Phony Egalitarianism : Smirnoff Equalizer

Some phony egalitarians at Smirnoff created an app to adjust Spotify playlist to include 50-90% women.

"performed by men artists" do they mean to use a noun as an adjective or do they mean male artists?

by "100% of the top streamed tracks" they apparently are referring to a subset of the lists published by Spotify.

part of the Spotify list of top tracks of 2017 (with Katy Perry at #14 and Rihanna at #15)

part of the Spotify list of top artist of 2017 (with Taylor Swift at #10)

Clearly by "100%" they really meant "not 100%"

So listening to an unequal playlist is bad, but the "equalizer" slider ranges from 50/50 to 90% to 10% favoring women. It's because they care about "equality" but it isn't as important as posturing

They're not egalitarians : Kate Jenkins of the Australian Human Rights Commission

Via JF Beck;  The Australian Human Rights Commission's Kate Jenkins considers the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap report (pdf) to be a quality source :

In the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Gender Gap Report, Australia ranked number one for educational attainment. Yet that same report ranked Australia 46th for overall gender equality due to low levels of economic participation and political empowerment.

…Incorrect assumptions are being made about the progress of gender equality both in Australia and internationally. 

While the WEF Gender Gap Report (pdf) claims to be interested in the question of whether countries "educate women and men in equal numbers" note that women in Australia (p90) are over represented in tertiary education with a score of 102 for women to 72 for men but they redefine what looks to regular people like a gender gap as "equality."

Equality, apparently, means when one side does better than the other.

With regards to political empowerment the Gender Gap report has 3 criteria : Women in parliament, Women in ministerial positions, and Years with female head of state (over the last 50 years).  At first, I thought they were under the impression that Queen Elizabeth was a dude. It turns out that by head of state they mean PM and not the Queen or Governor General. Second they are criticizing the choices women make to run or not and who women vote for. Third, you can get a grasp of the Gender Gap's line of thinking by noting the other data points they include : "Quota for women on candidate lists in national elections, Quota for women on candidate lists in local elections, Voluntary political party quotas."

Australia women voting for the wrong sex and women choosing not to run in elections causes gender gaps.

Australia ranking 2 places below Mauritania in the political empowerment category is shameful.  Mauritania has a President that became president after leading a coup (and it wasn't the first coup he had participated in), press restrictions, female genital mutilation, child marriage, a legal system that can result in rape victims being arrested for adultery, laws mandating islam as the religion of the state and all citizens so converting to another religion leads to a loss of citizenship, apostasy is also a death penalty crime and chattel slavery. If they're losing in a comparison with Mauritania then Australia must be a real hell hole for women. 

Political Empowerment rankings (p13) Mauritania has quotas for women on candidate lists in national elections so that makes Mauritanian women more politically empowered than women in Australia despite the chattel slavery, dictatorship, female genital mutilation 

The economic participation is covered by the now old wage gap discussions (education, experience, hours worked etc).  But  I will note that legislators are counted in both the "economic participation" category and counted again in the "political empowerment" category. Burundi is ranked as #1 in the economic participation category; possibly due to their poverty causing the necessity of women to work.

Kate of the AHRC didn't mention the WEF's 4th category : health. The WEF notes the Australian life expectancy is 74 for woman and only 71 for men which everyone can see is a gender gap. But to the WEF Gender Gap Report it is women falling behind because they have redefined "equality" as women living 6% longer than men. Consequently, Australian Life expectancy is ranked at 87th place dragging down their overall score.

Equality, apparently, means one side doing better than the other by at least 6%

In fact, the country listed at the very top of the 2016 Gender Gap Report Table C11: Healthy life expectancy (p55) isn't the country where men & women's health is most equal but the country with the biggest gap in life expectancy on the entire list : Russia (66 years for women and 55 for men). These are not rigorous egalitarians.

Someone should ask Kate Jenkins if the Australian Human Rights Commission shares the Gender Gap Report's views that "equality" requires men to die years before women and if she thinks quotas in a slave owning dictatorship means more political empowerment than Australia's system.

