I have no wordsâŚ
No longer funnyâŚas a man with a daughterâŚblah, blah, blah.
How about ânever was funnyâ and âstill hurtful regardless of the women related to youâ?
The theory rose to prominence in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published Man the Hunter, an edited collection of scholarly papers presented at a 1966 symposium on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The volume drew on ethnographic, archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence to argue that hunting is what drove human evolution and resulted in our suite of unique features. âManâs life as a hunter supplied all the other ingredients for achieving civilization: the genetic variability, the inventiveness, the systems of vocal communication, the coordination of social life,â anthropologist William S. Laughlin writes in chapter 33 of the book. Because men were supposedly the ones hunting, proponents of the Man the Hunter theory assumed evolution was acting primarily on men, and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress.
But *Man the Hunterâ*s contributors often ignored evidence, sometimes in their own data, that countered their suppositions. For example, Hitoshi Watanabe focused on ethnographic data about the Ainu, an Indigenous population in northern Japan and its surrounding areas. Although Watanabe documented Ainu women hunting, often with the aid of dogs, he dismissed this finding in his interpretations and placed the focus squarely on men as the primary meat winners. He was superimposing the idea of male superiority through hunting onto the Ainu and into the past.
Good news: he walked away because of the misogyny.
Bad news: that didnât deter them from misogyny.
This is, more or less, the conclusion of a recent study by a group of researchers at UMass Amherst and Williams College, who examined the oral argument transcripts of some 3500 Supreme Court cases decided between 1982 and 2019 to figure out which lawyers are getting interrupted most often, and who is doing the interrupting. On the whole, the researchers found, justices interrupt advocates about 25 percent of the time. But the justicesâall of themâinterrupt female lawyers more often than they interrupt male lawyers, and male justices interrupt female lawyers more often than female justices.
Even after accounting for other possibly relevant factorsâa lawyerâs experience, their speech fluidity, and the perceived alignment between their argument and a given justiceâs ideologyâgender is âthe primary factor driving interruption behavior among most justices,â the authors conclude.
Surprising exactly no one
I hope this bears fruit
Oh! Are they doing it again!!!
I had not realized that this had happened a total of seven times! Icelandic women are such an inspiration!
Can I addâŚ
While reading this, I found myself nodding and wishing there had been enough space for a âcrying couchâ in offices where Iâve worked. Maybe one day the media will stop treating these stories as one-off dramas about the toxic boss/environment in one specific industry or workplace. After 30+ years, I havenât found a company that didnât have some (or all) of the examples of misogyny in management described in that article.
It doesnât just come from founders, either. Itâs enabled in public and private sectors by managers and HR at every level. The movie 9 to 5 was released in 1980, and I wondered if the plans for a reboot kept failing because too few of the terrible boss tropes have changed at all. Thatâs more fuel for tragedy than comedy. Even corporations listed among the best employers for women have a lot of us rolling their eyes based on well-publicized reports and lawsuits about bias that take more than a few years to be resolved. Now weâre also fighting the anti-DEI forces who want to maintain patriarchal systems despite the increasing numbers of women and POC in the workforce.
Icelandâs PM joined the strike
I know the strike is not just about the pay gap, but: given that the womenâs pay gap in Iceland is just over 20%, women could strike every Tuesday, every week, and it would still not quite make up for the wage difference.
Well, the point is to change public policy so that employers can no longer discriminate on the basis of gender⌠
Thatâs what Iâm trying to get at: if employers find a one-day strike disruptive, imagine how disruptive they would find it if the strikes were commensurate with the scale of the discrimination!
(Edit: removed footnote because the point still holds without footnote)
