Monday, April 20, 2009

Polly & Harriet Go Fact Finding.

I see that Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman and assorted other left wing women are going off to Ghana to learn about women's equality. Whilst I will never begrudge using taxpayer's money to send those two off to Timbuktu I can't help wondering whether Ghana is an obvious choice of destination to learn about women's equality. It seems like going to Bhutan to learn about coastal erosion.

Luckily the World Values Survey which I referred to in my previous post allows us to compare Ghanaian and British attitudes towards gender equality and it doesn't cost taxpayers a penny.
Question: Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women

Great Britain: Agree- 16.2%, Disagree- 76.1%
Ghana: Agree- 53.6, Disagree- 37.4%
Okay Polly, Harriet, you know what you have to do in these hard economic times, resign so that a man can have your jobs. Of course that's just one variable, the folk wisdom of the Ghanaians is far more enlightened than that of our capitialistic patriarchal society, we need to look at some more questions:
If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove?

GB: Approve- 33.5%, Disapprove- 34.7%, Depends- 31.7%
Ghana: Approve- 6.2%, Disapprove- 92.0%, Depends- 1.2%
I sure hope Polly and Harriet are learning from the vibrant cultural traditions of Ghana. I'm not even going to dwell on the results for " On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do", because I'm sure that if Ghana had Gordon Brown then their result would be closer to our 20% than their 77%.

(via Mr Eugenides)

6 comments:

asquith said...

I thought La Toynbee was a secularist & a universalist. I doubt whether she'd have much time for cultural relativism, or illiberal practices in Ghana. (This is why I agree with her on some matters, & don't hate her as right-wingers do).

They are admitting there is a problem & trying to stamp it out.

Matthew said...

Aren't they going there to help the country deal with its problems in this area, not to learn from it?

Mark Wadsworth said...

That UN anti-racism conference you mentioned has descended into farce alreay.

Infidel753 said...

If anti-Semitism is a form of anti-racism, then discrimination against women is a form of anti-sexism. Plain and simple.

Is Ghana one of the African countries where they have clitorectomy, too?

Ross said...

"Aren't they going there to help the country deal with its problems in this area, not to learn from it?"Probably, but that's not what the report says and I'm not going to fact check myself out of a good opportunity for Polly bashing.

"Is Ghana one of the African countries where they have clitorectomy, too?"I don't think so although I'm not sure, I think it's more of an East African thing.

alison said...

They're not going fact finding. They're going wang finding. You know what they say.