(previous reports on the Gender Gap Report can be found under the Phony Egalitarianism tag)

Update May 19, 2017 : On the first of May, I twittered in the general direction of Kate Jenkins citing the WEF Gender Gap report claim that equality of life expectancy should be a 1:1.06 ratio and asking :

@Kate_Jenkins_ You cite the WEF Gender Gap report; you agree with them that men must die years before women for there to be equality?

But no response. Related :

Kate Jenkins (right) in her poorly spelled smash the patriarchy shirt

They're not egalitarians : Gender Gap Report 2015

The WEF Gender Gap Report 2015 (the report has been previously mentioned)


Russia is still at the top of the list (page 62) when it comes to equality of life expectancy. That is to say that there is an enormous gender gap between men and women but since the gap favors women the authors count that as "equality"

Australia (page 90) is still a sexist, misogynistic hell-hole because the Healthy Life expectancy is 74 for women and 71 for men. Of course, the Gender Gap Report defines this as the 3 year gap suffered by men as a gap where women are behind as they only count it as "equality" if women live 6% longer than men or longer.

Kazakhstan's sex ratio data (p216) is still wrong. The ratio shows male:female ratio while is is supposed to show female: male.

Note that the vertical dashed line indicates "equality." Since women do better than men they truncate the score at the "equality" benchmark because they don't want anyone to think men might fall behind (see page 5 of the report).  So, if you look at the 6th column of numbers you can see 1.06 is for sex ratio at birth and Healthy Life Expectancy is 1.14 but in the second column shows the truncated scores of 0.94 and 1.06 respectively.


They do 3 things with the data to generate the category score:
1) the convert to ratios to focus on differences between males and female scores

2) they truncate the data at their "equality" benchmark (ie with Healthy Life Expectancy they define equality as women living 6% longer than men; therefore with the Russian Life Expectancy Ratio at 1.20 they truncate the score to 1.06.) They don't want anyone to know if there is a gender gap where men suffer. "We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes, as it does not reward countries for having exceeded the parity benchmark."

3) the subcategory score is calculated with weighted average. A weight of 0.693 for sex ratio and 0.307 weight for HLE.  I think they calculated the weights (page 7) without allowing for their defining the more significant number as less than one and consequently even with perfect scores it'll always show women suffering inequality.

WEF logo - Committed To Improving The State Of The World (unless you are a guy)

Update :  Interestingly, they have been producing reports every year for 10 years and have gotten media attention with every report but no one noticed that the weighting was wrong. One would think it would be a clue when a country has men suffering a gender gap in health subcategories that they report that as women suffering a gender gap in the category. How depressing that they put so much effort into collecting the report each year and after all these years I seem to be the only person to take a close look at it. 

"The first is the sex ratio at birth, which aims specifically to capture the phenomenon of “missing women” prevalent in many countries with a strong son preference. Second, we use the gap between women’s and men’s healthy life expectancy."

The idea of "missing women," according to the abstract to the paper "Missing Women : Revisiting the Debate" referenced in the Gender Gap Report, is premised on "the number of females who had died as a result of unequal access to resources in parts of the developing world." Interesting that an "unequal access to resources" when it comes to men is seen as insignificant.

Update #2 (June 14, 2016) : I emailed some of the people listed on the report about this with no response after a week.

But I did notice that on page 11 they list the Health & Survival category and mark countries with a score of 0.980 as achieving parity (at least parity since the truncate the scores.) However, the chart they use to display each country's score in comparison to the sample average suggests that 1.0 is the standard of equality and Austria, for example is behind with regards to health.

I would also note that if they used equal values (ie a score of 1 for equality in each subcategory) then the weighting would work.

If the Gender Gap Report used the simple measure of life expectancy equality (results being equal to mean equality as opposed to insisting that women living 6% longer than men as "equality") then 138 out of 145 countries would have men suffering a gender gap, 4 would have equality and 3 would have women suffering a gender gap (page 62).

Lucky guy

clip from the TV show Criminal Minds (Season 8 episode 10 The Lesson)

The episode is about a killer who puts his victims on the rack to stretch them and crucifies them.

Transcript :

Dr. Spencer Reid : So far we believe he has spared the one woman that he still has in captivity. She's either witnessing these horrors or being forced to participate in them.
Dr. Alex Blake : Crucifixion is sadistic and watching it is the ultimate torture.

