Well, personally, I dislike the narcissism inherent in the male version and find the female version less “eye-roll worthy”, which leads me to the obvious question (for which I have no certain answer).
If they did focus group both ads this and found that each version of the ad had greater appeal to their respective genders, would the two separate ads have been acceptable?
In related news, my garbage collector is female (and black). I just said “hi” to her this morning.
Starting salaries for first officers in regional airlines are more like $20k.
OMG, why hasn’t someone rescued her yet from that HIGH-PAYING BUT DANGEROUS JOB!!
Is it sexism if it increases profits? I mean, everything is about money, therefore it can’t be sexist to use sexism to get more money. Makes perfect sense.
If people didn’t force advertising firms to use this kind of sexist tripe by falling for it hook, line and sinker, there would be no market force driving its use.
So really, when you think about it, this is the fault of the consumer, being all horribly sexist and whatnot, laying their hangups on the innocent ad industry, which would far prefer to use non manipulative psychology to sell you stuff. Ah well, one day in utopia this will all go away.
Also, have you noticed the alarming regularity with which consumers are forcing advertisers to use emotionally manipulative renditions of parent-child relationships to push tat? I mean, you do love your children don’t you?
You monster.
Eh–what I know about advertising comes from Mad Men– and then only up to Season 6. But it seems to me that coming up with the final copy is more a taking absolute best slogan or tagline from a lot of very similar ideas than coming up with each one separately. It’s not twice the work; it’s half the rewrites.
How terrible that she’s put some man out of a job!
Well yeah, but since the research I found kept saying “starting salaries” for those numbers it seemed disingenuous to do that only for pilots. I mean, it’s bad enough you’ll be a first officer at 70K for 15 years that I didn’t want to lowball those poor bastards as well.
I didn’t pick starting salaries for loggers or anyone else, median seemed more apt. There probably are loggers who make a hundred grand a year, but they’re the outliers.
Is it sexism if it’s just maths?
If Hasbro and Mattel were run by a dispassionate AI algorithm, and that algorithm trialled both blue vs pink toy lines and aisles against unsegregated-all-toy-styles-together and came to a statistical conclusion… would you call the AI sexist if it directed its marketing drones accordingly?
Like them there market forces? Capitulation to market forces is primary to morality, even a dispassionate AI would realise that essential truth.
In fact, why bother with organic consumers when you could just manufacture robots to fulfil their roles? When you have such pure-hearted, dispassionate motivation driving you, why bother with any kind of human consideration? It’s beautiful in it’s simplicity.
The market demands your death, resistance is futile!
Good point. That’s why the slogan has always been ‘equal pay for totally unrelated work’. Catchy, isinit?
PS, I would love to see you try to explain to ‘feminists’ how you totally understand how they never wanted to work those dangerous maaaanly jobs like, say, hardware, construction, fighter piloting, soldiering, riveting in WWII shipyards, etc. etc. that so many court cases have been argued about. It’s their near total lack of interest that made necessary explicit exclusionary policies the norm, where there wasn’t a law.
Presumably, then you’d call the culture sexist.
EDIT: You could also complain about the human ad execs who didn’t veto the machine.
Name 3.
It doesn’t seem bizarre to me at all that advertising is segmented to specific audiences. Indeed, it’s quite common – one advertisement with variations to the copy or visuals, tailored to specific ethnic groups, age groups, geographic areas, genders, etc. Sometimes it’s innocuous, sometimes it plays on tired and offensive stereotypes.
Why would I want to explain to feminists how I understand how they never wanted to work dangerous jobs, when I never said anything even vaguely resembling that. In fact, I said the opposite, and how it was sexist. Maybe you want to read what I wrote again, because it seems like you’re talking to some imagined argument here.
well, now I’m not buying any fucking volkswagon.
I don’t think this is worth automatically getting offended over.
Implying that someone MIGHT have a “bad hair day” - that’s transient. The wind can just blow and you’ll have a bad hair day. It’s not like saying, “Even if you’re fat, you’ll still look good in this car.” People feel insecure about being fat or otherwise not like the models on TV because they can’t fix that very easily, but bad hair? What do you need for that, a spray bottle and a comb???
a few points here:
My research was the article I linked to, which lists different figures than you list (in total the wages from the article were about 10k more in terms of median wage across the ten professions that you listed), though it’s not that dissimilar (some were more, some less).
Comparing those jobs to overall median wage in the US isn’t necessarily valid because it mixes several sources, especially when we’re talking about issues of gender it’s important to separate the two (median wage for women is around 10k less IIRC), and then you have to separate out the jobs I’m talking about (because they would skew any comparison).
It’s overly simplistic to just look at the top ten, if you include the next 25 from the article you’ll see they are also male dominated professions.
I wasn’t trying to explain the totality of the wage gap from this specific example (factors like hourly vs. yearly earnings and maternity issues have a much larger impact, discrimination is also undoubtedly a factor - probably in certain professions more than others, and less so than ever before, there are other factors as well). I was just suggesting that it was one aspect of it, I made no attempt to even quantify what percentage it was.
But even if my sums were wrong and after taking everything into account these more dangerous male dominated professions were as well paid (or less even) than the safer female dominated professions (and I don’t think they are, but there are a lot of variables, so it’s possible - after more reading on the issue the experts don’t seem to agree so I’m willing to remain agnostic on the issue), the main point was about the danger faced in these professions and how a sexist disparity materially benefits the health and wellbeing of women (what I was specifically asked to provide an example of).
Ah yes, it would be totally naive to say that women get paid less then man when doing the exact same job. Because people have studied that. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters/
