WatchmenComicMovie.com Forum

Be careful with the generalities here, as the policies of a company usually override any individual hiring tendencies/biases. We live in a more and more P.C. society where the major corporations and Fortune 500 companies go out of their way to not appear sexist and racist, and institute policies to protect against even appearing to discriminate. This sometimes leads to hiring based on race, but to the advantage of the minority (racial quota systems are an example). The very very last thing corporations want nowadays are discrimination lawsuits and Al Sharpton showing up outside their office building. This goes for termination of employees as well.

Nowadays you're more likely to get lifted up versus held down based upon your race in the corporate world. I have a friend who works for frickin' Lockheed who openly admits that the fact that's he Hispanic helped him get his job... I tell him not to remind me so I don't worry about the goof-ball that's designing our missiles. :p

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You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

-Bill Watterson

Thanks, Waylayer. Beat me to it.

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Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste......

Huge corporate conglomerates do go out of their way to not appear sexist and racist. Plus, even though I'm not disputing the hiring policies of all companies it still happens. Why do women make 15-20% less on average. Where are tthe corporate watchdogs there? Everyone hides behind the PR of being an "equal opportunity employer," but that's just not the reality.


The truth is affirmative action does not place unqulaified candidates. It helps qualified minority candidates get jobs they would normally be passed over for if race was not considered. So, for example, if a company had only 1% minority employees, and three people were being considered for the position who were all qualified, if one was a minority, they would be required to hire the minority. I'm sure your Hispanic friend is not a "goof-ball" and very qualified for his job.

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Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music - George Carlin

The 'women make less money on average' argument never sat well with me. I've had many, many arguments about this. Just some things to consider... gender roles usually play a large factor in how much responsibility women take on in the workplace and in life in general (same for men, of course - not so many stay-at-home dads). Men generally work to get higher-paying jobs, and once in them, probably work harder for promotions, since they usually don't have to worry about families. Also, the 15-20% discrepancy cannot be attributed to sexism unless you are comparing two identical jobs in the same workplace with the same qualifications and amount of work put into the job from a male and a female. 'Averages' don't mean bias, they mean difference. Black males commit more crime on average than any other demographic, but we can't attribute that fact to racism - it's fact, plain and simple, clean and unbiased. It's not a basis for judgment, and in the workplace, from what I've seen, judgments are hardly ever made based on that - but it's still a reality. Assumed roles in our society play a large part in how different ethnic groups and genders live out their lives (on 'average'). Expecting exact correlation between incomes with this societal mentality in place is unrealistic. The mentality must be erased first - the inherent assumption that there are differences between these groups that define their lives and personalities.

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You don't see how misogynistic that comment is?

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Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music - George Carlin

Look at statistics. Sexism/racism isn't ignoring commonalities within ethnic groups or genders. It's saying "Since X person is a member of Y group, they must be Z." It's not "Y group contains a lot of people that are Z" (as long as it's the truth, of course). Are you going to argue that women don't lean more towards the homemaker role?

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Are you suggesting that they should be takne less seriously as a part of the workforce because they do? Executives take "sabbaticals" regularly without penalty to their career.

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

-Juvenal

Not at all. Some women do. But to say they don't work as hard as men, in general, and that's why they deserve to make less is like making the blanket statement that since there are more blacks in prison than whites, Walmart should tag all black employees with a tracking device in case they decide to rob the store.

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Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music - George Carlin

That is a classic case of misleading statistics. One of my favorite lines from college education was, "There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are statistics." If you drill down on this one, you would find that this is not a statistic based upon same job comparison between men and women. This is actually a statistic based on overall male vs female employment. On average, men have higher paying jobs and loftier positions, but if you compared two employees (one male and one female) with the same position in the same company, there is not a 15-20% difference in compensation.

