Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
As women moved out of the kitchen and into the workforce, the Law of Supply and Demand came into play:
Everybody’s wages dropped.
Is the War on Women a case of Friendly Fire?
If we brought in millions of new immigrants, would the numbers get better or worse?
Joe Doakes
And if most of the immigrants were female, how much worse would it get?
Yeah, everyone’s wages dropped, but our tax liability went up. Then we added the expense of having someone else raise our children while we were out earning the money to pay them. Then there is the expense of all that behavioral therapy the kids needed after being raised by people that saw them as product.
Two cars became a necessity with all the expense that entails. We spent more on processed food because mom and dad don’t want to cook after 8 hours at work.
It’s a hamster wheel.
How many girls went into low-end retail or other drudge work for every girl who became a lawyer or a journalist?
I picked up a book the other week — “The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939”. From the title it could have been written by Limbaugh, but the author is an honest-to-God Oxford don named James Carey. It seems that from the very beginning of the progressive era, intellectuals viewed the common run of humanity, especially the middle classes, as being something less than fully human, contemptible, and in need of guidance from more enlightened beings (like themselves).
swiftee: two amens to that.
Try as they might, women have yet to shatter the glass ceilings of environmental services and architectural support. That is, I’ve yet to see a woman working on a garbage truck or carrying and nailing shingles up on a roof.
And that’s based on over three decades of driving around in a couple of cities. Maybe they’re just gathering momentum before tackling those two discriminatory professions.
One would think that after 30 years of evidence showing that it’s career choices that result in the wage gap, people would figure it out, but apparently not.
But that said, I have seen women nailing down shingles. My own daughters as their Dad told them to get up on the shed and help out! And there was no wage gap–the deal was get up there and work, or get a spanking. :^)
Good for you. I wish my dad would have done that. He was quite adept at everything but showing how it’s done.
I’m sure there are examples of it somewhere; the supervisor of the crew who did my last roof was a woman. A language barrier kept me from hearing what she was telling the workers, but they sure seemed to listen.
Still, in many years driving around I’ve yet to see those two occupations integrated by gender. I couldn’t do them either, but the notable absence of women would almost imply that the two genders were different.
Still, I wonder what the weight difference is between a couple bundles of shingles and the humanoid dummy used in a firefighter’s employment test?