Katie McQuater
WVoN co-editor
Women across generations are willing and eager to provide financial support to their family members, whilst also maintaining a strong desire for self-reliance, a US study has revealed.
The findings from the MetLife Mature Market Institute study are based on the responses of 1,060 women aged between 21-65 years old across the United States.
The study indicates the overall desire of women to provide financial support to family members.
Almost eight in ten women out of each of the three generations surveyed (Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y) stated a desire to be able to give more financially to children or grandchildren.
Additionally, approximately half of all women surveyed felt they had a strong or absolute responsibility to provide financial support for their children’s education.
Another trend which crossed all three generations was an acceptance that women need to prepare for retirement to avoid relying on family later in life.
The findings indicate a strong emphasis on self-reliance, particularly amongst the Boomer generation.
This trend also means that as women get older, they are less likely to accept financial support – 45% of Boomers said they wouldn’t accept financial help from adult children even if they needed it.
The study also observed some gender differences. Men were more likely than women to feel a sense of responsibility for ensuring their spouse was financially secure in the event of their unexpected death.
This is most prevalent in the older generation (83% of male Boomers compared with 71% of female). Fathers and grandfathers were also more likely to want to provide more financially for their children than their female counterparts.
I think the prevalence of divorce, starting with the Boomer generation, has caused a divergence of interests between men and women, such that women are focussing on the their interests as women specifically, and their own self-reliance. Women increasingly isolate their own needs, and those of their children, separate from the combined interest of husband and wife.
Men have traditionally done this, they have always had the opportunity to, dominating government and business. Their view is selfish, but then they have traditionally had the responsibility of providing for their families.
This is becoming increasingly visible. The world is ordered according to the needs of men, and of women as wives. This last is disappearing, but men still dominate positions of power. See how the Government moved on divorced father’s rights in custody arrangements, against the advice of their own parliamentary committee. Conversely, they have done nothing on improving women’s representation on boards and in government. They attempted to introduce anonymity for rape suspects, yet have done nothing on improving the conviction rate.
There are few women in positions of power and it shows.
I think the Government is wrong in their belief that women have no political opinions as a gender. This was the case in the past, but I think it is changing rapidly.
Jana, I understand where you are coming from however once again it seems that you are really focused on the very few at the top rather than the majority of the country.
In terms of the child custody stuff it is a lot harder for a man to get and enforce child custody – a system which assumes 50/50 split and no child support (with child support growing as the split alters) would seem like the best base system to assume that both parents are involved rather than making women the default parent. We want a balanced system not one which favours one gender over the other.
Similarly why should defendants be named until they are actually convicted of a crime? If the complainant is allowed to remain anonymous the defendant should as well. The courts already offer special circumstances for rape cases to assist in convictions, further altering things starts to get really iffy in terms of justice and fair treatment under the law.
Rape has a 58% conviction rate it’s on par with most other crimes for conviction and similar in terms of attrition (or better) to most other ‘hard to prove’ crimes such as assault. How much do you want to improve it, and how much are you willing to sacrifice to get there?
I understand the unfair position that men face in custody disputes, I’ve seen it. However, the first consideration should be the welfare of the child and the Government’s own committee looked at the results of a general joint custody policy and found children’s interests were not served, in general, by being shuttled between parents. Certainly there are many families where that is not the case, and I wholly support the removal of the automatic prima facie rights of mothers, so that the court can look at the specific circumstances of each case. In any event, my point was not the government action itself, but the higher visibility of men’s interests to Government. This is not surprising with so few women present in the rooms where policy decisions are made.
I don’t like the continual reference to the conviction rate for rape cases that reach court. You know as well as I do that only a tiny proportion of cases actually reach court. The CPS only proceed with the very strongest cases where they can be very confident of a conviction. From that perspective, the fact that only 58% of court cases do produce convictions is not so good. The real problem is what happens to vast majority of cases before they reach court.
My suspicion is that the police convinced the Government to change tack. They will have explained the closely guarded fact that very, very few of the cases that do reach court concern single offences. On average, first time convicted rapists are found guilty of 7 rapes. If suspects were granted anonymity, the already pitiful conviction rate (around 6% of all reported cases) would very likely drop further. Innocent men suffer for this. The answer is to re-balance the rights of victim against defendant. Rape is already treated entirely differently from other crimes. I don’t mean any change to the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ threshold of guilt, rather addressing more effectively the still-prevalent rape myths that discourage victims from reporting, and dissuade the CPS from taking cases to trial. Measures such as anonymity for victims, and preventing a victim’s prior sexual history being brought into evidence, encourage this. They don’t change the burden of proof requirement.
