Unpopular Opinions

surrey_commuter

TheBigBean said:

rick_chasey said:

It's cause or effect with a lot of women's sports, right?

What Tennis always had going for it is for as long as I can remember it has put the women's game on an almost equal footing (still waiting for 5 setters in grand slams) in terms of exposure and attention.

As a result, the women's game is as competitive as the men's. I've said this a million times but growing up, the men's game was really rubbish as it was just a power game so I grew up watching a lot of women's tennis as there was a bit of finesse to it.

That's switched over the last decade or so with the American coached women's like the Williams sisters, Sharapova etc turned up with just monster power games that just dominated.

Men's has also recently gone through a golden age of two, arguably thee top top level players who have extremely well rounded games which is very watchable. Was not always like that however.

The problem with other sports like football or cycling for women is just that the depth of talent isn't there. Now, is that cause or effect?

In olympic sports where there isn't much outside the olympics, I'd say the depth is comparable as the olympics gives them an equal footing. Maybe you guys are all 'lads lads lads' but I found the women's competitions in athletics as interesting as the men's, depending on the context.

Similarly women's gymnastics has always been held in high esteem alongside the men's and that is equally watchable.

So with your footballs or your cyclings of this world - do we not need to go through a generation of giving it the same platform as the men so the talent pool improves?

I suspect that's probably the answer. So in that respect I think what the BBC is doing re football is a good thing.

There is another problem with those sports specifically, and that is following football and cycling can be really time consuming, so there is not so much bandwidth for a whole parallel equivalent.

Not sure I have an answer for that.

I think it is a red herring to consider the Olympics as representative of sport watching. People are mostly just randomly cheering on representatives of their country and never watch the sport again.

It is true that sports that women have played for a long time have a much larger following e.g. tennis, gymnastics, ice skating, but in the latter two a lot of the events are different.

It is probably a srawman argument, but I sometimes feel that I am being told I should have equal opportunity viewing habits.

This was definitely the case in the women’s World Cup.

ballysmate

An indication of the standard of the women's world cup is the US team, who were head & shoulders above anyone else there, were beaten 5 -2 by Dallas U15s in 2017.

morstar

First.Aspect said:

rick_chasey said:

It's cause or effect with a lot of women's sports, right?

What Tennis always had going for it is for as long as I can remember it has put the women's game on an almost equal footing (still waiting for 5 setters in grand slams) in terms of exposure and attention.

As a result, the women's game is as competitive as the men's. I've said this a million times but growing up, the men's game was really rubbish as it was just a power game so I grew up watching a lot of women's tennis as there was a bit of finesse to it.

That's switched over the last decade or so with the American coached women's like the Williams sisters, Sharapova etc turned up with just monster power games that just dominated.

Men's has also recently gone through a golden age of two, arguably thee top top level players who have extremely well rounded games which is very watchable. Was not always like that however.

The problem with other sports like football or cycling for women is just that the depth of talent isn't there. Now, is that cause or effect?

In olympic sports where there isn't much outside the olympics, I'd say the depth is comparable as the olympics gives them an equal footing. Maybe you guys are all 'lads lads lads' but I found the women's competitions in athletics as interesting as the men's, depending on the context.

Similarly women's gymnastics has always been held in high esteem alongside the men's and that is equally watchable.

So with your footballs or your cyclings of this world - do we not need to go through a generation of giving it the same platform as the men so the talent pool improves?

I suspect that's probably the answer. So in that respect I think what the BBC is doing re football is a good thing.

There is another problem with those sports specifically, and that is following football and cycling can be really time consuming, so there is not so much bandwidth for a whole parallel equivalent.

Not sure I have an answer for that.

Not cause and effect, effect and cause in a lot of cases.

Also disagree with you about strength in depth. TBH I only really know more than not very much about rowing and cycling, but in neither case are there remotely the same number of competitive athletes or regular participants.

Cycling has to be nearly 10:1 if any of the group rides I've ever been on are representative and in the small amount of races I ever did, the women struggled to muster a full field.

