dagblog - Comments for "When is sexual discrimination wrong?"

By the way, I've also

Nebton — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:05:56 +0000

By the way, I've also considered doing a piece comparing and contrasting sexual discrimination with racial discrimination. I'll probably refer back to this piece, because consider what happens if race is the variable in the examples I provided instead of sex. Other than with dating preferences (and I'm not too keen on making an exception there, other than to say there's no accounting for taste), I can't imagine any of those forms of discrimination being remotely acceptable.

Of course, they still exist. Racial minorities are also underrepresented in politics, and blacks tend to earn less than whites. And, of course, there are other issues, such as incarceration rates. Now that I think of it, the incarceration rate issue demonstrates an even greater sexual bias than a racial one, not considering crime rates, of course.

You'd better be back! You

Nebton — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:00:57 +0000

In reply to Great post Nebby.

You'd better be back! You know I'm expecting something from you.

Thanks for the opinions,

Nebton — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:00:07 +0000

In reply to No takers? Maybe the

Thanks for the opinions, Genghis. It's not an easy question, and I've tried to present a lot of examples to provide a broad context.

If it wasn't clear, what got me thinking about this recently was the issue of insurance disparity. Specifically, health insurance disparity, but I thought I'd throw the car insurance bit in there just to provide a broader context there, as well.

Great post Nebby.

stillidealistic — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:16:00 +0000

In reply to When is sexual discrimination wrong?

Great post Nebby.

No takers? Maybe the

Michael Wolraich — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:01:44 +0000

In reply to When is sexual discrimination wrong?

No takers? Maybe the questions are too difficult. I think that there are two factors to weigh in job discrimination: the relevance of gender to the job and the impact of the discrimination.

For jobs where sexual physical traits are highly relevant to performance, discrimination is easier to justify. An obvious case would be film casting. You wouldn't to demand that production companies hire men for female parts or women for male parts.

Conversely, the more common the job, the more important it is to ensure equal opportunity. There are jobs where gender may make a difference, such as in physical labor (construction) or customer preference (medicine), but the difference is not that significant, and the job is so common that excluding one sex would engender substantial disparities. No pun intended.

In terms of equal pay, I don't know much about workplace discrimination law, but I believe that you need to compare apples-to-apples in order to prove discrimination, e.g. show a systematic difference in pay between colleagues that are equally qualified.

As to global pay differences, there have been many reasons proffered for why men are still paid better than women. I don't think that there's a way to scientifically demonstrate the significance of any particular factor, and there are likely multiple factors in play, so we should just remain agnostic. But regardless of the cause, we should design social policy to reduce the disparity as much as possible, e.g. discrimination law, scholarships for women, childcare options, etc.