[MememyselfandIJK]

In Western societies there is a cult of women actually. They have Women's Day, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and wedding anniversaries are like Valentine's Day mostly. Men are still expected to be polite and complaisant towards women in general, although the labour market never preferred them and it's still harder for them to get political power indeed.

Oh please, what about the wage gap, gender discrimination, attack on abortion rights, and poor (usually non-existent) investigations after cases of rape to name a few.

Furthermore, the only reason that women have rights in the west (aside from 2nd wave feminism) is because eastern communist societies granted women employment and other equalities, therefore putting pressure on the West to keep up.

[Beren]

Oh please, what about the wage gap, gender discrimination, attack on abortion rights, and poor (usually non-existent) investigations after cases of rape to name a few.

You should tell the 54% of white female voters who voted for Trump all about this.

What if I say the wage gap exists for a reason perhaps? Gender discrimination prefers women in many cases, even in the labour market. I also wonder whether how many women care about abortion rights so much actually? They usually have them anyways. Oh and don't forget about rape...

[MememyselfandIJK]

You should tell the 54% of white female voters who voted for Trump all about this.

What if I say the wage gap exists for a reason perhaps? Gender discrimination prefers women in many cases, even in the labour market. I also wonder whether how many women care about abortion rights so much? Or rape...

The general female vote was 54-42 Clinton. I am talking about ALL females -- white ones aren't the only ones who matter.

For what sane reason would the wage gap exist? And in most cases, gender discrimination does not benefit women. Look how few women are in the sciences for example. As for abortion rights, and rape investigations did you just completely forget about the March of Women a few months ago. Like Men, Women have every right to enjoy life without worrying about pregnancy -- Abortion rights are natural rights -- they encompass liberty, freedom, and equality. Same thing with rape.

[Beren]

The general female vote was 54-42 Clinton. I am talking about ALL females -- white ones aren't the only ones who matter.

Non-white females voted for her also because they're not whites. 54-42 among women was a poor result for Clinton against Trump by the way. That train has been stopped for a while, and not without a reason. Hillary still says women's rights is the most significant or important issue to address, and then she blames Comey for not having been elected president.

[MememyselfandIJK]

she blames Comey for not having been elected president.

To be fair the way the entire investigation and release of emails was set up severely harmed her candidacy. Do the entire investigation during the primaries and release the emails all at once, not once a week. That is the fairest way to do it.

Please refer to my other points in the previous post.

[Beren]

Please refer to my other points in the previous post.

Do you mean points like this one?

Like Men, Women have every right to enjoy life without worrying about pregnancy -- Abortion rights are natural rights

No rights are natural, they're all artificial.

[MememyselfandIJK]

Natural rights do not refer to natural vs artificial. According to philosophers such as Voltaire and Locke, they are basic rights that everyone is entitled to upon birth, no matter their background. They are (depending on the definition) life (you can make your own choices and shape your destiny), freedom (living without unreasonable obstacles and/or restrictions like poverty, censorship, etc.), Liberty (Being allowed to exercise your rights to the maximum extent possible), Property (No unreasonable violation of personal property), and equality (the state of being given equal opportunities).

Abortion allows women to exercise their right of property (its their body), freedom (living life without the obstacles presented by pregnancy), equality (given the same opportunities as men), Liberty (exercise their right to a pregnancy-free life), and so on.

[Beren]

Natural rights do not refer to natural vs artificial. According to philosophers such as Voltaire and Locke, they are basic rights.

They may be basic rights if we declare them such, but they're not natural rights. It's not only gender roles that are indeed artificial constructs, the whole world or reality we live in is an artificial construct.

Wake up, Neo...

[MememyselfandIJK]

@Beren May I ask how they are not natural rights? Please refer to the justifications in my previous post.

P.S. I'm not a neo

[Beren]

May I ask how they are not natural rights?

Natural rights don't exist.

[MememyselfandIJK]

@Beren Fine, lets asume that natural rights don't exist (we can argue this later, but for now, I want to get back on topic). In that case what justification is there to make abortion illegal?

[Beren]

Fine, lets asume that natural rights don't exist (we can argue this later, but for now, I want to get back on topic).

It's a fact that natural rights don't exist.

In that case what justification is there to make abortion illegal?

Legal and political justification I guess. It's a matter of legal, political, and socioeconomic circumstances.

[Rugoz]

Natural rights do not refer to natural vs artificial. According to philosophers such as Voltaire and Locke, they are basic rights that everyone is entitled to upon birth, no matter their background.

I don't think Locke believed in natural rights. There's the law of nature, but it doesn't guarantee any rights, only human conventions can do that.

[MememyselfandIJK]

It's a fact that natural rights don't exist.

According to what source?

Legal and political justification I guess. It's a matter of legal, political, and socioeconomic circumstances.