Whew, the guy who got crucified and murdered sure was lucky he didn't get tortured as badly as having to watch it happen to someone else.

How Orwellian : racism isn't racist

Bahar Mustafa is a student union diversity officer at Goldsmiths University in the UK who was trying to organize a racially segregated event but asserts that she can't be racist or sexist because she is an ethnic minority woman.

According to reports at the time, Ms Mustafa posted a message on Facebook which read: "Hey, I made as many of you hosts so please invite loads of BME Women and non-binary people!! 

"Also, if you've been invited and you're a man and/or white PLEASE DON’T COME just cos I invited a bunch of people and hope you will be responsible enough to respect this is a BME Women and non-binary event only."

Ms Mustafa added: "Don't worry lads we will give you and allies things to do", followed by  a winky face emoji.

In a video recently uploaded on local news website eastlondonlines.co.uk however, Ms Mustafa has described the backlash as "an outrageous distortion of fact".

In the seven-minute video, Ms Mustafa also refuted any accusation of racism and sexism', claiming "reverse racism and reverse sexism are not real".

In a presentation made in front of fellow students, Ms Mustafa said: "Furthermore, there have been charges made against me that I am racist and sexist to white men.

"I want to explain why this is false. I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describes structures of privilege based on race and gender.

"And therefore women of colour and minority genders cannot be racist or sexist because we do not stand to benefit from such a system.

"In order for our actions to be deemed racist or sexist, the current system would have to be one that enables only people of colour and women to benefit economically and socially on such a large scale and to the systematic exclusion of white people and men, who for the past 400 years would have to have been subjected to block colonisation.

"We do not live in such a system, we do not know of such a history, reverse racism and reverse sexism are not real."

First, this fails in reciprocity. Treat others how you want to be treated.

"Hey let's round up people based on their race and put them in a death camp!" should be considered racist who ever says it. Some people prefer chauvinism and think their racial hatred should be acceptable.

This definition enables racism against minorities.  "Hey, [ethnic slur], get in the back of the bus!" should be considered racist if uttered by an African to a Korean or vice versa. Her definition would mean that neither is racist.

If benefiting is the essential requirement of racism then wouldn't that mean a hotel owner who refuses to serve black customers is damaging his own business by turning away customers and is not benefiting from the discrimination.

It seems to me sadism is worse than someone benefiting. It is disturbing that treating another person badly isn't seen as poor behavior in and of itself.

Her notion that 400 years of discrimination until a minority could be considered racist is an appalling support of transgenerational race-based punishment. Fortunately, few people support punishing children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren for the deeds of their ancestors. Strangely, she doesn't seem to consider that transgenerational could be used against her.

400 years would suggest (about 25 years per generation) that she approves of punishing the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren not for any abuse dished out by the 16th generation grandparent –the individual's actions are irrelevant – but for the misdeeds of people who share the same race as the 16th generation grandparent.

I can't help but think of the similarity to the Curse of Ham being used as a justification of the slavery of the supposed descendants of Ham.

Some people aren't opposed to people suffering but just want to put the yoke of suffering around the neck of someone else.

phony egalitarians

2014 WEF Gender Gap report (PDF)

Well, there is no good news for Australia in this year's Gender Gap report.  Like last year, Australia (p104) had men showing a lower life expectancy than women by 3 years which the WEF scores as women suffering a gender gap. They manage this by redefining life expectancy "equality" as women outliving men by 1.06:1. 

The Gender Gap report also lists any category in which women outscore men as "Equality" no matter how onesided. (For example, p364 the US is marked as "equal" in the Educational Attainment category despite women being equal in 2 of the subcategories and leading men in the other 2 subcategories) The WEF must really hate women to define their terms so women can only be behind men or equal to men never ahead of them. 

The Gender Gap Report claims that Russia is the most equal country when it comes to life expectancy last year and the second most equal country this year (p74) because Russian men die so much earlier than women. 

One might get the impression these are not the most rigorous egalitarians.

