Sexsim: have the tables actually turned?

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Terminal Blue

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Daddy Go Bot said:
What - you decided to watch for a minute and decided it was not worth your time? Of course you fault it for being a youtube video, but that'd be silly. There is indeed a lot of dumb stuff on youtube, it still however a great place if you wanna reach a massive audience.
No, I watched the whole thing, against my better judgement. I just gave up commenting when I felt the bile rise into my mouth.

To summarize:

If you believe all this, if you believe that access to the labour market is exploitative, if you believe that the role segregated nuclear family affords 'protection' from the big, bad world, then why aren't you clamouring to take on the female sex role yourself? Why don't you (and every man) want to spend your life cooking and cleaning and raising children instead of being exploited and driven to early mortality and suicide by the labour market?

Because the self evident answer is, like the prick on the video, you believe that the fundamental difference between men and women is that men are never vulnerable (meaning that by extension those who are are not real men and are open to punishment and social discipline). This is the desire for authority, the desire to be seen as stronger than others, as authoritive and rational and able to make the tough decisions.

But it's okay, because we all know that the male authority is all based on this glorious sense of noblesse oblige. Through everything, daddy reaches down with his firm but gentle hand and protects his little girl, guides her through life and keeps her from evil and exploitation out of the goodness and kindness of his heart. There's nothing he gets from this arrangement, of course, perish the thought that almighty daddy would act on self interest. He's certainly not doing this because of the social rewards, he does it because because being confined to a limited role based on their supposedly 'natural' capabilities makes women happy.

Sure it does.
 

Illyasviel

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This is a pretty loaded question. I believe we are currently at a break even point, and given current trends, women may have a slight advantage in the future. Not super likely, but probable.

There are a few reasons for this. I honestly don't want to cite anything because it'll take forever so you can take my word for it or go look it up yourself. Also, I want to hit as many points as quickly as possible without producing a wall of text nobody will read.

Currently, the wage gap no longer exists in the United States. Evidence to the contrary is usually outdated or does not take into account all factors. But men, on average, do earn more. Let me explain. I, nor have any of my friends, ever worked anywhere where men were offered more to do the SAME job. Why? Because discrimination is bad and most employers need a new lawsuit like they need a new butthole. Now, let's get to the nitty gritty.

First, and I have no supporting evidence for this as I believe the sources to be biased, it is reasonable to say women tend to deviate toward cushier jobs. Cushier jobs pay less. As I said, I honestly can't prove this either way, but next time you walk into an university engineering class, pay attention to the percentage of males to females. Why this is? Maybe sexism. More later.

Second, women bear children. Men don't. When a working woman takes paternity leave or reduces her hours to care for her newborn child, it effectively puts her career on hold. It is difficult to dedicate the same time and energy to work when YOUR child is at home needing to be taken care of. At this point, men, who stay working, begin to out pace their counterparts. Again, you could argue that women staying home taking care of children all the time is an indicator of sexism, but in the end, men overwhelmingly make career oriented decisions while women do not. You could also say it sexism for an employer to promote a male employee who has three years experience over a initially similar female employee who has two and a half years experience after leave. Is it? Maybe. But it is definitely discrimination to artificially credit a female employee an additional six months because she took leave.

Third, a lot of people immediately point at the fact that the upper levels of society still predominately consist of men. Men make up the majority of the highest paying jobs, political positions, etc., sure. But when did the whole feminist revolution begin? Around the 1970s. And I don't even think a primary motive of first wave feminism was to get women into the upper crust. They just wanted equality. I think it was second wave feminism that made job place equality a major goal. In any case, fourty years is not a lot of time. See, the upper crust before the 1970s contained a lot of men and those guys aren't going to just roll over and die to appease some random female or statistic. And getting into the upper crust? Its not easy regardless of gender. So again, these things take tons of time and energy. Very few people can do it. Its the upper crust for a reason. Don't expect to miraculously change a system hundreds of years in the making overnight.

