The Second Life Mission Discussion

[Ayashe Ninetails]

24 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

But a woman having less time to work because of the children has nothing to do with the gender pay gap, at the moment that she started working the same amount of hours as a man, she would start getting paid the same as well, assuming that everyone had the same job and responsabilities.

Just want to point out that I've had issues getting paid the same amount as other women. And yes, we had the same exact job/responsibilities/hours/titles. In fact, I've often wound up doing *more* for less. As is the nature of business, I suppose.

These things aren't that rare, unfortunately.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

10 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

Hey, as long as I'm not the one saying it...

No need to worry, Paul. I just double-checked, and you are NOT on the official "Men-Who-Are-Really-Going-to-Get-It-When-We-Take-Over" list.

[Miguel Rowley]

11 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But it is if the reason you are not working the same hours is because you are a woman.

I take your point, but, again, it's more complex than merely "women don't work as much." In my place of employment, women get occasional bonuses in order to bring their average wages up to the rate of men -- and this is in a salaried job, not one based upon hours worked. In other words, hours worked isn't a factor, and yet women are statistically still being paid less for (in this instance) exactly the same work.

The document I cite also notes that "in its 10-year analysis, Statistics Canada (2018) notes that nearly two-thirds of the studied gender pay gap is unexplained. For this portion, possible explanations include gender differences in work experience, 'as well as unobservable factors, such as any gender-related biases.'"

But giving birth to her child was her decision. The parents should already know that they need to invest time on the child as well.

It's like I said, I understand that having a child can cause women (or men) to work less hours, but the gender-based pay discrimination is based around a man and a woman being in the exact same situation AND EVEN STILL the woman gets paid less because of her gender. In the moment that the hours worked are different, that makes the whole situation different and you can't define that as discrimination.

18 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But taking your car to a mechanic isn't a gendered activity. Pregnancy, maternity leave, and childcare are.

I should note that in my country, men are now eligible for paid paternity leave as well. That is a great thing.

I can simply just change my example to a prostate exam then since that is a gendered activity, not to mention that father's can also do childcare (Even though of course women doing childcare is more prevelant)

 

Since all your points about this are about pregnancy, let me ask you, if a woman wasn't pregnant, and worked less hours than a man, would you think there is a gender-based pay discrimination in that situation?

[Kiera Clutterbuck]

4 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

but the gender-based pay discrimination is based around a man and a woman being in the exact same situation AND EVEN STILL the woman gets paid less because of her gender. In the moment that the hours worked are different, that makes the whole situation different and you can't define that as discrimination.

The problem in the Equal Pay Act you mentioned where suing is possible, is that people find ways to skirt around it. When bosses want to make more money they can be tricky. Here's an actress I like who made great strides bringing awareness to the problem. For some reshoots she was paid 1000 while her male co-star was paid 1.5 million for the same task! 

https://www.insider.com/michelle-williams-pay-gap-mark-wahlberg-reshoots-equal-pay-day-2019-4

Efforts were made inAmerica to add some teeth to the Equal Pay Act with the Paycheck Fairness Act, but it's still not passed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Fairness_Act

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

12 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

But giving birth to her child was her decision.

It's not just her choice, Garrett. You make it sound as though women are the only ones who want children. It's not something women do for fun, and, whether planned or not, men bear an equal responsibility for it happening.

But the biological reality is that by far the greatest burden for having children -- and effectively keeping the human race going-- lies on women. And when that is compounded by actual financial, social, and political penalties, you've got a problem that needs to be redressed.

12 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

Since all your points about this are about pregnancy, let me ask you, if a woman wasn't pregnant, and worked less hours than a man, would you think there is a gender-based pay discrimination in that situation?

If everything else -- and remember, this is complicated -- were equal, no. 

But everything else is seldom equal. Again, look at the complex range of factors at play here.

It's important to note that in many cases "men" aren't to blame for this: it's systemic. And that is in part because the system -- and more generally our culture -- hasn't yet adjusted fully to the realities of women in the workplace. It's actually getting measurably better. But we're not there yet.

