First of all, there's no reason to say that if women don't make up 50% of a given workforce in any sector, that doesn't mean that there is necessarily discrimination, yet the proponents of this kind of system always presume that if women don't make up 50% of the workforce then that's proof of discrimination. Just because 50% of sumo wrestlers who aren't women obviously means that somewhere there's some employer who's a male chauvinist pig and won't let any women become sumo wrestlers. I'm exaggerating to make a point, but that's the thinking behind the feminist movement and equal opportunities.
It doesn't mean discrimination. It can mean differences in desire and ability. Let's cover desire first. Women, as a group, don't desire necessarily to do the same kind of things that men do, they don't like the same kind of jobs necessarily. It's true that on average, and we are talking about averages here, that there are many women who are very much into a career, but on average there's more women per 1000 of the population that doesn't consider their career important to them than there are men, and that's a statistically provable point. So the fact that there's less woman corporate directors, if we look at it in terms of desire, points not necessarily to some kind of discrimination, but to the fact that firstly women don't have the same desire to sacrifice everything to get to the top - rightly or wrongly - but more importantly there's a different desire pattern between women and men.
The second thing is ability. Men and women have different abilities, different strengths, different weaknesses. Anybody who isn't aware of that is either entirely stupid, or very unobservant, or has never read anything on the subject at all. Men and women are different, and feminists accept that at some levels and reject it at others, but the Bible and Christianity has always taught that men and women are different and whatever we have as legislation has to accept that, that men and women are different - that men are good at certain things that women aren't, and women are good at certain things that men aren't. Why this seems to be so difficult an argument to grasp I don't know.
The Bible says that women are not allowed to teach or have authority over men, ( 1 Tim 2) , this area of leadership is something that the Bible says that women shouldn't do. Interestingly , there are scientific tests that establish that show that womenon average score higher than men in every test except for two -- one is what they call aggressional leadership, and the second is abstract thinking : the kind of things that are needed for teaching and deciding on right from wrong. Men are better at that kind of thinking, deciding on rights and wrongs in abstract terms, women often can't be bothered with that kind of thing. Very often I'll be talking to a couple and when I'm dealing with the concrete matters of the relationship ... matters of finance and suchlike, it's the woman that is really listening and the man starts drifting off, but when we come to talk about some more abstract or distant doctrinal issue the woman switches off and the man tunes in. There's definitely certain things that men are better at and women are worse at, in the same way that there's certain things that women are better at and men are worse at.
These are factors that determine what jobs people should do. In leadership jobs and positions of power and authority, it's men that desire such positions more than women do, and it's men that have the ability to do these things more than women do. That should not be something that is offensive or something that is a shocker or difficult to say, that's just reality, and reality is something we need to face! The fact that 50% of corporate directors aren't women is something about which we should commend, that's the way it should be. Leadership is a male thing, leadership is something that men are supposed to do NOT because they are intrinsically better, but because God's given them a particular role. Women have equally important things to do other than leading, but we're made to complement each other. Adam was made first, 1 Tim 2 says, then Eve. And it wasn't Adam who was deceived, it was Eve. Adam was even more culpable in that he sinned wilfully. Certainly, Adam was formed first and then Eve was made as a helper to him, so women are better at support tasks, backup tasks, things that the man who's leading couldn't do without. If a woman sees her role in terms of backup and support, it's been my experience that she'll be far happier and more secure in life, and I've counted dozens of women who have been forced into some kind of leadership role and not been happy. They've been told by the feminist media and feminism everywhere that they're supposed to be leaders, they're supposed to be the same as men, what feminists would call equality, and they're miserable because they've been forced by the thinking of society into something that they haven't got the ability or desire to do.
I'm not saying that there are no successful women who are leaders, but I would say, the Bible leaves us no other conclusion than to say, that those who are successful as leaders who are women, would have been more successful under God if they had stuck to the calling that God actually had for them rather than a calling that it would be morally wrong for them to be in. So having an equal opportunities commission to ensure that women are in positions of management is not only misguided, it's actually wrong. Also, that the state should intervene in business is wrong in itself. That the state should approach companies like Barclays Bank and IBM to tell them who they should employ is not an area that God allows the state to get involved in. You don't find David or the Israelite state getting involved in that kind of thing, and it's not just because that was in ancient time -- Babylon did, Egypt did, Greece did -- but in Israel the state stayed out of business and that's the model we've got to follow.
