Saturday, September 24, 2016

ANZ goes SJW

ANZ is one of the big banks here in Australia. It is also a captured institution, being dedicated now to SJW causes, especially feminism. For example, it has decided to pay its female employees more than its male ones ($500 extra super a year) and it has spent a bucket load of money on an advertising campaign in which children are used to illustrate the evils of the "wage gap".

Here is one of the ads:



The ads seem to be annoying people more than inspiring them (at the time of writing the ad had 400 likes on Facebook and 4000 dislikes). And people are right to be annoyed for the following reasons:

1. The wage gap is a myth (see more below).

2. In a healthy society, men would earn more over a lifetime than women (on average). That's partly because women find men with resources attractive, giving men an added incentive to work for money rather than for life satisfaction or for work/life balance; partly because many men have a provider instinct and wish to work on behalf of their families; and partly because many women choose to prioritise time with their children when their children are young and so cut back hours, or choose more flexible work options.

3. It is hardly significant if married women with children earn less than their husbands over the course of a lifetime because their husband's pay goes to supporting their families anyway. It is in the interests of a woman if she has a husband with a well-paid job. In other words, the ANZ model assumes that husbands and wives are set against each other, rather than pooling resources.

4. It is destructive to set the men and women of a society against each other, to needlessly cultivate a sense of grievance in women, and an injured defensiveness in men. It is abusive for the ANZ to poison the feelings of young children in this way.

5. It is a bias in itself to believe that earnings is the true measure of a good life; i.e. that the measure of man is money. It is a fact that women report being less happy now than they were some decades ago, in spite of higher earnings.

As for the wage gap, economists have crunched the numbers and found that when hours worked in similar professions are compared, then earnings are much the same. In fact, young women are increasingly earning more money than young men:
according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

I don't bank with the ANZ, but if I did I would most certainly choose to take my business elsewhere.

14 comments:

  1. Hi Mark, Australia introduced Equal Pay for Equal Work in about 1973. I have read, also, that the Pay Gap has nothing to do with take home money, but everything about equality of opportunity in the workforce.

    Thus, calling it the Pay Gap, or Wage Gap, is a misnomer and actually quite misleading.

    When men and women in like-for-like jobs are compared, any discrepancy in take home pay is due to other factors: hours worked, time off, overtime, etc.

    The actual equality of pay can only be determined from the front end of the employment cycle: the hourly rate of pay. If a man and woman are on the same hourly rate of pay for the same job, then they are paid equally and that old legislation "Equal Pay for Equal Work" is fundamentally upheld.

    Part of what you see happening now is an argument for levelling across industries, at least in the wishful thinking of feminists, so that, for example, childcare workers should be paid as much as engineers because they work the same amount of time. This is the argument that "degree of difficulty" should be made not to matter so that there is a level playing field across the entire economy. I have seen this argument in a very limited capacity.

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    1. Good comment, thanks. My female peers are now in the 40+ age bracket. At this age, very few are strident careerists (none that I know of). When I talk to them, nearly all of them want to downscale in one way or another (not all of them can). The men, on the other hand, are just uncomplainingly resigned to working full-time. In order to have the same total lifetime earnings you would need to somehow make these older women as committed to the breadwinning role as the men are (which I just can't see happening); or else discourage men from taking on the responsibility of breadwinning; or else pay women more for working less than men. The ANZ feminists are prodding toward the last option. They want equal outcomes by treating men and women unequally. They seem to be pushing toward a system in which men would spend more time at work than women but without earning more.

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  2. Diversity means everyone MUST think alike about 'diversity'.

    Not to change the subject.... but on free speech and Google.. look at this. Staggering. Evil

    Google 'European people art'

    or even 'white man white woman'

    Is Google Blackwashing European Self-Image?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b14IgSPkPC4

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  3. The Guardian keeps putting out articles on the "gender pay gap" but the commenters there are largely not buying it and come out with all the arguments you have and more, cumulatively.

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  4. How encouraging that this video is deeply unpopular.

    Sadly, I expect Australian corporates will respond by doubling down on producing more of this kind of propaganda. I work in a large professional services firm that has embraced (along with our competitors ) the SJW agenda with - frankly - terrifying vigour. The HR department uses every opportunity to harangue us about "diversity and inclusion", the firm is actively campaigning for so-called "marriage equality", and the consequences of speaking a contrary opinion are (tacitly) made obvious. We are told now to insist on or expect "no women, no work" committments in tenders for major jobs (the irony of this blatant sex discrimination doesn't dawn on advocates of this new practice).

    No doubt when ANZ produced this ad, it was first shown to a staff gathering. After invoking the usual pieties to leftism, everyone would smile and clap. The Soviet Union or Poland must have been like this in the 70s and 80s. The hard-core Party faithful constantly harassing the productive workers with empty slogans with wide-eyed fanaticism, while the people who haven't lost their minds just shrug their shoulders and avoid stepping out of line (having mouths to feed, after all). But how long can this edifice of lies carry on? Something has to give.

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    1. Interesting comment, thanks. Sorry to hear your workplace is like that, but then so is mine. Your last thought is a good one. The corporate world and the big public institutions are becoming ever more radically liberal, whilst an increasing number of intelligent young people are rejecting it all. At some point the diverging trends are going to cause some sort of major friction in society.

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    2. My work is becoming more extreme too - the HR people, not the academics. Cultural Marxism has always thrived best among the lumpenintelligentsia. Where academics like to talk and discuss ideas, bureaucrats like to enforce conformity of thought. Having a bunch of low-IQ bureaucrats enforce thought policing on much more intelligent & thoughtful academics is bloody annoying.

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    3. I am definitely encouraged by Mr Brandywines statement that the commenters of even the Guardian are not buying this nonsense. These tyrants can make everyone appear to consent, as happened behind the Iron Curtain. But, like all human endeavours, the tyrants' missionary zeal will corrupt and weaken over time, just as occurred in the USSR and its satellites, and the edifice will eventually fall asunder from its own contradictions.

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  5. Percentage wise, a woman working part time would do best out of this. Given that they're paying women more for their life choices, they can't then discriminate against women who only work 2 days a week, as opposed to 5 days.
    A woman on $24k a year ($60k working only 2 days) would get 22% more Super, whereas a career woman on $150k full time would only get 3.5% more Super.
    The One takeaway I keep hearing from most companies is how reverse discrimination is ok if it is used to help balance out previous discrimination.
    Bit like how engineering companies keep hiring mostly female graduates to try to overcome the mostly male environment. Given so many women stop working, or at least cut back, when they get to a certain age, some companies can NEVER reach parity in gender because the women they do hire keep leaving for lifestyle choices.
    To bridge any immediate gaps they hire men (which is how men can still get a look in) but otherwise it's women.
    One year a company I was doing work for hired 9 female and only 1 male graduates (very few white people).
    This supposedly in a field where men still are the majority of students too!
    So many people wanted to call them out on it but we're afraid.
    I suspect the only reason they even hired 10 in a single year was that they were counting on half of them leaving in the first five years, which did actually happen.

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  6. Replies
    1. http://www.women.anz.com/at-anz/we-are-bridging-the-super-gap

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    2. Nvm I found it (the source of your quote I mean). Also this article discrediting it (although it is abc soooo...)
      http://www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck/2014-09-10/young-childless-women-earn-more-than-men-fact-check/5712770
      Thanks for your help anyway :)

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    3. The ABC report is interesting. It doesn't really discredit the original claim about median earnings in major cities in the U.S. It points out that there is still a pay gap if you take into account rural areas and part-time work.

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  7. lol sorry, I meant for your "wage gap is a myth" thingo

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