[Adora]

Originally Posted by justaman

I'd like to see you illustrate the 'misogynistic' claim a little more, but I think it is more generally erroneous to say that the smaller number of women in politics is because of the 'uphill battle' feminism has to fight.

Well, let me put it this way: if you're a Liberal party senator and you're a female, you've got Issues.

There is, after all, a demand for a minimum number of women to be present in a party, which indicates that there are in fact too few women willing and able to be competative for political positions. That's not male dominance, that's a female lack of interest.

And yet, women who get into politics are subjected to discrimination and prejudice unheard of in regards to male politicians. This is a symptom of male-dominated political culture. Or are you telling me people really care what Beattie wears as much as they do with Vanstone?

The stark fact of the matter is that the majority of women in our country want to have children. It is undeniable that there is an overwhelmingly greater commitment to a child from the mother than the father, what with the whole pregnancy thing. It is therefore statistically less likely that women will be available to dedicate the amount of time that is required to climb the slippery pole of politics. It's not to say they can't, it's not to say they shouldn't, it's a simple fact of a slight unbalance between the female and male pools from which politicians can be drawn.

I agree with your statement of facts, but it doesn't have to be that way. The problem is, because modern female equality movements have focused primarily on the public spheres (ie- those outside the home which were predominantly male-dominated) it has ignored the private ones, and thus we still have problems like women doing just as much housework as they once did, yet also working full time, and the continuing problems of sexual and domestic violence, which by definition is hidden in the private sphere, and only dealt with in a token fashion by those in public. If society bothered to equalise the private sphere, the pressure on women to try and balance an imbalanced career and homelife would be less, and you would have more women with the time and energy to go into politics.

This is my problem with those articles you see pop up in the media every week or so that bullshit on about "Women can't have it all like they thought they could" and shit. They can't have it all because they're still doing the same work they did 50 years ago in the home, because nothing has changed there, only with an added stress and pressure from the public sphere. A symptom of this is that there's still this idea being promoted of men spending "quality time" with their children, like the kids are getting something special and out-of-the-ordniary, which has so many things wrong with it I don't know where to start. When a father nurturing his children is depicted as something "special" and not simply a normal state of family life, you know there's something wrong, both in the public and the private spheres.

How exactly? I'm not trying to be clever here, I'm legitimately curious, I don't know enough about the proposed model to say.

Currently the liberal government is in a shit with the unions over there reformations of the industrial relation reforms where they want to introduce more individual contracting, and they've already put in a loophole for the unfair-dismissal laws for companies with fewer than 100 employees. They're promoting supposedly getting more women into the part-time workplace (and individual contracts) being a good thing, but part-time work does not provide the same economic stability and independence permanent-full-time work does, because you don't get the same benefits. As I mentioned, they got rid of the women's portfolio, which, especially in the case of industrial reforms, would have been the ones pointing this out.

I am honestly not 100% clear as to how the government would get more individual contracts into the workplace, because I'm not well-informed about the wokrplace negotiation laws. I think currently there's something like legislation that says certain business have to do group-contracts (ie- the same plan for a certain group of workers) which allows these groups to then negotiate their conditions for pay and hours etc (like unions) and helps build worker solidarity. Individual contracts are usually used for casual employees and businesses that don't want their workers grouping together for workplace rights etc, since it cuts out any wider-group negotiation and means the worker has to negotiate on their own with their employer. It goes hand-in-hand with unstable casual work, especially in places like the food/retail sector where the majority of casual work is. Group contracts are mostly in the larger industrial sectors, education and factory workers, where there is more unionisation and larger economic powers who will benefit more from the requirements for group-contracts being lessened (if that's what the model proposes).

I suspect it's because of the rather significant impact it would have on small business who quite simply couldn't afford to do it. It's all very well to think about the mother's rights here, but such legislation is effectively garnering the responsibility of the mother's decision onto her employer. In big organisations, no dramas. Small business is the concern.

I question this, since the economic model being pushed by the government is geared towards big-businesses, not smaller ones, who would take a significant profit cut if they had to implement a paid-maternity-leave plan for all their female employees.

That is - arguably - inherantly sexist, but if the government has correctly identified that more children need to be produced, how else could they encourage that end?

Allow them paid maternity leave? Allow them more group/unionised contract negotiations so they can cut themselves a better deal, and thus have less hours to work, be less stressed, and have mor reproductive coitus? Lessen the cost of raising a child in general? The government is doing the same economic dance they did in England over 100 years ago: trying to trade off a happy baby-making population with the demands of economic powers. Unfortunately, the Liberal government is putting business first, and expecting the people to just do as they say for peanuts.