Minority Groups "Special Rights"

PhantomWolf said:
It's surprisingly simple things that can create a hostile environment. Imagine that for your job you need to wear safety gear, but none of it fits. Your boots are too big and the wrong shape for your feet. Safety googles are too large and hard to use and keep in place. Your helmet is too big and moves about on your head. Your overalls are the wrong shape for your body, being tight and rubbing in some places and completely loose in others. Beyond that you can't get changed or shower in your workplace, even though there is a high change of getting dirty on the job. There is often no toilet for you either on the jobsite, you need to either use a chemical toilet that smells and requires that you lower your clothing into the muck on the floor or that you head over to other nearby businesses that might let you use theirs. Even in your workplace, you have to walk across the entire site to the admin wing for the toilets there. How long would you put up with this sort of thing to keep your job, even if you liked it? These are the kind of things that female trades people have to put up with on a daily basis.
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...I'm glad you bought this up.

I'm self-employed in an industry that is male dominated, and as my business has grown over the last year and is expected to grow even more next year. I have instituted a diversity policy and have been working to implement it over the next few months. I was having a few problems conceptualising how to do a certain thing: this post helped me overcome that. :) So thanks. :)
 
Argumemnon said:
Well, if you read the Canadian Employment Equity Act, it mentions that employers targeted by the Act must "ensure that persons in designated groups achieve a degree of representation in each occupational group in the employer’s workforce that reflects their representation in the Canadian workforce, or those segments of the Canadian workforce that are identifiable by qualification, eligibility or geography and from which the employer may reasonably be expected to draw employees."

It follows that if 50% of the workforce is female, they must have 50% female employees, but you are correct that they do not specifically set the proportion in law.
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I think that banquetbear did a pretty good job of explaining why you are incorrect on this one, I don't have anything more to add to his explanation.

Again with the confrontational language. I'm not "ingnoring" anything. I'm focusing on the part of AA I'm opposed to. It'd be pretty silly for me to address stuff I already agree with, especially after discussing them here.
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The problem is that you are attacking a fictional part of AA for fictional reasons and refusing to see this.

"You're ignorant" is a poor way to remove said ignorance.
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Well repeating one's self gets boring after a while when the person you are trying to discuss things with has a warped view of the situation and refuses to understand it any other way.

The first part may still have biological roots, so I'm not sure you can ever break even there. As for the rest, it's market forces. Some jobs are seen as worth more.
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Bollocks, treating men that work as nurses, hairdressers, interior designers, clothing designers, or pre-school teachers as if they are all less of a man is not biological, it's cultural because we are taught that those sort of things are beneath real men, the only men that do those sorts of things are gay.

What happens when you fail to meet the quota, then? Won't they be asked to hire more minorities, at which point they will indeed be forced to hire them?
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As noted by another poster, quotas are rarely enforced. They are mostly used as further evidence of a company discriminating against potential employees.

That is a terrible interpretation. It could just be that you have ONE job open and two candidates, or that you only have one job left and several candidates, and the last two candidates you're considering are the ones I mentioned. Of course that happens in real life.
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Then you go with the most qualified one, the law doesn't force you to take on the minority if they aren't as suited to the position as another candidate. If you choice to do that, it's on you as an employer, not on the law.
 
This stuff makes me laugh.

For the non-Kiwis, Matamata is a town of ~6000 people 100km south-east of Auckland.

Two different people told to remove their hats or to leave the bank premises they were on.

One, a 90-year-old man in a tweed hat, the other a woman with hair loss from chemo wearing a woolen hat.

Meanwhile, minority groups such as Sikhs and muslins are categorically not required to remove their headgear in a bank.
 
I agree.

Myself the only time I get an "off" feeling about the broad range of topics which fall under the umbrella term of "special rights" or "accommodation" or similar language is things which specifically have to be thought of in context of exceptions to broader rules which nobody (or very few) seem to be arguing need to go away entirely.

