【clover】ECO debate by 黑竹

黑竹UID: 2753377

文中蓝色为比较好名词性短语，红色为比较好动词短语及句型，橙色为比较好的形容词及副词，紫红色为比较好的介词短语
OK，let's begin.
topic：woman

Proposition：
This house believes that women in the developed world have never had it so good.

About this debate:

Women in the rich world have made remarkable progress over the past few decades. They make up almost half the workforce. They run some of the world's great companies, such as PepsiCo and Alcatel. They earn more university degrees than men. But they continue to lag behind their male colleagues in terms of pay and promotion. They continue to drop out of the full-time workforce in order to have children, and continue to bear the main burden for looking after children and elderly relatives. Women CEOs can be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Is this proof that women have never had it so good? Or is it proof that, in a world of growing prosperity and opportunity, women are continuing to get a raw deal?

黑竹UID: 2753377

文中蓝色为比较好名词性短语，红色为比较好动词短语及句型，橙色为比较好的形容词及副词，紫红色为比较好的介词短语

Background reading

Women in the workforce
Female power
Across the rich world more women are working than ever before(比任何时候都怎么样，很地道的语言). Coping with this change will be one of the great challenges of the coming decades.

THE economic empowerment of women across the rich world is one of the most remarkable revolutions（最显著的革命） of the past 50 years. It is remarkable because of the extent of the change（变化的程度）: millions of people who were once dependent on men have taken control of their own economic fates（掌握了她们自己的经济命运）. It is remarkable also because it has produced so little friction（没有产生多少冲突）: a change that affects the most intimate aspects of people’s identities has been widely welcomed by men as well as women. Dramatic social change seldom takes such a benign form.

Yet even benign change can come with a sting in its tail. Social arrangements have not caught up with economic changes. Many children have paid a price for（很多孩子为。。。付出代价） the rise of the two-income household. Many women—and indeed many men—feel that they are caught in an ever-tightening tangle of commitments. If the empowerment of women was one of the great changes of the past 50 years, dealing with its social consequences（处理它的社会结果） will be one of the great challenges of the next 50.

At the end of her campaign to become America’s first female president in 2008, Hillary Clinton remarked that her 18m votes in the Democratic Party’s primaries represented 18m cracks in the glass ceiling. In the market for jobs rather than votes the ceiling is being cracked every day. Women now make up almost half of American workers (49.9% in October). They run（经营） some of the world’s best companies, such as PepsiCo, Archer Daniels Midland and W.L. Gore. They earn almost 60% of university degrees（获得大学学位） in America and Europe.

Progress has not been uniform, of course. In Italy and Japan employment rates for men（雇佣男人的比率） are more than 20 percentage points higher than those for women (see chart 1). Although Italy’s female employment rate has risen markedly in the past decade, it is still below 50%, and more than 20 percentage points below those of Denmark and Sweden (chart 2). Women earn substantially less than men on average and are severely under-represented at the top of organisations.

The change is dramatic nevertheless. A generation ago working women performed menial jobs and were routinely subjected to casual sexism—as “Mad Men”, a television drama（电视剧） about advertising executives in the early 1960s, demonstrates brilliantly. Today women make up the majority of professional workers（大多数专业工人） in many countries (51% in the United States, for example) and casual sexism is for losers. Even holdouts such as the Mediterranean countries are changing rapidly. In Spain the proportion of young women in the labour force（劳动力中年轻女性所占的比重） has now reached American levels（达到美国的水平）. The glass is much nearer to being half full than half empty.

What explains this revolution? Politics have clearly played a part. Feminists such as Betty Friedan have demonised domestic slavery and lambasted discrimination. Governments have passed equal-rights acts（通过平等权利法案）. Female politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Mrs Clinton have taught younger women that anything is possible. But politics is only part of the answer: such discordant figures as Ms Friedan and Lady Thatcher have been borne aloft by subterranean economic and technological forces.

The rich world has seen a growing demand for（增长的需求） women’s labour. When brute strength mattered more than brains, men had an inherent advantage. Now that brainpower has triumphed the two sexes are more evenly matched. The feminisation of the workforce has been driven by the relentless rise of the service sector (where women can compete as well as men（女人可以和男人同样竞争）) and the equally relentless decline of manufacturing (where they could not). The landmark book in the rise of feminism was arguably not Ms Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” but Daniel Bell’s “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”.

Demand has been matched by supply: women are increasingly willing and able to work outside the home. The vacuum cleaner has played its part. Improved technology reduced the amount of time needed for the traditional female work of cleaning and cooking（科技进步减少了传统女性做家务所需要花费的时间）. But the most important innovation has been the contraceptive pill. The spread of the pill has not only allowed women to get married later. It has also increased their incentives to invest time and effort in acquiring skills（投资时间和精力在获得技术上）, particularly slow-burning skills that are hard to learn and take many years to pay off. The knowledge that they would not have to drop out of, say, law school to have a baby made law school more attractive.