How Orwellian : Women live longer than ever – women hardest hit

map of US life expectancy gender gap (here)

The headline is "U.S. Life Expectancy Map: The Gender Gap" with the subhead "Ladies Last" on this National Geographic piece by Amanda Fiegl

How long do you have? It depends on gender and geography. In the U.S., women live longer—81 years on average, 76 for men—but a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reveals a troubling trend. Though men's life spans have increased by 4.6 years since 1989, women have gained only 2.7 years, perhaps because a larger percentage of women have lacked adequate treatment for high blood pressure and cholesterol. "This is a wake-up call," says study co-author Ali Mokdad.

The question remains whether the "troubling trend" is that men's life expectancy has increased or if the troubling part is that women life expectancy increased less than men.

Despite the article's subhead reading "Ladies Last" the map is labeled "Margin by which women outlive men" with, apparently, no areas of the US where men outlive women. Poor, poor ladies last.

In looking for the context of the quote "This is a wake-up call"  this USA Today article shows that Ali Mokdad was referring not to men's increase or the comparative increase of women's but to some areas that have had a stagnation or decrease in life expectancy.

Amanda Fiegl's blinkered one-sidedness is similar to the WEF Gender Gap report mentioned previously.

More phony egalitarianism

To continue a critique of the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap report started here.

 Kazakhstan - Health and Survival
women are doomed!

Bizarrely, 0.9796 is the highest score for any country listed in the Health and Survival category (p19). Even Kazakhstan (p240) which is listed with an inverted sex ratio at birth* (1.06 – more girls are born than boys while in every other country listed has more boys born than girls) and women have a much higher life expectancy than men (60 for women and 53 for men; a 1.13 ratio) their score still maxes out at 0.9796 – still shy of the "equality" score of 1. The WEF must really hate women to define their terms so women can never be equal.

Even keeping in mind that they truncate the subcategory scores at the "equal" levels (the Kazakh sex ratio of 1.06 is truncated to 0.94 and the Kazakh life expectancy of 1.13 is truncated to 1.06) I'm not sure how Kazakhstan could be scored at less than one.

Update : on page 36 are footnotes #6 and #7 which read :

6 This is not strictly accurate in the case of the health variable, where the highest possible value a country can achieve is 0.9796. However, for purposes of simplicity we will refer to this value as 1 throughout the chapter and in all tables, figures and Country Profiles.
7 Because of the special equality benchmark value of 0.9796 for the Health and Survival subindex, it is not strictly accurate that the equality benchmark for the overall index score is 1. This value is in fact (1 + 1 + 1 + 0.9796) / 4 = 0.9949. However, for purposes of simplicity, we will refer to the overall equality benchmark as 1 throughout this chapter.

So where does 0.9796 come from and why not make it conform to the standard of 1?  The weighting mentioned on p5-6 doesn't seem to do it or I may be doing it wrong.
0.693 * 0.94 =  0.65142
0.307 * 1.06 =  0.32542
0.65142 + 0.32542 = 0.97684

On page 35 they state "On average, in 2013, over 96% of the gap in health outcomes… has been closed. No country in the world has achieved gender equality."

The average Health and Survival score I came up with (using their truncated scores from p12-13) is 0.97115. That is 99.1% of the maximum possible score of 0.9796.   If they didn't truncate at their life expectancy equality maximum and used a definition of life expectancy "equality" that didn't depend on men living a shorter span then the global life expectancy average would be 1.0586 - in the real world that would be men suffering inequality.


(* as an aside, Kazakhstan sex ratio at birth appears to be incorrect. The CIA World Factbook also lists the sex ratio at birth to be 0.94 male(s)/female but for the sex ratio of the 0-14 years cohort as 1.01 male(s)/female; and the total population sex ratio as 0.92 male(s)/female (2013 est.). The total population ratio is consistent with the life expectancy while a massive die off of girls 0-14 years doesn't seem to be reflected in the life expectancy numbers. It appears the male/female sex ratio numbers were transposed. Update : the WEF and the CIA appear incorrect; the Kazakh sex ratio according to Kazakhstan government statistics has been 1.06 males/females for each year from 2006-2010 – pdf page 12)

WEF logo - Committed To Improving The State Of The World (unless you are a guy)

By the way, which country does the World Economic Forum rank as most equal when it comes to Life Expectancy? The number one ranking (page54) belongs to the Russian Federation where women's life expectancy is 65 and men's life expectancy is 55 (a ratio of 1.18:1). Equality!