Men in power rarely advocate for men, they don’t advocate for women either but to say ‘women’s’ issues are being avoided is unfair. In terms of child custody it is important, we should really be focusing on the middle and the masses rather than worrying about which of the 1% doesn’t represent us best.
Why do you dislike referring to the conviction rate rather than the attrition rate? When we consider crimes we normally consider the conviction rate and rape isn’t out of line with others there, equally the attrition rate is in line with other hard to prove cases and better than ones that don’t come down to ‘zie/zie’ said. If you look at the attrition rates:
Murder – 14%
Robbery – 10%
Cruelty or Neglect of Children – 9%
Rape – 6.5%
Violence against the person – 4%
It’s all really a question of resources, the accused deserves the right to a fair trial and the right to a presumption of innocence and it is therefore the prosecutions job to bring evidence to say otherwise. Unfortunately rape falls into the category of hard to prove and since crimes are based on mens rea it’s not simply about the victim but about society and acceptable reasoning. Anonymity stops that precisely, which is bad, however it is prejudicial to a jury to be told someone has been brought before a court 6 times since in each case they were found not guilty. If they were found guilty then it is probably fair to let it be known since there are statistical patterns of reoffense.
I think it is an issue but I don’t think there is honestly much we can do to alter it unless we start giving signed waivers and video tapes out to make sure everything is working as intended.
I am going through a process of trying to sort maintainance of our child with my daughter’s father. I want her to have a father, but I want her to have a father who puts her welfare first, not his. Father’s rights have to go hand in hand with father’s responsibilities, something which receives very little discussion. Simply writing a cheque for an insufficient sum of money to keep a child housed in the same house she has grown up in, where all her friends are, where the custodial parent’s support network is, where she goes to school and remains in that school should be part of the deal. The court is meant to put the child’s interests first, and yet I am battling to get mediators to recognise that as well as having lost a father largely because he would rather spend his weekends clubbing with his new girlfriend and mates, he wants to remove the family home, which will necessitate me and my daughter moving to a new, much cheaper area where I have no support network to help me look after my daughter, and for her to move to a strange school having only just started there 6 months ago, losing all her friends that she has only just made after having lost her nursery friends just 6 months previously. Think about it, you lose your father, home, friends, school and neighbours that you regard as aunties – because your dad wants to move on with his life – and you his daughter has become an unwanted financial burden. Children are for life, not just for Christmas, and I think that fact should be spelt out to the departing parent as forcefully as it apparent to the remaining one.
2ndnin,
You ignore the fact that rape differs from the other crimes you mention (except child abuse, which suffers from the same problems as rape generally, though has a markedly higher conviction rate). Rape differs from other crimes in that there is always a witness, usually one who knows her attacker. It isn’t difficult to see how this differs from, say, murder. Despite that, however, the conviction rate for murder is more than double that of rape.
We use the attrition rate because the suspect is usually known. The question is usually one of ‘he said she said’. Stranger rapes are disproportionately represented in the the conviction rate. Take out stranger rapes and the proportion of cases where ‘she’ is believed rather than ‘he’ must be very much lower than 6%. Publicity brings forward more victims, which increases the chance that the CPS will go to trial. You do not demonstrate any empathy with rape victims in your comment, or constructive ideas to assist them. We cannot talk if you will not attempt to see both sides.
“If they were found guilty then it is probably fair to let it be known since there are statistical patterns of reoffense”
These people are rapists. Probably fair?
I’m not disagreeing that parents should have a responsibility to their child, however to expect nothing to change when the support their parents provide is split from one family to two. In your case it does sound like there are serious issues however that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still advocate for 50/50 split of caring and responsibility. Given our divorce system is no-fault it is unreasonable to force the non-resident parent to pay out beyond what a fair contribution would be. If we lived in a society where a single wage was enough to live on it would likely be a different story but a divorce in a 2 provider society will always impact the children negatively, and we don’t / can’t get rid of the causes of divorce.
With a male media that supports laddism – and regularly runs features on how to sext your girlfriends mates, how to ‘persuade’ her to have anal sex or how much do you have to fork out per shag, is it any wonder that divorce rates in the UK run so high? Men’s mags carry no articles on child care or what women go through to actually bring forth a baby, leading to many men having the same attitude as my ex that breastfeeding is simply a case of ‘flopping a tit out’ as he termed it and that loads of women have emergency Caesareans after a 28 hour labour because caesareans are a life style option for women too posh to push. It was left to me to point out that I was using the same amount of calories per day to breastfeed as I would if I was jogging for 3 hours a day etc etc. Fair behaviour comes from being properly informed so as to make fair judgements. Fair contributions come from men understanding that they are 50% responsible for a child’s welfare, and if the mother is left with a larger percentage of the 24/7 care bill, then they will have to take on the larger share of the financial package if the child is not to suffer disproportionately by losing their home, their friends and their school as well as their father. That is responsible parenting and something that too many absent parents fail to grasp, leading to children in the UK being at the bottom of the European league in key indicators such as mental health, education, drinking and obesity, behind countries such as Romania and Poland. Fathers need to either stand up to parenting or stay away from it … but this ridiculous attitude of men at the moment in a nuclear society means that a large minority of children are being brought up with only 50% of the parental support they are owed.
