[smush]

Wow, parent comment and this one summing up what often turn into X000 comment flame wars that dang has to bag up and send out to the flag truck, now that is a feat of summarization.

> Overwhelmingly the feminist position that's pushed to the fore is "any lack of equal representation of females in a roles that're desirable is down to patriarchal actions and unrelated to any natural differences between the sexes; which differences are an illusion".

How do we as a society address this point? Whether one argues that the above statement has merit (me) or not, many people on both sides (and probably me in many cases) have such emotional investment in their points that attempting to soberly look at where society is and where society should be on the spectrum between 'the above statement is categorically true globally in 100% of cases' and 'the above statement is categorically false globally in 100% of cases' can feel to me like trying to do laproscopic open-heart brain surgery.

[dhshahsndeisjwn]

I'd have more sympathy for critiques of feminism (and similar policies designed to help minorities) if even basic indices of equality like pay for equal work were fixed, and there wasn't clear evidence of discrimination on grounds of gender in interviewing, police treatment etc.

[pbhjpbhj]

In the UK equal pay for equal work is a legal requirement, and many women have successfully sued for it.

"Equal pay" statistics here purposefully ignore choice of occupation. Also the equal pay stats show (or did last year, they're put out monthly) that even ignoring occupational variations women under 30 got almost the same pay as men, and indeed that men lag behind women in wages for part-time work. I strongly suspect of you discount upper management that you'd find wages very equal -- in which case it's primarily an issue of wealth gap, so not really about sexual disparities in the general population but about sexual disparities in the C-suite (still an issue if there are artificial barriers there based on sex) but it might be busy as hard to break in for someone of the wrong class as anything else.

Which might make harping on "equal pay" (which we have) move focus away from the primary factor of income disparity.

[kbutler]

If you account for education, experience, and hours worked, equal pay for equal work is already here (or the pay gap is reversed for asian women).

Education and experience bring it to 98% parity overall, with asian women getting to 102% parity. https://www.payscale.com/data/gender-pay-gap

"job market forces and gender preferences in relation to marital status and parenthood could explain almost all of the pay gap. Most of the gap is not the result of gender discrimination" https://towardsdatascience.com/is-the-difference-in-work-hou...

"Because men tend to work more hours than women, especially if they are married, and even more if they are married parents, this could explain a large portion of the pay gap."

"As years pass, men accumulate more practice and training than women. The job market pays more if the worker has more experience. In other words, the gap widens as men acquire more experience than women."

[mcv]

Exactly. While it's entirely possible and likely that some nature is involved, far too often that's taken as an excuse to actively exclude or discourage women in certain jobs, and that does make it patriarchal action holding women back. IF we can get rid of that and allow people to freely choose without getting judged by their gender (or ethnicity for that matter) on the way, and then it turns out people have different preferences, and that's totally fine. But we're not there yet.

[smush]

In your opinion, is that viewpoint shared by a plurality or majority of what we can loosely define as the feminist crowd and adherents?

Admittedly, I don't have a big world-shattering new point to add or logical argument to segue to based on the results of the question, I'm just curious.