Be Excellent To Each Other

So, this new proposed equality legislation will allow employers to positively discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minority candidates where the candidates are otherwise equally matched and they would rather have a woman over a man.

Now, is it just me or should the word "equality" mean no discrimination at all? Ooooh, controversial.

Anyway. Let's say they do this, and pass a statute that says that employers can discriminate in favour of a female candidate where the candidates are otherwise equally matched. How on earth could an employer satisfy themselves that the two candidsates are equally matched? Is there any such thing, anyway? Unless the two applicants both went to the same schools, got the same grades, got the same degrees and then went on to the same jobs there's no way that an employer is going to take the risk here. If they pick the lady candidate the male candidate is inevitably going to be able to point to differences between their CVs (not always in the man's favour, of course, but you know what I mean) and claim that they were discriminated against solely on the basis of gender where they were the better candidate.

So this is an entirely pointless law, being passed for the sake of the appearance of doing something.

Oh.

Heard Ghastly Harman on the radio this morning justifying all this by saying that this would be of use to employers who have mainly female customers and would like to have female staff. Oh. So where you have mainly male customers and would like to have mainly male staff, ... no. Not allowed.

Wow, I thought the UK couldnt get any stupider.

The sooner I can justify emigrating, the better. I hate it here.

Yup, this may be the first time I've agreed with the daily mail.

A large portion of the pay gap is because women fuck off to have kids too. I wouldn't hire an attached woman of child age unless there was a compelling reason if I was a small business owner, the costs and risks are too great.

Ah, that's a whole other kettle of fish, and with which I disagree.

That's not the women's fault - the men could just as easily stay at home, but they bloody well don't, because their wife's pay will be too shit to support a family.

The pay gap's there whether women have kids or not, otherwise the single female lawyers would earn as much as the male lawyers. Which they don't.

*insert Futurama picture here*

One part of the pay gap is due to women being far less likely than men to ask their boss for a pay rise. I see it all the time.

I didn't even know there was such a thing as an Equalities Minister till I saw this story on the news last night.

We already have an equal pay law, of course.

What they need to do is bloody well enforce it.

And we should all be more open about our pay, which would help. I don't get the British thing about pay being private. Not least when celebrities' pay is such a talking point that people are so interested in.

Does your firm make salaries public? I know that some law firms do it, and I imagine it's very trying on the less well paid lawyers' enormous egos. People are petty enough to spend hours complaining that their meaningless job titles aren't exactly right, and adding public salaries into the mix would make it worse. Especially when the people arguing are professional arguers.

I do agree with you, but I think you'd have less trouble giving a group of kids different amounts of sweets.

Of course that doesn't quite work, because if you have mainly male customers, you still want to have mainly female staff

This is just a hunch, but I believe many employers have it written into contracts that you are not allowed to discuss your salary, and some places even your manager doesnt know what you are on.

Allows them to just make up a salary and pay people what they want to, not what the 'benchmark' is. Which sucks.

I talk about my salary with people.

According to the news story I saw about it, they're hoping to have that removed from contracts so that employees can actually discuss salaries.

I imagine in some circumstances it would cause some resentment if salary details were more open. For example, here, the general admin workers are apparently not on an awful lot and some would begrudge other folk their salaries despite the difference in skill levels required, nothing to do with any kind of discrimination

We publish average pay bands, but we don't discuss individual salaries. And for each year of qualification you could be getting a fairly wide banded increase, so by, say, 6 years qualification there could be 10 grand difference between you and a contemporary.



I've checked ours and we don't. I've never been at a place that did, either. People just seem to think it's impolite to talk about salary - whether by saying what yours is or ("GASP!") asking what someone else's is - and so noone ever talks about it. It's a conspiracy of silence that basically only harms the workers who are keeping quiet about it.

By and large, I agree with you. The reason people don't like to talk about pay is because it can make things go a bit nasty - I can remember years ago doing a temp job at one company where I was offered a pretty decent hourly rate for what the job entailed (presumably they were having trouble filling the role). When I mentioned this to someone else at the company, it turned out they were being paid less than me, which lead to them complaining to their supervisor, the supervisor complaining to their bosses and the temping agency where they demanded that my pay be reduced in line with other temps there. So I had to agree to take a pay cut if I wanted to keep my job there. Wonderful.

