Quiz! Do women suck? Or is it the world?

‘Pick one answer out of each five, and let’s see how attuned you are to the depressing reality of what 10,000 years of patriarchal domination can do’ Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/via Getty Images

Happy International Women’s Day! According to Australia’s Human Rights Commission, women make up 50.2% of Australia’s population. That means that women get 50.2% of everything, right? Or more – because women are so privileged and super-advantaged when it comes to money, property, power and are made out of unicorn pieces and cake icing. Or something. I’ve never been very good at gender roles, as I struggle to understand things that exist on a fact-free basis. Must be my lady brain!

My womanly obsession with facts is why I’ve put together this fun quiz! So many women find themselves suspecting – merely on the basis of instinct, observation or just plain lived experience – that even in pretty Australia something seems desperately out of whack in regards to the statistical social, political and economic experience of women to men. So my IWD gift to you, my femme cadre, is something rare and precious you’ll never receive in an argument with a beer-garden misogynist; hard data that proves gender disadvantage is not only intersectional, but true!

So pick one answer out of each five, and let’s see how attuned you are to the depressing reality of what 10,000 years of patriarchal domination can do.

In the feminist spirit of gender amity and inclusion I’ve even included some answers just for “men’s rights activists” to tick, to spare them the effort of typing the very same things into the comment section after the quiz. These answers are wrong but so is anyone who ever uses the word “misandry”, always and forever. Good luck, fellas!

Let’s rip!

According to the NSW government, women have made up a representative 50% or more of professional occupations since the mid 2000s, but fewer than 2% of employees in the well-paid, well-unionised construction, automotive and electrical trades are women. Once upon a time (in 2005) we were told (by the likes of the Harvard University president Lawrence Summers) that women’s underrepresentation in technical roles was “because of biological differences”. Actual science, however, has suggested that deeply held cultural biases, mythology and “gender stereotypical language” shape a social perception of gender from when children are born.

1. How much more likely is it that mothers will use explicit number quantifications (ie, “three blocks”, “four crayons”) when engaging with male toddlers rather than female ones?

   1. Never. Everything is totally equal between boys and girls from the day they are born, pfft, you feminazi

   2. 15%

   3. 36%

   4. 91%

   5. 270%

2. Also, women are repeatedly told that the gender pay gap is not real, or, if it is, it’s because women just randomly choose to do less well-paid jobs than men because they don’t like hard work or getting their pretty little hands dirty. Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency concluded in its 2017 report that the overall wage gap sits at 17.3% as a base salary difference for men and women. So does a gender pay gap exist in technical and trade roles?

   1. Sorta. Women receive 1% less than men in these roles, consistent across total remuneration packages

   2. Yes. Women receive around $4,000 less than men in these roles, with the gap increasing to $9,000 when taking into account total remuneration

   3. Yes. Women receive around $17,000 less than men in these roles, with the gap increasing to $28,000 when taking into account total remuneration

   4. No. They are perfectly equal

   5. Shut up, Van. Mark Latham is right about everything

3. In 1946, the United Nations established its Commission on the Status of Women to monitor the social status of women in member nations and to promote women’s rights. The UN general assembly did not adopt a convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women until 18 December 1979 – but what year did Australia outlaw sex discrimination?

   1. Who cares, you fat four-eyed mole

   2. 1950

   3. 1973

   4. 1980

   5. 1984

4. New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant voting rights to women, in 1893. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia granted voting rights to his countrywomen only in 2011. While in 1891 Australian suffragettes had delivered a “Monster Petition” 260 metres long and 20cm wide to Victorian parliament demanding women be granted the same voting rights as men, and South Australia became the first state to grant women the vote in 1894, which year did all Australian women gain voting rights to state and federal elections?

   1. 1902

   2. 1908

   3. 1920

   4. 1962

   5. Shut your mouth, bitch. No one cares about your stupid vote

5. Although straight, white, able-bodied men aged 40 to 69 represent only 8.4% of the Australian population, they represent the majority of Australian leadership roles as CEOs and chairs of Australia’s 200 largest companies. As of 2017, who is more likely than a woman to sit as the chair or CEO of an ASX 200 company?

   1. Women are just as likely as men to hold leadership roles, to insist otherwise is misandry! MISANDRY, I SAY!

   2. A professional figure skater

   3. Some dude called John

   4. Some dude called Larry

   5. A large cat

6. A survey released to coincide with International Women’s Day has revealed that one in 10 of Australia’s working women are being sexually harassed in the job they now hold. In a notorious survey undertaken by the United Voice union, workers in the majority-female hospitality industry reported that a staggering 89% of them have been subjected to sexual harassment at work. What percentage of hospitality workers went on to say they had experienced sexual assault in the workplace?

