The Rights Of Man

HARMAN AND BAIRD USE THE RECESSION TO ATTACK MEN

There was a TUC report last week (link) that said that female employment was being hit harder by the recession as many women work in the retail sector. The TUC said there had been a 2.3% increase in the redundancy rate for women even though the redundancy rate for men is just 6% and the female redundancy rate is just under 4% (graph).

The report received lots of media coverage, because It as about women, of course -(BBC) and had politicians rushing around to highlight their concern.

The way that this report though is being used by the anti-male feminists to inject some fervour about the fact that the redundancy rate is due to discrimination against women is an outrage and a clear abuse (link). There is absolutely nothing that Hariett Harman and Vera Baird won't use to attack men, make up stories about female discrimination with not one shred of evidence and generally show that their view of equality is to be free to attack men.

Whenever there is a recession, it hits both men and women whether they are in employment or not. A husband losing his job affects his wife and the wildcat strikes (link) show the effects on men. Also there tends to be a sharp increase in male suicide rates and depression when there is a recession as some men who are redundant feel worthless if they cannot provide for their family.

There is, of course, a queue to condemn the strikers but would it be the same if the strikes were being led by women. It is unlikely, very unlikely.

THE CITY UNDER SCRUTINY BY EQUALITIES COMMISION OVER GENDER PAY GAP AND HARASSMENT

The CEHR (Commission for Equalities and Human Rights) which formed when the EOC and other bodies merged last year is pulling up the drains on the City and the construction industry.

It is conducting a witch-hunt inquiry (link) into both, based on the gender pay gap in the City and harassment.

They quote that the gender pay gap in the City is 41% and the arguments about why the Gender Pay Gap is a myth has been outlined regularly on this site (link). However, the gap in the City is starker because, generally speaking, the hours that people work in the City are extreme and many women will choose not to take part especially when they want to bring up a family.

Often, they have a husband/male partner in the City and they are the ones that work ridiculous hours (often earning serious money for their family to boot).

On the harassment front, perhaps the Commission may turn its attention to this survey that showed that 85% of men had said they had been sexually harassed at work (link).

Sorry...Commission... I...cannot...hear...you...

EQUALITIES BILL OPENS UP NEW FRONT IN ATTACK ON MEN

As was feared, in the streamlined package of Bills announced in Wednesday's Queen's Speech, Harriet Harman's Equalities Bill made the cut. This will be a disaster for men and will embed anti-male legislation into the establishment even if the Government loses the next Election.

The Bill (link) which has been covered here before (link) will lump all discrimination legislation together into one Act.

However, it introduces new areas.

(1) Positive Action - If a man and a woman have equal skill, an employer who believes one gender is under-represented will be able to give a woman, for example, the job if the employer thinks they have too many men. Because of the criticism made when the Bill was announced that this would lead to widespread discrimination against men, the Government have laughably tried to say that it will allow head-teachers to pick male teaching applicants above female ones.

As stated in the previous post about this Bill (see above), this is a laughable sop.

We know, because of the previous tone of Harman et al and the rest of the anti-male establishment when the Bill wasfirst announced. It will be used to systematically discriminate against men when used in practice. This will especially be the case when it comes to the public sector and will be used to allow women to bypass men in the management chain because that is where they are supposedly under-represented.

With so many boys leaving school uneducated, the last thing they need is another brick wall placed in front of them solely because of their gender. Trevor Phillips (Equalities Commission Chairman) previously raised this as an issue (link) as did academic Dr Catherine Hakim (link).

(2) Gender Pay Gap/Equal Pay Audits - As covered extensively (link), this is a ruse to attack men, nothing more, nothing less. There is no proof that a woman doing the same job, with the same talent, same experience, making the same profit at the same company gets paid less than a man. Research shows that single women get paid more than single men!

(3) Extension of All Women Short lists/Gender Lists For The Next Five Elections - Parliament is holding a Speakers Conference on how to get more women into Parliament and the political parties will continue to be allowed to 'positively discriminate' against men in selecting candidates for elections (link). This is a clear denial of the political franchise to men and stops men from representing their community and country solely on the basis of the gender.

This Bill is another nail in the coffin of the British male.

It will go through because too many Parliamentarians are supine in the face of the anti-male feminist onslaught to dare resist it.

Daily Mail debate

ASPIRE VENTURE CAPITAL FUND DISCRIMINATES AGAINST MALE ENTREPRENEURS

Is there no area in life that this Government hasn't either ignored men or introduced measures that are deliberately anti-men.

In these times, small businesses and entrepreneurs find it difficult to get credit and access capital.