That said, I believe we will see many more women making it into that upper crust in the next two decades ( which is a much more appropriate time scale than this ridiculous fourty, more like thirty year turnaround current feminists seem to expect ). Why? Because education. I believe nearly 60% of graduating undergraduates are now women. I don't know the exact split, but look it up anywhere. Right now, more women graduate than men. And while it is true that men continue to dominate traditional powerhouses like engineering, if you've ever taken a look into other hard sciences like biology you'll see tons of girls right next to the boys. As for why men continue to dominate traditional educational powerhouses? Nobody really knows. It could be deeply ingrained sexism. But evidence points to the contrary. Because many schools have been doing all they can to get girls more interested in the maths and sciences. The current day elementary school programs in fact favour girls over boys, yet the percentage of women who enter engineering has only shown marginal yearly improvement.

When one has education and drive, well, getting into that upper crust should be easier.

Next, the Internet and misogyny thereon. Look, people say whatever they want over the Internet and are generally assholes. The Internet is not representative of real life. If you're a girl and somebody hurts your feelings over the Internet, go tell your coworker. He'll probably tell you those guys on the Internet are douches. Now don't go complain to him every time this happens because he'll probably think you're a whiny pissant and will eventually tell you to just stop using the Internet. Real life and the Internet. Different things. Oh, but all that anti-women stuff on the Internet will desensitize people to be anti-women. Well, I played tons of Borderlands and Battlefield and Call of Duty and Uncharted and I even own a real gun and I haven't shot anybody yet. Even that time I was really, really mad. Didn't even cross my mind. Btw, politically, I can be classified as a libertarian or centralist. A non-right winger owning a gun. Weird, right?

Now, let's talk about a few things nobody wants to talk about. Women in the military. In almost no first world armies do women serve as front line combatants. Even units that allow women to the front lines ( like the United States Army Green Beret ) have them in secondary and support roles ( liasons ). What does this boil down to? Well, a shit ton more men die, from non-natural causes, than women. And that's just not fair. If we want equality, for every man who dies in combat, a woman should die too, right? Even outside of the military, men are much likely to be killed due to violence or to commit suicide. Because life is hard on men. Also, because if civilization were reduced to two men, humanity would be screwed.

Next, a few things. Feminism has become extreme. No, neo-feminists or whoever do not speak for all feminists. They don't really speak for anybody except their crazy selves. But the problem is that they exist and they are crazy with their man hating and cries to burn down the patriarchy and real feminists aren't doing enough to distance themselves from that crazy fringe. As a result, they are allowing neo-feminists to co-opt the actual feminism movement, which is now in its third wave.

Which brings us to the next problem. Third wave feminism has no real goal. Its just this kind of dumb, pointless mess. The goals, like taking back the word ***** ( like how black people took back the n-word I guess ), are extremely minor when compared to the goals of first and second wave feminism. And that's when people can agree on a common goal at all. This kind of vague attitude has created a lot of couch feminists who proudly proclaim themselves feminists but don't really understand actual feminism ( and how important the first and second waves are ) and asides from being annoyances to everyone else, don't do anything to promote actual feminist goals. This creates a space for extremists to co-opt the movement which distorts feminism and leads to nearly as radical male rights movements. Its ridiculous and I think society is just tired and burnt out on all the stupid crap. Strangely, saying your are anti-feminism is still seen as declaring yourself a Nazi or something.

Wow, the last two paragraphs got side tracked. A bit of a rant. Also, the thoughts are kinda disjointed and I skipped a lot of inbetween bits for brevity.

TL;DR: Blah, blah, blah, no, the tables have not turned. Men still enjoy a handful of advantages but so do women. What's more, we probably will not have 100% equality in a long time. And that's okay. Because men and women aren't the same. No matter who tells you what, men and women aren't the same. Because women can have babies.
 

Moonlight Butterfly

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Daddy Go Bot said:
Marie Curie
Again you might want to look into the history of the person before you make such sweeping statements.

