Our little friend over at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog has done us a favor today by summarizing the, er, evidence behind one of the manosphere’s dumbest tropes: the notion that working women don’t really work, because their jobs don’t count, or something. Here’s Mr. PMAFT:
For the most part women don’t work. They may have jobs or be stay at home mothers/wives, but in neither case are they doing real productive work for the most part. Various groups promote their own form of make work jobs for women.
Ok, Mr. Hard-working Superior Man, let’s see you provide some evidence for these assertions.
The type of make work jobs for women we typically see today are all government derived. This includes direct employment by various levels of government from local government to the federal government as 57% of government employees are women. (That percentage actually should be higher since the military and law enforcement which are necessary jobs are mostly men. The percentage of women in make work government jobs is really higher than 57%.)
FWIW, only about 8% of Americans work in government jobs, so even assuming that these jobs are useless make-work jobs, we’re only talking about a relatively small percentage of working women.
Most of these jobs by their very nature are unproductive make work jobs (which are also detrimental to the economy). It also includes quasi-governmental jobs in non-profit sectors and government mandated jobs in private industry, both of which only exist due to government action and thus are mostly unproductive make work jobs also. An example of these types of jobs are in education and health services whose employees are 76.8% women.
Um, what? How exactly do you figure that teachers and healthcare workers are doing useless work –unless you are somehow opposed to people knowing shit, and being able to read, and actually living more than a couple of decades without dying of the plague.
From this information, it is clear that women aren’t doing productive work, but instead are mostly involved in unnecessary do nothing jobs.
Dude, aside from a couple of unsourced numbers, you’ve given us precisely zero “information” so far, just opinions. The first number seems to be correct, and while doing a quick search I wasn’t able to find the source of your second number, it’s certainly the case that women make up about that percentage of workers in education and health care. But you’ve proven precisely nothing about the supposed “make work” quality of women’s jobs.
For the heck of it, let’s break down the figures a little further, just to elaborate on the kinds of work that Mr. PMAFT sees as “unproductive.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Women in the Labor Force databook for 2011 (available in pdf form here), women make up 73.8% of the “Education, training, and library occupations.” Yes, women make up an overwhelming majority (97%)of pre-school and kindergarten teachers – presumably in Mr. PMAFT’s world, these highly unmanly jobs are the most useless and make-worky of all. Women, of course, also make up substantial majorities of elementary, secondary, and special ed teachers. And they also make up nearly half (45%) of postsecondary teachers – college professors and the like. Somehow people emerge from our educational system, as flawed as it is, with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate a complex world. If the women who dominate education are all useless bimbos doing fake make-work, how exactly is anyone getting educated at all?
There are any number of legitimate criticisms that can be made of our educational system. But “the real problem is that teachers are a bunch of lazy ladies who just pretend to work” isn’t one of them.
And what of health care workers? Yes, the percentage of nurses who are women (91%) is much higher than the percentage of doctors who are women (only 32%). I can only assume that Mr. PMAFT assumes that only the doctors themselves are doing the “real work” here, even though nurses are responsible for doing many of the essential medical tasks that keep hospitals and doctors’ offices working. Women also make up the overwhelming majority of occupational, physical, respiratory and speech therapists. All useless, I guess.
And yes, the vast majority of health care aides are also women – doing unglamorous but vital work. I’m certain that Mr. PMAFT looks down on these women – and presumably, on the men who also work these jobs – but again I am hard pressed to see how any of this is “unproductive make-work.”
Natually, Mr. PMAFT doesn’t bother to do the hard work of proving or even providing a shred of evidence that any of these jobs are somehow less vital to our society than, oh, developing sexbots for bitter woman-hating men.
It’s bizarre. I’m used to nonsense from MRAs. But the “women don’t do real work” trope is so patently false, and makes so little sense, it’s hard to believe that even dogmatic numbskulls like Mr. PMAFT can actually take it seriously.
Having utterly failed to make his case about working women, he moves on to attack “traditional conservatives” and stay-at home mothers:
Tradcons will say that they have an answer to this. They will say that women shouldn’t be out working like that and instead should be in the home raising large families. This is another form of a make work job for women. In the past it was necessary for women to have a lot of kids because most of them wouldn’t reach adulthood. If you wanted three children to reach adulthood, you would have to have six children or nine children to make sure that happened. That is no longer necessary since a person’s kids are now likely to all make it to adulthood. There is no reason to have a large family except as an unproductive make work job for women.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s … not … how that works.
The tradcons try to hide this fact from everyone (including themselves) with appeals to tradition, to God/Jesus, and/or nature. That is a fallacy because if you wanted to have large families in the way tradition, God/Jesus, and/or nature intended, only some of your kids should reach adulthood. If you have nine kids, for example, and nothing else kills six of them before adulthood, then you have execute six of your kids before they reach adulthood.
