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.
If you want to read more of this type of crap from another MRA jackass, check out http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/
This guy also fancies himself an economist somehow, despite the fact that he is neither trained as an economist nor has ever been employed as an economist. It’s fascinating to read his posts because he is such a self-important narcissistic woman-hater. Maybe I should continue to analyze his posts and then start my own claiming I’m a psychologist. Nah, I’m too self-aware for that.
“Today at my place of work, a female employee came in sick(even though she could’ve called in sick) and spent the whole day complaining about how she deserved extra pay for showing up at work despite being sick and how men are such babies when they’re sick and how she’s such a “strong independent woman”….etc etc. Every single time I read a whiny post or hear somebody whine I will be sure to post about it here on manboobz.”
Yes, all right, son. I’ve worked in an office for a long time, and twerps like you were always rating other people’s behavior and performance — when they should have been watching their own ass. If your above statement is anything close to being true, I’m sure the “extra pay” she allegedly asked for was to compensate for working with such an entitled little boy who thinks women shouldn’t talk unless they’re saying something sweet and nice — or stroking someone’s ego. We’re not all your mommy. Your little fee-fees aren’t always at the top of our priority list.
Oh man, this troll is probably my mom’s ex-coworker; he spent his last 2 weeks dicking around on YouTube, whining that no one was paying attention to him, bragging about his new job, and telling terrible jokes. My mom about had it up to here with that douche by the time he actually left!
Oh, that’s the gloss they put on it? It was a male field while it was still new and important, but then the men left when all the work was done!
Oh, are we doing anecdotes as evidence of how the world is totally the same as all of our experiences? Well, here’s mine. Both men and women whine, pretty equally from my experience, about work, but it is men who whine who are seen as bold truthtellers offering valid criticism. Women who whine are seen as whiny, useless bitches.
Example 1: recently, my department at my main job had a huge day long meeting event to discuss a lot of big picture stuff with all of the different people involved, from the high ups, down to the little no-names like me. Throughout the day, there were a number of breakout sessions people could go to (it’s a big department) and talk about different things. One of the sessions I went to was a focus on how the organization could provide a culture that promoted a healthy work/life balance and one of my male coworkers was very vocal in stating that he felt he almost couldn’t have a work/life balance because of the demands of his job. There was a lot of nodding and thoughtful discussion and acceptance of this by pretty much everyone in the session, including the session leader who was very high up and also a man.
Example 2: a few months ago, my second job had a big day long meeting to discuss a lot of things from procedure to retention. Our director lead all of the discussions, including the discussion on retention, where he was the one who brought up raises. Before, no one had seemed to be willing to offer any suggestions for retention, even though it was apparently a concern for our board of directors. But once he brought up pay raises and possibly benefits (currently, our male director is the only one on staff who receives any benefits like health insurance or dental insurance) and so our largely female staff was like “well, yeah, raises would be kinda nice”. Our director went from 0 to 60 in about 5 seconds, from joking about raises to yelling at everyone that we didn’t appreciate him enough, that nobody who worked there should ever expect to drive a porsche and if we didn’t think we were getting paid what we were worth we could go somewhere else. He then admonished us to think about what we’d said and that he’d be back in a half hour. Most people who talked spent most of that 30 minutes engaging in apologia for his extremely unprofessional behavior, saying that we were just so mean, that he’d had a stressful day trying to put together the agenda for us, that again, no one should ever expect to drive a porsche working there, that we didn’t do it for the money, we did it for the patrons didn’t we? (because any “noble” professions ought to be done for zero pay! And those professions often coincide with largely pink collar work! Surprise!) The meeting ended very bitterly with no promise of raises and no apparent promise of our director giving up his highly unprofessional manner and 6 months later 5 more people have quit.