The expansion of higher education（高等教育的扩张） has also boosted job prospects for women, improving their value on the job market（提升了她们在劳动力市场上的价值） and shifting their role models from stay-at-home mothers to successful professional women. The best-educated women have always been more likely than other women to work, even after having children. In 1963, 62% of college-educated women in the United States were in the labour force, compared with 46% of those with a high school diploma. Today 80% of American women with a college education are in the labour force compared with 67% of those with a high school diploma and 47% of those without one.

This growing cohort of university-educated women is also educated in more marketable subjects. In 1966, 40% of American women who received a BA specialised in education in college; 2% specialised in business and management. The figures are now 12% and 50%. Women only continue to lag seriously behind men in a handful of subjects, such as engineering and computer sciences, where they earned about one-fifth（五分之一） of degrees in 2006.

One of the most surprising things about this revolution is how little overt celebration it has engendered. Most people welcome the change. A recent Rockefeller Foundation/Time survey found that three-quarters（四分之三） of Americans regarded it as a positive development. Nine men out of ten（十个男人中有九个） said they were comfortable with women earning more than them. But few are cheering. This is partly because young women take their opportunities for granted. It is partly because for many women work represents economic necessity rather than liberation. The rich world’s growing army of single mothers have little choice but to work. A growing proportion of married women have also discovered that the only way they can preserve their households’ living standards（保持家庭生活水平） is to join their husbands in the labour market. In America families with stay-at-home wives have the same inflation-adjusted income as similar families did in the early 1970s. But the biggest reason is that the revolution has brought plenty of problems in its wake.

Production versus reproductionOne obvious problem is that women’s rising aspirations have not been fulfilled. They have been encouraged to climb onto the occupational ladder only to discover that the middle rungs（中层） are dominated by men and the upper rungs（公司高层） are out of reach. Only 2% of the bosses of Fortune 500 companies and five of those in the FTSE 100 stockmarket index are women. Women make up less than 13% of board members in America. The upper ranks of management consultancies and banks are dominated by men. In America and Britain the typical full-time female worker earns only about 80% as much as the typical male.

This no doubt owes something to prejudice. But the biggest reason why women remain frustrated is more profound: many women are forced to choose（被迫选择） between motherhood and careers. Childless women in corporate America earn almost as much as men. Mothers with partners earn less and single mothers much less. The cost of motherhood is particularly steep for fast-track women. Traditionally “female” jobs such as teaching mix well with motherhood because wages do not rise much with experience and hours are relatively light. But at successful firms wages rise steeply and schedules are demanding. Future bosses are expected to have worked in several departments and countries. Professional-services firms have an up-or-out system which rewards the most dedicated with lucrative partnerships. The reason for the income gap may thus be the opposite of prejudice. It is that women are judged by exactly the same standards as men.

This Hobson's choice is imposing a high cost on both individuals and society. Many professional women reject motherhood entirely; in Switzerland 40% of them are childless. Others delay child-bearing for so long that they are forced into the arms of the booming fertility industry. Some choose not to work at all, representing a loss to collective investment in talent. But a choice must be made. A study of graduates of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business by Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues found that, ten to 16 years after graduating, just over half of those who had chosen to have children were working full-time. About a quarter were working part-time and just under a quarter had left the labour force. It also leaves many former high-flyers frustrated. Another American study, this time of women who left work to have children, found that all but 7% of them wanted to return to work. Only 74% managed to return, and just 40% returned to full-time jobs.

Even well-off parents worry that they spend too little time with their children, thanks to crowded schedules and the ever-buzzing BlackBerry. For poorer parents, juggling the twin demands of work and child-rearing can be a nightmare. Child care eats a terrifying proportion of the family budget, and many childminders are untrained. But quitting work to look after the children can mean financial disaster. British children brought up in two-parent families where only one parent works are almost three times more likely to be poor than children with two parents at work.

A survey for the Children’s Society, a British charity, found that 60% of parents agreed that “nowadays parents aren’t able to spend enough time with their children”. In a similar survey in America 74% of parents said that they did not have enough time for their children. Nor does the problem disappear as children get older. In most countries schools finish early in the afternoon. In America they close down for two months in the summer. Only a few places—Denmark, Sweden and, to a lesser extent, France and Quebec—provide comprehensive systems of after-school care.

Different countries have adopted different solutions to the problem of combining work and parenthood. Some stress the importance of（强调。。。的重要性） very young children spending time with their mothers. Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Hungary provide up to three years of paid leave（带薪假期） for mothers. Germany has introduced a “parent’s salary”, or Elterngeld, to encourage mothers to stay at home. (The legislation was championed by a minister for women who has seven children.) Other countries put more emphasis on preschool education. New Zealand and the Nordic countries are particularly keen on getting women back to work and children into kindergartens. Britain, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and, above all, the Netherlands are keen on mothers working part-time. Others, such as the Czech Republic, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Portugal and South Korea, make little room for part-time work for women. The Scandinavian countries, particularly Iceland, have added a further wrinkle by increasing incentives for fathers to spend more time caring for their children.