Edited June 27, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Kiera Clutterbuck]

Deficiencies of the Equal Pay Act and why they need this other law to give it teeth:

https://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/governmental_legislative_work/priorities_policy/discrimination/the-paycheck-fairness-act/

Deficiencies of the EPA

The EPA has proven ineffective in eradicating gender-based wage discrimination for several reasons:

1. Remedies. The EPA's limited remedies often provide inadequate compensation to make the victim whole and are insufficient to deter future violations of the law by employers who view them as a cost of doing business. 
2. Interpretations. Judicial interpretations of two of the provisions of the EPA conflict with the clear intent of the law and have weakened its effectiveness. Specifically, courts have adopted a narrow definition of what constitutes a work establishment, and some courts have permitted employers to pay unequal wages to men and women based on factors that are not job-related. 
3. Class Actions. The EPA’s class action provisions are outdated. At present, it is very difficult to bring EPA lawsuits as class actions because the EPA, adopted prior to the current federal class action rule (FRCP Rule 23), requires plaintiffs to opt in to participate in a class action suit.
4. Retaliation. The EPA’s prohibition against retaliation only covers employees who initiate a complaint or lawsuit. Conduct leading up to that point is not covered. This is a problem because companies have restrictive policies that penalize employees from disclosing or discussing their salaries with co-workers, which often prevents or deters workers from discovering wage inequities.  

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Innula Zenovka said:

An old friend of my parents had been a radio operator for RAF intelligence during WW2, receiving Morse messages from agents in occupied Europe and transcribing them for decoding.   She said they were trained to watch for agents' distinctive Morse signatures -- the speed and rhythm at which they send their keystrokes -- and to report any variations from the normal signature because this raised the strong possibility that the agent had been captured and the signal was either being sent under duress or that the equipment and codebooks had fallen into enemy hands by some other method.   

Similarly, my father, who worked as a telegraph clerk in the Post Office as a young man, said that the operators always knew who as on duty at particular offices at particular times because they could recognise their unique signature.

Oh yeah, I learned Morse to get my Ham license and could recognize differences in other people's keying.

When I was little, my grandmother still had a party line phone in her farm house. She could recognize her various neighbors by the cadence and intensity of their rings, which were powered by cranking the magneto. I didn't know who was calling her, but the differences in rings was obvious.

People think "I recognize that ring" is a silly joke. Nope, it was once a skill everybody had.

[Madelaine McMasters]

29 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

43 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

Hey, as long as I'm not the one saying it...

No need to worry, Paul. I just double-checked, and you are NOT on the official "Men-Who-Are-Really-Going-to-Get-It-When-We-Take-Over" list.

What?

He's on mine.

So are you.

I don't discriminate based on gender.

Edited June 27, 2022 by Madelaine McMasters

[Rowan Amore]

27 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

But giving birth to her child was her decision

Not for long. 

[Kiera Clutterbuck]

I like this actress too, speaking to the issue:

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

So are you.

Well, Trotsky had his Stalin, I suppose.

But which are you?

[Madelaine McMasters]

28 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

father's can also do childcare (Even though of course women doing childcare is more prevelant)

Well then, you guys need to get going...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-males-can-lactate/

[Madelaine McMasters]

4 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well, Trotsky had his Stalin, I suppose.

But which are you?

I'm the little devil who sprinkled her parents ashes on the beach so she could squish them between her toes*.

 

 

 

*I was underfoot when little, now it's their turn.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Cali Souther said:

Equality is a wonderful vision / goal.   Obviously,  that comes second to making money - which is their #1 goal.

I see equality like I do world peace - We all want it,  but can't figure out how to get there.

 

Oh, we know how to get there. It's just that some people won't get their heads out of their... sand.

[Persephone Emerald]

9 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Linden Lab Executive Chairman Oberwolf Linden said one of things he admires about virtual worlds, SL in particular, is how incredibly equalizing they are across so many features of human beings.
He said unless you choose to disclose it we don't know your gender, your race, your religion...and that there's a beauty to that.
And coming back to commerce, he says that 80% of the top earners in SL are women.

"When everyone is equal, those that have the best offering, work the hardest, work the smartest, whatever it is...can provide for themselves in ways that in the physical world it's just not possible. There just is not the same opportunity in the physical world for people to increase their particularly monetary social economic status as easy as it is to do in the virtual world".

He is enthusiastic about this vision of SL, extended from Philip Linden's vision, as a participant in building equality around the globe.
He says it is a valiant purpose and mission.