Now if you want examine some reasons why men have higher paying positions in general, that's a whole other sociological discussion, but has less to do with sexual discrimination than you may think. It's more attributed to the fact that women birth little flesh creatures while men do not, leading many women to either abandon careers or stall/ignore their career growth to raise children. And the more children a woman has, the more it hampers their options to advance into higher-paying careers.

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You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

-Bill Watterson

You've never met him. You can be intelligent and still an extreme goof-ball at the same time. I've been accused of both. :p

And he's qualified, yeah, but this was just an example where ethnicity gave someone an extra "push."

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You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

-Bill Watterson

Ah, so children are bad for your career.










But only if you're a woman.




Of course, we as a society expect the little ladies to stay home and look after the babies (you ever had any, Mr waylayer?) while the men are expected to out and slay the wolves and make a million dollars. Besides, if a woman expected her husband to stay home and look after the brood, I bet everyone in their social circle would tell her to get her head examined.

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

-Juvenal

Welcome to Sweden!

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Oh, no, no, no chil'ren for me yet. Maybe I'll adopt a 16 year old later in life to avoid that whole annoying "changing diapers thing" but still catch the meaty angst-filled "my life is more important than anyone else on Earth's" teenage years.

My friend AJ (God love him), though, had twin girls at the ripe age of 25 (OK, so his wife really did). One of the parents had to abandon their career for at least a few years to help raise the whipper-snappers. Guess which one it was? Maybe it's because women are seen as having better and more natural maternal instincts (there's scientific evidence of this) or maybe it's just that women are "expected" to care for babies in our culture. Whatever the reason, the social convention exists (don't kill the messenger - I don't have a living will), and even though societal ideals are slowly changing, I predict we will never see an even 50/50 split of men/women being homemakers, at least in our lifetime. I personally would love to sit home and have a woman slay dollars and make millions of wolves while I sit at home and continue to look good, but that probably won't be the case, and I'll die (on average) about 4-5 years before she does. There's a trade off for everything, I suppose.

To simplify my rambling: while having children may not necessarily always be bad for a woman's career, it almost never helps it.

By the way, I'm revealing more and more about my friends and myself at what seems to be a startling parabolic rate. If I'm not careful, pretty soon I'll also be revealing that the reason Queen is my all time favorite rock band is because my neighbor and friend Billy used to loop every CD of their's on "random-repeat" while we played NHL '93 on Genesis almost every day after school.






I think I may have revealed too much again (and broke my enter key as well in the process - is this contagious?). If this is freaking anyone else out besides me, please let me know and I'll either stop immediately or do it even more.

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You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

-Bill Watterson

So are you saying that because many women choose to stay home and not work, this justifies a blanket decrease in salary when compared to men?

By the way, my wife does stay home to raise our two kids and it's very, very hard work. Most of her days are harder than mine by far. It is not the relaxed, stay at home fun-fest that you seem to think it might be.

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Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music - George Carlin

It's not a 'blanket decrease.' Like waylayer said:

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No, what I'm saying is that it sometimes prevents women from attaining higher level positions since men don't have to choose between a career and raising a family nearly as often. There are many women who have to stop and start their careers or stop them entirely due to families. Men don't have this concern.

Say employee A (woman) and B (man) work for 25 years in the same industry, starting at the same point. Hypothetically, in those 25 years, employee A works only a combined 19 years out of the 25 possible, taking off time here and there for maternity leave and extra time to care and raise 3 children, and/or also working only part time to accommodate raising them. That's a critical 6 year difference in work experience between A and B, allowing employee B to have more promotions, raises, etc., in that same time span. While starting at the same time, Employee A has now fallen behind employee B in the same career path due to the time lost.

Anyone here ever watch Nip/Tuck? Julia (Sean's wife) had gave up medical school to have a child. In the third season, she attempted to go back. So basically, her husband was now 20 years ahead of where she would have been had things been different, which she pointed out to Sean a few times. Oh yea, and then she got pregnant again with a lobster-hand baby.

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You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

-Bill Watterson