All posts tagged: Unequal

‘That’s why we work in finance – so one day we can afford air-con’: Britain’s unequal heatwave | London

Published by Jenni Sidey

Travelling from his air-conditioned flat to the air-conditioned Elizabeth line to his air-conditioned office, 27-year-old banker Aykhan found this week’s heatwave a breeze. Smiling while grabbing lunch in the shopping centre under the gleaming One Canada Square skyscraper in Canary Wharf, he said he’d been sleeping very well over the last few days. “It’s a new flat, the air-con is great, my bedroom is cool.” He hadn’t been affected by the heatwave, but said: “I think my colleagues have. We have higher attendance in the office this week because it has AC.” One Elizabeth line stop away in Whitechapel, one of the most deprived areas in the UK, Asiyha, 26, was having a very different experience. Sitting under a tree in Weavers Fields, she tried to sooth her baby, who is not yet one. Commuters are warned about the hot weather outside the Canary Wharf station in London. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters “It is way too hot in my flat, that is why we are sitting outside,” she said. “I live right nearby. My baby is …

Why Jewish values oppose Israel’s unequal death penalty law

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Judaism is a religion that values all human life equally. The foundation is written in Genesis 1:27, which states that humans were all created in the image of God. And while all the religions that hold Genesis in their canon of sacred texts differ in interpretation, Judaism is clear that every human life is a world unto itself, a line well known from the Mishnah (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5) quoted in the movie “Schindler’s List.” So how can it be that lawmakers in Israel — a country that purportedly bases itself on Jewish teachings and values — approved a death penalty law and tribunal that only apply to one class of people? As part of a congregation that lost 11 members in a violent antisemitic attack against our synagogue and two others in Pittsburgh in 2018, I know the pain of loss through terror. But perhaps the best rationale against the death penalty is that given by the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in a speech at Wesleyan University …

Benevolent sexism appears to buffer the impact of unequal chores on women’s sexual desire

Published by José Betancourt

A recent study published in The Journal of Sex Research provides evidence that how couples divide household chores is linked to women’s sexual desire, but this connection depends heavily on their personal beliefs about gender roles. The findings suggest that women who prefer equal partnerships tend to experience lower sexual desire when they take on more of the housework, while those who embrace traditional gender roles do not. These insights highlight how societal expectations about gender can shape intimate relationship dynamics. Low sexual desire is frequently reported among women in long-term relationships with men. Historically, scientists have often treated this as an individual or relational issue. They tend to look at stress, relationship dissatisfaction, or hormonal changes as the primary causes. Often, society treats women’s low desire as an internal problem or a medical issue without considering the environment the woman lives in. Psychological theories suggest that society normalizes strict binary gender roles, which position women as caregivers with naturally lower sexual motivation and men as providers with high sexual interest. The researchers wanted to …

People prefer generous partners over wealthy ones, unless wealth is highly unequal

Published by José Betancourt

Two studies using a hypothetical money distribution task found that people are generally more interested in the generosity than in the wealth of a potential partner. However, when potential partners differed more in their generosity, the preference for generosity was strengthened; conversely, when they varied more in wealth, the preference for generosity was weakened. The research was published in Evolution and Human Behavior. Choosing the right partner—whether in friendship, business, or romance—has played a major role in the evolution of human cooperation. When people can decide whom to interact with, they tend to prefer those who are helpful and reliable, which encourages cooperative behavior overall. In this kind of “social marketplace,” individuals generally try to show that they are generous or trustworthy in order to attract good partners. A good partner is someone who brings benefits while causing few problems or costs. In everyday terms, people usually judge this based on how kind someone is (their warmth), how capable or successful they are (their competence), and whether they are actually available to help. Both kindness …

How to Portray a Wildly Unequal Society

Published by Daniella Wilson

Books about masters and servants tend to come with an inborn flaw: They are written largely by those from the moneyed class, individuals who have seen the poor from above and must now, in their writing, illuminate their lives from within. This gap can sometimes be breached through immersive journalism of the kind championed by George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London or Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed. But such instances are rare, and even harder to achieve in countries like India or Pakistan—places with large domestic-worker populations where socioeconomic differences are so harshly inscribed that one can, more often than not, immediately infer a person’s status from their mannerisms and language. This is what makes the work of the Pakistani American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin so special and surprising. Mueenuddin is a U.S.-educated descendant of a Pakistani feudal family; he spent years running an estate in rural Punjab. In his prize-winning fiction, though, he is somehow able to enter the lives of the servant class with the same gentleness and attention …

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