It is very common to see people on the TV, in books and in other media, even people you meet, saying there are only so many women MP, or so many candidates, in this society and you different campaigns about this "problem". The world would be a happier place if people would just settle down and get on with the work instead of bothering about who's equal with who. We've talked about comparing ourselves among ourselves being a bad thing,
If there is genuine discrimination, perhaps a business manager interviews two people for a job, one of them's a woman and one of them's a man and the job isn't in leadership, perhaps marketing. The manager decides that the woman's more qualified for the job, has better qualifications and more experience but he's going to take the man instead. That's discrimination, but there's already an economic mechanism to sort that out. Let's consider what happens in that situation. The woman, being a talented and resourceful woman , goes to the next company and applies for a job with them. They see her values, maybe having already rejected the other man, but in this case the competitor to the first company does hire her. If this is happening consistently, the second company is going to have all the talented people and it's going to be far more successful, and the first company's going to go out of business.
Now, businesses know this, and so they're not likely to discriminate against women on a regular basis. It's easy in a climate of unemployment to say that you're being discriminated against because you didn't get a job, but it's very difficult to prove, and I certainly know from my point of view that if I was hiring somebody it wouldn't cross my mind not to employ a woman if she was better for the job, purely from a business point of view. Any businessman worth his salt thinks the same way. I don't think, empirically, there's as much discrimination of this kind for the simple reason that nobody's going to discriminate when they're actually going to lose money from doing so.. That's not to say it never happens - of course it does - but the best way around it is to ensure a free, competitive market. If a company does discriminate, then it's going to go out of business before long.
Anyway, equal opportunities isn't in the interests of women. The kind of equal opportunities regulations I'm talking about is based on quotas. It stipulates that you need to have so many percent of your employees who are women. This is a very bad thing. It's not in the interests of women for two reasons. Firstly, it distorts the labour market. Now, what I mean by that is that the company must have, say, 40% of its managers women. So it's going into the market and instead of just judging people on commercial grounds in terms of who's going to do the job best, it's saying "who can do the job best, but we're looking for women?" So that means that, in those kind of circumstances, they're going to take on women who they wouldn't otherwise have taken on, or certainly they may do, because they need to get their number of women up. This means they're taking women who are not as qualified as the people they would otherwise have taken just because they have to achieve a quota, just because they have to have more women on their staff.
Now, the effect on other women is that, whatever that business is, it's not being as productive as it was before. It's not got as skilled people as it had before, the people it's got are not as qualified as they were before, because they've been taking on inferior people just to get their numbers up. So, if this happens right across the board to different kinds of companies and you're getting all the companies not being as productive, that means the companies aren't producing goods as cheaply as before, they're not able to pay their staff more, and generally incomes aren't rising as fast. If incomes aren't rising as fast, the people that hurts most are the poor, who need the income most. By distorting the labour market, like any distortion of the labour market, the effect of feminism and equal opportunities regulations is to make everybody poorer, especially poor people who can't afford these kinds of effects. Around 70% of the poor today are single parents, mostly female single parents, so this kind of equal opportunities regulations hurts the very people it's supposed to be helping, namely women. So the whole thing needs to be scrapped and a free market needs to be established in labour again which is in the interests of women and is in the interests of us all.
The whole thing is that the biblical concept of men and women working together in harmony has been totally abandoned and in practice is disappearing, because feminism seems to have declared a war between the sexes, whereas in a free market the two work together, side-by-side, without any kind of equal opportunities legislation. All equal opportunities legislation creates is resentment because the man that's missed out on a job because a woman who's less qualified than him was needed to get a quota up then starts to think, out of bitterness, "if I'm in a position of authority then I'm going to discriminate against women, because I was discriminated against myself." So this regulation may actually cause discrimination, as opposed to trying to avoid it. Government regulation to try and make less sexual inequality less is totally misguided and will never work. It can never work because of the mechanisms that we're discussing today.
Furthermore, another reason it's not in the interests of women is that anyone who's hired to reach a quota will have this suspicion hanging over them of whether they got the job to make up the numbers, or through actual ability. So it doesn't even help the women who get the jobs, because they might have been hired anyway.
Now, equal opportunities regulation is another example of Marxism by the back door.The secular evil, the Marxist ideology which saw the deaths of hundreds and thousands of innocent people in Russia earlier this century, and the terrible tyranny which followed has now disappeared there. As an ideology it's dead. Everybody in eastern Europe realises that, it's just that there seem to be people in the west that still hold on to these ideas.
The new Marxists tend to analyse women as the new exploited class, but there's vast situational differences between women. There's women who are very rich, there's women who are very poor. You can't analyse women as a group, women all have different aspirations, abilities and desires from each other.
Another issue about the feminists is that they're not pro-women in general, because they seem to despise the women who have looked at feminism and rejected it, so feminist women will despise anti-feminist women, of whom there are many. This is particularly bad, because anti-feminist women tend to be highly moral people, who have rejected it from a moral perspective..< P> Feminists don't seem to be concerned with promoting the interests of that kind of women, for some reason. One of these women who has rejected feminism said simply this:
"Women are genetically predisposed to other priorities than top managerial jobs, with the total commitment involved."