Personally, when someone says they have equality as their mission they have my vote! Does everyone think this is an important vision for a virtual world company? How does SL compare to other virtual world companies regarding a mission? And practically, how well does SL achieve this mission? How might we, as residents (or LL as a company), create more equality if we find it lacking in SL, either monetarily or socially?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94R1-OeQmJg&t=1s
Comments on equality begin at almost the 1:30.00 mark 

I'd like to see a copy of their actual mission statement. It's easy to claim you're all for equality when you're actually just spinning events you didn't intend. 

What percentage of Linden executives are women? What percentage of Linden employees are women? What is the pay-gap between their male and female employees? What is their maternity leave policy? These issues are where they can show if they truly care about gender equity or not.

As for the percentage of female business owners in SL, there are a good many factors that make an online business favorable for women. Since women are often the primary caregivers of children and elderly parents, they can continue to do this caregiving while working from home in SL. Being their own boss behind the screen, they're also insulated from racial and body-size discrimination in the physical workplace. It's not just men who discriminate against women however, women do it to each other too. They might climb up that ladder as fast as they can, then pull it up behind them.

 https://www.dailydot.com/irl/google-interviewer-rejects-women/ (This one is a test.)

https://news.yahoo.com/underpaying-a-job-candidate-pay-disparity-213320214.html

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

16 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

What percentage of Linden executives are women? What percentage of Linden employees are women? What is the pay-gap between their male and female employees? What is their maternity leave policy? These issues are where they can show if they truly care about gender equity or not.

I was wondering these things myself. Linden Research Co. has had 4 CEOs, none of them women, for instance.

 

21 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

It's not just men who discriminate against women however, women do it to each other too. They might climb up that ladder as fast as they can, then pull it up behind them.

This is, sadly, all too true, although I suspect it is, at least in part, a generational thing.

[Miguel Rowley]

22 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It's not just her choice, Garrett. You make it sound as though women are the only ones who want children.

That's not what I said.

 

22 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It's not something women do for fun, and, whether planned or not, men bear an equal responsibility for it happening.

I also didn't implied otherwise.

I must have been too vague about it, so my bad,  but what I mean't about "It's her choice" I mean't that at the point that if a woman gets pregnant it's 100% her choice to make if she wants to make a abortion or not, the father can only try to convince her to do it his way, but in the end the mother has the last word, if fathers had the same influence just as mothers in regards to giving birth to a child or not , we would never have associated the words Drake and Hot sauce to begin with.

22 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But the biological reality is that by far the greatest burden for having children -- and effectively keeping the human race going-- lies on women. And when that is compounded by actual financial, social, and political penalties, you've got a problem that needs to be redressed.

I think this kinda goes off-topic, but the thing that you're forgetting about that is if the woman is having a child, then she is going to have the child's father to help her with the penalties to begin with. You can't think this situation as a lone wolf. at the moment that your talking about parenting, you already need to have the mentality that this is a team work. You can't have both worlds. If you want to focus about money, then don't have children. Otherwise you need to be aware that you can't work the same amount of hours as you could to take care of the child and let the father take care of the providing as well.

 

23 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

If everything else -- and remember, this is complicated -- were equal, no. 

This is what it really makes me confused about your point on this (When I mean by that, I mean the association of it with gender based pay discrimination, and not the point itself). Because if (correct me if I'm wrong) you agree with me that there isn't no gender based descrimination when a woman doesn't have a child, however when it's a situation when it's outside of her work life, and which was 100% her decision for her child to born which won't allow her to work as much as men, that makes it a gender based pay discrimination? It doesn't make sense. If it was discrimination, then all women would be affected by this, not just the ones that are in a specific situation.

23 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

and remember, this is complicated

You do say that there are more complicated things about it other than this, you mind talking more about it then? because I think atleast in the pregnancy topic we will have to agree to disagree, and maybe in the other topics I can be more knowledgeable about other factors that I'm not considering.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

7 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

This is what it really makes me confused about your point on this (When I mean by that, I mean the association of it with gender based pay discrimination, and not the point itself). Because if (correct me if I'm wrong) you agree with me that there isn't no gender based descrimination when a woman doesn't have a child, however when it's a situation when it's outside of her work life, and which was 100% her decision for her child to born which won't allow her to work as much as men, that makes it a gender based pay discrimination? It doesn't make sense. If it was discrimination, then all women would be affected by this, not just the ones that are in a specific situation.

