Again, you say women are not treated unfairly anymore. Can you back that up with statistics? Are there more abused males at the hands of females now? Do women on average make more than men across all fields? (Dare to expand your argument to include other countries than the US?). To date more women exist in secretarial position than in managerial ones despite the fact that women hold more and more advanced degrees. and to an extent this is because we do not "fit" into the male-friendly environment that makes up most workplaces. We cant go grab that beer after work with the boss ...act like one of the guys (admit it....most of the times this is what gets you a promotion) I think if more women were in managerial positions we would do away with such expectations.
and lets look at african americans.You could go to the bureau of justice for statistics on how many black youth are in US prisons? You will find the number is HUGELY disproportionate to their population in America. Policing strategies are only recently being reported to have a negative affect on their communities....in the past they applied zero tolerance and mass imprisonment strategies which destroyed black communities. Have u seen the pretty boy policemen in manhattan? trust me, they look nothing like the badass policemen in the bronx. a bunch of poor black youth "hanging out" in the bronx has a completely different meaning that a bunch of white guys hanging outside Tiffany's in manhattan. Who is the police likely to stop and frisk more? You can place an anti-discrimination law into effect, but can you make sure it is enforced at the individual level?
Every year the US department of housing and urban development reports how many black people reported being discriminated against when it comes to housing. Residential segregation is why so many blacks are confined to inner cities where they fall prey to even MORE crime. The thing is that this discrimination against them is COVERT....not done openly. If a black guy calls me for a house in a nice neighborhood and i am a real estate agent, covert discrimination would simply be not to return his call (can he prove i discriminated? no...)
These laws are in place not so much because there is a systematic discrimination against blacks (and women), but they are there to deal with personal biases and to ensure people actually have a justifiable reason for foregoing one applicant over another (not just on the basis of gender or race).
once the statistics show that women are actually being treated equal to men, i have no problem in doing away with such laws. Unfortunately, personal bias and covert discrimination is harder to do away with even if a set of laws are in place by the government.
The evident bias in your words is a reason for me to say that deliberate avoidance of rationality should not be incorporated into the argument. If you read my arguments carefully, you'll find that never once did I claim that women did not suffer in the past or are not (generally) suffering in any part of the world other than the West. You and I live in the West, and what affects our lives is what is imminent to us. So stay on topic, please!
Statistics can be quite misleading if not interpretted carefully. Mamaof3 answered your concerns about blacks quite well. Let me just add that, it's the protective shelter given by biased laws and social ideals that we're talking about here. Unfortunately I will be labelled a racist as well for saying this, but If a particular community (racial/religious) fails to progress despite the presence of protective laws and increased opportunities, most of the blame has to be shared by that community itself. What happened to blacks and women in the past was very unfortunate. It should've never happened, and I have zero tolerance for the ones who committed such crimes in the history. However, that does not mean that ".. because your grandfather abused my grandfather, I can abuse you".
Let's talk about statistics again. I think most of the hardest and dirtiest jobs are still being held be men, and I would take a secretarial job any day than working in a coal mine all day long. Women have a skewed representation in secretarial jobs, but would they trade those jobs with physically demanding field jobs? I bet not. For managerial positions, most employers offer performance based compensation and as Mamaof3 explained, she was making more money than most of her male colleagues for the same type of work. Among the Ph.Ds awarded in 2001, for example, in education 65% of the doctorates went to women; in the social sciences, 54%; in the life sciences, 47%; in the physical sciences, 26%; in engineering, 17% ** (Harvard University's Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative -- probably available online) **. Women generally outperform men in nonscience disciplines, and thus their representation such areas is usually higher. Additionally, they are given preference at technical jobs or academic programs, which is the protective shelter I referred to earlier. Men, however, do not have that luxury in the fields where women are overrepresented.
This is not a men vs women debate or to prove who is better of the two genders. This is a debate on morality, as to who is being treated unfairly or not. Women are better disciplined than men, they are more organized and consistently achieve higher grades, but the variance in their achievements is not huge. Men's performance on standardized tests and college exams, however, is highly skewed, representing both tails of the graph. They are also known to take more intellectual risks, which is also a reason they represent the top management more so than women. However, if you want to focus only on that, you would be deliberately ignoring the fact that they probably deserved that, and also that men hold the lowest strata of the jobs much more so than women.