Yes so we need to make them responsible for 50% of the child’s upbringing. That means both parents are providing a roof for their child (likely separate dwellings) and what they need in life and so yes in many cases both parties will need to downsize temporarily but fatherhood is / should be much more than just a pay check. If downsizing is going to affect the child then some other arrangement might be sensible but simply saying continue paying 50% of the rent + a second house isn’t viable in our current economic environment for most people.
For most women, downsizing will mean living in poverty outside the neighbourhood where their and their child’s support network is having been off loaded by their main support. And maybe men should be held accountable much more when trying to maintain their single lifestyles having had a child rips the family apart. Making a decision to have a child and then simply dumping that child on your partner is not an acceptable attitude when there is only the two of you. And this is very much a cultural thing before we get into all the biological guff – men in Spain and Italy do not largely seem to have this hatred and contempt for their partners and children that I see fostered in the UK men’s and tabloid media.
It comes back to the problem of a society built around dual income families and the fact that divorce creates two households out of one. I agree that support and being involved are important I just can’t see how to maintain the lifestyle in this economic environment. Even giving 50/50 support doesn’t work unless both partners are still living together since it introduces a second household into the matter which drastically drops available funds. I’m open to suggestions though.
No 2ndnin it comes back to a society based on men’s totalitarianism – they are brought up to regard women and children as inferior to them and therefore to be treated as they wish. Within a partnership, that is a corrosive attitude, a bit like a black person trying to be married to a racist. Most men conceal this attitude in the first months of a relationship pretty well, and some men don’t have it at all, but I suspect they are the minority, judging by its predominance in all men’s media. We live in a totalitarian state. That is why women cannot get a fair hearing in rape and largely have given up going to the State, because its part of the machine. As a women, if you are burgled, you do not have to prove first that you had the piece of furniture that you say was stolen, if you’re car is stolen you do not have to produce evidence that you didn’t give it to the thief, or if you are mugged, you dont have to prove you are simply lying to cover the fact you lost your purse – but the moment a man attacks you – whether in your home or out of it – you are branded a liar first and foremost. Getting justice in that situation is the same as a Jew in front of a national socialist court – it very rarely happens.
2ndnin
Well, it sounds like you don’t think the current allocation is fair. One answer, the actual solution, is to improve the work opportunities of mothers, so they don’t need so much support on divorce.
In our society as it exists today, even if the prima facie custody right of mothers was removed, they will still be the primary care giver in most cases. You cannot ignore the disadvantaged financial position that puts them in. This is crystallised on divorce, absent child support that is actually paid. Well you can ignore it, you seem to be doing just that.
You point to my focus on the top 1%, but this is where the power to mould society lies. Decisions made here, or not made, impact everyone, such as concentrating women in public sector and minimum wage jobs. Remove the employment obstacles mothers face (and this is done by allowing women into positions of authority to make those changes) and you alleviate the financial burden on divorced fathers too.
Everybody wins, except the men in the top 1%, and they have not been competent leaders in large part. We choose not to do that. Not we, in fact, but the men in the top 1% choose not to, unsurprisingly. You want a solution, there it is. What alternative can you suggest, other than driving divorced women into poverty?
No 2ndnin, it comes back to a society run on male totalitarianism – a view that women and children’s rights are inferior to men’s rights, an attitude that is predominant amongst men looking at their media. Having a relationship with a man that views you as his inferior is like a black person trying to be in relationship with a racist, it is a toxic mix. This is why rape reporting is so low – only 1 out of 10 rapes even being reported – as the law is part of the state machine. As a woman, if you are burgled you do not have to prove you aren’t lying about having furniture that has gone, if you are mugged you do not have to prove you didn’t simply lose your purse and are lying about being attacked, if your car is stolen you don’t have to produce photos of it and the documents to prove you had it. And yet, the moment the crime is sexist, about male dominance over you as a person, the woman is branded a liar first and foremost and proceeds from there. The victim is a liar. Getting justice in that scenario is as likely as a Jew presenting themselves in front of a National Socialist court …
Focusing on the 1% doesn’t help though when we consider that a lot of the problems in terms of occupational segregation are caused in primary and secondary school. We need to focus on a bottom up system to encourage all children to do what they want to do not what is stereotypical for their gender. We could push the 1% with quotas or similar but the Swedish model doesn’t seem to change much – sure there are more women at the top but they aren’t in the seats that wield power, and as Facebook shows there are always new companies and ways to make changes that go around any laws. History seems to show us that Women at the top don’t advocate more for Women than Men at the top do for Men… they are out for themselves and the other 1%.
