That looks so obscene. What makes it doubly horrible is that the man sitting there in that basket almost certainly subscribed to the view of women as the 'fairer sex' being weaker than men. That woman is not really a proper woman in his view. Not like the fair european women, epitomising civilisation with their grace and fragility. Her race and her class takes away from her humanity. If it didn't, then he'd be shamed by such a picture.
But, I came in here to post an article I just read in the Graudian (Guardian). Since this is the gender equality checkpoint, it's a good place to look at the big picture.
Quote:
A recent World Bank survey of 173 countries found that no fewer than 155 still had at least one law impeding women’s economic opportunities. Women face gender-based job restrictions in 100 countries, often confining them to low-paying activities, more often than not in the informal sector. In 18 countries the law gives husbands the right to prohibit their wives from working outside the home.
These legal differences have long-lasting economic and social consequences. Gender based job restrictions tend to be associated with wider wage gaps and lower employment rates for women. And where girls’ future earning potential is limited, families may choose to send their brothers to school instead.
-snip-
And it’s not just about the workplace. Women in several countries face extra documentation hurdles when trying to get a national identity card. Beyond making it tougher to access public services or contracts with others, no proof of ID means no chance of getting a bank loan to start or expand a business. Inheritance and marital property laws affect women’s access to financial institutions – access to property tends to make for greater equality within the household.
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Now, those are some pretty shocking statistics, but they don't actually spell out the full reasons why this way of organising labour and resources is such a bad idea, particularly when it comes to female participation in the workplace. Not everybody believes that increased female participation in the workplace is a good idea. As evidenced by the recurring themes of working-mother shaming and latch-key kid panic in our media (particularly the conservative media) and the regular bemoaning of a by-gone age when women were wives and mothers first and everything else second, and touting the loss of that world as a corresponding threat to masculinity.
Setting aside questions of fairness - which are complicated by the degree to which an individual believes men and women are just fundamentally different, and that they should retain fundamentally distinct but complimentary roles within society and family - let's look just at the concrete benefits of greater gender equality:
Quote:
The economic cost of gender inequality is staggering. The McKinsey Global Institute recently estimated that if women participated in the economy identically to men, with equal wages and labour force participation, it would add up to $28tn to global GDP by 2025: a 26% increase over business as usual, equivalent to adding a new United States and China to the world economy.
A more modest scenario, under which countries match the gender parity progress of their best-performing regional neighbour, would add $12tn to the global economy – about the collective economic weight of Japan, Germany, and the UK.
The implications are no less revolutionary for individual households. Literate mothers have healthier children. When women earn an income, they spend a higher proportion of it than men do on their children’s health, education and nutrition.
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Read the rest here:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-de...e-consequences