Marie Curie was the daughter of a man who was already in a learned position. She was priveleged and managed to gain a decent education because of her position in society. As you previously argued she is an exception but not because she is an intelligent women but becuase she is an educated one. It was very rare at that time for women to receive any sort of education and if they did, and they tried to use it, they were often ridiculed.

The Bronte sisters originally released their works under a male sudonym for example. If they had not they wouldn't have sold any books.

By using Marie Curie as your example you are merely proving my point.

Now get off your PC before Ada comes and haunts your ass.
 

Rufei

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Judging from posts on this fifth page here, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that there hasn't been much constructive argumentation here. I guess I'll pitch in my own opinion here:

The tables haven't turned, just that amongst different subsets of the population, the inequality works in opposite ways. Much of this thread asks if "women" as a set now exceed "men" - this is just silly, since it is practically impossible to assess the state of so many human beings across our country, let alone the world. What I can say is that progress is being made, and if it were to continue, it must move slowly, piloting with certain subsets of the population, and gradually readjusting when stuff doesn't work.

Does the movement need a bit of pruning? Yes. Is it detrimental to men? In some cases, yes. But is it constructive? Absolutely.

I would not forego the current trend. Can it go faster? Maybe. But as with our economic system, our culture ebbs and flows. Trying to rush the process only makes the waves bigger and the damage more severe.

As for examples of women having it better than men? Yeah, that's definitely the case in admissions policies in Engineering schools. Is this a bad thing? Yeah, probably. The question isn't whether or not inequality is a bad thing (generally we agree it's a bad thing), but rather if we should revert our progress or make amends to imbalances. And remember, for every preferential policy for women in Engineering, you have the same in Art or (especially) Women and Gender Studies (typically female-dominated areas) for men.

And yes, it is a moot point to try and compare admissions policies in academia to, say, the workforce. They're completely different. Saying the imbalance of one "equals" the other is just begging the question: On what criteria? How is it quantified?

And again, that's just a silly question to answer.
 

Daddy Go Bot

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evilthecat said:
Daddy Go Bot said:
What - you decided to watch for a minute and decided it was not worth your time? Of course you fault it for being a youtube video, but that'd be silly. There is indeed a lot of dumb stuff on youtube, it still however a great place if you wanna reach a massive audience.
No, I watched the whole thing, against my better judgement. I just gave up commenting when I felt the bile rise into my mouth.

To summarize:

If you believe all this, if you believe that access to the labour market is exploitative, if you believe that the role segregated nuclear family affords 'protection' from the big, bad world, then why aren't you clamouring to take on the female sex role yourself? Why don't you (and every man) want to spend your life cooking and cleaning and raising children instead of being exploited and driven to early mortality and suicide by the labour market?

Because the self evident answer is, like the prick on the video, you believe that the fundamental difference between men and women is that men are never vulnerable (meaning that by extension those who are are not real men and are open to punishment and social discipline). This is the desire for authority, the desire to be seen as stronger than others, as authoritive and rational and able to make the tough decisions.

But it's okay, because we all know that the male authority is all based on this glorious sense of noblesse oblige. Through everything, daddy reaches down with his firm but gentle hand and protects his little girl, guides her through life and keeps her from evil and exploitation out of the goodness and kindness of his heart. There's nothing he gets from this arrangement, of course, perish the thought that almighty daddy would act on self interest. He's certainly not doing this because of the social rewards, he does it because because being confined to a limited role based on their supposedly 'natural' capabilities makes women happy.

Sure it does.
Do not tell me you're one of those nutters who believe that gender is some kind of social construct?

By the way, did you watch all 6 parts?

xXxJessicaxXx said:
Daddy Go Bot said:
Marie Curie
Again you might want to look into the history of the person before you make such sweeping statements.

