Yap yap yap amirite?
This just in: women talk too much.
The president of the Tokyo Olympics has refused to resign after igniting a storm of criticism by saying that women do not belong on committees because they talk too much.
Yoshiro Mori, the 83-year-old former prime minister and president of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee, made the remarks at a meeting of the Japan Olympic Committee on Wednesday.
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Speaking at an online JOC meeting about proposals to increase the number of female directors, Mr Mori said that in his experience at the Japan Rugby Football Union, women made meetings last too long.
“It takes twice as long. Women have a strong sense of rivalry. If one raises her hand to speak then all the others feel they have to do the same. So it ends up with everybody talking,” Mr Mori said in comments first reported by the Asahi newspaper.
People were annoyed. He held a press conference to say sorry but also he’s not going anywhere.
Mr Mori, who was prime minister for a year from 2000-01, has a long history of committing gaffes and making chauvinist remarks, including attacks on women who did not have children and athletes who failed to sing the national anthem loudly enough.
I know of a guy in Palm Beach he would really get along with.
Never mind the studies that show women actually talk less than men. Let a woman once speak, and she is talking too much.
“Strong sense of rivalry”. Hehe. Yeah, I know of no career-ascendant men who possess such a sense and are more than willing to drag out meetings interminably with their endless blathering. None. Not a one. Nope.
My thoughts EXACTLY.
He’s right, you know. Meetings are so much shorter when nobody says anything.
Seriously though, he sounds like a guy who is used to holding forth to a room of people who just look serious and nod because he’s the boss. One brave woman is the first to stick her head above the parapet to bring up something that really ought to be said, other women back her up, guy’s ego is pricked, and there we have it – “women talk too much”.
I seem to remember reading about a study in which test subjects were shown a video of a mixed group of people – half men and half women – engaged in conversation. The video was specifically designed so that every person spoke for exactly the same amount of time, got exactly the the same number of words in etc. Still, when asked about it later, most of the test subjects insisted that the women spoke more than the men.
It kind of reminds me of the old trope that to those who are used to privilege, equal treatment looks like discrimination: The default assumption is that men should be allowed to dominate the conversation, so when they “only” get as much time as the women, that seems unfair. And not only that, it seems unfair that men only get more and not a lot more. Or even, it’s unfair that men only get a lot more and not everything.
There’s also a study where people are shown pictures of crowds… men think the crowd is half women when it’s much less than half, and they think it’s mostly women when it’s an even split. You people have no sense of perspective ;)