So there's a question on the issue of desire, saying that the total commitment of top managerial jobs is one thing that most women don't want to do. God didn't design women to do that kind of thing, the bible teaches us, it shouldn't come as a surprise to us.
So-called anti-discrimination laws by equal opportunities type organisations, which includes women's groups in local councils, attack the very important institutions of freedom of contract and the ruling of law, on which our freedom and prosperity depend. What they're proposing is that we shouldn't have the freedom to go to somebody and contract or hire them. It's proposing that wherever there is a contract, the government needs to be involved, the government needs to approve it. There's no freedom in that. It's a very very dangerous precedent to set.
There are biological differences between men and women,It may seem obvious but some feminists don't seem to notice. Biological differences necessitate women looking after young children, making them more likely to withdraw from the work-force and giving employers more risk that they will leave and hence more costs This is why 22 year old women are sometimes paid less in a particular job paid less than 22 year old man Not always , of course, but in industires where it takes a long time to train people it makes sense. In the same way it seems to make sense for many electronic factories to employ mostly women. If these paterns create that most productive economy then that's in all our interest..
If the first employer is statutarily obligued to employ at the same wage rent then he will employ only men and otherwise suitable women who would have worked for less would not get any jobs. The equal opportunities people, in making laws like that, make sure that women don't get jobs that they would otherwise have got. This is the central problem of regulations, they tend to do the opposite of what they're trying to do. Restricting price differences, differences in wages, only makes women unemployable in these situations..
It's interesting that statistics show that women with uninterrupted histories of employment earn as much as men. In fact, the figures show slightly more. The main reason why women earn less than men in society is because they've left work to go and have kids, and that's obviously acceptable. That's a penalty that's worth paying to have kids. But single women who have never married statistically end up with as much as men do, because they've been in the workplace all the time, without breaks There's not the need for an equal opportunities regulatory organisation. It does a lot of harm, and it should be done away with.
Sex differences in the number of years spent with an employer explains the four percent of the wage gap. That's not very much. Characteristics of jobs chosen by women, because of skills and domestic burdens explain about 85%. So, what these statistics show is that the main reason that men earn more than women is because women choose jobs to fit in with their domestic responsibilities, which is obviously a good thing. The second reason is that women choose jobs in line with the skills that they've got, and the skills that they've got are not as valuable to society, on average, as the skills that the average man has. Part of that is because some women train themselves to be wives and mothers, rather than training themselves to have marketable economic skills. I believe that women should train themselves to have marketable economic skills, because I believe in Proverbs 31 which says that the wife of noble character is a business-woman. She's not an employer, but she's a business-woman. She contracts out work. However investing in non marketable household skills is not a loss to society even if it doesn't show up on the income figures
Equality is not an important issue. Inequality is not a problem . If someone makes more effort, inequality is just. If you have two people and one person works twice as hard as the other, they deserve more. Inequality is perfectly acceptable
Similarly, if God requires somebody, because of the destiny he has for them, to control more resources to fulfill the purpose he has for them, then that is inequality but it's just. We need to submit to God's inscrutable plan.
Men are different, men are more dominant. They're supposed to be dominant. That can be bad in some circumstances, but it's something that industry values. Industries that value female traits employ more women, industries that value male traits employ more men. There's nothing fair or unfair about that. You find that the electronics industry tends to employ women. In other words assembly line electronics tends to discriminate in favour of women, because they find that women somehow have more nimble fingers and are able to do the electronics better. I have heard several employers saying that. There are reasons why women are intrinsically better at assembling electronic components than men are, so women are employed more.
It's perfectly reasonable to have that kind of discrimination in society. That's not the reason for a male union to start up, saying that this is discrimination and there must be something done about it. What's better for industry is better for us, because industry feeds us and clothes us, it provides us jobs and it provides the things we buy. So if things are good for industry it means cheaper goods for us and higher wages. It's very very foolish and short-sighted for us to penalise industry in any way, so to allow industry to choose men or women, whichever are better in its particular industry, will for us produce cheaper goods and more wages. That would be better for women as well as for men, so equal opportunities can do nothing other than make things worse for us all, and particularly worse for the poorer people who require economic productivity to bring wealth to them quicker.
There are reasons why in the early years of a child's life a woman should stay home and look after them. God has given that to women as one of their many roles, they're also better at it as I'm sure the feminists would be quick to remind us, and they also desire to do it Its as highly important role and it shouldn't be despised in the way that many feminists despise it.
Let me give you an example of some of the insane laws that we're now seeing and that we must revoke in order to make this kind of occurence impossible ...