So to help, the Government has launched a fund called Aspire which is Government run £25m venture capital fund for women (link). £12.5m is bona fide taxpayers money which is matched by private sector investment. As reported in the Telegraph (link), the Government has realised that such a blatant anti-male fund would be discriminatory so men can apply but only if they meet other criteria such as having 30% women on their board. It would be good to have this tested in court as it is discriminatory come what may.

The bias is clear. It gives people cheaper access to taxpayer funded venture capital on the sole basis that they are women. This is discrimination and will give a woman a competitive advantage against a man especially if looking to start up similar enterprises.

Also with capital so tight, not allowing people equal access to it, shows how gender politics is more important than fairness.

Llastly, there is no evidence that women need a special venture capital fund because they cannot obtain access elsewhere. For example women run 700,000 companies; they now sit on 78 of the FTSE-100's boardrooms; they are more female millionaires than male millionaire's between 18-44 (47,000 women / 38,000 men. But hey, lets not put facts in the way of a bit of anti-male discrimination.

SWISS AIR SHOW MEN IN NEGATIVE LIGHT by GRAHAM SLIGHT*

 Recently I have been a regular traveller on Swiss Air.

I am seemingly one of the few to watch the safety videos but got increasingly annoyed with the Swiss Air one for its glaringly obvious anti-male bias.

It features a cartoon family of man, mother and daughter who skips merrily down the massively wide aisles of a similarly cartoon aircraft. In this video it is the man who is seen sneaking off to the aircraft toilet for a smoke and setting off the alarm despite there now being more women smokers than men in the UK.

To make matters worse, there is an evacuation of the aircraft and the man is shown abandoning the concept of women and children first and has exited the aircraft on his own leaving his wife to carry the daughter down the escape slide to safety. It is only the women who is shown caring about the child’s safety by putting on the child’s oxygen mask and life jacket. When they evacuate into the water once again the daughter is carried by the mother down the slide.

 Then to cap it all the mother is shown in one aisle seat with her daughter in the middle seat with the man set apart from them as though on the other side of the aisle as if not part of the family.

*name changed to protect privacy of author

ACADEMIC SAYS MEN WILL SUFFER UNDER HARMAN'S EQUALITY BILL

As the recession starts to bite and employment becomes tougher, Harriet Harman will be cementing the plans for her single Equality Bill which will allow employers to discriminate against men when it comes to recruiting people to the workforce.

Following on from comments made by Trevor Phillips who declared that such discrimination will provide extra support for the BNP because it will be the white-working class that will be discriminated against, an academic has also hit out at the plans.

Writing for Public Policy Review and covered here (Telegraph), Dr Catherine Hakim, believes that men will become the new victims of sex discrimination if workplace equality laws are strengthened further.

The Telegraph article quotes that she accuses 'feminists of peddling "myths" about the extra hours put in by women and their thwarted career ambitions to justify "futile and perverse" attempts to help them balance work and family life'.

This is important article for a number of reasons:-

Firstly, it is a woman defending men and the Fawcett Society et al cannot deal with it. She understands that the motivation behind this equality law is not equality but a way of legally discriminating against men. If a man is discriminated against it is his wife/aprtner, mother, sister and daughters who will also be discriminated aagainst.

Secondly, it ignores the facts that women are now more great inroads into what would traditionally be termed male occupations. This investigation in the Telegraphshows for example that 61% of trainee GPs are women, 63% of students enrolled into the law society are women and 79% of vets are women. What more help do women need.

Thirdly, Marxist anti-male feminists such as Harriet Harman are hell-bent on destroying men. When boys are seven years behind girls at school (the outcome of which is highlighted in the above), it is men that need help. If this carries on then Harman and her friends will have succeeded.

BBC BIAS ON GENDER PAY GAP

In a post last week, the issue about BBC bias was on the issue of domestic violence (see previous post). This time it is on the gender pay gap.

In October, a publication by J R Shackleton which received a high volume of coverage (see previous post) highlighted that the gender pay gap was largely about lifestyle choice and not discrimination.

Yet when the latest figures are published, the BBC just stick to their left-wing politically correct assumptions and publish a story (link) that does not mention the alternative arguments. Instead, it gives a free platform to anti-male organisations such as the Fawcett Society and the Commission of Equality and Human Rights to berate men and companies.

The BBC are biased, what other reasonable conclusion can you draw?

GENDER PAY GAP HYSTERIA DESTROYED

For a decade at least now, the anti-male establishment hasused the gender pay gap in the UK to beat men and employers up - its all allegedly about discrimination in the workplace. Anyone who disagreed with campaigns from the anti-male Fawcett Society, the Labour Government, the TUC and others were shouted down. The media, always looking for an easy anti-male story, lapped it up (link).

