In New Zealand, our Human Rights Commissioner is Susan Devoy, and she is universally mocked. We tend to ignore what she says. Most Aussies do not. Tony Abbot shows the correct response to proposals to regulate workforce and quotas: tell the commissioner to pull her head in, and be silent. For she has made herself a fool.
This was praised on Aussie TV. It made me want to scurry over the Tasman, where we still can laugh at people: perhaps Tony Abbott should move to the native land of his wife, where his attitude would be supported.
Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins has told the federal government to take “disruptive action’’ and make private sector contractors hire more women, to help close the 16 per cent pay gap between male and female workers.
“Pull your head in,” the former prime minister said of Ms Jenkins, during an interview with Sydney radio 2GB.
“We absolutely have to give women a fair go but some of this stuff sounds like it’s just anti-men.”
Well it is. A lot of the concentration has been on boards and executive positions, and ignores that men and women tend to look for different things. Men look for jobs that bring in reliable money. Women, particularly mothers, need flexibility. Women give up money for the flexibility: men are not prepared to do the low wage flexible mac-jobs is there is an alternative available. And this proposal assumes that only big companies, who have human resources departments, will apply for contracts.
The Aussies are fairly well off, but not that well off. They cannot afford to be this feckless.
Under the plan, companies that fail or refuse to recruit similar numbers of men and women risk losing lucrative government contracts in the gender-bending experiment intended to boost women’s pay but which business groups have warned could mean a bad outcome for taxpayers and tougher conditions for small businesses.
Ms Jenkins wants government agencies to include a clause in contracts requiring “demonstrated efforts to improve gender balance’’ — with targets of 40 per cent women.
Contractors would have to prove that they have “gender-balanced shortlists’’ for job interviews.
“This means that the gender balance in the organisation would be 40 per cent men and 40 per cent women, with the remaining 20 per cent unallocated to allow for flexibility,’’ Ms Jenkins said.
“I would want to see evidence that organisations had made extra efforts to reach these targets in recruitment, for example through gender-balanced shortlists.
“In male-dominated industries I would want to see data that indicated an upward trend in the recruitment and retention of women over time.’’
The controversial gender quotas would be a blow to businesses in male-dominated industries such as construction, electricity and water supply, and manufacturing, where blokes make up at least 80 per cent of the workforce.
But companies with feminised workforces — such as cleaning, catering and social services — would also be forced to hire more men to win government work.
I would like to see the first court case when a person challenges why they were left off the gender balanced short list. You can hire people in… in tech there is active efforts to get women involved, but it does not matter. Women leave. Because they don’t like the way such places work: in computing it may be because they cannot do matrix math or hold 100 lines of code in their head.
The majority of geeks who can do that are from a few ethnic groups. Most of them are socially inept: many of them are now older and/or foreign, because too many school nurses diagnose Asperger’s in anyone who is bookish and try to medicate out this behaviour. They tolerate a lot of abuse if they can just be left to code. Most of society is not that introverted and cannot tolerate those working conditions, but they cannot do the job. either.
Women, blacks and Latinos are far more likely to quit jobs in tech than white or Asian men, according to a new report by the Kapor Center for Social Impact.
The Oakland nonprofit commissioned an online survey by the Harris Poll, which asked 2,006 people who voluntarily left tech jobs in the past three years about why they quit. It found women were twice as likely to leave as men, while black and Latino tech workers were 3.5 times likelier to quit than white or Asian colleagues. The most common reason they gave for their departures was workplace mistreatment.
Cat Perez, who participated in the survey, once woke up every morning dreading the thought of going to work. She disliked most of her colleagues at a male-dominated tech company where she previously worked. Perez felt like her boss frequently hovered behind her as she worked, and recalled women being delegated tasks like ordering lunch for co-workers and putting up office decorations.
“It was toxic,” said Perez. “It wasn’t an environment I could grow or do my best work. I didn’t like how others were being treated, I didn’t like the ethics of the leader and these experiences added up.”
Perez left and is now the co-founder and chief product officer of HealthSherpa, a startup with offices in San Francisco and Sacramento that helps people obtain health coverage.
The quotas are stupid, overly simplistic, lack any understanding of what men and woman are like at work — that is not the same — do not consider in any way or means how to support young parents, assume that there is a union and the resources of a big corporation, and put a conspiracy in place where there is not one. The current work situation is fraught enough — to the point where the Billy Graham rule is being adopted by nonevangelicals as a self-defence against lawyers who take any accusation as means for dismissal.
Some of this problem is statutory: the Human Rights act needs to be removed. Not rewritten: abolished. The Crimes Act used to be enough.
The Human Rights commission is a train wreck. It leaves nothing but destruction in its wake.
Mock it relentlessly.
Do not take government contracts, for these harpies will ruin your church, your cooperative, your firm, or your family.
And do not be like them.