   1. <1%

   2. Whatever – when I buy a beer, I’m paying for the waitress, too

   3. 3%

   4. 10%

   5. 19%

7. A report from the White Ribbon campaign last week identified that one in six Australian women have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner. The same report revealed that Indigenous women are more likely to be killed by family violence than non-Indigenous women, and are 32 times more likely to be admitted to hospital as a result of family violence. According to White Ribbon in the same report, how many Australians have witnessed violence perpetrated against their mothers by a current or former partner?

   1. 17,000

   2. 60,000

   3. 125,000

   4. 180,000

   5. 2.1 million

8. In Australia, what percentage of perpetrators of violence are men?

   1. 5%

   2. one in three

   3. 50%

   4. 75%

   5. 95%

9. Based on Australian Census data from 2016, how many Australian women retire with no superannuation?

   1. All Australian women receive superannuation

   2. One in three

   3. One in five

   4. One in 10

   5. A husband is the only retirement plan a woman needs

10. As of 2017, just how much more childcare and chores do Australian women do than men?

    1. After generations of inequality, the rate has progressively stabilised to an equal load in the past 10 years

    2. Women spend, on average, 1 hour and 15 minutes more on household chores and 37 minutes more on childcare a day than men do

    3. Women spend, on average, 51 minutes more on household chores and 22 minutes more on childcare a day than men do

    4. Women spend, on average, 17 minutes more on household chores than men do, but childcare has stabilised to equal

    5. Get back in the kitchen and make me a sammich

11. BONUS QUESTION: Why isn’t there an International Men’s Day?

    1. Because men are an oppressed class, and I’m totally going to start a Facebook group to explain my resentment of women who won’t date me just because I am a big hostile jerk. Because everything is a feminist conspiracy to keep men in chains. Because the UN is run by a coven of witches, I saw a documentary on YouTube about it. There will be, just as soon as we get this Republic of Gilead thing going

    2. There is. This year it’s on 19 November

Solutions

1:E - This is not about biology. The University of Delaware researcher Alicia Chang discovered that mothers were twice as likely to use number terms when they spoke to boys rather than girls, and 2.7 times more likely to refer to specific quantities. Her study is one informing a growing research consensus that cultural messaging shapes a gendered difference in a belief in numerical – and other – competences, that affect children’s interests, participation and eventual outcomes., 2:C - The WGEA survey for 2017 discovered the gap in technician and trade roles, and has concluded an informing factor may indeed be the greater likelihood of male workers to access overtime and occupation-specific allowances., 3:E - Not during the “liberal” multi-decade reign of Robert Menzies, nor during the paradigm-shifting single term of the Whitlam government, nor even within 12 months of the friggin’ thing being signed. It took until the Hawke Labor government in 1984 for women to gain protection from discrimination under the law. I was already nine years old when that happened., 4:D - Although there were women granted federal voting rights in 1902, Victorian women were not enfranchised to vote in state as well as federal elections until 1908 - after a 17-year campaign led by “that dangerous and persuasive woman”, Vida Goldstein, the president of the Women’s Federal Political Association. It took 19 private member's bills in state parliament to finally pass Victoria’s legislation. This was nothing, of course, to the campaign survivors of Australia’s Indigenous genocide had to wage to gain their own right to vote: it took until 1962 and the repeal of the 1902 Commonwealth Act for Australia’s First Nations people to win the right to vote, and, by doing so, win the enfranchisement of all Australian women. As an Indigenous woman, Labor’s Linda Burney, the federal MP for Barton, was born without the prospect of voting for parliament in which she now holds a seat., 5:C - Cats, figure skating, misandry (which is not a real thing) and Larry don’t come into it. In 2017, and for the third year in a row, workplace diversity specialist Conrad Liveris crunched data to prove that the CEOs and chairs of Australia’s 200 largest companies are more likely to be named John (32), Peter (32) or David (21) than be women (19). Sorry, Larry. The number of women in leadership roles actually fell in 2017., 6:E - Oh, Pollyanna. The world has a terrible lesson to teach you. In United Voice’s survey, a terrifying 19% of respondents reported actual sexual assault taking place at work. Next time you go into a cafe or bar staffed by five servers, make a point of acknowledging that one of those people is likely to be an assault survivor, merely because they happened to provide the service you enjoy., 7:E - Do not underestimate the problem. The Guardian reported that “about 2.1 million Australians had witnessed violence towards their mother by a partner” and that those children were then “two to four times more likely to experience partner violence themselves as adults”. White Ribbon claims the financial cost of violence against women and their children was $22bn just across the 2015-16 year. That’s the value of the entire funding allocation for the NDIS., 8:E - Perpetration of violence really is a “men’s issue”. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2013, about 95% of all victims of violence (both male and female) reported that their experience of sexual and physical violence, or serious threats of the same, were from a male perpetrator., 9:B - One in three women retire with no superannuation. The cost of the care burden that women bear at far greater levels of responsibility than men do – raising children, caring for elderly relatives and for dependants with disabilities – often oblige women into “flexible” jobs that are highly casualised and do not pay superannuation, or out of the workforce entirely. A government report actually entitled “A Husband Is Not a Retirement Plan” delivered the horrifying superannuation statistic – one that perhaps explains why Australian women over 55 are the fastest growing demographic of the Australian homeless., 10:B - The burden of care is disproportionately borne by women, who the ABS has found spend, on average, two hours and 52 minutes a day on household chores, compared with men’s one hour and 37 minutes. Women spend 59 minutes of each day on childcare, men spend 22 minutes. The obligation of “unfair care” informs the contexts driving women into lower-paid, insecure work with fewer entitlements. Revealingly, single mothers are the most overrepresented parental demographic in insecure work – a whopping 26% of single female parents have no leave entitlements, five points more than single men in the same situation., 11:B - International Men’s Day really is 19 November. I don’t know what the official events constitute, but I suspect everyone has a good ol’ soak in what it means to live in unearned systemic privilege. Hooray!

