The Man Who Had Power Over Women
According to one school of thought, things changed around 12,000 years ago. With the advent of agriculture and homesteading, people began settling down. They acquired resources to defend, and power shifted to the physically stronger males. Fathers, sons, uncles and grandfathers began living near each other, property was passed down the male line, and female autonomy was eroded. As a result, the argument goes, patriarchy emerged.
The Man Who Had Power Over Women
This origin story is supported by a study published in 2004. Researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, studied mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mothers) and genetic markers on the Y chromosome (inherited from fathers) in 40 populations from sub-Saharan Africa. This suggested that women in hunter-gatherer populations, such as the !Kung and Hadza, were more likely to remain with their mothers after marriage than women from food-producing populations. It was the reverse for men, suggesting that agriculture is indeed correlated with patrilocal societies.
Restoring and strengthening equality will require effort on multiple fronts, she says. If patriarchy originated in sedentary social structures that formalised male ownership and inheritance, then laws that give women the right to own property in their own name, for instance, can help.
All this is because gender equality is fundamentally a question of power. Centuries of discrimination and deep-rooted patriarchy have created a yawning gender power gap in our economies, our political systems and our corporations. The evidence is everywhere.
Women are still excluded from the top table, from governments to corporate boards to prestigious award ceremonies. Women leaders and public figures face harassment, threats and abuse online and off. The gender pay gap is just a symptom of the gender power gap.
Or take the wars that are ravaging our world. There is a straight line between violence against women, civil oppression and conflict. How a society treats the female half of its population is a significant indicator of how it will treat others. Even in peaceful societies, many women are in deadly danger in their own homes.
There is even a gender gap in our response to the climate crisis. Initiatives to reduce and recycle are overwhelmingly marketed at women, while men are more likely to put their faith in untested technological fixes. And women economists and parliamentarians are more likely than men to support pro-environmental policies.
Finally, political representation is the clearest evidence of the gender power gap. Women are outnumbered by an average of 3 to 1 in parliaments around the world, but their presence is strongly correlated with innovation and investment in health and education. It is no coincidence that the governments that are redefining economic success to include wellbeing and sustainability are led by women.
This is why one of my first priorities at the United Nations was to bring more women into our leadership. We have now achieved gender parity at the senior level, two years ahead of schedule, and we have a roadmap for parity at all levels in the years to come.
Our world is in trouble, and gender equality is an essential part of the answer. Man-made problems have human-led solutions. Gender equality is a means of redefining and transforming power that will yield benefits for all.
The movie's cumbersome title and its billing as a sex farce both miss thetarget. The story -- although frequently and fatally over the top-- has much more depth than just being about a man who can't keep "hisgrasping hands" off women.
Unfortunately, such simple scenes of clear emotion are too few in thismovie.BEHIND THE SCENES In a 1969 interview, Rod offered a "peek" at what might have been planned for the movie:According to the script, I'm a character who keeps having these fantasiesover women. There's one incident which strikes me as being particularly funny.This mixed-up character -- me -- catches a bus and discovers that the girlcollecting the fares is completely nude. The only items which cover her modestyare the money-bags and some leather straps.Then he notices all the passengers are sitting naked. I shall be nude myself in this scene, and let's say I shall need plenty of rehearsals with the girls before I'm satisfied with the scenes. At least, I hope so.--People magazine (Australia)July 16, 1969 Alas, for his audiences and himself, this isn't quite how the movie turned out!
But if mesmerism could entertain, anesthetize, and control, its promise was inextricable from its danger. Mesmerism transferred power over female bodies from protective male relatives to operators, threatening early nineteenth-century gendered constructs of virtue and honor.3
Women in the United States have made significant strides toward closing the gaps that have kept them from achieving equality with men. But the country is sharply divided over how much work remains to be done, and those divisions are rooted mainly in the growing partisan schism that pervades American values and culture these days.
Democrats are also much more likely than Republicans to say that men have easier lives than women these days: 49% of Democrats say this compared with 19% of Republicans. A majority of Republicans (68%) say neither men nor women have it easier today (compared with 45% of Democrats). Those who see an advantage for men often say these inequities are rooted in the workplace.
Politics also underpins views about who has benefited from the changing roles of men and women. Among Democrats and Republicans, more see an upside for women than for men as women have taken on a greater role in the workplace and men have assumed more responsibility for child care and housework, but Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to see benefits flowing from this societal shift.
Roughly six-in-ten Democrats (58%) say that changing gender roles have made it easier for women to lead satisfying lives; about a third of Republicans (36%) say the same. And while about half of Democrats (48%) say these changes have made it easier for men to lead satisfying lives, only 30% of Republicans share this view. In addition, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say changing gender roles have made it easier for parents to raise children, for marriages to be successful and for families to earn enough money to live comfortably.
The views of Millennial women differ sharply from those of Millennial men on the question of whether changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live more satisfying lives. While 61% of Millennial men say women have benefited from these changes, only 48% of Millennial women agree. Among older generations of adults, there is no similar gender gap.
Among both women and men who say they have faced discrimination because of their gender, more cite situations related to hiring, pay or promotion than any other example of unfair treatment they have experienced.
About four-in-ten women (38%) who say they have experienced discrimination or have been treated unfairly because of their gender cite experiences in the workplace, and this is particularly the case among older women. About half of Boomer women (51%) who say they have faced gender discrimination cite situations related to hiring, pay or promotion, compared with 36% of Gen X and 26% of Millennial women.2Among men who say they have faced gender discrimination, experiences related to the workplace are by far the most common. About a third of these men (35%) say they were discriminated against or treated unfairly in hiring, pay or promotion. By comparison, 7% say people made assumptions about their personality because of their gender, the second-most cited example among men who say they have experienced gender discrimination.
In many ways, the workplace has represented the front lines in the battle for gender equality in the U.S. Over the past half century, the role of women in the workplace has been transformed as they have increased their labor force participation, seen their wages increase and made inroads into occupations that were previously dominated by men. Even so, women still lag behind in several key leadership realms.
Higher earnings for women and lower earnings for men have resulted in a narrower gender wage gap. In 2016, women earned, on average, 83 cents for every dollar earned by men. In 1980 women earned 64 cents for every dollar earned by men.
The gains women have made in wages have been driven in part by their increased presence in more lucrative occupations. Today, women are just as likely as men to be working in managerial occupations. In 1980, men were twice as likely as women to have these types of jobs. In the past, women were more highly concentrated in lower-paying clerical or administrative occupations than they are today.
Even as women have made inroads in a wide range of leadership positions in recent decades, the gender gap remains quite wide in this area. Women made up roughly 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs in the first quarter of 2017 and about 20% of Fortune 500 board members in 2016. Only about 20% of members of Congress and about a quarter of members of state legislatures are women. Currently, there are six female governors and four females in executive branch Cabinet-level positions (not including those serving acting positions).
Americans across demographic and partisan groups agree that women should have equal rights with men. About eight-in-ten Americans (82%) say it is very important for women to have equal rights with men in our country, and another 14% say this is somewhat important. Just 4% of Americans say gender equality is not too or not at all important.
Asked whether the country has gone too far, not gone far enough or been about right when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, half of the public says the country still has work to do, while 39% say things are about where they should be; one-in-ten Americans believe the country has gone too far in giving women equal rights with men. These views differ by gender, education and, most of all, partisanship. 041b061a72