Absolutely the same in rowing, though not quite a stark. Its not uncommon for a decent female athlete to be catapulted to olympic level in 3-4 years (or less) from "she's tall" recruitment events. With men it can happen in a few years, but overwhelmingly it is tall posh chaps who rowed at school who eventually make it.

Why? More competition and being tall and strong is much less likely to be enough.

When I started playing recreational ice hockey, we had 3 females join around the same time. 2 of them were OK players. 1 went on to play for GB within 2 years and 1 for England.

Out of the 40 odd male players on the team, a full spread of talent was on show with half a dozen or so good players. Of these, one player managed to go on to get a spot on a 4th tier league team (lowest level) in a country where the sport is by any measure, weak.

Strength in depth is everything when talking about elite sport. For whatever reasons, mens sport is frequently disproportionately more competitive than womens. The ones worth watching are those that are competitive, (swimming, tennis athletics).

Jeremy.89

I think there is more to it than out right quality though. League 1 and 2 football still attracts good crowds, despite often lacking quality.

Ice hockey is a sad example, this country does have some history of being OK at it, and (believe) of having had a competitive league system with relegation and financially healthy clubs. Or at least clubs that were run on a shoestring but didn't go bust. Then the Super league came along with clubs that had access to arenas, but without the support to necessarily fill those arenas. Then the league ended up with only four clubs in its final year! Perhaps its slightly more healthy now, but my old Bracknell Bees are not what they once were.

Do miss playing it though!

morstar

Jeremy.89 said:

I think there is more to it than out right quality though. League 1 and 2 football still attracts good crowds, despite often lacking quality.

Ice hockey is a sad example, this country does have some history of being OK at it, and (believe) of having had a competitive league system with relegation and financially healthy clubs. Or at least clubs that were run on a shoestring but didn't go bust. Then the Super league came along with clubs that had access to arenas, but without the support to necessarily fill those arenas. Then the league ended up with only four clubs in its final year! Perhaps its slightly more healthy now, but my old Bracknell Bees are not what they once were.

Do miss playing it though!

I’d argue that if you can get to the third or fourth tier and still arrive at a product that people will pay to watch, whilst comparatively the quality may be poor, there is enough strength in depth to sustain a professional sport.
This is pretty self evident by the sheer volume of good players we knew as kids who were not even good enough to make these teams.
Unfortunately many sports, such as men’s UK ice hockey and women’s cycling, simply don’t have that depth of talent.
Even the top tier is limited in quality.
As somebody else mentioned, a cat 4 men’s race may have a field of 40 whereas a women’s all cat race has 7 or 8 on the same day at the same venue.

UK I’ve hockey leagues continue to fold. The 2nd tier got cannibalised by the tiers above and below a couple of years back. Interestingly, a lot of debate rages about whether protectionist policies for British players is good or bad for the leagues.

Ben6899

ballysmate said:

An indication of the standard of the women's world cup is the US team, who were head & shoulders above anyone else there, were beaten 5 -2 by Dallas U15s in 2017.

Yeh I had a bit of an argument once when I insisted that the team (Unibond North then) my brother played for would have won the womens world cup.

Got all the comments of "disrespectful", "these women are athletes"... I don't care, I was merely being objective, I'd seen what kind of players each team had at their disposal and how they put that together on the pitch.

The woman's game needs refining, for its own benefit.

I guess we're doing this in the right thread, eh?

pblakeney

oxoman said:

...We get forced to employ female apprentices and engineers to hit quotas and as a result we end up training up 75 per cent of them only for them to leave because its to hard or dirty. The remaining 25 per cent make good engineers but a lot drop out to have families...

That's an unpopular public opinion, but a popular private opinion. 😉

ballysmate

pblakeney said:

oxoman said:

...We get forced to employ female apprentices and engineers to hit quotas and as a result we end up training up 75 per cent of them only for them to leave because its to hard or dirty. The remaining 25 per cent make good engineers but a lot drop out to have families...

