Re: The Reputation Hilarity/Insanity thread
Now you could take into account that companies will have to actively support female staff in order not to have to recruit from external places (and in practice, the latter is how it actually works) this is still unjust in the sense that in job offerings, women of equal qualification will have to be preferred instead of men. That is actually common standard nowadays in academia.
While this is true, and in many cases bound to create feelings of injustice on an individual level, it is essentially an admittance that social change does not occur in a vacuum.
There are a number of factors that are in disfavor of women in many labor sectors, such as cultural expectations of having children, and consequently being the person that spends the most time and effort on those children. This often means that women are seen as less desireable than men by companies out to hire, because they're viewed as being less "reliable" workers, if that makes sense. Up here it's technicall illegal to ask a woman if she intends to have children, but a lot of companies get around by asking oblique questions anyway ("where do you see yourself in five years?" or "do you find family values to be important to you?").
Another factor is of course the "old boys" factor, in which the presence of a female is resented because it might alter the social dynamic of the workplace. Suddenly certain jokes might be objected to that would've previously been seen as acceptable - kinda the same reason why an all-white workplace might resent the presense of a black guy, or an all-straight place the presence of a gay person (contrary to the stereotype, most gay people do not make above-average salaries. At least in the Us last time I checked. And certainly not transgender people). Or indeed the presence of a low-caste worker in a place that previously mostly had high caste employees.
Academically speaking - and this is particularly interesting to me as I'm currently within an academic field - is that even though in a lot of western countries the portion of female students is slowly but surely becoming larger than the male portion, the vast majority of professional academic positions are held by men. This becomes truer the higher you get in the academic hierarchy.
And then of course you have the oddity that even in the most "progressive" societies, there is still a kind of expectation that the male partner in a relationship or marriage is
supposed to make more money, otherwise he's not "wearing the pants in the relationship" or some other emasculating phrase from the 40s. Frustratingly enough, one might argue, many women hold on to this as well, some might even consider a man who makes less money as being less desireable for various reasons. There's actually a sociological phenomenon that's been described in Scandinavia for this: "pent brukt mann", or "gently used man", which highlight why there is an increasing degree of unmarried, low-income men, and multiple-times-married high-income men. Fascinating, but perhaps also worrying stuff.
Anyway, all of this (as well as other factors) compounds to women, as a group, possessing less (literal) capital, and fewer politically influential individuals. Now granted, this neglects a vast amount of internal differentiation within both genders, but the point does stand.
Does legally mandated quotation work then? I honestly don't quite know. I could be wrong, but I thnk there are mixed reports on its efficacy. I'd certainly admi that there are important objection to it, and also, perhaps as importantly, on
where it should be applied.
