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On cognitive biases distorting how we see women’s representation

Why do people think the world is "feminised", even though women are still significantly underrepresented in politics, leadership and media representation?

Because people don't notice the absence of women, but they notice the presence of any women, no matter how few.

"When underrepresentation is the everyday default, even the presence of a lone minority can start to feel like ‘plenty,’ while a small handful may already seem like ‘too many.’ Our stereotype-saturated minds can pull a strange trick: we overestimate — sometimes wildly — how many women and minority-group members are actually present in a given environment.

In another relatively recent study published in BMJ Open, more than 400 medical professionals in the UK were asked to estimate the proportion of women across different areas of medicine — general practice, medical specialities, surgical specialities — and in various professional roles. Yet despite working in the field themselves and presumably having a better grasp of its demographics than the general public, participants consistently overestimated the number of women in nearly every category.3 The largest distortion occurred in surgery, where respondents estimated that women made up around 25% of surgery consultants/GPs, when the real figure was only 14%. And, as in the PNAS study, both female and male participants showed comparable levels of overestimation.

A similar pattern emerged in a 2018 Ipsos survey. Nearly 20,000 respondents across 27 countries were asked to estimate the percentage of women holding top CEO positions worldwide. Their average guess? 20%. The actual figure? Just 3%."

#gender #feminism #politics #sexism

All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.

bell hooks

#bell hooks #quote #gender #feminism #gender roles #relationships

Horrified by the recent murder of Kawthar al-Husayjawi, one of her female relatives describes what happened – and her fears for other women

"The men of my tribe [extended family] threw my relative Kawthar Bashar al-Husayjawi, 15, into a pit and put a little dirt over her body. They had killed her hours earlier with 10 bullets, and split her small head with an axe. My family then joined others in coming on to the streets to dance and celebrate her death.

Kawthar lived in al-Nahrawan, a district in the south-east of Baghdad. She had been taken out of school and at age 13 forced to marry an alcoholic years older than her."

source

#gender #feminism #misogyny

As the pornography platform has exploded in popularity, a side industry has emerged: middlemen who encourage young women into the industry,

"Hussle, 27, describes himself as an OnlyFans manager. Others view him as an e-pimp, although he rejects this description as “cringe”. He says he makes his money by taking a 50% cut of the earnings of women who sell videos of themselves performing provocative or explicit content on the website OnlyFans. Hussle, whose real name is Markuss Kohs, runs a digital marketing agency that encourages men to buy clips of the women he manages removing their clothes.

Mostly, he avoids talking in clear terms about what the women – to whom he refers euphemistically as clients or content creators – are expected to do on camera to generate all this income. On one podcast, he was asked whether he would let his hypothetical daughter open an OnlyFans account. “Absolutely not,” he replied."

#sex industry #gender

A recent study connects a strong feminist identity with the ability to navigate romantic conflicts constructively. For women who experienced

"A recent study suggests that embracing feminism might help women navigate romantic conflicts, especially for those who experienced emotional neglect in their early years. The research indicates that a strong feminist identity acts as a buffer, allowing women to maintain constructive communication with their partners despite past childhood trauma. These results were recently published in the journal Health Care for Women International."

#feminism #gender #relationships

Historically, public humiliation rituals were almost always accompanied by moral explanations of why the victim deserved what was happening. People locked in stocks or paraded through town squares were accused of adultery, blasphemy, abuse—individuals whose public shaming supposedly served the greater good. The humiliation of the offender reassured everybody else that justice had been served, and warned the rest of the community to stay in line. Online ridicule operates through a similar framework, although the line between criminal behavior and cringe often blurs. Some internet figures targeted as lolcows have committed actual crimes or expressed reprehensible views, while others have done little more than exaggerate their talents or fail to realize they’re being made fun of. In both cases, the same dynamic emerges.

And yet the targets almost always hold no power. For lack of a better word, lolcows are “nobodies.” They are highly visible online precisely because they lack the kind of protection afforded to other members of society. What does it mean to demand accountability from a homeless man with schizophrenia? What punishment could you inflict that life hasn’t already? Surely, there is an abusive CEO—or politician, or priest, or soccer coach—out there equally “deserving” of harassment. But in those cases, the lolcow dynamic would be impossible to replicate. Most powerful people aren’t isolated, sourcing their only human connection from the internet. If their cringeworthy video went viral, friends or family members would tell them to delete it, to stop replying to comments, to walk away. If the harassment escalated, they’d hire a lawyer. So while a scandal involving a powerful institution might briefly dominate the news cycle, it rarely manifests the kind of long-term participatory obsession that surrounds a lolcow. A politician who lies may be criticized for a week, but a mentally ill livestreamer who behaves erratically may be taunted for years. The crowd returns, day after day, to the person least capable of defending themselves.

The Insidious World of Lolcows

#internet culture #quote

mysharona1987

Annette Bramley says Holly’s Law would stop perpetrators acquiring pets and raise awareness of domestic abuse link

"“I didn’t think he would stop at animals. I knew the connection between animal abuse and domestic abuse,” she said. “When the police came to the door, we knew nothing else could possibly have happened to her. We didn’t suspect a car accident or anything like that; we just said: ‘What has he done to her?’”

