{"id":471,"date":"2010-08-24T14:30:24","date_gmt":"2010-08-24T14:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/athenedonald.wordpress.com\/?p=36"},"modified":"2012-10-12T10:37:41","modified_gmt":"2012-10-12T10:37:41","slug":"lawson-willetts-and-equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2010\/08\/24\/lawson-willetts-and-equality\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawson, Willetts and Equality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dearie me, it really is the silly season. Dominic Lawson, in today’s Independent<\/a>, writes a perfectly sane piece about the fact that if more girls go to university than in the past, then necessarily there are fewer places for boys \u2013 of whatever social class – and so can have the effect of reducing social mobility. Bizarrely, though, the piece’s html tag is http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/opinion\/commentators\/dominic-lawson\/dominic-lawson-feminism-is-the-obstacle-to-equality-2060177.html<\/a> which is enough to get the blood flowing. He doesn’t say that at all, though, and sometimes the tag appears much more reasonably as http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/opinion\/commentators\/dominic-lawson\/dominic-lawson-boys-learn-from-your-sisters-2060177.html<\/a> , corresponding to the actual headline in the newspaper.\u00a0 I think someone in the Independent must have worked out that actually the piece wasn’t about ‘feminism as the obstacle to equality’ after all and tried to change the tag. Unfortunately the original tag is now being circulated \u2013 eg by the UKRC <\/a>in its daily update \u2013 with the headline Dominic Lawson: Feminism is the obstacle to equality<\/strong> .<\/p>\n

Lawson does indeed ask equality for whom, citing Willett’s much trumpeted book The Pinch which has a chapter on “Feminism has trumped egalitarianism”.\u00a0 Lawson neatly unpicks Willets’ apparent view that social mobility is equivalent to equality, whereas treating men and women equally would not be (I haven’t yet read the book, I am merely reflecting Lawson’s comments here). \u00a0But what are the implications for all the girls entering HE if Willetts really does believe this version of equality, rather than being sloppy in his writing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dearie me, it really is the silly season. Dominic Lawson, in today’s Independent, writes a perfectly sane piece about the fact that if more girls go to university than in the past, then necessarily there are fewer places for boys … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[932,111,146],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-equality","tag-equality","tag-nigel-lawson","tag-willetts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}