You have a very broken idea (just like most equality supporters) about what gender equality is. It should be equal opportunity not equal outcome. The usual argument about having a parliament divided 50/50 is that the population is divided roughly 50/50. But everybody always somehow forgets that even women voters aren't voting for women...
There is a difference between "parliament should always be 50/50" and "parliament has always (until today) skewed in one direction, that suggests a problem".
So if women voters for the most part have thought that a man is the better candidate there is a problem? Maybe i am just misunderstanding and basing my opinion on how election system works in my country which i think is gender equal - anyone can make a party (obviously you have to be a citizen) as long as you get the minimum amount of party members, you can run in the election and the election itself is based on votes per party + votes for each candidate within that party (+/- system). So if a party gets 5 seats in the parliament, the top most "upvoted" candidates get those seats.
There is nothing preventing women from creating a party which would appease to the women voters and running for election. That is equality. But nowadays it is easier to blame sexism and whatnot if the result is something you don't like (women not voting for the women centric party).
If, in a vacuum, men and women are equally viable as members of parliament, then a 50/50 split in parliament should be about the average in a society without bias on the part of the system or the people.
Except the world does not operate in only black and white - not everybody goes to vote, not everybody becomes a politician, not everybody has the same political views etc. This can be seen in gender equality/feminist "success" countries where when people are more or less free to choose, the distribution is not 50/50 and some groups of people simply don't want to agree to the fact that men and women can be different and want different things in life.
Right, it should be "men and women were equally likely to seek political office and ..." to account for the sexes seeming to prefer different occupations.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that in my comment. In any case, I think there are many countries where the lower number of women in parliament is largely/partially due to systemic/social factors, as opposed to biological factors.
But I don’t know if any broad studies that would indicate that being a politician is something that suits males on some biological level. If anything politics seems like a very female endeavor(stereotypically), since you’re organizing a community and highly communicating complex sociological ideals with peers of various education levels.
That’s extremely wishy washy. Women may be more socially oriented than men when it comes to work, for example, but the nature of this social disposition and inclination is different than the kind that is fruitful in politics. The motive and the end matter.
What I am missing is, that women do actually get pregnant at times. And when they do, they have rightfully other things on their mind.
Now becoming a father is surely something that got my mind busy, too, but I was still able to give 100% the whole time, without vomitting on the toilet, or having to spend the day in bed. Meaning I could have done a political campaign in that time, but my female partner physically could have not.
So demanding 50/50 either requires even more effort from the women, meaning giving birth to children AND pursue 100% (political) career - or it means, lowering standards because of sex? Meaning voting for someone because of sex and not because of competence. (sounds like sexism, no?)
In other words, it is complicated and I try to for myself to just focus on the competence on the person and not their gender (or race,...).
There is something called "opportunity cost". Small kids demand more, than just physical inconvenience during pregnancy. And small kids usually require their mother. (I cannot breast feed for example and mother milk is still quite superior to the industrial milk, but it is about more than that)
So all of it is time and energy, that could not be invested into a political career.
Have a baby and be out of the game for some time and you will have to struggle to catch up to those, who did not have a baby.
So I find it not surprising, that we do not have 50/50 for leadership positions, as they usually require intense effort, before reaching that. (networking, building skills, reputation ...)
So should we find ways, to support women more, to not "just be mothers", but also going other ways? Absolutely. But maybe we can start with not degrading women who are "just mothers" - as being a good mum, can be a 24h job.
So I think the idea that women should be mothers AND have successful careers (and preferable both at once), just creates uncecessary pressure and stress. And the 50/50 idea creates that, in my opinion.
I’m not sure we can separate the two so cleanly, equality of opportunity comes along with all of a child’s inputs and external forces as they’re growing. Equality of opportunity would absolutely mean not funneling them in one direction or another based on something like their sex, gender, or whatever.
A 50/50 outcome might be a flawed measurement of something like equality of opportunity if it were the only measurement we were using, but I don’t think it is the only thing we see.
When we consider the not too distant past, this ratio indicates we are probably doing something correctly to mitigate those external forces that used to funnel people into (or away from) certain professions purely because of something like which sex they were born.