Holly, 26, was killed by Metson in March 2023 in what prosecutors described as a “twisted and barbaric” attack, cutting Holly’s body into more than 200 pieces, which were later discovered by a member of the public.

Bramley is now campaigning for Holly’s Law in her daughter’s memory, to stop prolific animal abusers from being able to acquire more pets, and to raise awareness of the link between animal and domestic abuse.

She wants to see an animal abuse register and a scheme to allow police to disclose information on animal abuse and neglect to prevent perpetrators acquiring more pets.

Studies have shown a strong link between pet abuse and domestic abuse, including perpetrators using animals as a coercive control strategy, while analysis by the UK’s national wildlife crime unit found a link to domestic violence and abuse for 27% of all wildlife crime offenders."

#animal abuse #domestic violence #dv #law #uk #animal welfare #gender #feminism

People have been made to believe that government is inept, but that ineptitude was manufactured so that it could be privatized.

Trevor Noah

#Trevor Noah #quote #government #politics #neoliberalism

The product of our most determinedly “unproductive” hours (for Gen Z, over 6 hours of captured attention per day) is used to generate massive profits that we do not share, and to enable pervasive surveillance. The activity of scrolling (or clicking, or whatever) is intensely piecemeal, by design: we are algorithmically sorted with godlike efficiency into various silos and echo chambers that cut us off from any context that might salvage our act of attention from the constant fragmentation (cat video follows live beheading follows stock tips) that has been quite helpfully characterized as a form of “human fracking.” It goes without saying that we are unprecedentedly isolated from all the other people with whom we are supposedly more “connected” than ever before in human history. And, most importantly, we are increasingly cut off from our natural desire to spend our “free” time doing something that is free—something that is active and creative, something that strives for coherence and depth, something that involves not “connection” (that is what machines do) but honest-to-god relationships.

Alienated Leisure

#politics #surveillance #quote

scribefindegil

Everyone is so weird about people who cry easily. Fellas, is it evil and manipulative to *checks notes* have an involuntary stress response?

bluishorange

actually a coworker of mine said something interesting about this. I was saying that I truly can’t help how easily I cry, and I hate when people assume I do it on purpose.

and he paused for a second and then said, “when you’ve been taught from a young age that crying is weak and you should train yourself never to cry for any reason, you assume that everyone else has trained themselves too, so anyone who cries has to be doing it on purpose. it took me a long time to realize that wasn’t true.”

listen we’re never gonna run out of ways the patriarchy hurts all of us.

To augment information about you that it collects directly, the US Government is buying less-regulated information harvested by cameras, cel

#privacy #surveillance

According to the sexist ideology, the man goes out into the world to interact with others, while the woman occupies herself with a domestic role. The man discovers who he is through engagement with the nomos, while the woman remains unalienated and attends to the oikos. Or, as the sexist cliché has it, “A woman’s place is in the home.” Sexism doesn’t alienate women. It treats them as if they were whole beings incapable of suffering from alienation.

Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldnt Try to Find Ourselves by Todd McGowan

#Todd McGowan #quote #patriarchy

One indication of the existence of oppression is the reduction of a group to a collective identity with definite desires or ways of being. In the oppressed situation, all subjects become reducible to a consistent symbolic identity. Identity overwhelms subjectivity in the oppressive viewpoint, which is why people tend to identify those in an oppressed position in a collective way, with statements such as “They smell bad” or “They are lazy” or even “They are destroying our nation.”

The characterization can even be a positive one, such as “All mothers love their children.” It might be difficult to recognize this statement as a sexist one since it makes an unqualified positive statement about women who have children, but its sexism consists in the attribution of an undivided symbolic identity to all childbearing women. According to the logic of this statement, women are not subjects but substantial beings. If mothers were subjects, some would love their children, but some would not. And even those who did would have times when they didn’t. The alienated subject is not identical with itself but desires in contradictory ways.

Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldnt Try to Find Ourselves by Todd McGowan

#gender #oppression #social issues #gender roles #patriarchy #feminism

A cottage industry of women are selling courses aligned with a conservative movement that claims feminism is the source of women’s disconten

"Wife School and similar courses are indoctrination disguised as spiritually rigorous self-help content. “These women are building businesses that exploit these feelings of inadequacy that their followers have,” Wellman said. “They can say whatever they want, because they have been extremely successful in their curated presentation of self.”

Much of what they say is that every problem in a modern Christian marriage is the woman’s fault."

The name "wife school" already gives the game away! Dystopian.

"Dillehay uses the metaphor of a tandem bike to prescribe gender politics in marriage. The husband is at the front, managing the ride while his wife pedals helpfully behind him. “You’re exerting effort without being in control,” she said. When couples disagree, Dillehay said, wives should practice “the skill of ‘zip it’”."

#religion #gender #marriage #gender roles #sexism #politics #patriarchy

I took this photo in Tokyo today.

#donald trump #tokyo #politics #Japan #shinjuku

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

The United States is destroying itself

Rebecca Solnit

#rebecca solnit #quote #politics #us

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