[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by Dante Hicks

I think there's some kind of UN statement against conscripting women (that may be crap though) and I think Israel is the only country that does. That doesn't lessen your point however.

In fact, it does the exact opposite. Finland conscripts women on voluntary basis (men are forced to, or face 6 months in jail). The issue here could be easily fixed: obligatory military service extended for women, so that the default type of service would be civil service unless otherwise asked for. This would solve both equality issues on the subject and also lessen the problems of lack of workers in the certain care areas. Of course, nobody will ever agree to such a proposition, and even suggesting it would probably break hell.

I could make you a long list of things where men are discriminated in the local society, but that's really pointless.

How can you say for certain that a woman will never suggest a quota for men in certain fields? It might be unlikely now, but that's probably because they're not needed.

So you're saying that the fact that, for consistently almost ten years now, of accepted university freshmen well more than 60% have been women there's no need for a quota yet? If you say on left hand that PLCs need a 40% women quota (notice: 40%), shouldn't you, on the other hand, be saying that universities should have a 40% male quota? Now, what's different with universities is that the amount of women accepted is on a steady rise (in where I study, the department is closer to 80% women, the whole university at large 67%), the amount of women on the boards and positions is also on steady rise. Some would interpret this as a sign of that on the long run, there's really no need for a quota as the process has been fixing the problem for a while now.

It's stupid to assume that it would change over a decade, obviously without legistlative enforcing.

Gender imbalances in terms of employment are not (by themselves) evidence of discrimination. The majority of people who clean offices seem to be women, for example, but that does not mean men are being excluded by unfair selection policies.

And a good share of the wage gap can be explained with this. In Finland, some unions claims that the alleged 20% wage gap between the genders is bullshit, and the realistic intraprofessional gap is more like 5-7%. Again, lots of janitors are men, and if you've been following it close to the business, you probably know how difficult it is to get a job as a secretary or assistant without boobs (manboobs don't count here). Again, a lot of women still end up on the low wage business (nurses, teachers), while a lot of men end up on the higher end (business, engineering). You can hardly blame either gender for this, and the fact that the first are public jobs and have certain perks (quaranteed work, nigh impossible to get sacked) should seriously be taken into consideration when comparing to higher wages on private sector (where you'll actually need to work to get work, and where you can never be certain if you'll still have work at the firm in a year).

Affirmative action / quotas can be argued against on a range of levels (I am personally against them as a rule) but they still need to be understood in the context they exist in.

But placing a quota for a number such as 40% of the PLC board members have to be female is in fact discriminating men. Because, it forces people's hands very heavily. Strikingly, simultaneously there has not been a 40% men quota introduced in Norway (again, the matriarchal order), for which there is no reason to, and which just underpins that in such cases the quota isn't about equality, but about discriminating men - why shoulnd't there be a quota to quarantee 40% men too, when it's already forced there'll be 40% women. It's not only adverse selection it leads to.

There is absolutely no excuse to allow a quota if the direct follow-up of the quota is that the things turn inside out - replacing discriminating one gender with discriminating other takes us nowhere, except towards a matriarchal order.