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DAYS AFTER THE discovery and swift disappearance of two shining metal monoliths spotted half a world away from each other, another towering structure has popped up – this time at the pinnacle of a trail in Southern California.
Its straight sides and height appear similar to one discovered in the Utah desert and another that was found in Romania.
Like those structures, the origins of the California edifice are also mysterious.
It is at the top of a hill in Atascadero, about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Keyt-TV reported Wednesday.
The tall, silver structure drew hikers to the area after photos were posted on social media.
A similar one spotted about two weeks ago in Utah’s otherworldly red-rock country became a beacon of fascination around the world as it evoked the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and drew hundreds of people to the remote spot.
But it soon disappeared, as did a similar structure that appeared last week in Romania.
Whitney Tassie, a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Utah Museum of Fine Art, said the monolith was fascinating in part because of its context in the landscape.
“That’s a big, big part of land art in general is this idea of an experience, of a journey,” she said.
The intense social media reaction to the monolith against the backdrop of a punishing pandemic, along with the quick destruction of the piece, has become a part of its story, she said.
“It’s good to think about our relationship with the earth, which is ultimately what these sorts of projects do,” Ms Tassie said.
“Man’s impact on the environment front and centre.”
Two extreme-sports athletes said this week that they were part of a group that tore down the monolith in Utah because they were worried about the damage the droves of visitors were causing to the relatively untouched spot.
Officials said the visitors flattened plants with their cars and left behind human waste.
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Women get paid equally for equal work. Holly knows this but it doesn’t serve her to say so.
@Henri Poincaré: Yes, we all know that. It’s private sector that needs looking at. I’m not sure they discriminate but men earn more in law accountancy, engineering, etc, for doing the same job. Maybe it’s because men just ask for more.
Many employers might not know the salary scales of their employees as contracts are private and dealt with by HR.
The other point, even in the civil/ public service, men dominate the higher grades and the better pay. Very few female CEOs fir instance. Another example, most teachers are female, most principals are male.
@Teresa Ryan:
Certainly the negotiating of conditions by male dominated industries is far more aggressive .
Tram drivers earn more than nurses for example, because they are willing to withdraw labour completely.
If nurses were willing to go “all out” they would earn far more.
“it is better to be feared than loved” to paraphrase Machiavelli .
@Teresa Ryan: “men earn more in law, accounting and engineering for doing the same job.”
Can you show me where you get this from please?
@Teresa Ryan: men dominate rubbish collection, bomb disposal, drain/sewage cleaning, painting, roofing, high rise window cleaning, mountain rescue, construction and logging.
Should there be more gender balance for these jobs?
@Teresa Ryan: more women qualify and start out in a law career than men. Ie graduate from college. But its mostly men at the top. The men from the start progress up the ladder so to say but from late 20s on women work less, take maternity leave, career breaks and job share. Child care is the country costs a fortune so normally one parent generally the mother works less. It also maybe true that women have different priorities. They are not so much focused on career progression rather than looking after small kids. This is on average. Hence why more men are principles of schools ect ect. Peoples priorities change over time. Look at either Norway or Sweden where companies are mandated to having women on boards of companies. They’ve have to hire women from other countries to fill the gap because the women locally didn’t want to do the job. Roles probably involve travel and the 60+ hours a week.
@Teresa Ryan: as someone who has trained and qualified in one of the industries you mentioned, that is complete and utter NONSENSE. The year i started the hire was pretty much 50 / 50 men and women and we were all paid the exact same. As we progressed through our training contracts to qualification, guess what – both men and women doing the same job were paid THE EXACT SAME. In fact, the company i was with usually gave promotions on time served and ability. Everyone ends up getting promoted but if you were good you got promoted quicker. Women were fast tracked for promotion. Obviously there were some historical ratios that needed balancing out but women got promoted quicker than men. So i can say for an absolute fact, from my actual experience, you are talking complete bull.
@Henri Poincaré: and how do you know this ? Can you provide evidence of this ! A lot of men commenting in this section very quick to defend that they don’t earn more with no evidence to prove this! I work as a midwife and I can guarantee that if it was mainly men dominated sector they would not put up with the poor pay and poor resources available to us!
@Kate Mchugh Moylan: Women put up with it because they are more agreeable. Its the trait that makes them choose caring professions.
I agree, its a disgrace that our nurses are paid so poorly. It proves what a failure the HSE experiment has been. If you want to be paid properly all nurses need to walk off the job. But again will it happen? The caring trait prevents them from carrying it out because people would die. But can you imagine if EVERY nurse walked off the job and refused to come back if they didn’t get a 20% pay rise and better conditions. You’d have it in a day.
