The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[Lamplighter]

I think I've established a definitive gender checkpoint,
right here in the Moms Hate Christmas: thread

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

...
As the wife/mother, you have to buy the presents for everyone.
Extended family is hard enough, but now you have to add all of his family
--people whose tastes you don't know and may actively dislike. ...

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

Send everyone a gift card for Amazon.
"Prime if you like them" ... "Non-Prime" if you don't.

[xoxoxoBruce]

We were talking mostly about American women joining the WW II workforce, but Brit women, of course, did too.

[xoxoxoBruce]

'Cause everybody knows raising kids and running the household isn't hard work.


But now we're worried, so skedaddle on home, and let us never speak of this again.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Women have always invented stuff, especially poor women trying to make do are forced to adapt, recycle and rube Goldberg new things. A lot of beauty products have been brought to market after being concocted in some woman's kitchen. All this is well known although not always acknowledged, 'cause we don't want y'all to get uppity.

There's a couple other things women have invented, like;
The Apgar Scoring System
Signal Flares
The foot-pedal trash can
The Monopoly Game
The paper bag
The dishwasher
Windshield wipers
The solar house
The circular saw
Kevlar
Just to name a few.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

The circular saw

I remember hearing somewhere that the Shakers invented the circular saw blade, so your post and that memory led me to wikipedia, where the topic is far more complicated than anybody wanting for a straightforward answer would like. And it drives home something I've noticed before. We are so used to living in a world with information at our fingertips, that it's easy to forget that it wasn't always this way.

A woman Shaker did invent the circular saw, but it had also been invented numerous other times by others in Europe decades earlier. But they didn't have the internet, or trade journals, or the Sears mail order catalog. People just didn't share information that quickly. So the Shakers didn't know the Germans had already done it. Fast forward a hundred years, and Alexander Graham Bell was working on inventing an airplane because he didn't know the Wright brothers had already invented one. And he succeeded. Many of the inventions we take for granted as being invented by some specific person were actually invented numerous times by many people and they just didn't find out until later that they weren't the first.

[Clodfobble]

It also sort of points to the weird inevitability of progress. No one's going to invent movable type before paper, but once you have paper, it's the next logical step and someone WILL create it. Like how the squid developed an eye independently from our evolutionary line, even though we split off far enough back that neither of us had vision.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The internet wasn't needed for news to travel, there were ships and people traveling back and forth all the time. Guys like Franklin practically commuted, as well as corresponding with smart guys all over Europe. News of longer, lower, wider, ways to improve productivity traveled fast. We'd had water powered mills here for 150 years or more by 1800, and before 1776 a lot of mills here were owned by foreigners. Even if a couple of those foreigners had round blades who's to say a woman didn't think of it. But nobody patented it, so Tabitha wins because she was obviously a witch, being Samantha's kid.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by glatt

snip--

Many of the inventions we take for granted as being invented by some specific person were actually invented numerous times by many people and they just didn't find out until later that they weren't the first.

hindsight, 20/20.

How can we tell if this isn't happening still?

only in the future, eh?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by BigV

How can we tell if this isn't happening still?

It is absolutely happening still. I work in a patent litigation law firm and my livelihood depends on it.

But you have to admit that communication today is faster, so you're not going to have decades go by where news of groundbreaking technology advances isn't shared.

[DanaC]

I love this advert. I love (almost) everything about this advert. I like the ordinary dudeness of the player. Very nicely done. I like that they decided it was a good idea to also show a female player.

It's really not so long ago that this would have been pretty much unthinkable in this genre for anything but an indie game (femShep notwithstanding)

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's life, you slay the dragon or something and feel like a hero, then suddenly a chick shoots you down.

Originally Posted by glatt

It is absolutely happening still. I work in a patent litigation law firm and my livelihood depends on it.

But you have to admit that communication today is faster, so you're not going to have decades go by where news of groundbreaking technology advances isn't shared.

Now if you do something neat, there's always somebody close by figuring out how to capitalize on it.
Shakers didn't communicate with the outside much. In her mid-teens my grandmother lived with(was used by) a Shaker family.

[Lamplighter]

@Dana: The author of this article was on a tv show this morning.
She finished off her interview with this quote...
As Jenji Kohan, creator of “Orange Is the New Black,” told me:

“Talent with all sorts of genitalia’’ can make money

So l went looking for her entire article... it's long but good.

The Women of Hollywood Speak Out
NY Times - MAUREEN DOWD - NOV. 20, 2015

Female executives and filmmakers are ready to run studios
 and direct blockbuster pictures.
What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps them from doing it?

@Glatt: Yes, I know ... I cherry-picked the quote.

.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

@Glatt: Yes, I know ... I cherry-picked the quote.

ok

[DanaC]

Fascinating. This caught my attention:

From 2007 through 2014, according to Smith’s research, women made up only 30.2 percent of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films.

Another study I read about, though can't recall the details, showed a similar imbalance in the gender of characters in children's tv.

Facepalm moment:

When I phoned another powerful Hollywood player to ask about the issue, he said dismissively, ‘‘Call some chicks.’’

[DanaC]

There's a lot in that piece that is heartening. But then there's things like this that make me want to do violence:

From Nora Ephron to Dee Rees, women who write their own material may have a better chance to direct it. But even in the writing phase, women must contend with Hollywood conventions that women on-screen must be likable or cleave to Madonna-whore-catfight stereotypes. ‘‘I’ve had male executives say that my lead character was unlikable because she slept with a lot of guys,’’ says the director Julie Taymor. Liz Meriwether, the 34-year-old creator of Fox’s ‘‘New Girl,’’ says that before this show, she received notes from executives saying, ‘‘I don’t understand how this character can be smart and sexy.’’

and this:

But if only 1.9 percent of the top 100 films are helmed by women, there is virtually no trickle-down effect. ‘‘What struck me the most was how blatant and out in the open some of the discrimination was,’’ says Ariela Migdal, who initially helped oversee the A.C.L.U. gender-discrimination case. ‘‘Agents openly say, ‘I’m not putting you up for that because this guy won’t hire a woman director.’ The list for directing big films is five plausible dudes and Kathryn Bigelow. And Bigelow is not going to direct ‘Jurassic World.’ You can’t have a list with no women.’’ Executives have been known to say, ‘‘Oh, we hired a woman once, but it didn’t really work out that well.’’