Marie Curie was the daughter of a man who was already in a learned position. She was priveleged and managed to gain a decent education because of her position in society. As you previously argued she is an exception but not because she is an intelligent women but becuase she is an educated one. It was very rare at that time for women to receive any sort of education and if they did, and they tried to use it, they were often ridiculed.

The Bronte sisters originally released their works under a male sudonym for example. If they had not they wouldn't have sold any books.

By using Marie Curie as your example you are merely proving my point.

Now get off your PC before Ada comes and haunts your ass.
You actually kind of prove one of my points as well. Things were never about sex, they were about class. A thing feminists fail to recognize.

And does your claim about the Bronte sister have any base? Stating that the mere fact that they were female would have guaranteed them no book sales proves nothing. And IF it did, how come exactly?

Another thing to ponder: The greatest inventors in human history (All men) had little to no formal education, so that's no excuse. And to prove my point even further, just look at society today. Women still haven't done much with their equal status in our society.
 

Ledan

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thaluikhain said:
No. Women aren't as oppressed as they used to be, but that hardly means that men are being oppressed by women, it's not an either/or situation. Feminism is about equality, not dominance.

However, people do not give up privilege lightly. If you believe that men should dominate women, that's it's just the way things are/should be, that it's to your personal benefit, than changing the status quo in favour of equality is going to seem frightening and dangerous.

Rights movements do not "win" when one groupcollectively says to themself "Oh, yeah, we've been a bit of a dick, we should stop doing that and be nice to people", they "win" when one group is forced kicking and screaming to treat others as equals.

And...I'd challenge anyone to honestly say that, after growing up in this society, that there's no part of them that's never thought that men are better than women, that homosexuals are unnatural, that PoC are subhuman, whatever. Everyone has been influenced by our culture to favour inequality, the trick is to recognise this and work against it.
Challenge accepted, I haven't. Don't know what culture you have grown up with.
 

Continuity

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Trivea said:
I wouldn't say that the tables have turned; even though it's more politically correct to be a misandrist, it seems that misogyny is still pretty rampant. Personally I think they're both terribly neanderthal views. I'm not going to get all up-in-arms if, for example, a man opens a door for me (I live in Texas, it happens) and start accusing him of assuming I'm too weak to open a door. Though... I think this view is really just women shooting themselves in the foot.
Opening a door is common courtesy, it has nothing to do with sexism, imo women who think this come off as paranoid/obsessive.

OT: it varies greatly, but there are certainly a lot more situations these days where women have a clear advantage over men, that never really used to to be the case. Plus there are even officially sanctioned instances of so called "positive" discrimination which imo is simply wrong, merit should be the only measure, a person should not be more or less likely to get a job purely because of their sex be they man or woman (with some exceptions, e.g. a woman would have a tough time trying to be a sperm donor).
I know the counter argument is that in some areas there are less women than there "should" be and the quickest way to redress the balance is via positive discrimination... but really, are we in that much of a hurry to achieve equality that we want to get there by using inequality as a tool?

Which leads to the other issue which feminism seems to be wilfully blind to: Men and women are actually different! its perfectly possible that all things being equal men and women may still decide to do different things, leaving disproportionate numbers of men in engineering and women in childcare (as an example) and what do we really achieve by forcing an unnatural "balance"?
 

Rufei

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Illyasviel said:
Ohgodohgod why are you going into the theory of education? This is dangerous territory in which I only have light empirical data on (and not actual analysis).

When you refer to why engineering is male dominated, we theorize that a lot of it may come from how people acquire systems (and how motivation works). Most of math and science is based off of exploring the rules of a system and learning how they can function so that implications can be made and predictions can be derived. Now, it is key to understand that once a human has reached that desire to perform under social pressure, that human begins to prefer systems that engage their current skill set. In otherwords, if you want to learn advanced math, it is crucial that you learn basic math before people look at you funny and assume you're just stupid.