@Kate Mchugh Moylan: The whole argument is that men earn more but aren’t paid more for the same work. Getting paid less for equal work is already illegal in this country. There are many reasons why men earn more than women – they work longer hours, they’re more likely to travel for work, they work outdoors more, they work in higher paying sectors, they take less time off, they work in more dangerous jobs, and as you’ve identified above they’re less agreeable.
However I’m sceptical that if midwifery was dominated by men that the pay would greatly increase. Our defence force is largely male dominated I’d imagine and the pay and conditions are pretty poor.
@Kate Mchugh Moylan: as Podge said above, the argument is ‘equal pay for equal work’.
So the question is: do you think you are paid the same as male midwives?
Also, I disagree with your speculation that you would be better paid if midwifery was male-dominated. Plenty of male-dominated industries that are very poorly paid.
(BTW I think healthcare workers in general are treated disgracefully in this country)
@Henri Poincaré: engineers ireland have just published this years salary survey. Men are paid more than women across the sector.
@Aoife Murphy: Yes but what Henri said was “for the same job”. I don’t understand why people fail to take this into consideration. All the Engineer’s Ireland survey that you’re referencing shows is that men are earning more and unless I’m mistaken it’s not looking into why. You can’t just take this basic fact and attribute it to something without controlling for other possible explanations.
@Teresa Ryan: messing with the private sector is difficult to implement,
@Teresa Ryan:
Because fewer women apply for principal posts even though women are 80% in primary schools.
Why? – they want to go home at 3:00pm
Why again – they have their own families and housework.
It’s been that way since Mr. Caveman went out to hunt and Mrs Cavewoman did the cavework and minded the children
It’s not a pay gap it’s an earnings gap. This article is so poorly written and jumps around so much it fills me with such despair that it was written by on of the supposedly best legal minds in the country.
You point out in the article that women make less on average than men and that there are many reasons for this. But then you make the jump to the assumption that women aren’t getting paid the same as men for the same work with no substantiation. My jaw dropped when you said “we should not have to constantly prove what is so obviously true”. All that’s been proven is that women on average take home less than men, nothing more.
Now can you please work to solve the crime on our streets and get off twitter or wherever you’re getting the air for your ideological bubble.
It’s early in the morning. I mixed up Holly Cairns with Helen McEntee. So she’s not a legal mind but the rest of my points stand.
@Podge: Agree, terrible article. First half spent talking about issues from over 50 years ago. Maybe it’s a topic in itself but the article is supposed to be about the gender pat gap. Then she says pay gap is mainly due to fact women more likely to work part time or in low skilled jobs. Well there you go, thats the vast majority of the pay gap, nothing sexist or discriminatory about that. Work more and in more skilled demanded jobs and you get paid more, who would have thought it. And then she mentions about the minimum living wage. Again an article in itself but it has nothing to do with gender.
@DK: very true. It’s the lack of logic that’s annoys me so much. Everyone knows that if you want to figure out if something’s true you try to isolate your results from all other possible explanations. Control for anything that might be the cause of the earnings gap (I heard of 20 before but things like hours worked, industry, experience, results, etc) and if there’s still an earnings gap after that you can chalk it up to discrimination.
But above all the worst thing is that our politicians seem to have skipped the part where they try to figure out if this is actually true and are going straight to “solutions” to a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Women earn less money very often because they choose not to want to climb the greasy pole with as much fervour as some men. Many women favour life balance over financial reward at the expense of family and self.
Why is it viewed as a negative that women aren’t as ready to devote their lives to Jobs and material success, which is often fleeting, than men?
And why do feminists of all people not respect those choices?
@Gerard Carthy: I agree. Married couple have a child one parent may want a less demanding job in terms of time, energy and focus to focus more of these things on their family and home life. Now this might not mean changing roles but it may mean less chance and more importantly less desire for promotions. It can also be a cut to hours. The majority of times the couple will decide this will be the mother but not always. On the other side the other parent may feel the need to step up financially to cover their partners earning shortfall. They may need to work longer hours, get overtime pay, push for promotions etc. but can do this with the support of knowing partner is looking after the family. A lot of times this is the father but not always. Not sure which of above people I’d rather be.
@Gerard Carthy: I believe the point being made is that women earn less for the same roles that their male counterparts are doing too. Herein lies the 30% difference.
@Mossy Quito: can you show me where you get this? If women are getting paid less than men for the exact same work/output in the exact same role then;
1. This is already illegal in Ireland.
2. Why the hell would any employer hire a man when they could just hire women and save “30%” of their payroll?
If the gender pay gap was real, all companies would just hire women instead of men as it would be cheaper… Curiously this doesn’t happen.
