Although I probably should know better I cannot help being dumbfounded by the ongoing hypocritical and childish antics of gender feminist students in our universities, most notably the motley crew down at the Monash Student Association, Women’s Department.
While they have a ways to go to match their contemporaries at the University of Toronto, their largely unchallenged bigotry no doubt slowly infuses into the higher education culture of increasing female privilege.
This week they are celebrating “Blue Stockings Week” which is described as a celebration of “the achievements of women past and present, as well as encouraging future (female) academics and scholars!”
In one of the most extreme examples of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy I have seen these student ideologues have hosted an “Equality Cupcake” event. It appears however that not all cupcakes are created equal.
From the Blue Stockings Facebook page :
“TUESDAY
Equality Cupcakes!
The MSA will be selling equality cupcakes to raise awareness of the gender pay gap that exists in society. Cupcakes will be 70c for trans* and sex & gender diverse folk, 80c for women and $1 for men! Campus centre/ menzies (sic)[1] lawn (depending on weather) from 10-12.”
The decision to highlight wage discrimination by price discrimination is akin to being violent to protest against violence, or raping to protest against rape. But why stop at gender as the only factor in statistical pay gaps? Why not add age, ability, race, religion, sexual orientation etc. into the mix? What should an elderly, disabled, Muslim, female to male transgender, homosexual, non English speaking, Afghan refugee, first year Arts student pay for a cupcake; 10 cents, 20 perhaps?
What you can be sure of in Australia, is that all work covered by Fair Work Australia award conditions is gender neutral. The same position, in the same industry at the same level is paid at the same rate. Most students do it tough, often haveing to work to support their studies and will almost certainly work under such award conditions. Is there a gender pay gap for university students? I don’t know but if there is it is NOT because they are not being paid equally for equal work, so to discriminate against your fellow students is in my view simply abhorrent.
Surprisingly some Monash students both male and female rather then ignoring this over sexism got onto a private Monash Students Blog with some 19,000 members and started complaining about the sexism. The Facebook post according to Herald Sun Community Leader News Paper attracted nearly 1,500 likes and more than 900 comments.
One of the MSA women’s department feminists felt the way to respond to this criticism, which she referred to as “trolling” was as follows:
“- Send an email out to as many lecturers as you can. Target lecturers who you know teach the students who have been the most vocal on the stalkerspace discussion.
– Explain the situation to them.
– Explain the wage gap to them.
– Explain to them that it is their duty as tertiary educators to discuss the wage gap with their students.
– Explain that given that this is happening, they have an obligation as professionals who are preparing students to work in their chosen fields to spend the first five minutes of their next lecture explaining what the wage gap is in their field and why it is important that we are all aware of it.”
So there you have it, lecturers should take up time scheduled to teach their subjects to spread feminist propaganda to non-conformist students!
But even getting local mainstream media coverage for their “awareness” campaign, they are not happy. The women’s department Facebook page contains an unhappy discussion that one of them (law student Louisa Ashton) was mentioned by name in the Community Leader article, and whilst she “stands by her comments”, apparently not so much as to have them reported publicly. Indeed the group is considering writing to the paper requesting to have the article removed. How’s that for standing by your convictions!
The reason for the average statistical gender pay gap has been comprehensively explained time and time again. Still when the meme of a “gender pay gap” is repeatedly conflated and blamed on sex discrimination by the current Australian Prime Minister and President of the United States of America, it’s not surprising that sheepish students take this at face value, rather then “unpacking or drilling down” into the statistic to try and understand why it exists. No, that would entail critical thinking and students are doing much less of that these days.
Universities instead, are sticking to their core business of manufacturing politically correct thinking indoctrinated drones for employment in the ever-growing business of big government. Its simpler and less complicated to just toe the feminist ideological line that the pay gap is all due to male privilege promoted by the mythical patriarchy.
But wait there is more; Equality Cupcakes come with the added bonus of raising funds and getting comments to support a submission for “affirmative action policy for course readers.” This means the MSA Women’s Department will petition the Arts Faculty Board, to mandate that 40% of all journal articles used in teaching must be written by women. Not that the journal articles be of high quality and relevant to the course work, just that women write them. Hopefully the Art’s Faculty Board will have more common sense then such students.
Indeed the Faculty Board would be well aware of the university policies that already offer affirmative action for women staff. Further they would be aware of the gender gaps that exist and has existed for years in the student population and the future effect this will have of staffing at universities.
For example they would be cognizant with the trend in sex ratio for enrolled students at Monash University.
And the disparities at Monash University in student enrollments across faculties for 2013.
They would also be aware of the sex ratio treads across Monash University staff.
But where is the MSA Women’s Department cry of discrimination when it comes to addressing the gender gap in education? They firmly focused only on the areas in which women are still below parity, despite the obvious reasons which are proven by research to not be about discrimination. But they remain eerily silent on area’s where women lurch well ahead of parity. Monash provides more proof that modern feminism is not interested in gender equality, but only in advancing women’s interests and power.
That is not a cupcake I can swallow.
?
# Sir Robert Menzies after whom the “menzies lawn” (sic) is named was a longstanding conservative Australian Prime Minister. I am sure the failure to capitalize his surname was just a typographical error on the part of the MSA Women’s Department. This focal point at Monash University (Named after Sir John Monash Australia’s Military Commander in WWI) is a frequent venue for activities and no other promotion ever has made the same error.
