaves earn more. I don't know how you quantify that but it is significant.

My impression is that most of the remaining income disparity in our society comes down to individual choice, I'm not convinced that women currently get the short straw on that either (or that they are to blame for men's choices).

R0bert

@ Suz

You said: (about we old ranters)

"all the terrible women in the nasty feminist world out there, does not negate the fact that some women ARE still paid less than men for an equal days work, in some jobs."

Firstly, I'm not aware of jobs which pay women less than blokes. Enlighten me please.
I know that if my male son applies for a job in a hospitality role, he is paid exactly the same as a girl applicant.

My POINT.....just in case you missed it..which you appear to have,...was that the industralian unrest killed jobs for about 48000 people (of both genders) in Dagenham.

The Union was not in the slightest bit interested in 'equality of pay'....though they use such issues for their own political agenda..no.. they were more interested in destroying capitalism than getting equal pay for women.

So...after all this 'pseudo' campaigning for 'equality' we end up with the real outcome NO jobs for 48,000 people. (but there are heaps of people in Asia and Eastern Europe who now have their jobs and much lower rates of pay... woop de doo...

Can you see a 'winner' in the 48,000 jobless brits from this?

BAYGON, you make some good points about the way in which official policies can prevent valuable data being collected. It gets worse when there is an arbitrary change in the data set which makes comparisons year on year fairly meaningless, or when those in charge of designing the research that provides the data have a special interest in achieving a particular finding and so limit the data reported to that which supports their pre-determined POV, or they cherry-pick their participants. Research around aspects of gender is especially prone to these problems, but it is treated by those who want to believe it as though it is indisputable fact and to question invites vilification.

The problem is that sociology has become dominated by the "social constructionalists", who hold to the not-unreasonable view that societioes are "constructs" which can be changed purposefully. It's not a long stride from there to the view that if that's the case, then it's OK to manipulate the process by producing advocacy "research" or by demanding that all uni students muct participate in a brainwashing unit called gender studies or some equivalent.

The outcome, as we are seeing, is that negative impacts of the preferred social construction are ignored and simply not studied, since that may inhibit the process. If one mentions the negatives, as has been seen here time after time, it is met with accusations that one is a "dinosaur", out of touch, bitter over personal experiences (but of course when she complains it needs research) and so on - and of course that means one need not be heard.

As I've said before, it's simply dishonesty and that is never something to be proud of.