For a solution I suggest changing the bottom up and the motivation of women to work – solve the problem of more women wanting to work part time than men and you solve a lot of the pay gap since the like for like gap is about 5%. Then solve childcare – run schools 9-5 and for most of the year, we have the infrastructure so lets hire some more teachers / coordinators and make learning and education a real part of our society.
Women at the top do advocate for women more than men do. Look around and see the sex of those pushing for change, and, yes, I know some men do too. Can we move away from black and white – not ALL women do any one thing, neither ALL men. Women who succeed in business, in large part, are of a certain type, having no children being a primary characteristic. Men at the top rarely see their children.
‘Motivation of women to work’. It is not a question of motivation. When couples have children, it is still women who are penalised in the labour market for it, in MOST cases. Someone must be primary carer – both socially and commercially, the world is ordered to put more obstacles in the path of women as breadwinner, and men as primary carer. You make it sound like women, and men, have some kind of free choice. Social rules push us firmly in a set direction.
You don’t explain how you intend to ‘motivate’ all these women. Giving them equal pay and promotion opportunities and effective child care would be a start. These are governmental and management actions. They are ‘top down’ decisions. Change comes from the top more quickly and effectively than from the bottom, though I agree both can work.
… and that is the $64,000,000 question.
You keep bringing up equal pay but actual like-for-like pay is very similar, it’s a red herring. Promotion as you state most of the people in the situation of being promoted highly give up that chance at family, again people make choices and men generally negotiate more and value themselves more highly (rightly or wrongly). It’s hard to alter that in a top down manner without active discrimination. Finally childcare I did suggest we bring the archaic school system more in line with the working world, we do have the basis for it and it would likely let us actively introduce things like more technology and entrepreneurship to kids which would help address those issues.
Changes from the top are rarely meaningful until society accepts them, sure you can push but if you don’t get the bottom up support it fails.
Seat belts, drunk driving, racism, sexism, hompohobia. With the odd exception.
http://www.ias.org.uk/resources/factsheets/drink_driving.pdf suggests drink driving policies haven’t had that much effect since the number of cases seems pretty variable each year but still in the 60-70k+ range.
Racism, sexism, and homophobia would seem to make my point – legislation hasn’t done much to change these where more general acceptance has.
Seat belts ok, we have a winner.
2ndnin – legislation has led the way in making racism and homophobia less acceptable. This is not the case in sexism as the media has largely undermined the law with regard to treating women as equals as the big media barrons such as Desmond Morris and Rupert Murdoch make a lot of money from pornography. Couple this with the cost to big business of protecting women’s jobs and incomes whilst they give birth to the next generation of this country, and you have a very powerful anti equality lobby who advertise with the media and therefore pay journalists wages and hold considerable clout over how stories get covered … speaking as the daughter of two Fleet St editors. If you want further proof of how corrupt the media in total is in this country, I suggest you look at the Leveson Inquiry, or my father’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph, a paper he was deputy editor of for 16 years who whitewashed both my brother and myself out of his life in order to protect their reputation for the morality of their employees. This despite the fact that my brother was working at the paper at the time. The newspapers in this country are working against the citizens of this country, particularly women, in trying to undo every bit of legislation that gives women and the poor the chance to claw their way up to some type of level playing field.
What I found really interesting with my ex was the way a job such as decorating was treated as far harder than me taking our daughter to attend her friend’s various birthday parties … until I spun it round and told my ex to do the birthday party ‘jollys’ as he called them whilst I did the decorating, which I would prefer to do rather than sitting round policing a bunch of five year olds out of their boxes on cake and crisps. When he came back from the parties there was barely a mention of how well I’d done in decorating an entire kitchen in a day. Men value jobs not on the learnt skill necessary to do them … or their physical hardness … its based on the social rank of the person that’s doing them. Women’s jobs are not valued because women are not valued by men and that is not going to change with a men’s media that pours contempt down on women at every turn of the page or click of a button. Its an attitude that every man either buys in to or turns the other cheek to with very, very few exceptions. If it was based on politics rather than gender it would be called a totalitarian state.
So how do Women value jobs? Is women’s media any better than mens?
Women’s media do not consistently sneer at men and make them out to be fools and therefore unworthy of paying equally and respecting their contribution to society. Nor does women’s mags say you should only value men as fuck toys or rate them by the size of their bollocks or bank accounts, so yes, in general I would say that women’s media is less prejudiced towards men and treats women’s careers and job prospects very seriously too.