We all can probably relate to this experience in the form of video games. Generally speaking, people don't like playing competitive multiplayer games that they're bad at - well, unless if it's because they're playing so that they can be around their friends. Regardless, if a system is intimidating and I am pressured to perform better, I am discouraged by the fact that I am terrible at the system. This generally leads to the abandoning of a system.

Why go through all of this? Because it is crucial to understand that math and science-related activities are not targeted towards girls, especially at a young age. This has been changing in recent years, but by no means is it anywhere near common practice to engage both genders in math and science in their elementary years and prior. (At least, in the US.) This is why we are generally deficient in female engineers.

Of course, it's just a theory. It doesn't encompass other societies, it doesn't deal with people who push themselves to learn systems they're bad at (another part of motivation), and it certainly doesn't explain how social pressures other than simple peer pressure can affect individuals.

Either way, it might be helpful to throw it out there.
 

Terminal Blue

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Daddy Go Bot said:
Do not tell me you're one of those nutters who believe that gender is some kind of social construct?
'Gender' is a social construct. It's what the word actually means, if you have ever used the word 'gender' to refer to anything but a social construct, you have misused the word.

As for being a 'nutter', all I can say is that it's the 21st century. You can probably get access to an academic library, read any contemporary text in any of the social sciences and you will come face to face with the realization that many (if not most, or even all) of the things men and women do in any given society are non-essential.

Nutters are people who refuse to accept the prevailing and self-evident explanation in favour of a nonsensical fringe opinion. I really don't think I'm in that position here.

Daddy Go Bot said:
Things were never about sex, they were about class. A thing feminists fail to recognize.
What the fuck are you even talking about?

Any feminist text of the last 40 years has had to deal with class, race, sexuality and numerous other variables which position people differentiality. This does not remove the effect of gender or the usefulness of gender analysis.

This is like saying that being a gay white man means you'll never suffer any discrimination for being gay because you'll never suffer misogyny or (majority) racism.
 

Daddy Go Bot

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evilthecat said:
Daddy Go Bot said:
Do not tell me you're one of those nutters who believe that gender is some kind of social construct?
'Gender' is a social construct. It's what the word actually means, if you have ever used the word 'gender' to refer to anything but a social construct, you have misused the word.

As for being a 'nutter', all I can say is that it's the 21st century. You can probably get access to an academic library, read any contemporary text in any of the social sciences and you will come face to face with the realization that many (if not most, or even all) of the things men and women do in any given society are non-essential.

Nutters are people who refuse to accept the prevailing and self-evident explanation in favour of a convoluted and nonsensical one. I really don't think I'm in that position here.
I'd say you're right, but gender has always been defined by the actions of the sexes throughout history.
 

Rufei

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Continuity said:
Trivea said:
I wouldn't say that the tables have turned; even though it's more politically correct to be a misandrist, it seems that misogyny is still pretty rampant. Personally I think they're both terribly neanderthal views. I'm not going to get all up-in-arms if, for example, a man opens a door for me (I live in Texas, it happens) and start accusing him of assuming I'm too weak to open a door. Though... I think this view is really just women shooting themselves in the foot.
Opening a door is common courtesy, it has nothing to do with sexism, imo women who think this come off as paranoid/obsessive.

snip
Opening a door for anyone is common courtesy. Opening a door for only women is being an asshole to men. Refusing to allow a woman to open her own door is belittling of women.

Also, people tend to take only one data point and make assumptions on one's personality. It's terribly unscientific and illogical, but we do it anyways because we hate not making judicial decisions about people.

Just my take on it.
 

Rufei

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evilthecat said:
Daddy Go Bot said:
Do not tell me you're one of those nutters who believe that gender is some kind of social construct?
'Gender' is a social construct. It's what the word actually means, if you have ever used the word 'gender' to refer to anything but a social construct, you have misused the word.

As for being a 'nutter', all I can say is that it's the 21st century. You can probably get access to an academic library, read any contemporary text in any of the social sciences and you will come face to face with the realization that many (if not most, or even all) of the things men and women do in any given society are non-essential.