We don’t yet have an agreed upon and accurate way to measure whether or not we are indeed offering equality of opportunity, and until we do, seeing something like this at least indicates we’re much closer than we were 20, 30, or 100 years ago.
> equality of opportunity comes along with all of a child’s inputs and external forces as they’re growing
This reminds me of the nature vs nurture debates.
"A child’s inputs and external forces" is a funny name to call their parents and teachers. Because it's mostly their parents and teachers that are going to have an influence in their education. And if they do spend more time, money and effort to boost the education of their children, then it's a family and teacher merit. It's not unfair when their children do better.
An even more important part which is not mentioned is that opportunity is in large part the result of hard work. A child makes her own opportunities by intelligence, passion and effort.
> "A child’s inputs and external forces" is a funny name to call their parents and teachers.
I used that phrase specifically because a person has far more influences in their life than just their parents or teachers. The things that limit or expand a person’s choices are far more than just teachers or family life. Are parents and teacher influences important? Sure. But they are absolutely not the only influences. And neither of those are what I mean when I say external forces.
I’m not sure I have a lot of disagreement with most of the other things you say. Of course a person should make their own opportunities from hard work, passion, and effort.
However (to tie this to the comment I initially replied to) if equality of opportunity is the goal, then we need to make sure we reward actual hard work, not only family multipliers. It’s not like we have to look far to see how many lazy rich kids have countless opportunities and how many hard working poor people struggle yet are incredibly limited in their choices.
Maximizing individual agency means we give everyone who wants to pursue an educational field or career a fair shot at it regardless of who their family is or regardless of what sex they’re born as or their race or whatever. Do they have to work hard? Of course.
Should a lazy rich kid whose family “…spend more time, money and effort to boost the education of their children…” have more opportunities because of “family merit” than the poor kid who worked their ass off and did well? Absolutely not. And the reverse is true as well.
We should be maximizing individual agency and maximizing individual choice and neither of those means we have to abandon hard work. But it does mean we have to knock down arbitrary barriers.
Equal opportunity would mean there would be a roughly 50/50 split. Unless one subscribes to some notion that biology would make women desire the positions (politics, management, ...) less.
Which didn't stop men to dominate all positions of power for centuries. Women weren't even allowed to vote, something that changed very recently in some countries (looking at you, Swiss). So yeah, equality here means to have the same right to he overspreading that men have.
Its not the first female majority parliament in the world, its the first female majority parliament in europe.
Right now, there are five countries where there is a female majority: Rwanda(61%), Cuba(53%), Nicaragua(51%), Mexico(50%) and United Arabian Emirates(50%).
Cuba is an undemocratic authoritarian one-party state where elections are not free and no opposition is permitted - but hey, they have women in parliament so let's celebrate them?
It is the opposite, gender equality needs to have been achieved decades ago to get equal gender ratios in leadership positions since it takes so long to build a career and rise to the top. What we see today mirrors the social dynamics that existed in the 80's. What we will see in the coming decades will be the social dynamics of the 90's, then 00's to the 10's etc.
“ The 33 women elected to Alþingi for the coming four years amount to 52 percent of members, making Iceland the first country in Europe to have a female majority in parliament. Five other countries in the world share this accolade: Rwanda (61 percent), Cuba (53 percent), Nicaragua (51 percent), and Mexico and the United Arab Emirates (50 percent).”
https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/26/katrin-to-lead-female-ma...
I always found it hard to understand what are the ultimate generic principles that drive people with the attitude that you demonstrate (which is even more surprising given that so many people around me also do that).
Why should the percentage of women in parliament be related in any way to their percentage in the population? Why don't we apply the same reasoning to all the other properties which can be used to divide people into groups (e.g. right- vs. left-handed people, gamers vs. book readers, engineers vs. lawyers, meat-eaters vs. vegans). When there's literally an infinity of possibilities, what makes women vs. men so special?
Why does your notion of representation require sharing traits with the elected person? If I took part in the elections (and I believe they were honest and not rigged in any way) then the person who wins represents me in the sense that this person is now legally authorized to make the decisions (limited by the laws) on my behalf.
As some others noted here, since women voted on elections before, how can one claim the elected people did not represent them?