The world’s biggest economy has adopted an idiosyncratic approach. America provides no statutory paid leave for mothers and only 12 weeks unpaid. At least 145 countries provide paid sick leave. America allows only unpaid absence for serious family illness. America’s public spending on family support is low by OECD standards (see chart 3). It spends only 0.5% of its GDP on public support for child care compared with 1.3% in France and 2.7% in Denmark.

It is difficult to evaluate the relative merits of these various arrangements（评价这些方案的优缺点）. Different systems can produce similar results（产生类似的结果）: anti-statist America has roughly the same proportion of children in kindergartens as statist Finland. Different systems have different faults. Sweden is not quite the paragon that its fans imagine, despite its family-friendly employment policies. Only 1.5% of senior managers are women, compared with 11% in America. Three-quarters of Swedish women work in the public sector; three-quarters of men work in the private sector. But there is evidence that America and Britain, the countries that combine high female employment with reluctance to involve the state in child care, serve their children especially poorly. A report by Unicef in 2007 on children in rich countries found that America and Britain had some of the lowest scores for “well-being”.

A woman’s worldThe trend towards more women working（更多女人工作的趋势） is almost certain to continue. In the European Union women have filled 6m of the 8m new jobs created since 2000. In America three out of four people thrown out of work（失业的人） since the recession began are men; the female unemployment rate is 8.6%, against 11.2% for men. The Bureau of Labour Statistics calculates that women make up more than two-thirds of employees in ten of the 15 job categories likely to grow fastest in the next few years. By 2011 there will be 2.6m more women than men studying in American universities.

Women will also be the beneficiaries of the growing “war for talent”. The combination of an ageing workforce and a more skill-dependent economy means that countries will have to make better use of their female populations. Goldman Sachs calculates that, leaving all other things equal（保持其它不变）, increasing women’s participation in the labour market to male levels will boost GDP by 21% in Italy, 19% in Spain, 16% in Japan, 9% in America, France and Germany, and 8% in Britain.
Rex FeaturesThe next generation
The corporate world is doing ever more to address the loss of female talent（女性人才） and the difficulty of combining work with child care. Many elite companies are rethinking their promotion practices. Addleshaw Goddard, a law firm, has created the role of legal director as an alternative to partnerships for women who want to combine work and motherhood. Ernst & Young and other accounting firms have increased their efforts to maintain connections with（维持联系） women who take time off（抽出时间） to have children and then ease them back into work.

Home-working is increasingly fashionable. More than 90% of companies in Germany and Sweden allow flexible working. A growing number of firms are learning to divide the working week in new ways—judging staff on annual rather than weekly hours, allowing them to work nine days a fortnight, letting them come in early or late and allowing husbands and wives to share jobs. Almost half of Sun Microsystems’s employees work at home or from nearby satellite offices. Raytheon, a maker of missile systems, allows workers every other Friday off to take care of family business, if they make up the hours on other days.

Companies are even rethinking the structure of careers, as people live and work longer. Barclays is one of many firms that allow five years’ unpaid leave. John Lewis offers a six-month paid sabbatical to people who have been in the company for 25 years. Companies are allowing people to phase their retirement. Child-bearing years will thus make up a smaller proportion of women’s potential working lives. Spells out of the labour force will become less a mark of female exceptionalism.

Faster change is likely as women exploit their economic power. Many talented women are already hopping off the corporate treadmill to form companies that better meet their needs. In the past decade the number of privately owned companies started by women in America has increased twice as fast as the number owned by men. Women-owned companies employ more people than the largest 500 companies combined. Eden McCallum and Axiom Legal have applied a network model to their respective fields of management consultancy and legal services: network members work when it suits them and the companies use their scale to make sure that clients have their problems dealt with immediately.

Governments are also trying to adjust to the new world. Germany now has 1,600 schools where the day lasts until mid-afternoon. Some of the most popular American charter schools offer longer school days and shorter summer holidays.

But so far even the combination of public- and private-sector initiatives has only gone so far to deal with the problem. The children of poorer working mothers are the least likely to benefit from female-friendly companies. Millions of families still struggle with insufficient child-care facilities and a school day that bears no relationship to their working lives. The West will be struggling to cope with the social consequences of women’s economic empowerment for many years to come.

黑竹UID: 2753377

Women and work
We did it!The rich world’s quiet revolution: women are gradually taking over the workplace
Getty Images
AT A time when the world is short of(shortage of名词形式) causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce（劳动力大军的主力）. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.

Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times. Just a generation ago, women were largely confined to repetitive, menial jobs. They were routinely subjected to casual sexism and were expected to abandon their careers when they married and had children. Today they are running some of the organisations that once treated them as second-class citizens. Millions of women have been given more control over their own lives（女性可以更好的控制她们的生活）. And millions of brains have been put to more productive use. Societies that try to resist this trend—most notably the Arab countries, but also Japan and some southern European countries—will pay a heavy price in the form of wasted talent and frustrated citizens（付出了浪费人才和国民失落的代价，这句很好啊）.