The notion that there is no gender pay gap is demonstrably false and has been the focus of significant study. It is not simply that women work less or chose a lifestyle that gives them less opportunity to work (such as becoming a parent).

I could easily cite sources for that assertion but there is no point as you have made up your mind and adopted an intractable position.

[Miguel Rowley]

21 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I was wondering these things myself. Linden Research Co. has had 4 CEOs, none of them women, for instance.

That's not how you measure equality.

Equality is about having the same opportunity, not the outcome.

 

If 4 women and 4 men were  applying to a job with 4 spot applications, where they had to make a exam, and it happens that the 4 highest grades on that exam happen to be men, and they all got hired, that's equality.

Because the women had just the same chance to get hired for that job as the man did, they just had to be on the TOP 4 Exams

 

The only way it wouldn't be equality is if there were one or more women on the TOP 4 Exams and even still they didn't got hired.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

That's not how you measure equality.

Taps the sign ... 

[Miguel Rowley]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The notion that there is no gender pay gap is demonstrably false and has been the focus of significant study. It is not simply that women work less or chose a lifestyle that gives them less opportunity to work (such as becoming a parent).

I could easily cite sources for that assertion but there is no point as you have made up your mind and adopted an intractable position.

The reason why I'm talking about this is to get my ideas challenged in the first place to become more knowledgeable, and I do think that I'm making fair points about it, it's not just because that I'm offering a different perspective that I'm not open minded.

If you can cite sources and have anything to add to this, then please do it. I don't have a problem to admit when I'm wrong.

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, IGarrett said:

If you can cite sources and have anything to add to this, then please do it. I don't have a problem to admit when I'm wrong.

Google "gender pay gap" .. there is enough rigorous study in the first 10 results to keep you busy for a week.

[Silent Mistwalker]

21 minutes ago, IGarrett said:

That's not what I said.

 

I also didn't implied otherwise.

I must have been too vague about it, so my bad,  but what I mean't about "It's her choice" I mean't that at the point that if a woman gets pregnant it's 100% her choice to make if she wants to make a abortion or not, the father can only try to convince her to do it his way, but in the end the mother has the last word, if fathers had the same influence just as mothers in regards to giving birth to a child or not , we would never have associated the words Drake and Hot sauce to begin with.

I think this kinda goes off-topic, but the thing that you're forgetting about that is if the woman is having a child, then she is going to have the child's father to help her with the penalties to begin with. You can't think this situation as a lone wolf. at the moment that your talking about parenting, you already need to have the mentality that this is a team work. You can't have both worlds. If you want to focus about money, then don't have children. Otherwise you need to be aware that you can't work the same amount of hours as you could to take care of the child and let the father take care of the providing as well.

 

This is what it really makes me confused about your point on this (When I mean by that, I mean the association of it with gender based pay discrimination, and not the point itself). Because if (correct me if I'm wrong) you agree with me that there isn't no gender based descrimination when a woman doesn't have a child, however when it's a situation when it's outside of her work life, and which was 100% her decision for her child to born which won't allow her to work as much as men, that makes it a gender based pay discrimination? It doesn't make sense. If it was discrimination, then all women would be affected by this, not just the ones that are in a specific situation.

You do say that there are more complicated things about it other than this, you mind talking more about it then? because I think atleast in the pregnancy topic we will have to agree to disagree, and maybe in the other topics I can be more knowledgeable about other factors that I'm not considering.

 

 

You haven't got a freaking clue what you are talking about. But I'm not going to tell you my life story to prove it either.

 

With that I am out of here before my blood pressure goes sky high.

[Miguel Rowley]

8 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

You haven't got a freaking clue what you are talking about. But I'm not going to tell you my life story to prove it either.

 

With that I am out of here before my blood pressure goes sky high.

Okay then. I'm not trying to upset people here, and I do think that I never made any disrespecting comments  when making my points. But I'm sorry if you felt something about what I said, i'll refrain to engage in this topic anymore to avoid that.

Edited June 28, 2022 by IGarrett

[Love Zhaoying]

Regarding vision, mission, equity, and pay gap:  I fully support making salaries PUBLIC. Sure, it would create a lot of..issues, but if I understand correctly, if everyone knew how much $ everyone else makes - then there is less likely to be as bad a gap at some point.