A company fired a woman who became pregnant because they thought that the dangerous chemicals at the company who was involved could damage the child. These are responsible employers who realised they worked with dangerous chemicals which could damage an unborn person. The woman still wanted to be employed, wanting to be irresponsible and put the child's life in danger. The employer didn't need to sack her, but it's the employer's business, it's up to him. It's nothing to do with the government, it's nothing to do with the courts. The courts held that this action was discriminatory and the company was penalised..
I'm reminded of a cartoon that I saw once, and it had this black woman sitting in a room with a sign on the door for the campaign for racial equality and sexual discrimination act, and she was banging her fist on the table and saying "they won't let me be a member of the Royal family!" Thepoint is clear. Basically, these are people trying to achieve through political action what we can't achieve through our own abilities and talents. It's a very morally wicker thing to do. We need to find the things we're good at and do them, rather than claiming through legal or political means positions that we really don't deserve to be in.
Incidentally, on the racial issue, there are parallels here. There's no intrinsic difference between the races in the way there's an intrinsic difference between the sexes, but certainly it's an insult to people of other races to suggest that they need special anti-discriminatory laws to allow them to get to the top of society. There are many people I know as we all do who are doing exceptional well, who come from a non-Caucasian background. The thing is to have a free enterprise society, one where the Government stays out of things, and then the best can be rewarded, whatever their race and sex
It's a very bad practise for people to try to get ahead by guilt, manipulation or legal means rather than by merit. For women to try and get ahead by claiming discrimination and looking for compensation is a very unhealthy , just as it would be if a man was to do it. We've got to get ahead on merit, not on anything else.
Equal opportunities demands legally that businesses hire women that they would not rationally hire. People know that in the businesses concerned ,they know that a certain person's there only because of the regulations. This is lost production that could be made if money and time didn't have to be spent monitoring the legislation. If we were tomorrow to abolish all the non-biblical or counter-biblical legislation in our society, then everyone would earn an estimated 60% more., because businesses spend such a lot of resources on monitoring legislation.
It's good for men and women to have different roles. It's good because of the principle of the division of labour. The basic principle we find in the first chapter of Adam Smith's book on the wealth of nations.( It seems to be the only chapter people read because they only talk about the first chapter, they never talk about the rest of the book.) It's very interesting from a historical point of view, it goes into things like silver from Peru and all the ins and outs of the economic process there, and it's quite interesting!
. Basically, the point is that everybody does better when everybody does a specialised task. If everybody has to do the whole process of making a particular product, then it would take far longer than if everybody gets to be proficient in a particular part of the process. It's the same with men and women. If women try to do the things that men are best at, and men try and do things women are best at, then all we'll do is end up being far less effective that we would otherwise be. We need to accept that men are good at certain things, women at others, and both are equally valuable. Both are equal in the sight of God, in the sense that God values them equally or values them both. Both are very important parts of society, and are good at different things. It's not a bad thing if there aren't any women judges or any women MPs or any women chief police officers.
These legislations come down on businesses so they're hiring people they wouldn't otherwise hire, and if there's less wealth for men there's less wealth for women. A classic case of envy, making yourself worse off, in order to make someone else worse off.
That's what the equal opportunities legislation is all about. It's saying "I don't care if I'm making myself worse off, I want to make these employers who are [supposedly] discriminating worse off as well." This is envy, and the bible says this is sin.
The equal opportunities legislation is based on envy, it's based on an un-biblical idea of men and women, it's an immoral organisation and we'll need to disband it.
Since the majority of the population are married, this legislation is lunacy from any perspective, because in making businesses less productive we're reducing our joint incomes. Even if it was possible to equalise income so that men get the same as women, all that would happen is that the joint income of a family would stay the same! Great!
But that would never happen. It would be minus the transaction cost for complying with the government regulations. This is just totally ridiculous, since most married women work to increase income. In order to increase wealth and make life better for women and men, and particularly for the poorest people in our midst, we need to have a productive society, we need to remove all government restrictions on business, especially all restrictions on where people can and cannot work, and who people can and cannot employ.
If legislation says that we have to employ a certain number of women, then what we're basically doing then is discriminating against men with better abilities than the women who have been hired. All that leads to is inter-sex war, which seems to be what the feminists are after.
The bible's idea of people working together in harmony has gone out the window and we've got a battle between the sexes, led by the feminists. What we need is free market competition. Free market competition eliminates discrimination, because discrimination produces inferior employees, that good employees would leave in disgust either because of the discrimination or because the quality of their colleagues isn't as good as it would be at other companies, or because the customers become alienated because of these inferior employees. The free market is therefore the best way to create a non-discriminatory society.
Government regulations have singularly failed to produce a better situation for a woman, whereas free market competition would end any discrimination that exists and produce more productivity for the women that are in the poorest state of all. If feminists were really serious, they would abolish the equal opportunities commission and labour for free enterprise. The more competitive a society, the more discrimination will turn against a company.
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