This revolution has been achieved with only a modicum of friction（以很小的冲突） (see article). Men have, by and large, welcomed women’s invasion of the workplace. Yet even the most positive changes can be incomplete or unsatisfactory. This particular advance（进步） comes with two stings. The first is that women are still under-represented at the top of companies. Only 2% of the bosses of America’s largest companies and 5% of their peers in Britain are women. They are also paid significantly less than men on average. The second is that juggling work and child-rearing is difficult. Middle-class couples（中产阶级） routinely complain that they have too little time for their children. But the biggest losers（失败者，收损失者） are poor children—particularly in places like America and Britain that have combined high levels of female participation in the labour force with a reluctance to spend public money（公款） on child care.

Dealing with the juggleThese two problems are closely related（密切相关）. Many women feel they have to choose between their children and their careers. Women who prosper in high-pressure companies during their 20s drop out in dramatic numbers in their 30s and then find it almost impossible to regain their earlier momentum. Less-skilled women are trapped in poorly paid jobs with hand-to-mouth child-care arrangements. Motherhood, not sexism, is the issue: in America, childless women earn almost as much as men, but mothers earn significantly less. And those mothers’ relative poverty also disadvantages their children.

Demand for female brains is helping to alleviate some of these problems. Even if some of the new theories about warm-hearted women making inherently superior workers are bunk (see article), several trends favour the more educated sex, including the “war for talent” and the growing flexibility of the workplace. Law firms, consultancies and banks are rethinking their “up or out” promotion systems（晋升体系） because they are losing so many able women. More than 90% of companies in Germany and Sweden allow flexible working. And new technology is making it easier to redesign work in all sorts of family-friendly ways.

Women have certainly performed better over the past decade than men. In the European Union women have filled 6m of the 8m new jobs created since 2000. In America three out of four people thrown out of work since the “mancession” began have been male. And the shift towards women is likely to continue: by 2011 there will be 2.6m more female than male university students in America.

The light hand of the stateAll this argues, mostly, for letting the market do the work（又市场来决定）. That has not stopped calls for hefty state intervention of the Scandinavian sort. Norway has used threats of quotas to dramatic effect. Some 40% of the legislators there are women. All the Scandinavian countries provide plenty of state-financed nurseries. They have the highest levels of female employment in the world and far fewer of the social problems that plague Britain and America. Surely, comes the argument, there is a way to speed up the revolution（加速革命）—and improve the tough lives of many working women and their children?

If that means massive intervention, in the shape of（以。。。形式） affirmative-action programmes and across-the-board（全面的，全盘的） benefits for parents of all sorts, the answer is no. To begin with, promoting people on the basis of their sex is illiberal and unfair, and stigmatises its beneficiaries. And there are practical problems. Lengthy periods of paid maternity leave（paid leave带薪假期，paid sick leave，带薪病假） can put firms off hiring women, which helps explain why most Swedish women work in the public sector and Sweden has a lower proportion of women in management than America does.

But there are plenty of cheaper, subtler ways in which governments can make life easier for women. Welfare states were designed when most women stayed at home. They need to change the way they operate. German schools, for instance, close at midday. American schools shut down for two months in the summer. These things can be changed without huge cost. Some popular American charter schools now offer longer school days and shorter summer holidays. And, without going to Scandinavian lengths, America could invest more in its children: it spends a lower share of its GDP（GDP较低比重） on public child-care than almost any other rich country, and is the only rich country that refuses to provide mothers with paid maternity leave. Barack Obama needs to measure up to his campaign rhetoric about “real family values”.

Still, these nagging problems should not overshadow the dramatic progress that women have made in recent decades. During the second world war, when America’s menfolk were off at the front, the government had to summon up the image of Rosie the Riveter, with her flexed muscle and “We Can Do It” slogan, to encourage women into the workforce. Today women are marching into the workplace in ever larger numbers and taking a sledgehammer to the remaining glass ceilings.

黑竹UID: 2753377

Schumpeter
Womenomics(女性经济学)Feminist management theorists are flirting with some dangerous arguments

Illustration by Brett Ryder
THE late Paul Samuelson once quipped that “women are just men with less money”. As a father of six, he might have added something about women’s role in the reproduction of the species（人类生殖繁衍中女性扮演的角色）. But his aphorism is about as good a one-sentence summary of classical feminism as you can get.

The first generations of successful women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men（以同样的标准来衡量）. They had nothing but contempt for the notion of（观念、想法） special treatment for（特别对待） “the sisters”, and instead insisted on getting ahead by dint of （借助）working harder and thinking smarter. Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her contempt for the wimpish men around her. (There is a joke about her going out to dinner with her cabinet. “Steak or fish?” asks the waiter. “Steak, of course,” she replies. “And for the vegetables?” “They’ll have steak as well.”) During America’s most recent presidential election Hillary Clinton taunted Barack Obama with an advertisement that implied that he, unlike she, was not up to the challenge of answering the red phone at 3am.

Many pioneering businesswomen pride themselves on（以。。。自豪） their toughness. Dong Mingzhu, the boss of Gree Electric Appliances, an air-conditioning giant, says flatly, “I never miss. I never admit mistakes and I am always correct.” In the past three years her company has boosted shareholder returns by nearly 500%.