In the interest of equality and bringing awareness to the magnitude and scope of gender-based disparities, I'll note that only in 6 countries is the female life expectancy not equal or greater than male and the worst life expectancy ratio listed for women is Trinidad and Tobago's 0.97 (or 1.03 as expressed men:women instead of women:men). Considerably less severe than the gender gap in Russia.

Only 18 out of 135 countries have a sex ratio score below their standard of "equality" 0.94. I will point out again that they considered measuring the gender gaps of both men and women but instead decided on page 5 that "We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes."

United Kingdom - Political Empowerment

Political Empowerment Rank 29, Score 0.275
Years with female head of state (last 50)

rank :	8
score :	0.30
sample average :	0.20
Female :	12
Male :	38
Female-to-male ratio :	0.30

I see 2 problems with this aside from the worthwhileness of the subcategory in assuming the importance of a single person and that it is a score based largely on the distant past.

First, 12 divided by 38 is 0.31578 not 0.30. To claim precision to the ten-thousandths (as in the overall Political Empowerment category score p19) and then to round a subcategory seems odd. They appear to be using whole numbers in the subcategories but calculating with more more precise numbers (Thatcher's 11.5years /38.5 = 0.2987)

Second, Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state of the United Kingdom and has been since 1952. So the score should be 1 (as their policy is to truncate the score at the "equal" value)

Ah, I see that on page 4 they chose to redefine the head of state :

…we include the ratio of women to men in terms of years in executive office (prime minister or president) for the last 50 years.

New Zealand - Political Empowerment
was Helen Clark a dude?

For everyone except the WEF, the head of state of New Zealand is the aforementioned Queen. Using the WEF's definition of head of state we find that the WEF thinks Helen Clark and Jenny Shipley were male as they list the number of years with a female head of state as zero (p296).  They must not consider the Governor-General to be the head of state as more than 10 years of Governors-General have been female. Perhaps New Zealand has a secret phallocratic government.

How Orwellian : Gaps in understanding the meaning of equality

The WEF's Gender Gap report (PDF) redefines inequality as equality. 

US Educational Attainment (page 370)

The female to male ratio of USA enrollment in tertiary education is 1.41 but it is scored as "1" (1 = Equality). There is no extra credit given for women being in an advantageous position as the maximum score is one. When there is a gender gap where men suffer then it is defined as equality.

Fiji Educational Attainment (page 198)

The result of truncating the score at 1 is that Fiji's Educational Attainment has women equal to men or leading men in 3 of the 4 subcategories but because they trail in one subcategory the entire category is graded as showing inequality to women.

Cameroon Health and Survival (page 158)

Further, they define the "equal" life expectancy ratio at 1.06:1. If men and women have the same life expectancy, like Cameroon, then that is marked as inequality. 

Also note that the Sex ratio at birth is bounded at a predetermined "equal" value of 0.94 instead of Cameroon's actual 0.97. The result is that despite being equal in life expectancy and higher in sex ratio at birth the result is a overall Health and Survival score of 0.961 – Not Equal. 

As an aside, I'm unclear as to why "Sex ratio at birth" is a significant category. It doesn't capture female infanticide (except for sex selective abortion) and unlike most categories it doesn't seem determined by traditions or social institutions. A cynical person might suggest that it is a subcategory added solely to lower the Health and Survival average and to game the OMGsomethingHasToBeDone system.

Burundi Health and Survival (page 154)

Burundi's women have a higher sex ratio at birth than average and a higher life expectancy than men. This may lead some to think men are suffering inequality. Not according to the WEF. Because the sex ratio at birth score is capped at 0.94 and because women outlive men but do not outlive them to a sufficient degree that means the women of Burundi are the ones suffering inequality. 

In Australia (p120) men have a lower life expectancy than women by 3 years which the WEF scores as women suffering a gender gap. 

It is interesting to note the existence of a category listed under "Additional Data - Social Instutitions" : "Quota type" which notes if there are laws requiring a quota of female candidates or if laws require seats in the legislature be reserved for women.

On page 4 they acknowledge that they could present both gaps in the achievements of women and also the gaps in men's achievements but "We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes." 

One might get the impression these are not the most rigorous egalitarians.




the critique of the WEF Gender Gap report continues here.