Nutters are people who refuse to accept the prevailing and self-evident explanation in favour of a nonsensical fringe opinion. I really don't think I'm in that position here.
Please define essentiality. Do you mean by the utility in a given action, or are you taking into account irrational factors?
 

2xDouble

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Daddy Go Bot said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

Oh man, just look at how oppressed this female Nobel Prize winner was.
Yep. She must've gotten it just for being a woman. There's no way she could've done anything impressive like invent a new field of study, because:

Daddy Go Bot said:
While she did make advances in her field (Like plenty of women are doing), she didn't "invent" anything per se. Like I said before, women are good at adapting to the world men create.
2xDouble said:
Daddy Go Bot said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

Credit is given where it's due. Always has been.
From that very article:
Her achievements include a theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes.
According to this evidence, Marie Curie created Radiology, the study of radioactivity.
Daddy Go Bot said:
Some people just refuse to listen to the truth.
My sentiments exactly.
 

Terminal Blue

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Daddy Go Bot said:
I'd say you're right, but gender has always been defined by the actions of the sexes throughout history.
Which change, are still changing all the time, and are often unrecognisable from one place to another. I don't see you proving your manhood by ejaculating into the mouth of an adolescent boy, yet in some places that's what being a man means (passing on your seed or vital essence to younger men).

So why pretend to be protecting a natural order in which roles are segregated along specific axes which only really made sense in the 1950s?
 

Illyasviel

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Rufei said:
Illyasviel said:
Ohgodohgod why are you going into the theory of education? This is dangerous territory in which I only have light empirical data on (and not actual analysis).
I am aware of most of these things. I also did include a disclaimer that I was skipping entire connecting ideas so I could keep the length down.

A few things I've read have boiled down to similar things you've stated, namely, women are more likely to get discouraged pursuing mathematics or sciences. As to why? Well, schools have been hiring way more female teachers than prior to help encourage female students to participate more actively. It was believed male teachers might be unconsciously discouraging or oppressing female students simply by being male. Not far fetched; when I touched on women in the military as liasons, its for the same reason: commonsense is women are more comfortable speaking to other women. As for validity? Whatever. Classes also now involve more sitting. Because evidently girls learn better in calm environments. Boys, on the other hands, are terrible, rambunctious buggers and generally believed to learn better through doing. True? Maybe, more on that later.

But even with these efforts, among many other efforts, well, we've seen an improvement but we're still a long way from 50 / 50.

And the later parts. Another thing could be just sexism so deeply entrenched that we don't even realize its there. Maybe we are unconsciously ingraining different values into our children which causes them to learn differently. Do boys learn better by doing by nature or is that we just let them dick around more frequently? Nobody knows.

Which is another thing about sexism. Its been around for so long we don't even know what is nature and what is constructed anymore.

As for why go there? Its an important question that confounds our best scientists to this date. Could just take time, like what I said about the lack of women in the upper crust. Who knows.

I'd also like to say I'm a computer scientist. High five!
 

The_Emperor

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no sexism isn't reversed, both genders get sexism now, I feel sexism against men tends to get overlooked more often sometimes but women and men get it equal portions I find.
 

Daddy Go Bot

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@2xDouble I like how you take my quotes at face-value just to strengthen your own argument. Cute.

Anyways, it's 12 PM now, which means it's time to shower-up and head to work. Peace!
 

lynnfire

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SirDenim said:
The problem with these questions is that both sides argue feverishly until either they get annoyed or the thread dies.
Is there really any other kind of thread?
 

AngloDoom

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Why do we have to put it into one camp or the other?

Society is equally sexist because there are some things men are frowned upon at doing that women can do, and vice-versa. I'm not saying both have it equally tough, because there's really no way in hell to measure this, but I hate when men say "women have it better" because a woman got a job they wanted due to some silly government plan. It's not the same in all jobs and in a lot it's the opposite way around. Just because someone got the job, doesn't mean they'll be treated equally.