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ACCORDING TO LIZ - We’ve all heard the worldwide stats: Despite being a majority, only 9% of heads of government are women, and only 22% of ministerial posts are held by women. While women now fill 28% of managerial positions in businesses worldwide, most still experience gender bias whether in pay, being held to higher standards, or having their judgement discounted.
More to the point, nearly half the world's population still feel men make better political leaders than women, even though women tend to be better leaders by many objective measurements. Except when, like Margaret Thatcher, they try to out-testosterone the men.
Over forty percent of respondents in an international survey still believe a man makes a better business executive and even more believe a man has a greater right to a job even though, too often, it is woman’s wages that support low-income families.
Even worse, is the ongoing conviction that a man has the right to beat his wife and children. Men’s right to control women’s bodies is propped up by the almost 60% of people who assert that abortion is never justifiable, even though the outcomes of unintended pregnancies range from a lifelong detrimental economic impacts for mother and child to a death sentence for the woman.
Worldwide, 90% of people exhibit gender biases that translate directly into negative consequences for women. At work, at home, politically and financially. In their bodies and for their futures.
In 2015, the United Nations established 17 metrics to pursue in order to achieve a target of gender equality by 2030. These included the end of all forms of discrimination against women and girls, including violence and harmful practices such as forced marriage, ensuring access to economic resources and reproductive healthcare, recognizing underpaid domestic work, and boosting female leadership in politics and business.
Instead, as of 2021, 20% of women were married before the age of 18; 1.7 billion women and girls live on less than $5.50 a day; and, around the world, women continue to take on as much as six times the unpaid care and domestic work as men.
When such gender-based biases are carried into the voting booth, board meetings, interviews, and political assemblies, they limit women's abilities to break through current barriers so they can fulfill their full potential.
Americans can’t pat themselves on their backs. The Trump and the Federalist Society stacked the Supreme Court with misogynist judges. California’s disregard of modern-day bracero labor practices by Big Ag operations across the state, which unconscionably affects the quality of life for women and children caught up in the scheme, is insupportable.
Los Angeles produces a hugely disproportionate amount of misogynist movies, TV and other programming, and baser fodder for porn websites.
Our leaders at local, county, state and federal levels turn a blind eye to all but the most egregious of ongoing physical, emotional and psychological violence against women. And no-one seems to want to address the issue because it makes money for far too many, mostly men.
Social norms that disparage women teach boys that it's ok to be abusive and derogatory, and girls that they have to accept it.
These behaviors are grossly detrimental to society and to improving human rights and the quality of life worldwide.
Lack of progress on gender social norms is aggravating a crisis in human development: For the first time on record, the global Human Development Index [[[https://hdr.undp.org/]]]) declined in 2020. And then again in 2021.
Power depends on wealth and wealth grants the ability to control the lives of others. Here and around the world.
Women earn less than men, about 82¢ on the dollar, putting far more of them in the lowest 20% of wage earners.
More to the point, the gender wealth gap is even larger than the income gap: For every $1 owned by a white male, on average white women own 56¢, Hispanic women own 10¢ and Black women 5¢.
So what is our government proposing to do?
Legislation proposed by House Republicans would gift over $28 billion to the majority male 1% an average tax cut of $16,550 next year while, on average, the questionably named Tax Cuts for Working Families Act would provide a meager $40 to the poorest fifth of Americans taxpayers. Majority female.
This and two other measures currently moving through the Republican-dominated House would lavish $60.8 billion in tax cuts on the wealthiest 20% of taxpayers (again male), and would slash business taxes for foreign investors for simply owning 40% of shares in US corporations.
How does THAT benefit Jane Q. Public in Kalamazoo?
While the new bills are unlikely to pass the divided Congress, they underline how the ever-widening disparity in incomes, and ultimately those between men and women, is exacerbated by corporate-driven legislation. Not-so-subtly silencing women’s voices and their ability to overturn misogynistic practices embedded throughout our society.
Furthermore, these cuts are based on slashing Biden’s climate programs which will disproportionately affect poor communities. Simply returning taxation to pre-Trump levels would be the best approach… but maybe not so acceptable to the MAGA-Republicans’ corporate masters.
On the home front, California accounts for about a third of the nation’s homeless people, and seniors are estimated to be the fastest-growing demographic on our streets.
From 2017 to 2021, as rents and home prices skyrocketed across the state, California’s overall senior population grew by 7% but the number of people 55 and older seeking homelessness services increased by 84%, twice as many as the average across all ages.
A conservative estimate of two million Californians seniors rely on income that can’t keep up with the cost of living and struggle to afford spiraling rents and the escalating costs of healthcare.
On average, women live longer and are too often saddled with end-of-life medical debt. They are more subject to elder abuse by partners sinking into dementia with no resources to address the situation, or by daughters suffering in the clutches of the same dysfunctional system, or by poorly paid staff in poorly monitored institutional warehousing with no advocates to alleviate their victimization.
Reports show that many of our homeless suffer from substance abuse or mental health issues but, too often, those are the results not the cause of homelessness. Too many Angelenas today are forced to live rough – in cars and tents, under overpasses and in abandoned buildings – for economic reasons.
And living on the streets — eating and sleeping poorly, being exposed to the elements, rape and other physical abuse, without consistent medical care – too often takes women living precariously on the edge, over that edge to rapid decline and then death.
A study in Oakland found homeless people aged 50 and over were three-and-a-half times more likely to die early – more than ten years early – compared to other seniors.
Even as disabilities have increased, most shelters are not equipped to serve a geriatric population, and lack wheelchair access and handicap-friendly washrooms, let alone support facilities for the rampant mental challenges facing this population.
Given women have fewer resources to begin with, more and more women are being left destitute with no place to even store mementos of a life time other than in their fading memories.
Is this any way to treat anybody’s granny or great-aunt?
Will this ever change so long as the reins of power remain in the hands of men?
California has set the example for progressive change in the past, why not now?
As part of the Mayor’s war on homelessness, Los Angeles should proactively pursue a transition from a taken-for-granted toxic masculinity that celebrates violence and oppression and, instead, energetically embrace a holistic approach of compassion and understanding across all our affairs.
Address the issue head-on and exterminate the misogyny that currently flourishes not only in all the crevices of City Hall, but in the jokes we laugh at, in salacious materials people buy, and in the examples we set for our children.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