That's an unpopular public opinion, but a popular private opinion. 😉

The truth often is.

rick_chasey

pblakeney said:

oxoman said:

...We get forced to employ female apprentices and engineers to hit quotas and as a result we end up training up 75 per cent of them only for them to leave because its to hard or dirty. The remaining 25 per cent make good engineers but a lot drop out to have families...

That's an unpopular public opinion, but a popular private opinion. 😉

There is a flip side to it, and I imagine the truth is somewhere in the middle. I had a friend who was properly into cars in a big way. Loved them. She trained to be a car engineer and got a job at one of the more high-end places round here.

I remember she was super happy. Anyway, long story short, she was pretty good looking and she ended up leaving totally despondent because of the way she was treated, despite doing good work.

Similar story in the other garages - colleagues hitting on her, making comments about her appearance, making her do the more 'girly' jobs.

Anyway, she's given up that dream now and now works as a car parts middle man or something like that - desk jockey basically.

She gets so angry about it to this day.

pblakeney

Engineering is a fairly harsh environment where everybody gets abuse on a regular basis.
Is that a popular or unpopular opinion?

Stevo_666

pblakeney said:

Engineering is a fairly harsh environment where everybody gets abuse on a regular basis.
Is that a popular or unpopular opinion?

Sounds more like fact than an opinion.

Jeremy.89

Lots of people confuse technicians with engineers.

rick_chasey

pblakeney said:

Engineering is a fairly harsh environment where everybody gets abuse on a regular basis.
Is that a popular or unpopular opinion?

So is it that women don't like the job, or is it that the culture is hostile to women?

Both parties have lost out there - someone who was a good worker and someone who wanted to work there.

pblakeney

The culture is hostile full stop.

blazing_saddles

rick_chasey said:

So is it that women don't like the job, or is it that the culture is hostile to women?

Both parties have lost out there - someone who was a good worker and someone who wanted to work there.

pblakeney said:

The culture is hostile full stop.

Nowt to do with women, just what PB said.
By rule of thumb, the heavier the industry, the tougher the gig.

veronese68

Was she a mechanic/technician or an engineer for a manufacturer? Very different jobs. Workshops are very harsh environments.

Ben6899

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

rick_chasey

veronese68 said:

Was she a mechanic/technician or an engineer for a manufacturer? Very different jobs. Workshops are very harsh environments.

Former (as you can tell this is not my area of expertise...).

Jeremy.89

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I've worked in a particularly unprofessional workplace which could verge on hostile. More childish rather than malicious though.

TheBigBean

rick_chasey said:

I mean more the platform, rather than number of viewers.

No-one's forcing you to watch it. I Just think if you put the genders on an equal footing for long enough, the quality will be comparable.

I think in this case you are referring to quality as the strength of competition. Of course, with great participation this would increase, but that doesn't mean the sport will be of the same quality from a technical point of view.

For example, consider snowboard half-pipe. Elizabeth Swaney fancied being an Olympian and worked out the best way to game the system. She worked out that as qualifying events didn't have enough participants, finishing last in enough events would enable her to qualify for Hungary (she is American, but is eligible to compete for Hungary through her parents). So she raised funds and competed in 2018.

She is a terrible snowboarder. The views on this ranged from "well done for playing the system and realising a dream" to "making women's half-pipe something to laugh at".

At the other end of the spectrum Chloe Kim is a lot better than all her peers, and won easily in 2018 in the same way that Shaun White did over a decade earlier.

Since the commercialisation of the half-pipe event, the men's competition has now got competitive. Shaun White still won in 2018, but only just.

Anyway, my point is that the women's half-pipe could become more competitive in exactly the same way as the men's did. Although, it is a long way from that at the moment. However, who would I rather watch ride the half-pipe: Shaun White or Chloe Kim? And that's just not going to change no matter how competitive the women's event is.

rjsterry

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

Ben6899

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

No?