So in my experience, men and women whine, but when men do it’s seen as valid criticism. When women whine they’re useless whiney bitches. But you don’t have to take my word for it, here’s an actual citation of real life examples of how women actually typically “whine” less in order to try to get more out of their workplaces and those who do “whine” are often seen as horrible, ungrateful bitches http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133599768/ask-for-a-raise-most-women-hesitate
Ah, that bullshit. I’ve been in that meeting before. Did he back that beyond tired mess up by saying there’s people lined up around the block to do your job?
It’s so cute when they think work should be done for free. And by cute I mean puke-inducing.
There’s a cultural idea that women should be humble and accept what they have and not be ambitious. I know because I moonlight in Christian blogging circles. In September, this list of top Christian blogs got released, compiled by a coupla white guys, and made up, coincidentally I’m sure, of 93% white guys. There were three women out of 200 bloggers.
This ruffled a few feathers (and kicked Slacktivist’s sarcasm mode into high gear).
The coupla white guys replied with this terrible, terrible, condescending, defensive post. Among all the “don’t blame the algorithm” and “women are just being emotional,” there’s this bit:
So the argument that how influential your blog is doesn’t matter is being put forth by guys who just compiled a list of most influential blogs. They then go on to accuse women bloggers of jealousy and warn them against selfish ambition. Celebrating achievements is great when it’s a list of dudes, but when women want to know why they aren’t being celebrated, suddenly it’s all about humility.
Rachel Held Evans, of course, was having none of it. (And she made the list.)
So far today at work has been full of both whining and legitimate complaints! Let me tell you of them as I NOM THIS DELICIOUS TORTELLINI WITH MY MOUTH GOMGZZ.
First, my office-mate whined about how she could barely see straight, since the Reactine she had taken the night before had kept her awake and panicked all night. Silly woman! A man wouldn’t take drugs for allergies! Or feel panic! Or need sleep!
Later, about 2 hours into the work day, Boyfriend spoke bravely and frankly about how he had done a full day’s work already and how they need to give one of his dual-roles to a new employee*. Much nodding and serious looks! He is only one man! Who among us would be willing to stand up for our needs as he has done! (Certainly not a woman, who, if she works too much and is paid too little, has only herself to blame for not asserting herself.)
Later still, one of my managers expressed his legitimate complaint about his admin assistant (me!) who had not ordered lunch for his meeting until the last minute. Did she not know that any lunch meeting she is invited to, she is expected to order lunch for? He has important-high level man things to do! It is so hard to find good ladyhelp these days!**
Then the admin assistant (still me) whined about how she wasn’t even on the invite list, so how was she to know about the meeting? Passing the buck! Can’t she just do her job? I mean, admin isn’t even hard! Which we know, because women do it!
Wow, women really are whiny.
*they really should though, no sarcasm
**my boss wasn’t actually being a sexist douche, this is just what a sexist douchetroll would think.
I can’t whine at work because I’m home with the flu! I’m letting the sisterhood of whining whiners down, I know.
Oh no, flu 🙁 🙁 feel better soon. I would email you some chicken soup if I could.
Cloudiah, you whiner, getting the flu just so you can stay home. (I myself quit my job to devote myself to full-time whining.)
I would do full-time whining but let’s be real, as a woman I can only do part-time or make-work whining at best.
Yes, only men are serious enough to really devote themselves to whining. (Wait. Hang on.)
Enh, I wouldn’t WANT to be a full-time whiner. (Though I suppose in my current economic position, ANY job I could do would be a good one.) I mean, I’d feel so gross afterward!
Then again, the webcomic I’m working on is apparently (according to the totally unbiased opinion of a friend) is very good at taking the horrible things that happen and making them funny. That’s kind of like anti-whining, right?
I wouldn’t be good at whining unless I was having an emotional meltdown and that I Do Not Want.
TMI ranting? Yep. Very good at that. 😀
@helkell
Yep. How’d you guess? Oh, right, because every douchebag says that. What really grinds my gears too is that he was all “we are a for profit entity!” which, no, we’re not. We’re a public library. Which, I should indicate that since we’re in a state that cut funding for public libraries, no, a lot of us really CAN’T just go find work somewhere else, at least not in a public library, which is why I work primarily as a secretary to pay the bills. The fact that as many people have left in the 4 years I’ve worked there when we’re in a recession and in a hugely competitive field (particularly in this area thanks to the grad school pumping out 100+ MLIS grads every year) to me speaks VOLUMES about how not good of a work environment it is.