You seem to be having a different idea of representation. What is it and why should it matter? This is an honest question, not trolling or anything.
A different way to look at this question is to ask why do certain roles have lopsided gender distributions. For, e.g. nursing, it can be explained by gender preferences towards human care roles.
For leadership, there's elephant-in-the-room factors that explains higher rates of male leaders, i.e. perception of competence in patriarchal societies, the relationship between boys clubs and wealth as prerequisite for successful political campaigning, etc.
If we were to control for these factors, we should be able to see representation rates that are 50/50 (or at least rates that are explainable by "morally acceptable" factors, e.g. rate of interest by gender)
That's as realistic as all men voting for a all-female parliament. The point is that realistically, given a spectrum of political stances, a purely meritocratic system would statistically be more likely to yield a distribution with similar representation rates as the base population rather than a lopsided distribution.
Unequal representation doesn't automatically imply something non-meritocratic is happening.
There could be self-selection due to preferences, which explains why almost all nurses are women and why almost all garbage truck drivers are men. There could also be selection based on differences in behavior or competence: almost all prisoners are men because almost all of the most aggressive people in society are men. The justice system isn't sexist, the lopsided gender balance is a consequence of group-level differences in criminality due to genes and culture.
In the case of societal leadership, sexism has clearly played a role in shaping representation historically, but that conclusion definitely doesn't follow from the mere observation of unequal distribution, it follows from an understanding of the details of why that distribution is lopsided.
Nah, you're projecting a black-and-white world view. Statistically speaking, some men would vote for men, some would vote for women, some women would vote for men and some would vote for women, and overall it would average out to around half and half representation.
To be clear, it's not bad for an all-men or all-women parliament to exist in a high functioning democracy. It's statistically possible, just highly unlikely. If we look at a large timescale and there's a lopsided distribution the majority of time, or highly lopsided spikes for short periods of time, that sugggests that there are confounding factors that don't align with democratic idealism.
Surely - if this is your goal - then its better to focus on encouraging a 50:50 representative choice of candidates and humbly accept whoever the men and women then chose to represent them?
You may just get a large group of competent women who are very popular to all. I can't see why it would be better for as you say - democratic idealism - to then decry that some incompetent men candidates didn't get the gig.
Sure, in theory that could happen, but then you'd be able to explain the lopsidedness somehow. For, e.g. professions like nursing, the lopsidedness can be satisfactorily explained by gender preferences wrt roles related to human care.
The elephant in the room with regards to leadership is all the stuff related to perception of competence in patriarchal societies, boys clubs (recall that in many places, wealth is somewhat of a prerequisite for campaigning successfully), etc.
No. Women generally prefer male politicians. This suggests that sex matters. Men are traditionally heads of their households in virtually every society in history. The monarchy is an extension of the notion of fatherhood, hence the patriarchy. This is a natural role for men, and women generally sense this subconsciously. You need something potent to get women to work against this perception. Father wounds and the ideologies of resentment that exploit them are good bet.
If men and women were identical, then you should expect matriarchies to account for half of all societies. But you don’t which means a difference must exist, and clearly a meaningful one. The notion that there is some adversarial misogyny behind patriarchy is preposterous. God bless the patriarchy!
You don't think that bring physically stronger has any role in this on a historical basis? That it's just due to some vague "masculine nature" that women "subconsciously sense?"
It's fine to point out problems with specific comments but your claims about "prevalance" and "dominance" are incorrect. They're far from prevalent or dominant, and it's a cognitive bias which causes people to arrive at such conclusions: they/you/all of us drastically over-weight the comments we dislike, which leads to false feelings of generality ("prevalence").
The truth is that HN gets all sorts of comments because it's an open public forum. It's divided in the same way that the public at large is divided—all over the world, because this is a highly international site. We can't expect immunity from bad or extreme comments under such conditions. All we can hope for is that most of those get downvoted, flagged, or otherwise moderated—which is precisely what happened to the comment you were reacting to upthread.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Feel free to browse the comments, particularly the fine fellow trying to convince us all that women were never actually that oppressed to begin with, and then tell me if you think the tone on here is being fair to women.