@Ned Gerblansky: Exactly. The author uses the first half of this article complaining about the marriage bar in the civil service, a historical practice abolished almost 50 years ago.
She then complains about the alleged ‘gender pay gap’, claiming it exists, but citing no proof. We just have to take her word for it. What we do have is equality legislation that means, legally, men and women must be paid equally for equal work. If this were not the case, as is claimed, there would be thousands of court cases. Where are they?
The idea of ‘pay transparency’ is in itself somewhat is somewhat controversial, are employees not entitled to privacy. We know TD’s earn substantially more than, say a hairdresser, but it’s none of our business what the hairdresser earns. In some cases, rather than just saying everyone is subject to equal pay, exotic maths formulae have been suggested which appear to skew the results.
The fact remains everyone, or at any rate most people, would agree that equal pay for equal work, the equality legislation we already have works, and even the author has failed to demonstrate it doesn’t.
@Ned Gerblansky: unemployment among women is eternally lower than men…
Women tend to do more caring roles, ie nursing, social care, teaching, law. Roles where people are involved. Men tend to do roles where objects are involved ie apprenticeship, engineering.
The roles men do often pay more. Look at how well we pay our nurses. Look at how much the HSE refuse to pay nurses more. It’s one example. Yet women are more agreeable and often don’t look for more money and continue in the job. Compare this to a salary of an engineer.
Now we have something massively overlooked. From the ages of 30 on women work less than men. They have babies which means the take lots of time off. Some leave work entirely for a number of years, some women job share and don’t work the full week. Most men are CEO’S because they work 80 hours a week. Women focus more on raising families so in the main don’t work the same hours.
I agree we should pay women more, ie nurses, care workers, childcare, home help are professions that under pay women with very little careers progression.
Holly is wrong in the other areas. In higher % Men work more and are paid more. Women work less due to maternity leave and being focused more on family than work in their 30s and 40s. Hence why it suits them when they can job share. These are in the averages.
@Diarmuid O’Braonáin: to add to your point it’s also a scalability problem. If you start out as an engineer/technician/tradesman as you progress you can take on bigger and more complex projects. If you go into childcare/teaching you’re limited by class size/the number of kids you can take care of by law. So it’s harder to progress throughout your career and to constantly justify pay increases.
@Diarmuid O’Braonáin: children grow up with such strong gender role expectations in this country. In my hometown in india for example there’s plenty of women engineers who didn’t grow up with similar expectations- maybe it’s the anti patriarchal movement there but I’m always amused at how many gender related jokes for example are considered appropriate here and ofcourse just how the typical irish family operates with the mother taking on more traditional motherly roles. Surely that sets an expectation with the child?
@Niall Power: I once referenced this Interview before on a similar article, and the response I got was pretty much ‘Im not listening to some old white man telling me about why women get paid less’ , just goes to show u that one form of fake discrimination will always drive another level of bias.
@Niall Power: This should be shown to kids in school to demonstrate how to calmly, clearly, and logically articulate your point.
Holly is a political tour de force and the Social Democrats are lucky to have her. I just hope she doesn’t break my heart like Donnelly did and join FF!
@Zack Twamley: really? Sounds like another soc dem fluffy woke soundbite that means nothing in reality but appeals to upper class liberal feminists. ‘we need to introduce a living wage..’ Lovely. Who’s going to fund that? Why don’t they talk about something like means testing children’s allowance and see how that goes down.
What gender pay gap?? take gender out of the equation. Should soneone who works part time or a lower skilled job get paid the same rate as soneone busting a nut to get to the top? All jobs I’ve worked pay has been equal for jobs done by male or female. Gender pay gap is nonsense.. if it does exist anywhere it would be in the higher echelons of business where salaries are negotiable. Not many workers get that far in either gender.
Are we not learning that gender is just a social construct and therefore this issue isn’t real either
Has this not been debunked a million times already? It’s an earnings gap, specifically an earnings gap between married men and married women, not a pay gap. I don’t doubt discrimination occurs, but studies of various labour statistics have shown that most of the time the difference between pay earned by men and women is accounted for by a man’s main contribution to raising children being his salary, so he makes more sacrifices for his career through longer working hours, a greater willingness to do hazardous work, and a greater willingness to relocate for his job. This is also reinforced by the fact that unmarried, college-educated women on average, earn more than their male counterparts. Strangely, women who own their businesses also earn less than men who own their own businesses, on average, so if there’s nobody there to discriminate against them, there must be something else going on.