😛
I heart public librarians. “For profit” — pffffffffft!
@Shadow – didn’t even intend that, LOL!
@cloudiah – right, he amended that slip later in his rant, but for a minute I was like “for profit? Really? The board will be VERY interested to hear how you turn a profit here and where exactly that profit goes to.” What’s really sad to me too is how immediately he turned to “if you don’t like it, go somewhere else” which, fucking duh, is NOT what retention looks like.
Demarcq: Are you stupid, or just dishonest?
You made a statement of fact, viz. Most people are unhappy. You made this in the form of a comment that unhappy people whine.
Ergo, with 300 million people in the US, there ought to be (per your model) a lot more people actively whining than the evidence (Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Deadjournal) show evidence of.
Your model, observeable fact contrardicts it.
To this you offer “refutation” in the form of one, unsubstantiated piece of anecdote. It’s insignificant as evidence (and may be confirmation bias, if it’s not made up to meet needs).
Furthermore, I said it before and I’ll say it again: HAPPY PEOPLE DO WHINE!
Nobody is happy all the time at every single moment in their life. And it wasn’t me who put forth the abysmally stupid idea that “happy people don’t whine”
Really?
B>Protip: happy people don’t whine incessantly.
Clearly there aren’t many happy people here on manboobz nor (many)happy women in society by that logic.
You may think this is a denial of the proposition, but actually it’s adopting it, to attempt it’s refutation by saying, “all you people whine, so you must be admitting you aren’t happy”.
Which isn’t what was said, what was said was a reply to this drivel: That being said, at least men have the integrity not to whine and complain about having to work. Even if it means being a homemaker.
Seems like modern housewives think they should get to sit on their pretty lil’ tooshies; or perhaps be out boinking some cad who is clearly not marriage material but studly enough for a dirty fling. But instead they’re stuck being soccer moms and housekeepers.
And yes I know there are married working mothers who also complain about having to pitch in to take care of the kiddos. Even when daddy puts in at least 50% of the effort.
That’s the funny thing about contemporary American women; particularly those from generations X and Y: They are more liberated, independent, and powerful than women from any generation and yet they act like they’re miserable all the time!
So you posited that women whine, and men don’t. That women are whining because they can’t be happy with what they’ve got.
That’s one the biggest reasons this blog exists and people like you post here: MRAs are engaging in socially unacceptable behavior as it is considered a faux pas for men to whine and complain
No. It’s not that we think men complaining is a faux pas. We think them complaining they can’t rape, and abuse, and underpay, and otherwise deny women equal rights is fucking immoral.
Also, criticizing women’s behavior does not equate with misogyny. The idea that if you aren’t inherently sympathetic to all people who are female simply because they are female you’re a misogynist is a false dichotomy.
The idea that we are doing that is just plain false.
Again, are you stupid, or just dishonest?
Again, this is your idea of logic so overwhelming it will be banned to shelter our precious little egos?
Please.
Because IRL, unlike the Matrix, male whining is actually not all that common whereas female whining is incessant!
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. 😉
shitthatneverhappened.txt
Maybe I just have an irrational hatred of outdated buzzwords, but I can’t get over how MRAs are so fixated on the phrase “strong, independent woman” despite being the only ones who’ve used that phrase in the last fifteen years.
Well emilygoddess, I’ve heard quite a few card carrying feminists and single, 30something professionals describe themselves that way. Stop acting like yours truly invented it. I’ll tell ya 1 think sweetheart, that phrase was definitely not coined by a man! Let alone an MRA. I never even heard the acronym MRA until I found this blog. Hmmmm……
Backing up shit that never happened with more shit that never happened.