At least in the USA they had Warren Farrell (link) highlighting how the gender pay gap is down to lifestyle choices, the family unit and how the gap does not apply across the board. There had been no equivalent in the UK, until now.

In a ground breaking monograph for the Institute of Economic Affairs, J.R. Shackleton, Professor of Economics at the University of East London, comprehensively destroys the arguments of the politically correct.

In "Should We Mind the Gap?" (link), he finds that 'the free choice of men and women - as well as earlier educational choices and the choices they make regarding their domestic arrangements - are at the heart of differences in pay levels'. He states the 'it isn't appreciated what a crude statistical artfefact the gender pay gap is.'

It's conclusion is that the gender pay gap is not down to discrimination. It is down to women making a choice to bring up families and also that inequality exists within groups. He also highlights huge anomalies in the blanket 17% gap that the anti-male groups use to beat men and employers up.

For instance, he shows how that although married men earn more than married women, singlewomen, as they get older, earn more than single men. Or that, Black Caribbean women earn more than their male equivalent.

In addition, as more women choose to work in the public sector and pay in that sphere is generally lower than in the private sector, it is small wonder that there is a gap.

His clear insightful study, using official figures, completely and utterly destroys the arguments put forward by the Fawcett Society, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights and the anti-male hystericspurveyed by Harriett Harman (she will be introducing more legislation soon on it). They even try and describe hisresearch as 'unhelpful', they know they have been found out.

Whenever, you hear them making the point, ask them whether they have read this research?.

Articles on the monograph can be here (Sunday Times, Sunday Times 2, Telegraph  and Daily Mail with debate).

Recent articles on the site can also be found here (1, 2,3 )

GENDER PAY GAP - GOVERNMENT'S OWN STATISTICS EXPLAIN AWAY HARMAN'S MYTHS

The Gender Pay Gap and the reasons behind it is one of the biggest anti-male myths going.

When Harriet Harman put forward draft legislation in June (link) explaining that there was a need for employers to be able to discriminate between men and women, she explained it was due to the Gender Pay Gap.

This has been used for decades now as a stick to beat men and also to allow all sorts of discrimination against them such as women-only courses, "positive" action training and used as a general anti-male propaganda tool. There has never been any systematic proof that a women is paid less than a man when she is doing the same job as a man at the same company with the same skill, experience and adding the same economic value

The Office of National Statistics this year produced clear statistics (link) and an explanation on why the gap exists and also that in some cases the gap is in favour of women.

The graph below from the Economic & Labour Market Review Vol 2 / No 4 / April 2008 shows that there is no discernible pay gap between men and women working full-time (median) until a women reaches her mid 30's (7% gap) and then accelerates to around 19% when a woman is in her mid forties.

Why is this? Well of course, as the research states, it is because many many women change their priorities in life (of which they are comfortable with) to bring up a family. It means there are then either working part-time, limited full-time hours or not working at all. In addition, when a mother is home, the father tends to work harder not only because there is one income coming in but also to make sure the household remains financially viable and he is also committed to bringing in as much money as possible for his and her children.

With such career breaks, when a woman goes back to work full-time, she has less work experience which will have an impact on her salary.

The report also shows that women working part-time in large companies earn more than men. In addition, in the health, social care and secretarial occupations, part-time women also earn more than part-time men. In the first two categories, the gap is 22.% in favour of women.

It is interesting to note that the oft-quoted 17% gap between men and women is based on a mean average rather than the more sensible median average which takes out the distortions of the very high earners. If the median is used, the figure is just over 13%.

What the research states is that the reason for the gap is because of :-

• Differences in educational levels and work experience;
• More part-time women workers;
• Travel patterns as men travel further to work than women;
• Occupational segregation because many female occupations are paid less than male ones.

It also clearly states that "part of the gender pay gap is the result of RATIONAL choices made by the different sexes and not all due to discrimination."

What this means is that whenever the Government or others wheel out the Gender Pay Gap as a reason for more positive discrimination for women and therefore negative discrimination for men, use this Government report.

It nails the myths of those who want to use Gender Pay Gap as another stick to beat men with.

SAVE THE MALES - NEW BOOK ON THE PLIGHT OF MEN IN TODAY'S WORLD

American columnist Kathleen Parker's book "Save The Males" has now been published in the UK (link). It was also the subject of a two-page article in the Daily Mail by columnist Amanda Platell (link).

After decades of subjugation, there is an ever increasing library of books on the plight of men. As ever, a well recommended read.

UPDATE 4th AUGUST - Book with debate featured in The Sunday Times (link)