Sunday, November 04, 2012

Another rogue statistic

Here is a photo of a young woman explaining why she needs feminism:

Could this really be true?

Her claim is that women do two thirds of the world's work but own only one per cent of the world's property.

That seems highly unlikely. A sociologist decided to investigate the statistic and found that it first appeared in the late 1970s. The feminist author who created the statistic, Krishna Ahooja-Patel, has admitted that she relied on "fragmentary indicators of the time" and that the 1% figure was based on the logic that if women were low paid they would not be able to accumulate property and therefore it was likely that women owned 1% or less of the world's property.

So the statistic is based, as the sociologist Philip Cohen puts it, not on hard data but on "a guess based on an extrapolation wrapped round an estimate."

Cohen also points out that it's difficult to measure precisely which sex owns property as wives often have a legal claim on the property accumulated by their husbands. What he does show is that American women alone earn over 5% of world income today.

And when feminists are in a more triumphant mood, they prefer to emphasise the economic clout of women in society. For instance, there is a Virginia Tech page celebrating female philanthropy which claims:
  • women control nearly 60% of the wealth in the U.S.
  • women represent more than 40% of Americans with gross investable assets above $600,000
  • 45% of American millionaires are women
  • Some estimate that by 2030, women will control as much as two-thirds of the nation’s wealth

Nor is the 1% of property claim the only rogue statistic still floating around; for another example see here

13 comments:

  1. Ugh, well she's not white. Let her birthrate be depressed.

    I agree with the 1% statistic as applicable to Africans where the men sit around while the women do all the work :)

    Going back to the non-white thing....The white gentile women I know are not feminists, all married, all happily being moms. However, I see a lot of non-white Hispanic/Indian college students voraciously reading feminist/abortion books.

    I'd like to think that gentile white women are wisening up to all of the b.s....but the b.s. is being kept alive by third worlders just discovering the ideology.

    If that is the case, I could care less. As long as my people go back to traditions and have children.


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  2. So she's basically saying "I uncritically accept any self-serving statistic I hear, regardless of its legitimacy." Will feminism do that for me too?

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  3. I love the ingratiating look on her face. She isn't sad for the poor abused women. They don't even cross her mind. She's delighted with herself because she's performing a simple trick to please her professors.

    Sit up and beg!

    The simple trick she's performing -- regurgitating a memorized fake statistic that she can't even explain -- is called "critical thinking". Just ask them.

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  4. Anonymous up there a bit of a mental patient or whats up with his world>

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  5. She's probably a rich non-Western woman. Those are the most feminist types out of them all.

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  6. gree with the 1% statistic as applicable to Africans where the men sit around while the women do all the work

    Yeah, but no wealth or property is created when Africans "work".

    "Get food, eat it" is not a great model for capital accumulation. =)

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  7. Matthew Walker nailed it.

    I know the kind of people she's appealing to. They have sky high and basically un-meetable standards for anything that conflicts with their prejudices, and under-the-carpet standards off acceptability for anything that flatters their prejudices, which an attractive non-White young woman flashing a beautiful smile and publicizing feminist "facts" certainly does.

    They think this is fine, because they have a heroic oppositionist mentality. Like Madonna, they are rebels even though they are 100% lined up with the system, and in effect are paid conformists.

    As heroic intellectual rebels, they are entitled to encourage any speech that might arouse opposition to the oppressive system.

    They know they are rebels because the targets they set for society are not being met. They never think that's because their theories aren't true and their recommendations don't work; they always think it's because "out there" there's still an immense amount of resistance to progress.

    In other words, the more their theories are wrong, they more their recommendations, embodied in law, fail, the worse the social outcomes, the more they see an unjust establishment as still being in power - secretly. That frustrates and scares them, and spurs them into an "anything goes" mentality.

    (This is the same mentality that in the Soviet Union defined every bad outcome as evidence of "saboteurs and wreckers" and a reason for more purges.)

    Bad outcomes don't make them think they might be wrong, because they are the experts. There is a massive and ever-growing body of "research" and theory that all fits in with their thinking, and essentially nothing against it. (Because right-wingers conceal their perspectives, rightly believing that if they revealed them they would be discriminated against. Plus, there are very few right-wing academics, because they have been purged or they saw how things stand and avoided academia in the first place.)

    And if they, the enlightened ones, were not the experts, who would be? Ignoramuses with money? Hardly.

    People like this are not going to be eager to call a feminist non-White woman on a rogue statistic that serves "progress".

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  8. She needs feminism in order to fight against the dreadful scourge of sexist gardening gloves.

    Things must be pretty damn good for women in Australia if this is a big concern.

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  9. "I agree with the 1% statistic as applicable to Africans where the men sit around while the women do all the work"

    Another feminist statistic.

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  10. Daybreaker, that's an interesting argument. There's something to it, I think.

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  11. I, am entitled to more, and I really really like it!: (see photo)

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  12. Mark Richardson, I owe this argument to jaw-dropping conversations I had, and not to any process of reasoning.

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  13. If women only own 1% of the property, why is she smiling so much?

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