I would prefer it if the bloke who comes round to fix my washing machine wasn't referred to as an Engineer. And if he is an Engineer, then what is he doing earning a living under kitchen worktops?

veronese68

rick_chasey said:

veronese68 said:

Was she a mechanic/technician or an engineer for a manufacturer? Very different jobs. Workshops are very harsh environments.

Former (as you can tell this is not my area of expertise...).

Yes, thought that was the case. I'm all too familiar with it of course, quite a few blokes struggle in that environment so I can imagine how hard it would be for a pretty girl.

rjsterry

Ben6899 said:

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

No?

I would prefer it if the bloke who comes round to fix my washing machine wasn't referred to as an Engineer. And if he is an Engineer, then what is he doing earning a living under kitchen worktops?

No. It's just vanity. It doesn't actually protect the function and people use similar titles that dodge the restrictions.

TheBigBean

Ben6899 said:

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

No?

I would prefer it if the bloke who comes round to fix my washing machine wasn't referred to as an Engineer. And if he is an Engineer, then what is he doing earning a living under kitchen worktops?

You want this annoyance to go in a non-trivial thread? At least that opinion is in the right thread.

I don't even bother to put my job title on my email. Judge me on the strength of what I say, not the strength of a random title.

Ben6899

TheBigBean said:

Ben6899 said:

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

No?

I would prefer it if the bloke who comes round to fix my washing machine wasn't referred to as an Engineer. And if he is an Engineer, then what is he doing earning a living under kitchen worktops?

You want this annoyance to go in a non-trivial thread? At least that opinion is in the right thread.

I don't even bother to put my job title on my email. Judge me on the strength of what I say, not the strength of a random title.

My title reflects how I do what I do and how I have done what I have done in the past. It's not a job title, it's a professional one: I'll be an Engineer after I retire.

Ben6899

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

No?

I would prefer it if the bloke who comes round to fix my washing machine wasn't referred to as an Engineer. And if he is an Engineer, then what is he doing earning a living under kitchen worktops?

No. It's just vanity.

I disagree. What about "Doctor"? Is it vanity if a medical professional has an issue with me suddenly referring to myself as "Doctor" and selling services under that guise?

rjsterry

Ben6899 said:

TheBigBean said:

Ben6899 said:

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

No?

I would prefer it if the bloke who comes round to fix my washing machine wasn't referred to as an Engineer. And if he is an Engineer, then what is he doing earning a living under kitchen worktops?

You want this annoyance to go in a non-trivial thread? At least that opinion is in the right thread.

I don't even bother to put my job title on my email. Judge me on the strength of what I say, not the strength of a random title.

My title reflects what I do. It's not a job title, it's a professional one: I'll be an Engineer after I retire.

Would you still pay your registration subs after you retired?

surrey_commuter

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

TheBigBean said:

Ben6899 said:

rjsterry said:

Ben6899 said:

I've worked in Engineering for 20years and I have genuinely never experienced a hostile environment.

I think there are some blurred lines here. Are we referring to fabricators, machinists, workshop technicians etc as "Engineers"?

We need another thread "non-trivial things which you find annoying" so I can suggest "hard-earned professional titles being devalued through unregulated use and unprotected status".

I can tell you that regulated use and protected status is not all it's cracked up to be.

No?

I would prefer it if the bloke who comes round to fix my washing machine wasn't referred to as an Engineer. And if he is an Engineer, then what is he doing earning a living under kitchen worktops?

You want this annoyance to go in a non-trivial thread? At least that opinion is in the right thread.

I don't even bother to put my job title on my email. Judge me on the strength of what I say, not the strength of a random title.

My title reflects what I do. It's not a job title, it's a professional one: I'll be an Engineer after I retire.

Would you still pay your registration subs after you retired?

my old man still referred to himself as a Chartered Acct way after retirement and kept receiving trade mags so I am guessing he kept paying subs

rjsterry

Most professional registration schemes also require you to complete an amount of CPD to maintain full registration, I don't think I would stop reading about it, but that is slightly different.