Statistically, women are drawn to jobs that are physically safe, have no exposure to the elements, have shorter commutes and don’t have any late-night shifts, but these also tends to be lower-paying roles. While the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs are men, males also dominate the least-prestigious, smelliest, hottest/coldest, noisiest, most dangerous, most physically demanding and lowest paying jobs, despite what pay gap ideologues will have you believe. How many female roofers, electricians, female “binpeople”, labourers, or oil rig workers do you know?
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@Eric: The hours worked is important because once you go beyond working 40 hours a week, your salary starts to increase rapidly. Therefore, you could break the earnings gap down even further into an “hours-worked” gap.
“a woman’s work is never done” which is why they get paid less. I heard once.
How original and predictable that someone representing the Social Democrats is peddling the idea of the alleged gender pay gap.
funny how politicians like Holly get excited about middle class women wages but doesn’t seem to care about the women on minimum wage.I suppose their getting the same wages as their minimum wage men so their both getting bad wages good equality
If you are treated unequivocally – go to court and win big payouts
If women are cheaper to employ what employer in their right mind would ever hire a man.
For Gods sake – focus on Housing for young workers, and improving the health system.
Hold on a second. Women earn 14% less PER HOUR?
That’s . . not true.
On annual median total annual salaries women EARN less. True. It’s largely not down to discrimination (about 4% possibly is; called unexplained disparity).
The main cause is women are forced to exit the workforce to raise children way longer than men and end up needing more time at home to raise kids. Men end up working longer hours and uninterrupted careers. Hence higher Annual EARNINGS.
Not to mention career choices, asking for wage increases, etc.
More paternity leave is one easy way to massively reduce the disparity.
Very simple to solve really, there are sectors where females and paid lower than males and other sectors where its the other way around too.. All the companies in ireland that used international women’s day as a platform to say all these good thing, if female pay is lower than males in a comparable job, just raise their pay and same to for males…
I agree that it should be sorted. One big issue is that maternity leave as vital as it is, is an issue for employers. To make it even more of a burden a few years ago a rule came in that employers have to pay holiday pay while the employee is on maternity leave making it even more of a cost. Rightly so but more of a cost none the less. How about the govt covers that holiday pay and gives a payment to businesses for each employee who goes on maternity leave to help cover the cost of finding and training a replacement for the cover? Or give men equal time off for paternity.
Also in relation to living wage mentioned it should be tied to rents in the area as David McWilliams suggested. Dublin being higher than the rest of the country for example.
The difference in pay comes in who get the chances at work that will give them the bonus? The chances that also will give them the bigger payrise. Who is having to take time off to mind sick children? How many women can only take part time work for the hours the children are in school as she cannot afford to pay for childcare? Wonder what would happen if women refused to have children so they could focus on their work like men do?
@Cecilia Doyle: “Wonder what would happen if women refused to have children so they could focus on their work like men do” – we’d have a huge number of dissatisfied people who deep down wanted families but put it all aside for work and who’ll have deep regrets at the end of their lives. And then as nobody is having kids society will simply end. But it’ll be great for the GDP for a few decades…
@Cecilia Doyle: Exactly as you say above happened in Japan. Women work equally as hard as men. A lot of women left it too late to have children. IVF treatments have skyrocketed in Japan as a result. Its seen as an epidemic. There were a lot of women in the documentary I saw explaining how they wished they had made the decision to have children sooner instead of prioritising work. Some did have babies and some didn’t. The one that didn’t were very unhappy and their work didn’t give them purpose anymore.
We in the EU have it the best in the world when it comes to looking after our women. For example maternity leave in the US is 6 weeks. Women here can take a full year of and not be affected financially at all. There are very few countries around the world that have this system in place. We give women the ability to take career breaks, parental leave and it is illegal to discriminate against women when recruiting them even if they are pregnant. We should be thankful we are in the EU.
@Diarmuid O’Braonáin: you are actually wrong. “Women here can take a full year of and not be affected financially at all” Only some companies offer additional maternity pay, but they are not legally obliged to. So most women are in receipt of statutory maternity benefit (if they actually qualify for it, as some do not) for 26 weeks – which is capped at 245eur per week. If they wish, they can take an additional 16 weeks UNPAID leave, so I’m not sure where you get the idea that they can take a full year off without being affected financially? I suggest you read “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez to see just how affected women are by the inequality within our society.
@Lynn Carroll: Dead right Lynn. Many women’s careers and earnings suffer massively because of leave.
forget about gender pay, some politician giving out about wages what a joke , they only vote for their own pay rise
Well done Holly, one of the best TDs in the country and a breath of fresh air!
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