HOLY FUCK I FINISHED THIS POST AND WAS LINKING SOURCES AND THEN CHROME FREAKING CRASHED AND ONLY MANAGED TO AUTOSAVE LIKE 8 WORDS. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH GOOGLE. OKAY THIS IS ALL RETYPED.
In that questionnaire story today, I was reminded of my wondering before about whether Christianity would be so damn popular in America if they found out that Jesus was most probably not white. And that his appearance is most probably Lebanese/Jordanian/Syrian/Palestinian/the like. I'm sorry but I cannot imagine mainstream whites worshipping someone who isn't perceived as white. Thank God for all that white Jesus marketing, I guess.
Okay now I'm retyping the main body of the post again and thanks to the crash I'm like twice as pissed off so bear with me. I'll probably structure it better this time around though.
Backstory:
We were discussing the Education Rebate. You know the one where you can essentially get a laptop for half price if it's for "educational purposes" and "not porn and Facebook". Now I was recalling that, if the household income was greater than $100,000 then the family will not receive the education tax refund.
So the ignorant dumbshit in question (we'll call them FID for "Fucking Insensitive Dickbag") then goes and says "You know 100k is shit, right". That's pretty much verbatim. If not, the association of an $100k income with the word "shit" is definitely undeniable.
This is loud enough for the whole class to hear, mind you.
Allow me to pause for a few moments to collect my thoughts.
The Numbers:
I will firstly need to present to you some facts. The median household income (as of 2008-2009, and also off wiki... I couldn't be bothered reading ABS) is $66,820. For some reason the state median is the same number. By the definition of the word "median", if you earn a somewhat "somehow worse than shit" income of $66,820, you are wealthier than half the fucking country. This is no mean feat in a country with the 14th highest quality of living, if GDP per capita is anything to go by.
Unfortunately I could not find the standard deviation or mean income so I can't really say that $100,000 a year would make you the top x% most wealthy in the country, but allow me to quickly calculate just how much $100,000 is. It is 149.66% of the median, and if we look at something like a standard distribution curve, I will make the (quite unfounded, unfortunately, but at the same time quite conservative) estimate that that would leave you in the top 10% of families if you earned 100k a year. Note that if $100k is "shit", we'd have a fair way to go to get to "decent", a tad more for "satisfactory" and then some more to "good". By the time we reach "good" we're probably somewhere around $200,000 I'm guessing, which happens to be more than 3 times the national median. Haha, all those idiots living off 70k a year, right?
This, my friends, is either extreme privilege, or extreme ignorance.
And I'm not fucking finished yet:
The reason I labelled FID as such is because there will be some people in the room who do not even reach the $100k range in income. You know what? Fuck that. Everyone in the room except for a maximum of 5 have families earning less than 100k. There is clear evidence for that in how many people talk about claiming their education rebate.
Not only are there people who don't earn $100k a year to offend, there will be kids whose families are on freaking welfare who have to deal with pricks telling them (albeit indirectly) that $100k is some shit quality of life.
I don't know why FID thought it would be appropriate to make such an assertion but it is indeed saddening. I can only hope that it is not representative of the views of the rest of people.
And you know what? I wasn't even fucking wrong. If you'll take a look at this site you'll discover that you'll need to receive Family Tax Benefits A in order to receive the education tax refund. A little digging into this site found that $100k wasn't really a far cry from the actual figure.
If a household has 2 kids both in high school, the maximum income you can have is $107k before not receiving FTB-A (and hence education rebate)
If a household has 2 kids, one in high school and one in uni, then the max income for the family is $109k
And in conclusion:
- Money is not free flowing for a majority of the people we know.
- Man, FID is a dickweed
- And I'm still interested in seeing some reliable stats for any other displays of my personal displays of privilege, say in sexism, in which my (mis?)conceptions may be disproved readily by stats (preferably something believable and not some unsourced blog post). I would appreciate that
Also I couldn't be bothered checking over the post so there may be grammatical mistakes or something. Deal with it please :L
7 comments:
i concur (with all including the first statement).
It was better the first time around Jeff. Doesn't make sense after you retyped it.