Likewise, the firm I work at now is one of those places that pay staff as little as they dare get away with. Some conversations with colleagues in the pub after work reveal that some of us on the lower rungs of the ladder earn shockingly low salaries, whilst management earn megabucks for doing relatively jack shit. Certainly there's a lot of us that could earn more working somewhere else.

There is no such thing as equality. It is just a smokescreen for enabling <insert group> to get one over <insert other group>.

I occasionally get dragged onto an interview panel and the paperwork we have to go through in order to justify each and every decision in case a candidate decides to question or challenge why they didn't get the job is immense.

Unless I'm mistaken, public sector pay scales are (oh-ho) public, so if you know the scale, you can find out roughly what someone is on (length of time in the role not withstanding).

Do you see those 'diversity monitoring' forms which most job applications seem to have attached to them these days? I find them highly insulting and tend to tick 'other' - as far as I am concerned you might as well ask for my eye colour (which I can never remember) or how many cuddly toys I keep. Such information about as relevant as an arbitarily defined 'ethnic backgroudn'.

I'll stop now before you start thinking I've been channeling the Twatotron...

It's a stupid idea.

I agree, and the asking about your sexuality thing, why does that even matter? If I'm hetro you probably wouldn't think I wanted to hump all the guys so if I'm Bi or Homo am I going to suddenly want to turn all the girlies?

I suppose the government are hoping for a reaction like this:

Disgruntled Labour supporter: 'Well, I'm against the war, the surveillance, Mr Brown, tax rises, PFI ... but at least they're doing something for women and minorities. Hurrah'

Of course this is also in the main true about people who find kids attractive, trying selling that one at a job interview.

It does seem to be assumed though that if you are male and gay you will also like little boys. Very sad world. Sorry, going a bit OT there.

Indeed.

I (and the people I worked for) got taken to court over discrimination before.
It was a now-closed night club in Bedford, and we hired 10 dancers to go in cages for a big night. About 20 came and auditioned, and I chose the fit ones.
One of the ugly (well, uglier - she wasn't bad) ones kicked up a fuss because we asked for 'dancers' in the advert, and then her dance school got behind her and took us to court.
We won that, but it's a good job no-one thought to look at my record of employing bar-staff

You sexist PIG.

/Germaine Greer.

See that's just daft, of course you discriminate on that basis, it's no different that discriminating based on intelligence for any other job.

Rob Grant may have had it right after all.

I think you should be able to discriminate on looks in every job. I don't want to share the office with uggos, like.

They're my eyes and given how many awful things they unfortunately alight on during the drive to and from work they should really be given a break from fat wobbly people whilst in the office.

What was your defense?

I hope it rested on the prosecution parading the hot ones into the court, saying "Exhibit A, your honour - This girl is hotter than my client. She was hired; my client was not. Exhibit B, your honour..."

That's why Phoenix Wright got into law. Poor chap only gets the murder cases though.

TBH, it never really got that far. Our lawyer/solicitor said something to the judge, then the other side's lawyer said something, and it was all over.
/shrug

Grim..., court reporter extraordinaire, ladies and gents. Can someone do a little court room sketch too? Please include the obligatory "surprised bearded juror", and Grim... in the dock surrounded by the hot women looking super smug.

Someone should do this. Dimmers?

Can't you just do it at home with a camera and the household staff, Grim...?

What about the Wimbledon thing - should the winner of the female singles get as much money as the winner of the male singles?

No. Clearly not, for 2 reasons.

1) Should the pay be based on how long they play? If so, absolutely not. Not only do they play 3 sets instead of 5, the women tend to win in far fewer games per set in earlier rounds too. In 2007's first round women recieved an average of £481.93 a game vs £284.70 for men. Men's matches lasted 35 games and 121 minutes. The women 21 games and 79minutes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -cash.html (yes I know, the mail)

As normally insane Ann Widdlecombe sensibly put it.



2) Ok so sod length, 100m sprinters can get 100k for 10 seconds work after all, so if the matches are as popular, they should get the same money... right?