Apparently when not fantasizing about sexbots and other forms of Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology, Mr. PMAFT spends a lot of time thinking about children being murdered. Who knew?
Also, it’s worth pointing out that full-time motherhood simply isn’t an option for most mothers — the overwhelming majority of whom remain in the workplace.
It’s not surprising that groups from feminists to tradcons to people in between are trying to create unproductive make work jobs for women. It’s because whenever there is an actual productive job to be done, that job is almost always best filled by a man (government regulations notwithstanding). This is why you don’t see women doing real work like rebuilding after hurricane Sandy, repairing 1700 foot tall transmission towers, HVAC, or sulfur mining.
What exactly makes HVAC more essential than healthcare? Aren’t they both essential to modern society? Is HVAC “real work,” but nursing not, simply because it involves more heavy lifting?
There isn’t any productive job out there now that women are better at than men.
Well, if “making logical arguments that are well-supported by evidence” can be considered a job, Mr. PMAFT is not exactly doing men proud here.
That said, he and his fellow dudes of the manosphere are better than almost any woman I can think of at whining about nothing.
Backing up shit that never happened with more shit that never happened.
Yo dawg I heard you like shit that never happened so I put shit that never happened in your shit that never happened.
Demarcq, I never said you (or MRAs, or men) invented the phrase. I was just pointing out that your straw feminist is more than a decade out of date. If you’re going to make fun of imaginary feminists, they could at least be imaginary feminists from this century…
ORLY?
Shit cubed?
I’ve always thought that we should measure peoples’ inherent worth by how much they could lift.
No wait, I didn’t think that, because that would be STOOOOOPID.
I’ve always thought that we should measure peoples’ inherent worth by how much they could lift.
Suck it, Hawking!
FYI everyone, NPR is the Matrix (which is hilarious, considering all the MRA obsession with blue pills and red pills).
LOL! “It’s not my fault you bitches won’t sleep with your bosses to get that promotion and corner office! Even though that’s totally the only way you could get that promotion because everyone knows all women do is whine incessantly!”
Are you talking?
STOP MAKING ME LAUGH. EVERY TIME I LAUGH IT TURNS INTO A LONG COUGHING FIT. STOP BEING FUNNY. 😉
“You hear it when you turn on your radio…”
“And if women can’t learn to put their feminine charm and their (allegedly)superior social grace and intuition to use in terms of negotiating for a raise or a promotion. Whose fault is that? Hint: Not menz.”
DKM?!
Seriously though, did you just claim that men never complain? While complaining about how much women complain?
Argenti! Have a look at the Tardis ballgown in the Head-clearing thread, it’s amazing. 🙂
I wonder if Demarq/Steele/whoever came to the conclusion that “men never complain” because everyone’s reaction to his incessant whining is to tell him to stfu. Hence, he never complains *cough*.
<A HREF="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-01-09/national/35441928_1_gender-gap-catalyst-research-women Our latest findings should help us move past arguments that women themselves are to blame for the gender gap. “Too often the focus is on ‘women’s perceived issues’,” says Shahla Aly, a vice president at Microsoft. “This notion gives false comfort – that with time women will ‘be fixed’ and advance.”
If women are asking, but are still not advancing as quickly, maybe we need to frame things differently. Perhaps it’s not that women don’t ask—but that men don’t have to.
I’m curious how Demarq (Marky Mark?) knows the women he whinges about are “card carrying feminists”. Have they shown him their official feminist card or does zie just do what most MRAs do, which is assume all women zie doesn’t like are card carrying feminists (which in most cases, is most women who dare exist).
ack – pronoun fail
What does the feminist card look like? Is it just a blank, laminated business card with the word “Feminist” written on it? Because I would totes carry one of those.
One could get a personalised credit card with FEMINIST written on it.
ostra321 — Demarcq ID’ed himself as male, just so you know (and don’t go guilting yourself over using “him”)
On topic, “I wonder if Demarq/Steele/whoever came to the conclusion that “men never complain” because everyone’s reaction to his incessant whining is to tell him to stfu. Hence, he never complains *cough*.”
Yeah, probably.
Especially if he is Mr Al, whiner extraordinaire.
Clearly he’s talking about work in the physics sense, of accellerating a given mass over a particular distance. This is why one’s salary is usually commensurate with the quantity and weight of objects one moves around each year.
I know I’m… a couple of years late to this convo, but I just saw some guy on another forum use that “men almost never whine” nonsense just this week.
I can’t help but want to show him links to incel/mgtow/mra sites & show him the literal hundreds of examples per day of men complaining & histrionically whinging…