Also Jeff, i think you are confusing household income with individual income. Considering some households have two working adults, ~50k falls within 1sd of the average I think. Not saying that ~50k is bad by any means.
Regardless FID is still a dickweed.
not sure what you specifically mean by sexism, but there is definitely a gender pay gap that is due to discrimination:
- http://www.eowa.gov.au/Pay_Equity/Files/PE_STATS.pdf shows 2009/2010 ABS data in an easily digestible form but doesn't give much information on the causes
- i can't say i know enough about economics to evaluate how valid the results in this article http://www.business.curtin.edu.au/files/295watson1.pdf are, but the author analyses the issue in an understandable manner
some quotes:
"Women full-time managers earn about 27 per cent less than their male counterparts and somewhere between 65 and 90 per cent of this pay
gap cannot be explained by the characteristics of managers and is possibly due to
discrimination. Indeed, the characteristics of male and female managers – at least as
measured in this sample – are remarkably similar. One is left with the stark conclusion
that the major part of the gap is simply due to women managers being female.
Despite quite different methodological approaches, these results are consistent
with the findings of Barón and Cobb-Clark (2008), the study most similar in scope
to this one."
"It has been argued, for example, that women’s movement into senior management jobs can be blocked by ‘exclusionary masculine practices’ (Sinclair, 1994).
As with many in-groups, such practices include the recruitment of ‘similar’ persons
into higher positions...At its crudest, this reduces to ‘Men employ men’: ‘Male executives support and promote other men looking like themselves and they use each others success to their own advantage’ (Lausten, 2001, p. 3)."
"A recent study on promotions (Booth et al., 2003) using the
British Household Panel Survey found evidence that women were just as likely to be
promoted as men, but that the pay increases they received from those promotions
were smaller. These findings were consistent with a sticky- floors model of promotion:
‘the mechanisms operating are not the simple glass ceilings ones of an unfavourable
promotions rate for women, but involve lower wage returns to promotion for women’
(2003, p. 297). The implications of this for the present study are subtle, but important:
‘the promotion process...may very well increase the disadvantage, not through a lower
promotion probability, but through a lower wage reward over time to promotion’
(2003, p. 319)."
"The literature on
the glass ceiling has suggested that managerial career paths are inherently gendered
with an early insight being that senior managers ‘treat all workers as if they are men’.
In so doing, they fail to provide support for their staff in the form of child care, parental
leave or flexible work schedules (Newman, 1993). What makes this discriminatory in
its impact is the prevailing domestic division of labour, which leaves most women
with the greater share of parenting and housekeeping tasks (see, for example, Bittman
and Lovejoy, 1993; and Baxter et al., 2005; and Noonan, 2001)."
- http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/pubdocs/2010/18/en/2/EF1018EN.pdf is an interesting meta-study focused on the gender pay gap in europe
/: sorry for the odd formatting
@Tom
Already addressed in Chem
@Claudia
Ahaha the sheer number of links sent that comment straight to spam :L
First link - I appreciate that it is from Australia and from 2010. It is superly clear that blue-collar jobs favour men by up to 50% increase in wages, but interestingly the white-collar jobs start evening out (females even having a 8.3% salary advantage over males in medicine! =O). For the CEO part I do see the injustice for an apparent 50% reduction in income for women who "are as influential as men")
Thanks, I think that was the kind of thing I was looking for but never googled hard enough.
And wtf that second article totally went over my head. The abstract already had me lost. But I read over your summary
I found the point about equal chance of promotion but smaller wage increases quite interesting - it renders many people's arguments misguided but not completely wrong.
And in an address to all of them I did find that some do hold the opinion that women should not work/invest lots of time in their career, due to the apparent inevitability of pregnancy and raising a child, which would render the studying/hard work a "waste of time". Interesting attempt to trivialise a woman's career.
And yes indeed the linebreaks are in retarded places in PDF's. Thanks for the links (liked the first one the best because it makes sense to me =P)
mm for the second article the abstract didn't make too much sense to me either :L the introduction is okay and the discussion is where i got all the quotes from (pg21).
also i literally found all these pdfs through gender pay articles on wikipedia xD but hey, even if wiki isn't too reliable, these pdfs seem pretty reputable
Post a Comment