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 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.”
You know, I was just looking at a baby elephant with ducklings, and then I see this shit. Here guys, have some cute — http://twitter.com/CuteEmergency/status/293612451507879936/photo/1 — those probably aren’t ducklings, but birds aren’t exactly my speciality (and who cares, they iz cute!)
Hello delurkers!
As for the actual topic, can the MRA fool of the day explain whether hospital pharmacy interns, the ones who fill orders before you go and die of um…
Gross things ahead, put down food and avert eyes as needed —
… vaginal MRSA — does this job count as real work or make work? Ad does this depend on the biology of my not-an-ex? (Yes that was an actual case, but that’s all I know about it cuz confidentially, and ze’s out of hospital work now and *thrilled* because really, who wants to deal with that)
Oh wait…healthcare. So make work? Or only when the emergency case is female? (Well, or otherwise possessed of a vagina, I was too “wtf MRSA where!?!” to think to ask)
/ gross things
The stories you hear when friends with hospital staff! That this is make work is serious news to me, I’d have sworn that the lab job ze has now was less dirty work, ergo why ze’s thrilled to be “working in the drug mines”. Or is that a real job because it might somehow involve mining and humor is beyond the MRM?
I’m so confused!
Ok, that got long, I really shouldn’t discuss anything related to the not-an-ex or I just start babbling, sorry guys! (Insomnia doesn’t help either, so g’night!)
Wait, they think women had their husbands do all the work? Maybe they should take that up with Mary Shelley? Because I’m pretty sure both her and Mr. Shelley were authors in their own rights…
Utterly randomly, the weekend she conceived of Frankenstein’s Monster, Polidori wrote The Vampyre, Twilight needs to live up to that standard, not make this shit. (That’s a pretty interesting in study in the potential consequences for writing off any claims by the mad as being just a figment of their illness actually [and Jesus Christ my mother’s right, no wonder I like Criminal Minds, I sound like Reid!])
*is now really going to bed* meep, sorry for all the off topic things
*whoosh*
Was that an Argenti flying past?
Strewth and other Oz slang, I’m sorry your not-an-ex had to get that (and there, of all places!) but glad to hear ze is out of hospital.
I wonder how Pfft the Wonder Dog* thinks all those manly men doing real manly productive work would get the education to do it (because hello, he’s not talking unskilled labour here) without the education he dismisses as make-work? Or is he of the Owly variety of idiot who believes that the manly man brain is so super-smart it can do all this stuff without wasting time learning stuff like reading and maths and so on?
Teh stupid, it burns …
*yeah I know dogs are way smarter but I used to have a manager we called Ivan the Wonder Dog and I kinda like the name.
According to my Family Resources textbook, “Family Life Now” by Kelly J. Welch, if housewives and stay-at-home moms were paid to do what they do, they would make over $100,000 a year. I can’t remember the exact number, and I sold back the book. That’s right. All you housewives are working a six-figure job for free.
Basically, this guy believes in girl germs infecting anything they touch and making it no longer valuable.
And back in the days where women made clothing as part of their normal household labour, clearly men should have been out working naked (apart from their boots, but no socks!). Clearly, all that household clothing making was make-work and men could have totally not frozen outside without it.
The could have just worn their sabre-tooth tiger suits year around because those suits would never have worn out, or rotted, or been too hot or too damaged to wear.
And they could have just survived on meat year around too because gathering was woman make-work. So when the large protein sources migrated off for the season, or the hunt failed, the manly thing would have been to eat cockroaches and spiders.
@Shaennon- Thanks for that takedown of how careers become less valued as they become feminized! I’m entering into a rapidly feminizing career (the rabbinate), and there’s been TONS of research on the gender pay gap in Jewish communal institutions. GAH.
Also, both of my parents are teachers. Is my dad’s work super manly and important, and my mom’s work just glorified babysitting? And before you answer, please note that my mom is the one who is staying at school until 10 at night some nights writing lesson plans and doing accreditation on new programs to teach kids with learning disabilities to read.
Kiwi girl – and sometimes even the boots would be trivialised because women were involved, so the fellers would have to go barefoot. Notice that both master and mistress of this shoe-making business are involved in the process …
I wonder if he thinks the university studies that are majority female here (biology, for example) are pointless because there’s too much vagina flaunting around.
I’m also just wondering if he realizes how much gender binary affects employment – both from the side of people applying and the people hiring.
Like do these guys know that the standards for what sex is preferred for any given line of work shift with time, often going back and forth?
Or that there never was a time when women were strictly homemakers and child bearers, because for most of our history it was not an option to “just” be a home staying mother?
Does the value of any given job depend on what genitalia the majority of the workers have? Because to me, his logic seems to strongly suggest this. Not too long ago women were deemed unfit to teach, after all.
I’d like for Idiotface to tell my mum her job as a nurse’s assistant was make-work (she’s a teeny tiny woman and she used to do heavy lifting in her job – mostly people twice her size and weight). Hell, tell ME to my face my job is make-work (I work damn hard for my wages, which are decent, I must admit, but then I happen to work for an awesome company).