Please be more specific. Saying "legal, political, and socioeconomic circumstances" is not a ligament means of taking away rights (whether they be natural or artificial).

I don't think Locke believed in natural rights. There's the law of nature, but it doesn't guarantee any rights, only human conventions can do that.

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions

[Beren]

According to what source?

Let Rugoz be my source then:

There's the law of nature, but it doesn't guarantee any rights, only human conventions can do that.

Please be more specific. Saying "legal, political, and socioeconomic circumstances" is not a ligament means of taking away rights (whether they be natural or artificial).

Believe it or not, it's only a matter of legal and political power whether what rights someone has, and it mostly depends on socioeconomic circumstances whether who and how much legal and political power has. I can assure you it has nothing to do with nonexistent natural rights.

[MememyselfandIJK]

@Beren @Rugoz We are getting way off topic -- this belongs more under philosophy. The point is that there is no "cult of women" in the United States.

[Pants-of-dog]

If we all agree that human rights are social constructs, is it a huge leap to think that gender roles are also a social construct?

[Rugoz]

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions

That's a misunderstanding, it's taken out of context. Men being "equal and independent" is the state of nature, and "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions" is the social contract reasonable men should agree on, according to Locke.

[Beren]

We are getting way off topic -- this belongs more under philosophy. The point is that there is no "cult of women" in the United States.

There is a cult of women everywhere where women are considered or expected to be fairer and generally better than men, I think the USA is a place like that. Also, there has always been a cult of fertility, although it may not be the cult of women you prefer.

[MememyselfandIJK]

@Beren How is there a cult of women if in the United States?

Political participation
The Center for American Women and Politics reports that, as of 2013, 18.3% of congressional seats are held by women and 23% of statewide elective offices are held by women; while the percentage of Congress made up of women has steadily increased, statewide elective positions held by women have decreased from their peak of 27.6% in 2001. Women also make up, as of 2013, 24.2% of state legislators in the United States. Among the one hundred largest cities in the United States, ten had female mayors as of 2013.[5]
In 1977, political science professor Susan Welch presented three possible explanations for this underrepresentation of women in politics: one, that women are socialized to avoid careers in politics; two, that women's responsibilities in the home keep them away out of both the work force and the political arena; and three, women are more often than men members of other demographic groups with low political participation rates.[6] In 2001, M. Margaret Conway, political science professor at the University of Florida, also presented three possible explanations for the continuation of this disparity: one, similar to Welch's first explanation, sociological and societal norm discourages women from running; two, women less frequently acquire the necessary skills to hold a political leadership position from nonpolitical activities; and three, gatekeeping in party politics prevents women from running.[7]

Work life and economics
The United States is falling behind other Western countries in the percentage of women engaged in the workforce.[8] Researchers from the Institute for Women's Policy Research at the University of California Hastings College of Law argue that this growing gap is due to a lack of governmental, business and societal support for working women. They ranked the United States last out of 20 industrialized countries in an index that measured such programs as family leave, alternative work arrangements, part-time employment, and other means to make workplaces more flexible and family-friendly.[8] The United States is also the only industrialized nation that does not have a paid parental leave policy mandated by law, and is one of only four countries world-wide that does not; in addition, fully paid maternity leave is only offered by around 16 percent of employers in the United States.[9]

Sex discrimination in employment
According to a study conducted by researchers at California State University, Northridge, when an individual with a PhD applies for a position at a university, that individual is significantly more likely to be offered a higher level of appointment, receive an offer of an academic position leading to tenure, and be offered a full professorship if they are a man when compared to a woman of comparable qualifications.[10] However, these findings have been disputed, with one study finding universities pushed to hire more women, resulting in females being given a 2:1 advantage over males in science, technology engineering and mathematics fields.[11] Another study found that women were significantly less likely to receive a job offer or an interview for a high-paying waiter position when compared to equally qualified men; this study also found that such hiring discrimination may be caused in part by customer's discrimination of preference for male wait staff.[12] Similarly, research conducted at the University of California, Davis focusing on academic dermatology revealed a significant downward trend in the number of women receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health, which the authors concluded was due to a lack of support for women scientists at their home institutions.[13]
Research from Lawrence University has found that men were more likely to be hired in traditionally masculine jobs, such as sales management, and women were more likely to be hired in traditionally feminine jobs, such as receptionist or secretary. However, individuals of either gender with masculine personality traits were advantaged when applying for either masculine or feminine jobs, indicating a possibly valuing of stereotypically male traits above stereotypically female traits.[14]