But some of today’s most influential（有影响力的） feminists contend that women will never fulfil their potential（名词潜力） if they play by men’s rules. According to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, two of the most prominent exponents of this position, it is not enough to smash the glass ceiling（瓶颈）. You need to audit the entire building for “gender asbestos”—in other words, root out the inherent sexism built into corporate structures and processes.

The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented. Judy Rosener, of the University of California, Irvine, argues that women excel at（擅长） “transformational” and “interactive” management. Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, the authors of “A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom”, assert that women are “better lateral thinkers than men” and “more idealistic” into the bargain. Feminist texts are suddenly full of references to tribes of monkeys, with their aggressive males and nurturing females.

What is more, the argument runs, these supposedly womanly qualities are becoming ever more valuable in business. The recent financial crisis proved that the sort of qualities that men pride themselves on（男人们引以为傲的品质）, such as risk-taking and bare-knuckle competition, can lead to disaster（导致灾难）. Lehman Brothers would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters, according to this theory（这句有点搞笑）. Even before the financial disaster struck, the new feminists also claim, the best companies had been abandoning “patriarchal” hierarchies in favour of “collaboration” and “networking”, skills in which women have an inherent advantage（与生俱来的优势）.

This argument may sound a little like the stuff of gender workshops in righteous universities. But it is gaining followers in powerful places. McKinsey, the most venerable of management consultancies, has published research arguing that women apply five of the nine “leadership behaviours” that lead to corporate success more frequently than men. Niall FitzGerald, the deputy chairman of Thomson Reuters and a former boss of Unilever, is as close as you can get to the heart of the corporate establishment. He proclaims, “Women have different ways of achieving results, and leadership qualities that are becoming more important as our organisations become less hierarchical and more loosely organised around matrix structures.” Many companies are abandoning the old-fashioned commitment to treating everybody equally and instead becoming “gender adapted” and “gender bilingual”—in touch with the unique management wisdom of their female employees. A host of consultancies has sprung up to teach firms how to listen to women and exploit their special abilities（利用她们的特殊能力）.

The new feminists are right to be frustrated about the pace of women’s progress in business（商业中女性进步的步伐）. Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission calculated that, at the current rate of progress（以目前进展的速度）, it will take 60 years for women to gain equal representation on the boards of the FTSE 100. They are also right that old-fashioned feminism took too little account of women’s role in raising children（考虑的太少在女性抚养儿童方面）. But their arguments about the innate differences between men and women（男女之间天生的差别） are sloppy and counterproductive.

People who bang on about innate differences should remember that variation within subgroups in the population is usually bigger than the variation between subgroups（小群体作为一个整体，其内部的差异，经常比不同小群体间的差异要大）. Even if it can be established that, on average, women have a higher “emotional-intelligence quotient（情商）” than men, that says little about any specific woman. Judging people as individuals rather than as representatives of groups is both morally right and good for business（以个体而不是以某个群体的代表，来判断一个人在道德上是正确的，也有利于商业）.

Caring, sharing and engineeringBesides, many of the most successful women are to be found in hard-edged companies, rather than the touchy-feely organisations of the new feminist imagination: Areva (nuclear energy), AngloAmerican (mining), Archer Daniels Midland (agribusiness), DuPont (chemicals), Sunoco (oil) and Xerox (technology) all have female bosses. The Cranfield School of Management’s Female FTSE 100 Index reveals that two of the industries with the best record for promoting women to their boards are banking and transport（有着提升女性进董事会最佳纪录的两个行业是银行业和物流业）.

Women would be well advised to ignore the siren voices of the new feminism and listen to Ms Dong instead. Despite their frustration, the future looks bright（前途光明）. Women are now outperforming men markedly in school and university. It would be a grave mistake to abandon old-fashioned meritocracy just at the time when it is turning to women’s advantage.

黑竹UID: 2753377

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Lexington

The triumph of American feminismSep 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition
THIS was supposed to be the year in which America’s feminists celebrated the shattering of the highest glass ceiling. They had the ideal candidate in Hillary Rodham Clinton, a woman who had been tempered in the fires of Washington.…

这是另一篇background reading
这篇文章只有订购者才能看，看来eco上不是所有的东西都能免费看哦

下面这篇也看不到

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Women and the world economy
Women and the world economy Apr 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition
“WHY can't a woman be more like a man?” mused Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”.…

黑竹UID: 2753377

下面这篇也是background reading里面的，但是里面已经开始辩论了
Reporting the gender pay gap

• Jul 25th 2007, 17:14 by The Economist | Lisbon

THE Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), Britain’s gender-equity watchdog, has just issued its valedictory report before it is subsumed into the all purpose Commission for Equality and Human Rights.

They note, quite rightly, that things are better than when they started, but there is still some way to go before full gender equality is achieved. However, one minor note, a blogging point if you will, about the way in which certain statistics are presented. They state that:

Women who work full-time earn, on average, 17% less per hour than men working full-time. For women who work part-time, the gap in pay relative to full-time men is a huge 38% per hour.