For example. A Muslim goes into a courtroom or to get a driver license photo or whatever and is asked to remove their religious headcovering. Often times it will be argue by many that this is an unreasonable burden on their religious practices. However a random person wearing a NY Yankee ballcap being asked to remove their headcovering in the exact same scenario wouldn't even raise an eyebrow.

Or breastfeeding. Woman with breast out, illegal. Woman with breast out to feed child, legal. (But to be fair this is mostly probably because the general societal taboo against public nudity, at least it being codified into law, is something I've never fully got my head around so maybe I'm not just in the mindspace that I can fully "get" the difference between the two. And I don't mean that in a snarky way, it might very well be the place where the disagreement lies.)

And examples like this are generally very hard for me to fully get onboard with. Not to say that I don't recognize some nuance in the cases, just that from a legal and moral perspective codifying what are, let's be honest here, double standards is problematic for me.

I'm generally of the opinion that if a law can survive a codified exception, it's very rarely important enough to bother retaining as a law anyway. If Rastafarians smoking pot, Muslim wearing headgear in ID photos, and bare breasts being used to breastfeed aren't going to cause the downfall of society then my view of it does tend more toward smoking pot, headgear in ID photos, and bare breasts in general aren't going to do it and making exceptions just for those cases is not the way to go.

Fighting simply for exceptions to laws seems... self serving to me.
 
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PhantomWolf said:
I think that banquetbear did a pretty good job of explaining why you are incorrect on this one, I don't have anything more to add to his explanation.
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All he did was agree that they don't specifically say 50%. I don't see how that's explaining why I'm incorrect.

Bollocks, treating men that work as nurses, hairdressers, interior designers, clothing designers, or pre-school teachers as if they are all less of a man is not biological
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Ugh. That's NOT WHAT I SAID. I was talking about men's interest in those types of jobs.

Then you go with the most qualified one, the law doesn't force you to take on the minority if they aren't as suited to the position as another candidate.
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It depends how the law is interpreted. Would the state interpret it to mean that if the minimum qualifications are met, you go with the minority in that situation, or can you instead argue that the other person was _more_ qualified than what you were asking for and get away with this? This is a very serious question because if the answer is the latter, this removes one of my objections to quotas.
 
blutoski said:
. Same with our perception of who should be the household child caregiver versus wage earner. I think we're generations away from shaking that.
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I could have used any one of quotes from this thread, but this is a good example.

Why should we?
Who's to say that we actually need to change that division?

Are you aware that women are more likely to throttle back on their careers later in life (even when the kids have grown up), when men continue work long hours and work up the career ladder?

Child care is just one aspect, but I think some people have a strange attitude or priorities as to what is important. I see full time work as a sacrifice to provide for my kids.

The gender pay gap is largely a sign of female privilege. Warren Farrell identified 25 factors that contribute to it, and they were all about men and women making different choices. Others have identified that only a small % of women are actually career centred.

But there are other factors as well. Eg. As a society, we do not want to pay huge amounts for child care. This isn't a bad thing, for it were any other way, what would it say about us and our attitude to our kids?

If you want to shrink the pay gap, you could encourage women into more dangerous/ unpleasant jobs, work longer hours, etc. But would that make them happier? I suggest not. And when women earn more than men in a marriage, there is evidence that the risk of divorce goes up (this is an average, and may not apply to you).

Again, just because men and women make different choices, does not mean it is something we need to change. I would rather respect those choices, as there are biological differences at play.

When you have differences with race, within the same society, it becomes for worrying, and may well need addressing at the education level and /or addressing aspirations etc. Studies to check for discrimination are of course essential for race or gender, but an assumption of discrimination is an unhealthy approach.
 
wobs said:
If you want to shrink the pay gap, you could encourage women into more dangerous/ unpleasant jobs, work longer hours, etc. But would that make them happier? I suggest not. And when women earn more than men in a marriage, there is evidence that the risk of divorce goes up (this is an average, and may not apply to you).
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...do you have a source for this?
 
