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Originally Posted by flylock shox
I've always thought the pay gap stuff is hugely oversimplified in the public discourse and would welcome more information about the variables that lead to it. The interviewer's point that there are hardly any women at the top of major companies - for example - is an argument that always struck me as a red herring. The people at the top of major companies are old, mostly got there over the course of careers that unfolded over decades, and the disparity is in part going to be explained as the product of social barriers and mores that existed 40 years ago rather than today. The only way to fix that seems to be to artificially mandate that women replace some of the men at the top - a bit unfair to those men and to those companies I'd say.
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Single women who have never married earn 98 per cent of what single men who have never married earn. The pay gap is almost entirely about choices families make when they have kids.
Women have been graduating from medical school at higher rates than men for about 20 years now. And yet female doctors are four times more likely to practice part-time than male doctors, and far more likely to quit medicine altogether once they have children. Since social justice dogma only measures outcomes in terms of income and power, its advocates regard this as a problem that must be fixed, rather than personal choice that makes those doctors happier than working 60 hours a week.
At this point, any efforts to close the gender income gap will have to focus mainly on childcare and parental leave, and fostering a workplace where parents - women
and men - don't have to sacrifice their home life in order to pursue jobs with high pay and responsibility.
But the people who dominate public discourse about gender don't get this, because they're far from representative of society as a whole. The activists and media pundits who make a career out of championing gender equality tend to be younger, childless, and career-focused compared to women in general. They genuinely don't understand how a smart, competent, liberated woman may dramatically change her outlook and goals once she has children, and decide that earning 90K a year and engaging herself with family life is preferable to earning 200k a year and working 60 hours a week.
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Originally Posted by sworkhard
As far as I can tell he doesn't really present anything new, but rather presents it in a more interesting fashion than most.
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Yes, very little of what Peterson says is original. The way some of his fans have embraced him as a kind of guru only demonstrates how ill-educated many people remain after 16 years of public education. And the fact he's controversial only shows how narrow and dogmatic our dialog over anything to do with gender, race, and inequality has become in the last decade.
The ironic thing is the reason his detractors are so ill-equipped to challenge him is because the dogma they follow has been presented to them as revealed truth. They haven't contested their beliefs in a critical environment, and so learned the strengths and weaknesses of their argument. Which is why free speech and open dialogue are so important in the first place - how do you know your beliefs have a strong foundation if you've never had to defend them from rigorous criticism?