I recently was in the hospital for abdominal surgery, and the crap the nurses (predominately female, I might add) had to put up with (not from me because I’m a decent human being and appreciate the work they do and they really did work hard to make me comfortable and happy) and the work they had to do, definitely wasn’t make-work at all. My surgeon was also a woman. She was fantastic and anyone who tells me a man could have done it better because he was a man would get told off like he was never told off before.
Ps. In teh olden times, your genitalia had little bearing on wether or not caring for the kid was your responsibility or not. Who ever was handy at the time took care of the kid when it cried, otherwise needed care or was just doing something suicidal.
Pretty much, Catfish. He’s the nth degree of what Shaenon described before – the way jobs pay less and are less respected the more they are identified as “women’s work”. This chump seems to think nothing women do is work at all. I daresay that’d be news to all the millions of women who do the primary agricultural work around the world. That was another irksome thing about his garbage (though it’s way down the list of his stupidities) – his totally US/Western/first world view of what work people in general do.
Numbskull.
My work helps prevent accidents (thus potentially saves lives) by providing up to date navigation information. I wonder if that’s unimportant or make-work because it’s infested with my girl cooties?
(Actually the only thing that’s probably infested at work is my keyboard, but that’s another matter.)
@Shaenon – would you mind if I link to your comment on the Twitter feed I’m helping to run? It’s @feministwiep, for your reference. Many thanks
This all reminds me of a male flatmate I had years ago (he who said, “not being sexist or anything, but the way to solve the unemployment problem is to get all women out of the workforce”). We had managed to get onto the topic of whose job was more important. Mine was a medical laboratory technologist, his was the parts person at a car sales yard. I said “I save lives, like through cross-matching blood for surgery.” He said “If I give a mechanic the wrong part a person could die.” He was being serious.
I did not last long as his flatmate.
He has obviously not seen the statistics of how much of the entire world’s work women do – and how much they earn for their troubles in comparison to men. Priviledge-blind indeed.
He’d likely just shake the statistics off as feminazi propaganda.
@Kiwi- Your former flatmate sounds like a right idiot.
You know if 57% of employees are women in a field, that means 43% of employees are male, right? And (assuming a cis-centric method of record-keeping) 51% of people are women… It’s not exactly OHEHMGEE-worthy stuff.
There was a study just done at Yale* where
…but I guess they just didn’t want to make busywork for the female-coded applicant or pay her for flailing her arms, amirite? Even though ‘she’ was of the exact same educational and experience standard as… OH DAMMIT.
(*Link to newspaper report not actual study, but it should be easy to find if people have access to journals, author and journal edition are cited. If I did it I’m sure it would just be busy-work.)
What is this, I can’t even.
Not to devalue male workers, but when I broke my wrist back in November, I saw the male ER doctor all of three minutes. He didn’t even touch me. He took down my info and told me what the female X-ray tech had already told me about twenty minutes prior. It was the female nurse who actually handled my complete care–including the vital splinting of my arm.
Just sayin’, I don’t think it was the ladies doing the make-work in this scenario.
Ugh! I know right? Every time I go see my female doctor all she does is diagnose my ailment and write me a prescription. Pfft! Women!
@ Kiwi Girl
“He said “If I give a mechanic the wrong part a person could die.””
Probably based on experience:
Mechanic “If you send me the wrong part one more time I swear I will freaking kill you.”
This reminds me of when I mentioned that MRAs have serious mom issues, but it sounds like this one is still holding a grudge against his mother for making sure he was able to exist to write this crap, his nurse for giving him that mean old ouchy shot, and his teachers for reprimanding him on his poor writing. It takes a special kind of willfulness to hold on to that kind of immaturity, extra special indeed!
Good grief, I bet he also thinks that other female dominated areas like say waiting on customers at a restaurant is make work (despite which there would be no food since he probably could not be bothered to get up and get it) nor in my own area of the law where the clerks are all female and increasingly so are the lawyers. Yet he would be the first to complain if the staff did not have all of the paperwork ready, they did not spend a half hour on the phone explaining everything to him and then did not give the judge his file in a timely manner.
Much less when he took his disgruntled ass over to the local eatery to then take out his bad attitude on the woman who just had to deal with a family of five who could not make up their mind, the church group that did not tip her despite her running back and forth with a zillion requests and the two year old who threw some food on her.
Tulgey, ‘Fedorakin’ is genius. I remember a thread on a different forum a couple of years ago where we imagined the right-wing keyboard warriors to be a sort of polar opposite race to the Mentats in Dune – they were the Stupidest Beings In The Universe. Somebody even wrote a new version of the Mentat mantra for them:
It is by ignorance alone that I set my mouth in motion
It is by the dust of Cheeto that the thoughts become slow
The keys acquire stains
The stains become smelly
It is by ignorance alone that I set my mouth in motion
@princess
Yikes! Are you a waitress? If so I’m so sorry you have to deal with stuff like that. I’ve never been one, but I can’t imagine how rough it is to do that while being on your feet all day.