While this is true, it is a little misleading(虽然是真实的，但是有点误导), as has been noted before. Why compare female part time wages to male full time? Why not to male part time?（这一点攻击的非常好） It's difficult to shake off the feeling that it is deliberate, done in the knowledge that the qualifier will get dropped. As indeed happens in The Guardian:

A "part-time pay gap" will take 25 years to close and the "full-time pay gap" 20 years, in a system that now pays women 38% less per hour than men for working part time and 17% for full-timers;

The Independent unfortunately manages to garble it completely:

...women working part-time earn 38 per cent less than men working part-time.

But enough of such Disrealian observations. It is accepted in a certain sector of the political landscape that the very existence of such a pay gap is proof positive that discrimination exists. In American politics, a similar figure (women earn 71 cents to every dollar received by men) is routinely employed to the same purpose.

Which rather means that someone has some explaining to do about Table 13 here (please note that these are exactly the same figures from which  the EOC originally derived（得到，derive from） their estimations of the gender pay gap: same year, same source). One group of workers receives, on average（平均）, only 90% of the mean hourly wage（平均工资，mean也是平均的意思，和average有所不同） of the other. For men the gap is 12%. For women 20%. For part time workers (comparing part time to part time) the gap widens to 25%. Beleaguered male part time workers suffer a 39% gap.

It's worth noting, however, that all of those receiving the higher pay also have earlier retirement ages, higher pensions and greater job security. They're even also more likely to receive a gong at the end of their careers as a note of the self-sacrifice with which they have pursued public service careers.
For, yes, on every count, public sector hourly mean wages are higher than those in the private sector. If we take the first argument seriously, that the existence of a pay gap is proof of discrimination, then we must ask why almost everyone is so viciously bigoted against workers in the private sector?（这句击中要害）Of course, the more parsimonious explanation seems to be that there are alternative explanations（另外的解释） of the gap.  Perhaps public sector workers are more highly skilled, or more productive, or take fewer career breaks, or simply have stronger unions. (Would it be unworthy to suggest that it helps, too, when you can vote your boss out of office?)  But if we’re willing to accept such arguments to explain the public/private gap, we should be at least as prepared to entertain them in the case of women.

Otherwise, there's a problem.  While the gender pay gap is widely acknowleged to be shrinking, even if too slowly for some, the public/private gap is growing, as Table 13 shows.  That’s even before we look into the increasing disparity in pension provision. Perhaps it's time for a new unit to be created in the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to deal with this clear and obvious bias? And if we do create such a creature, how do we induce civil servants to stamp out discrimination in their favour?

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这是最后一篇background reading


And what about women?

• Jun 4th 2009, 17:42 by The Economist | WASHINGTON

WE'VE already spotted some of the predictable criticism in America of Barack Obama's "Muslim Speech". More compelling grumbling comes from an ad hoc coalition of the left and the right, angry over what the president said (or didn't say) about women's rights.

Peter Daou, a veteran of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, calls the speech empty—"with women being stoned, raped, abused, battered, mutilated, and slaughtered on a daily basis across the globe, violence that is so often perpetrated in the name of religion（以宗教的名义进行暴力活动）, the most our president can speak about is protecting their right to wear the hijab?" Stephen Hayes, who wrote Dick Cheney's authorised biography, accuses the president of ignoring the region-wide struggle for women's rights.

But perhaps they forget America's most recent effort to confront the Muslim world on this issue. Karen Hughes, briefly the American ambassador of PR to the Middle East, talked about many of the issues that have rightly angered Mr Hayes and Mr Daou. She did so four years ago and was practically laughed out of a meeting with Saudi women. So there are limits to what Mr Obama could say. If he wanted to soft-sell average Muslims on American tolerance, then siding with Muslims in France was the smarter play than, say, siding with the Saudi female-driver lobby, which doesn't appear to be looking for American representation.

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下面是opening statements

The moderator's opening remarks

This promises to be a debate that engages people's emotions as well as their intellect.

Richard Donkin argues that the motion is what Americans call a "no brainer". Women clearly enjoy opportunities to make their livings and shape their lives that their predecessors could only dream of. They may not be doing as well as they would like. But, as he remarks, to say that they have never had it so good is not to say they cannot have it better.

Terry O'Neill produces a wealth of（大量） statistics to show that women still get a bum rap. They earn less than men, on average, and bear more responsibility for looking after children and the elderly. Only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female.

There is much to chew on here. As the debate continues, Mr Donkin needs to grapple with the fact that, particularly in America, ordinary people have seen their incomes stagnate since the 1970s. It now takes two incomes to afford what one could afford in the 1960s. Are women running faster just to stay in the same place?

Ms O'Neill needs to deal with the worry that she has already conceded too much ground. Proving that women still lag behind men, and indeed that they suffer from innumerable social ills, does not deal with the assertion at the heart of this debate（辩论的中心论点）: that they enjoy immmeasurably better lives, in terms of incomes, opportunities and social mores, than their ancestors just a few decades ago, not to mention（更不用说） the millions of people in the developing world.

