fuzzy post-it

dontneedfeminism:

Do you know who makes up the majority of the electorate in America? Yeah, that’d be women. That means *gasp* WOMEN have more of the voting power. It’s been this way since the 1964 election.

according to this breakdown of the 2012 election (via exit polling), women are 53% of voters. which is technically a majority, but barely more than the 51% of women in the general population. i don’t believe the difference is statistically significant but please don’t make me do the math

tl;dr men and women vote in roughly equal proportion

it’s kinda weird to use voter turnout as a measure of political influence when the viable presidential nominees are always men. though bravo to Belva Ann Lockwood for getting on the ballot in 6 states all the way back in 1884 damn

Women also control about 80% of consumer wealth, and 51.3% of the private wealth. That means that WOMEN have more of the spending power.

i wish there were a source here other than a book (which only covers part of it) because i’m very interested in the breakdown of these numbers

i did find this nielsen (lol) article which suggests to me that women do more of the spending because they buy most of the groceries and clothing and have more of a vested interest in a lot of appliances. which doesn’t sound quite so much like “control” unless the choice between jif and skippy is critically important to your life. (it is to mine!)

the same article suggests that the spending done by men is increasing steadily, which is cool if it means regular shopping is becoming less of a Wife Thing

your article says women own half of the stock held in the US, but keep in mind that the richest 10% own 80% of all stock, making this statistic of dubious value to most women. the census does show that the wealthiest women own a sizable share of wealth (albeit still less than men, and in fewer numbers), but that still just suggests that oprah is rich, which is not a surprise. also none of these things are very clear about how joint ownership affects the numbers; mitt romney’s wife probably owns half of his assets, even though we probably wouldn’t think to name her as the millionaire, and i can’t actually remember her name.

Women are also favored in every form of the legal system (custody cases, shorter prison sentences for the same crime, etc). That means that WOMEN have more of the legal power.

the very article you link about custody cases suggests that determination of the “primary caregiver” often determines custody, and the standard 50s-era nuclear family structure is a stay-at-home mother with a working father. i don’t know if 80% of families still look like that, but surely it plays a big part.

not to say that custody battles always end fairly, but there is more room for nuance than you are giving here. also it’s encouraging that the first paragraph of the article says mothers are explicitly not to be automatically given custody.

i’m surprised that i couldn’t find much of anyone talking about that prison gap article (except MRAs celebrating its existence), so i had to go read the damn thing. the article contains some fascinating insights that were lost in the huffpo article, such as: 30% of the gender gap in drug cases is due to differences in drug quantity; 20% of the gap is non-drug cases is due to severity in crime (which is hard to measure and may be much less or much more); black men are penalized significantly more harshly than anyone else, whereas black women appear to be treated about the same as non-black women. most of the article is actually about mitigating factors like these, yet the only number in the conclusion is the 63%. there’s no prosaic conclusion about how much of the gap isn’t explained by the bulk of the paper. kind of disappointing.

also unusual: it appears that there are four times as many men in the sample as women, but this is never commented upon. and it’s not that three quarters of women get off without a sentence, because this data supposedly tracks all the way back to initial arrest records or something. hmm.

Women also make up the majority of college graduates, and the school system favors girls from KINDERGARTEN. This means that WOMEN have more of the educational power.

CNN suggests that this growing difference is because men decide they’ve racked up too much debt and drop out to start working, whereas women who’ve dropped out generally have lower starting salaries and are dissuaded from doing the same.

which i suppose makes sense, since the huge spike in tuition costs did start just before 1985, the year your article cites as the first year women outnumbered men as graduates.

your first huffpo article says “that girls are truly only outperforming boys in ‘non-cognitive approaches to learning’ – defined as attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization – leading to better grades from teachers.”

i’m not sure what i should conclude from this. schools “favor girls” because they grade on whether you can pay attention and work on your own, not just by how you do on standardized tests? is the argument that boys shouldn’t need to be flexible or organized to succeed? i don’t get it. these sound like pretty reasonable criteria to me, and if boys are having trouble with them, that is an alarming problem.

that same CNN article quotes: “our research shows that boys’ underperformance in school has more to do with society’s norms about masculinity … Boys involved in extracurricular cultural activities such as music, art, drama, and foreign languages report higher levels of school engagement and get better grades than other boys. But these activities are often denigrated as un-masculine. … Boys have less understanding than girls about how their future success in college and work is directly linked to their academic effort in middle school and high school.”

surprise, gender stereotyping ruins everything

There isn’t a “pay gap” there is an EARNINGS gap. It’s nobody’s fault if women decide to work less.Here’s two sources.

well, not so fast. you might as well say “it’s nobody’s fault if men decide to commit crime more often”. why do women decide to work less?

i basically hate the whole wage gap argument since both sides have piles of studies that claim to control for every imaginable variable and still come out with wildly contradictory results. fucking statistics.

it sure looks like something funny is going on, and i wish we could figure out what that something is and address it instead of arguing about who to blame for it.