A quick glance at a random tout website suggests you can get a ladies final ticket now for £917. (http://www.tickets-4u.com/prodList.asp?idCategory=348)

A men's will cost you £1947, over twice as much.

Equal pay at Wimbledon is nothing more or less than legalised discrimination against men.

What about the argument that the women want to play five sets (or, indeed, against the male champion), but only play three?

I've never heard any indication they want either.

One of the female players they talked too said they'd happily play against the men, but the men didn't want to be beated by a woman

I wouldn't want them to play five sets.

Just three sets of that "Nyurgh!" sound they make whenever they hit the ball is quite enough thank you.

There's also the argument that reasonably paced rallying play is actually more skillful than ace after ace after ace.

It should come down to how much money women's tennis at Wimbledon generates compared with how much men's tennis generates.

If it is the same, they should be payed the same.

You can certainly argue that, but that's irrelevent to the pay.



See those ticket prices.



They would get crushed. Equal pay wouldn't be an issue since you'd see maybe 2 in the entire tournament and they'd be gone by weekend 1.

Did you know: There is no rule preventing women playing in the NFL, as when the rules of the league were codified, such a rule seemed unnecessary.

Things being what they are, a woman will almost certainly end up playing on a NFL team, at some point.

Well that's Rugby for girls as it is.



Absolutely, so long as they set up their own new combined tour. They shouldn't be allowed to enter current male only events unless the women's tour is abolished. They can't have it both ways as they tried briefly to do in golf.

I used to play setter for a men's volleyball team in a men's volleyball league. Again, there was no written rule to say that I couldn't (which was handy, 'cause that fake beard itched ), but I think they simply never thought that such a rule needed to be made. There are three net heights: girls/boys & womens/mens. I actually started playing on the team when I was still at the age where the girl's height would have been the designated height, so most teams upon meeting me would be a little taken aback but usually very nice and friendly. As the setter I didn't need to be tall or to jump high, and apart from when serving I never needed to be that powerful (and developed a tricky serve that kind of floated the ball over the net that used to catch people out to counter that). Twice, though, teams kicked up a fuss. One started being abusive and had to be told off by the umpire, and the other team actually refused to play and forfeited the match.

Anyway, we won the league twice when I was there, but someone threw a basketball at my face one day (not at a volleyball match, I hasten to add...) and in quickly raising my hands to block it I broke two of my fingers, so that was that.

The less emphasis a sport has on physical prowess, the more likely it is that a woman may stand a chance competing with men.

In sports where physical prowess is important, women will be annihilated by men.

So much so, that it would be uncompetitive and uncomfortable to watch and result in poor attendances/viewing figures.

It's probably important to distinguish between strength/stamina, and agility there. Ballet dancers have a lot of physical prowess.

Absolutely, the ultimate example of that point is the 100m sprint

Interestingly, motor racing, historically a mixed sport anyway may be the one that gives the lie to this. There are now 3 women who in modern times have won "International" class motor races (Katherine Legge, Simona de Silvestro in Atlantics and Danica Patrick in Indycar), at least one who will do very, very soon (Ana Beatriz in the Indy Pro series) and several who have always performed very well. Long time DTM drive Susie Stoddart, LeMans drivers Vanina Ickx and Liz Halliday and Sarah Fisher who managed to start up a team and still get into the Indy 500 all come to mind. Plus several who could well break through such as Natacha Gachnang, with a pole, a fastest lap and a podium from just 2 starts in Spanish F3 in a 2 year old car and 2 podiums last year in Star Mazda.

Motor Racing is absolutely a physical sport, but rarely does it require "explosive" physical power, just the ability to perform a physially demanding task for 2 hours in 50C wearing fireproof overalls and it appears that may well be something where a sufficiently talented woman can and will eventually bridge the gap.

EDIT : I think this might be an argument for, as much as possible, never segregating sports. If we had completely segregated motor sport, Katherine, Ana and Susie especially would be superstars but ultimately I think all 3 are better for racing, and beating all comers.

The ultimate example would be Ultimate Fighting!

Well yes but I meant in a measurable sense. Running is one of those where you have nice handy numbers to tell you EXACTLY how much "worse" women are at that sport and a sufficiently high participation rate to make it a reasonably fair test.