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The proposer's opening remarks

When asked to argue for this motion, it seemed like a straightforward task. The proposition is what Americans like to call a "no-brainer". Well it is, isn't it? How could anyone argue that the lot of women has not improved immeasurably in the past century?

They got the vote, they got the pill, they got relatively easy(相对容易的) divorces when their marriages didn't work out plus a fair share of the spoils, they got multiple orgasms（这句:L ）, trouser suits, retail therapy, pedicures and the Chippendales; and they got the keys to the executive lavatory.

And when they began to get into positions of power（获得权力） they generally earned respect（赢得尊敬）. Other than Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher must have been the most admired and recognised British prime minister abroad since the end of the second world war. Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Gro Brundtland all proved they had the character to lead their countries in tough political arenas that in two of those cases would cost them their lives. Women have nothing left to prove.

So why do I feel like the patsy, the fall guy, the blindsided winger in rugby who knows he is about to be felled at the ankles after receiving what in the game they call a "hospital pass"? I am conscious of（知道，意识到。。。） some weighty personal disadvantages in supporting this motion（支持这一观点的一些重大不利于个人之处）.

The first and most obvious of these is that I am a man and, while I can claim empathy with the opposite sex, my emotional relationship with children is not the same as that of a woman（我和孩子之间的情感关系不想女人那样）. Equally the physical experiences associated with childbirth and the monthly cycle must remain by default something I can only imagine (and which my wife says I cannot imagine).

The second disadvantage is that I was not around a few generations ago to know just how bad women had it before the suffragette movement won them the vote, or how bad it was in the early 1950s when society assumed that the woman's place was in the home.

I was raised in a family that approached home-keeping and child-rearing in a practical if somewhat traditional way at the time. The mother was the home manager, home labourer and home economist, while the man of the house went out to work for the good of the family. I know my mother never felt inferior to men（从没感觉比男人差）. It was through doing（通过做。。。） what was called war work in the second world war that she met my father. When the fighting ended（战争结束） he came back to his old job to find it was being done by a woman.

My mother was happy to hand over（交付，移交） the job. Attitudes（态度，观点） were different then, but a point had been proven, nevertheless, even as mothers assumed their former roles as housewives, heralding a post-war baby boom. The idea that women felt chained to the kitchen sink is not a myth but neither is it representative of all women during that era. My mother never read "The Female Eunuch" by Germaine Greer and had she done so I doubt it would have changed her. But part of Greer's argument was that men were the last people who could make such judgments（做判断）. Whether housewives knew it or not, said Greer, their sexuality was being repressed in the consumer-driven family home.

Some might argue that the varying degrees of（不同程度的。。。） liberation from this repression（从这个束缚中得到的解放） have created their own problems, since so many working women still bear the greatest domestic burdens of the family（承担家庭的重担） while trying to pursue careers（追求事业）.

And therein lies a third problem in this argument and one that worries me the most. If reliable contraception in the late 20th century gave women anything it gave them choices. It is how they have handled these choices（处理这些选择） and how they feel about their decisions that leaves the proposition open to debate.

Once upon a time（从前） it was only men who failed to understand women. We could sympathise with（同情） Sigmund Freud's exasperation when he declared: "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"

Is it reasonable today, I wonder, to question whether women themselves know what they want in exercising their career options（运用她们的职业选择）? Katherine Hakim, a sociologist at London School of Economics, has observed that women are heterogeneous, or diverse, in the way they handle the conflicts between family life and employment. These conflicts, she argues, have become more acute in the last 50 years as women have expanded their role in the workplace.

The expansion, to the stage that in both the United States and the UK women now comprise（组成） nearly half of the labour market, has resulted from a number of factors: the contraceptive revolution, equal opportunities and sex discrimination legislation, a growth of white-collar jobs that prove more attractive to women（对女性更有吸引力的工作）, and changing attitudes towards（态度，看法） women and work in modern, liberal societies. When, for example, Johanna Siguroardottir became Iceland's prime minister it was noted that she was the first openly lesbian head of government in Europe. But that was all: the point was simply noted, not debated.

To say that women have never had it so good is not to say that they cannot have it better. There is still much work to be done, breaking through those corporate glass ceilings, still work to be done on equal pay and equal opportunities, still work to be done in removing an almost inbred resistance in men to domestic chores and still work in coaxing some men to assume an equal role in parenting.

As women stand on the brink of inheriting the workplace they could be forgiven for asking themselves: "Is it worth it?" Possibly not, if women simply assume the roles and past perspectives of men, if they perceive themselves as slaves to work, or if a woman's career is to be nothing but a guilt trip. If this is how women today feel about their lives, then the motion is lost. It stands or falls on an attitude of mind.

Tomorrow's battles may involve feminising the workforce in different ways, other than numerical dominance. As Mary Parker Follett once said from a distinctly female perspective（从一个不同的女性的视角）, there is merit to be gained in managers exercising power with their fellow employees, rather than power over them.