The Atheist said:
This stuff makes me laugh.

For the non-Kiwis, Matamata is a town of ~6000 people 100km south-east of Auckland.

Two different people told to remove their hats or to leave the bank premises they were on.

One, a 90-year-old man in a tweed hat, the other a woman with hair loss from chemo wearing a woolen hat.

Meanwhile, minority groups such as Sikhs and muslins are categorically not required to remove their headgear in a bank.
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This doesn't bother me at all. It's not surprising that holding to a principle will produce different outcomes in seemingly similar circumstances.

The difference here is the meaning of the headwear. In the examples referenced, wearing a head covering is a purposeful choice by the wearer based on fashion. There is no deeper significance. The believer, however, is following the dictates of their religion. For all we know, they may hate having to wear a scarf, but must do so anyhow. The believer's preferences don't matter. Asking them to remove their headgear is equivalent to banning them from the bank. Not so for the others.
 
Argumemnon said:
...do you have a source for this?
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First there are the number of hours worked. So when a wife works longer hours in order to earn more, there is a correlation to unhappiness.
http://asr.sagepub.com/content/81/4/696.abstract

Then, when a wife earns more than the husband, you run the risk of resentment by the wife, as it is contruary to what she expects. You might think this is a societal issue that can be addressed, but actually, it reflects the wife's privileged position of someone with more life choices. With a husband who earns more than her, she has more chance of easing off from her career. When she earns more than her husband, she is under pressure to continue, despite some wish to do otherwise. And when kids arrive on the scene, this can get magnified.
http://www.forbes.com/2006/08/21/careers-marriage-dating_cx_mn_0821women.html

Anecdotally, I have met career orientated women from our head office wish their husbands earned twice as much as them so they could do just this. By my early 30s, of my friends who married in their 20s only one was still married. All had married career orientated women apart from my friend who married a more home centred woman (who now works in nursery care).

Most of said friends are now either still single, or re-married and stayed married.

The phenomenon of women resenting earning more is something I initially learnt from an Aunt some years ago, who is herself career centred, but can handle earning more than my Uncle. It is something she is well aware of though.

I must emphasis that I'm not saying that marrying a female breadwinner will lead to divorce, but that there are correlations to divorce/unhappiness. If you want to reduce the risk of such things, these are issues one should take into account.
 
wobs said:
I must emphasis that I'm not saying that marrying a female breadwinner will lead to divorce, but that there are correlations to divorce/unhappiness. If you want to reduce the risk of such things, these are issues one should take into account.
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How do lesbian couples manage it? Or do they?
 
marplots said:
This doesn't bother me at all. It's not surprising that holding to a principle will produce different outcomes in seemingly similar circumstances.

The difference here is the meaning of the headwear. In the examples referenced, wearing a head covering is a purposeful choice by the wearer based on fashion. There is no deeper significance. The believer, however, is following the dictates of their religion.
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How about really, really rabid Cubs' fans? Do they get to keep their religious baseball caps? ;)
 
Here's something that is unlikely to come up in stats:
“I definitely feel resentment, but it is not around money or expenses. I have been the breadwinner for the last 3 years, the sole breadwinner for two of those while my husband started a company. It wasn’t until the birth of my son that I felt resentful. I have been back to work for a few weeks and every morning that I get in the car to go to work I resent that my husband gets to stay home with our baby.”

—Amelia
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http://thoughtcatalog.com/jessica-w...ts-like-to-make-more-money-than-your-husband/

Its not just the money, its the lack of choice caused by the difference in salary.
 
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Argumemnon said:
I didn't "skip" it. I quoted the relevant part. None of what you added changes that.
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...yeah you did. You recontextualized the act when you replaced "instituting such positive policies and practices and making such reasonable accommodations as will" with "employers targeted by the Act must".
 
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