Scores

1. 11 and above.

   Solidarity, comrade. Let’s not agonise - let’s organise. Share the quiz, promote your score and be an advocate for change.

2. 10 and above.

   Solidarity, comrade. Let’s not agonise - let’s organise. Share the quiz, promote your score and be an advocate for change.

3. 9 and above.

   Either your finger slipped, you misjudged the author’s bleakness or something was just too nasty for you to readily absorb. Sterling effort, but do share the quiz and the knowledge with others.

4. 8 and above.

   Either your finger slipped, you misjudged the author’s bleakness or something was just too nasty for you to readily absorb. Sterling effort, but do share the quiz and the knowledge with others.

5. 7 and above.

   It seems that you’re beginning to grasp the reality of the disadvantage. Your homework from this point is to engage one conversation each on every question that you got wrong. Pass on what you have learned!

6. 6 and above.

   It seems that you’re beginning to grasp the reality of the disadvantage. Your homework from this point is to engage one conversation each on every question that you got wrong. Pass on what you have learned!

7. 5 and above.

   It seems that you’re beginning to grasp the reality of the disadvantage. Your homework from this point is to engage one conversation each on every question that you got wrong. Pass on what you have learned!

8. 4 and above.

   Hmm. This is a poor result - I suspect you’re skimming over the details of the situation as a conscious or unconscious act of denial. Your remedial homework is an essay: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them” - Germaine Greer. Discuss.

9. 3 and above.

   Hmm. This is a poor result - I suspect you’re skimming over the details of the situation as a conscious or unconscious act of denial. Your remedial homework is an essay: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them” - Germaine Greer. Discuss.

10. 2 and above.

    Hmm. This is a poor result - I suspect you’re skimming over the details of the situation as a conscious or unconscious act of denial. Your remedial homework is an essay: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them” - Germaine Greer. Discuss.

11. 0 and above.

    I ALREADY TOLD YOU the misogynist answers were wrong. Guess what? They’re still wrong! So either you’re clinging to wrongness just to be wilful OR you are the world’s most gender-optimistic individual and, in either case, go back and do the test until you right-size your relationship to reality.

12. 1 and above.

    I ALREADY TOLD YOU the misogynist answers were wrong. Guess what? They’re still wrong! So either you’re clinging to wrongness just to be wilful OR you are the world’s most gender-optimistic individual and, in either case, go back and do the test until you right-size your relationship to reality.

PS, you can argue with me about this stuff, or you can check out these links:

Question 1 here and here

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6 here and here

Question 7

Question 8

Question 9 here and here

Question 10

Question 11 (Bonus question!)

• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist