Women’s Equality Party - Policy Document Just Published Online - HEqual Comments

By Mike Buchanan: Our thanks to Jane for informing us the Women’s Equality party has just published its first policy document. We haven’t gone through it in detail, but a ‘speed read’ shows plenty of predictably absurd content e.g. on ‘equal pay’, p6:

Forty-five years after the Equal Pay Act, for every hour they work, women still earn just 81p of every pound earned by men. There are many ways of measuring the pay gap – pay for each hour worked, pay for each worker, total pay for all women, and for all men – but however you measure it, the story is the same: women earn less per hour, less per job and less overall.
In total, women earn just 52% of what men do every year because not only do they earn less, they are more likely to sacrifice the opportunity to earn a wage for the sake of their family.
The contribution of women to our economy and our society is undervalued, both in paid work and at home. The OECD has shown that if we unleashed the true potential of women the economy could grow by an extra 10% by 2030 – adding an extra £180 billion to growth. WE will ensure all women who want to work can do so and are paid fairly for it. WE will work to end the bias in pay for occupations perceived as ‘male’ or ‘female’ that means caring work is paid less than manual labour.
WE will be ruthless in the fight against direct discrimination that sees women pushed out of work or held back because of their gender.

Then there are downright lies, such as the one I’ve highlighted in the following (p.20):

The Women’s Equality Party’s work will not be complete until violence against women because of their gender has been ended. It is a stain on our society that women can be murdered, violated, assaulted or oppressed because of their gender.
No woman is free until she is safe: by diminishing women’s freedom to participate in their societies, violence against women and girls acts as one of the most pervasive barriers to gender equality.
To end this violence we have to recognise what it is: structural violence, overwhelmingly carried out by men. It is both a cause and consequence of gender inequality.

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HEqual comments on the policy document of the Women’s Equality party
MB: Earlier today we posted a piece linking to the absurd initial policy document of the Women’s Equality party. With the publication of this document, Sophie Walker – the party’s leader –  has nominated herself for a number of our awards, including:

• Lying Feminist of the M0nth (already won twice in the space of just three months by Sandy Toksvig, the party’s spokeswoman from the outset)
• Gormless Feminist of the Month
• Whiny Feminist of the Month

I was pleased to see some comments by HEqual in response to the piece, and they’re reproduce here, with his permission. They take up the remainder of this blog post:
HEqual: “What’s often most interesting about these documents is not so much what’s said, but what things are absent which might have been present a few years ago.
Not so long ago, feminists would go on and on about domestic violence and that would be a key term in almost any feminist document. Once the truth started to get out about dv and just how many men were victims, feminists realised they’d lost the arguments and that their lies really weren’t so effective any more. Therefore we see them increasingly abandoning the term “domestic violence” particularly in official policy documents and instead they’re now excluding men by moving the goalposts and introducing the term “violence against women”. The is essentially a completely meaningless term which has come to mean “any bad thing that ever happened or might happen to a women”.
I’m always puzzled and annoyed by this whole “violence against women because of their gender” nonsense and don’t see enough people debunking this crap. I expect you’ll come up against it in a debate before too long Mike, here’s my view, would love to hear other arguments debunking it
1. Domestic violence comes about due to living with a person. No gender is being targeted, it’s only predominantly male on female and female on male because most people are in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex.
2. The armed forces generally don’t conscript women and it’s rare for them to serve in front line and dangerous positions in war (just look at the gender breakdown of combat deaths in recent wars for proof of this). Therefore ever military conflict is essentially violence against men with men dying because they are men.
3. We have very strong social norms in our society that men should should NEVER be violent towards women, children or even animals, even in self defence. Therefore, the only violence considered acceptable by society is violence against men. If men are the only legitimate target for violence then it’s actually fairer to say that all the violence against men is “because of their gender” – the exact opposite of the feminist position.”

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