Occupational segregation
Occupational gender segregation takes the form of both horizontal segregation (the unequal gender distribution across occupations) and vertical segregation (the overrepresentation of men in higher positions in both traditionally male and traditionally female fields).[15]
According to William A. Darity, Jr. and Patrick L. Mason, there is a strong horizontal occupational division in the United States on the basis of gender; in 1990, the index of occupational dissimilarity was 53%, meaning 53% of women or 47% of men would have to move to different career field in order for all occupations to have equal gender composition.[16] While women have begun to more frequently enter traditionally male-dominated professions, there have been much fewer men entering female-dominated professions; professor of sociology Paula England cites this horizontal segregation of careers as a contributing factor to the gender pay gap.[17]

Pay gap
Women's median usual weekly earnings as percentage of men's, for full-time workers, by industry, 2009[18]
With regards to the gender pay gap in the United States, International Labour Organization notes as of 2010 women in the United States earned about 81% of what their male counterparts did.[19] While the gender pay gap has been narrowing since the passage of the Equal Pay Act, the convergence began to slow down in the 1990s.[20] In addition, overall wage inequality has been increasing since the 1980s as middle-wage jobs are increasing replaced by larger percentages of both high-paying and low-paying jobs, creating a highly polarized environment.[21]
However numerous studies dispute the claim that discrimination accounts for the majority of the pay gap. When adjusting for industries commonly chosen, hours worked, and benefits received, the pay gap returns to 5%, which has been attributed to less aggressive pay negotiating in women.[22][23][24][25] One study actually found that before 30, females made more than males, and hypothesized that choosing a family over a career resulted in the drop of the female wage advantage during the thirties.[26][27]
According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the primary cause of this gap is discrimination manifested in the tendency of women to be hired more frequently in lower paying occupations, in addition to the fact that male dominated occupations are higher paying than female dominated occupations, and that, even within comparable occupations, women are often paid less than men.[28]
In addition to the gender pay gap, a "family gap" also exists, wherein women with children receive about 10-15% less pay when compared to women without children.[16][29] According to Jane Waldfogel, professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University, this family gap is a contributing factor to the United States' large gender pay gap.[29] She also noted that men did not seem to be affected by this gap, as married men (who are more likely to have children) generally earned higher than unmarried men.[16][29]

Social life
Researchers from the University of Michigan have found that from 1970 to 1985, the percentage of men and women who supported traditional social roles for wives and believed that maternal employment damages mother-child relationships or children's development decreased.[30] Similarly, Jane Wilke from the University of Connecticut found that men's support the idea that men should be the sole source of income in a married couple decreased from 32 to 21 percent from 1972 to 1989; in practice only 15 percent of households were supported by a male spouse's income alone at the time of the study.[31]
However, more recent research in 2011 has found that attitudes towards gender and societal roles have changed very little since the mid-1990s, with attitudes hovering at about sixty to seventy percent egalitarian. This study theorized that a "egalitarian but traditional" gender frame emerged in popular culture during this period, which supports each gender assuming their traditional roles without appearing sexist or discriminatory, and is responsible for this backlash.[32]
Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family history at Evergreen State College, noted that one of the factors contributing to the gender inequality in the United States is that most men still expect women and men to assume traditional gender roles in the households and for women to carry out a larger share of the housework.[33] This has been confirmed by a number of other studies; for example Makiko Fuwa from University of California, Irvine noted that while there has been movement towards greater equality, "in 1995 American women still spent nearly twice as much time on housework than men" and there is also a segregation of household tasks.[34] This gendered division of household labor creates what is known as the second shift or double burden, where working women in a heterosexual couple with a working partner spend significally more time on childcare and household chores.[35]
Researchers from the University of Maryland have found that while men have steadily begun to perform more household labor since 1965, most of the essential and traditionally feminine tasks are still carried out by women; men generally carry out more nonessential or infrequent tasks, such as taking out the trash or mowing the lawn.[36] While both genders tend to have roughly equal amounts of leisure time, men have more uninterrupted leisure time when compared to women.[37] Working mothers also tend to get less sleep when compared to their working husbands.[38]

Education
Literacy and enrollment in primary and secondary education are at parity in the United States, and women are overrepresented in tertiary education.[1] There is, however, a notably gender segregation in degree choice, correlated with lower incomes for graduates with "feminine" degrees, such as education or nursing, and higher incomes for those with "masculine" degrees, such as engineering.[39][40] In addition, men have a statistically significant advantage over women when applying for highly selective universities, despite the fact that women generally outperform men in high school.[40]

Other issues
Research conducted at Lycoming College has found the enjoyment of sexist humor to be strongly correlated with sexual aggression towards women among male college students.[41] In addition, studies have shown that exposure to sexist humor, particularly humor related to sexual assault, can increase male aggression and their tendency to discriminate against women.[42][43] One study also asserted that the attitudes behind such humor creates an environment where such discriminatory and possibly violent behavior is acceptable.[42] Men's tendency to self-report the likelihood that they would commit sexually violent acts has also been found to increase after exposure to sexist humor, as reported by researchers from the University of Kent.[43]