Some have questioned whether women can have it all in raising families and pursuing careers. But that must be a question for individual women. The most convincing of all the points that support the motion we are debating here must be that women today have choices they never enjoyed in the past. It is not up to me or anyone else to suggest（取决于。。。to do。。） what they do with those choices. As Annie Lennox pointed out, in a song that has almost earned the status of an anthem, "Sisters are doing it for themselves."

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The opposition's opening remarks

The first question the motion（提议） raises is: why focus solely on women in the developed world? Surely The Economist is not implying(暗示) that we should care only about the status of women in industrialised countries（工业化国家）. Perhaps the distinction is made because women in developing countries are in such dire straits. News of the discrimination, confinement and violence levelled at women in places like Afghanistan has opened many eyes to what sexism（性别歧视） taken to the extreme looks like.

The "you've never had it so good" canard has long been used as a smokescreen by those who would avoid or deny society's most intractable problems. For women, it is tantamount to being told to sit down and shut up. We will not. The motion is insulting, and I reject it.

It is not good that the wage gap between women and men has narrowed by less than half a penny per year since 1963. It definitely is not good that because of gender pay discrimination women in the United States are at higher risk of poverty（贫困的风险更大） than men, especially in retirement. Denial of equal pay for comparable work（拒绝为类似的工作付同样的工资） is a form of oppression of half the population that underlies（引起） lower productivity（更低的生产力）, higher poverty rates（更高的贫困率）, more old age poverty, more ill health and family instability.

Women in the United States do make up half the workforce, but that hardly makes us equal. Since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, women have closed the wage gap by a mere 18 cents. Today, women's median annual paychecks reflect only 77 cents for each dollar paid to men, with African American women paid 68 cents and Latinas just 58 cents (in nearly every arena, women of colour are short-changed at startlingly high rates（以惊人的高的比率）).

Recently The WAGE Project concluded that full-time working women lose a startling amount of wages over the course of their lifetimes: an average $700,000 for high-school graduates; $1.2m for college graduates and $2m for professional graduates. I ask all of your female readers to pause a moment to reflect on this statistic. What might you do with $700,000? Pay off your mortgage? Send your kids to college debt-free?

As a former law professor at Tulane University, I know that women get more high-school and university-level degrees（get degree）. But that is no marker of equality, it is an obvious follow-on to a discriminatory wage system in which a woman with a college degree earns about what a man with a high-school diploma does.

Why are women a measly 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs? I will give you one hint: it is not the myth of the so-called opt-out revolution.

True, a longitudinal survey of three Harvard Business School graduating classes showed only 38% of graduating women ending up in full-time careers. A Harvard Business Review study shows that of those in full-time careers, nearly eight in ten women reported taking drastic steps to care for their families, with four out of ten deliberately seeking work with fewer responsibilities and lower compensation in order to continue unpaid care-giving work, and another four in ten reporting voluntarily leaving work at some point in their careers（职业生涯中的某个点） (most often to care for their families). Would this have been the case for many of these Harvard graduates had high-quality, affordable child care been widely available?

Beyond the truism that women are encouraged and expected to take on the lion's share of unpaid care-giving work within the family in the United States, there are additional economic reasons why a woman with a male partner is the one to leave the paid workforce: the wage gap grows as women age (his work is compensated even more over time); women who try to negotiate for higher pay are perceived negatively; and care-giving work is not compensated in wage dollars（没有以美元工资的形式进行补偿） or through safety-net retirement programmes such as Social Security.

Outside the higher income brackets, a gender poverty gap persists. Women are 35% more likely to be poor than men. Only a minority of eligible poor families（少数有资格的穷家庭） (the vast majority of which are headed by single mothers) receive benefits in the United States, and those who do are unable to adequately provide food and shelter.

One reason for persistent female poverty is job segregation. Only 38% of management positions are held by women, with most women clustered into（归类） low-wage occupations（低薪岗位） including administrative/secretarial work, teaching, nursing, customer service, book-keeping and child care (these are the same positions women filled back when employment ads were "men only" and "women only").

Closing the wage gap in the industrialised world will require not only educating more women in science, math, technology, engineering, business and other male-dominated professions, but we also must start to institute comparable-worth legislation（制定。。。法律，立法） that acknowledges that many of the underpaid positions（职位） held by women are highly skilled and deserving of fair compensation（得到应得的公平的补偿）.

Recently the World Economic Forum assessed countries on how well they divide their resources and opportunities among（在。。。之间分配资源和机会） women and men in their populations. The top five countries—Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand—were followed by South Africa, which is on the International Monetary Fund's list of emerging and developing economies. The United States is on the list at no. 31, behind eight other developing countries.

Could it be this is related to the astonishingly disproportionate lack of women in political power? Here in the United States, women make up a paltry 17% of Congress, less than 20% of state governorships and only two of nine Supreme Court justices. And, of course, like many other industrialised nations we have never had a female head of state. This photo from the most recent G20 Summit says it all about who runs the industrialised world and why women must continue to agitate for equality for all:

Try to imagine more women in this picture, and then just think what we might be able to accomplish for our sisters living in Afghanistan and here at home.

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组长神贴~顶礼膜拜之~

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膜拜lz的debate..!!

同时膜拜LS的作文... !!