In 1909, 11,000 Boy Scouts gathered at Crystal Palace for Britain’s first jamboree. And among them, illicitly, was a small group of girls. Barred from membership because of their sex, they rustled up some makeshift uniforms and smuggled themselves in with the crowd. Realtime lovers 555 english patch.
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“We were laughed at, we were whistled at, there were catcalls, but we didn’t mind,” remembered one of the girls, seven decades later. “We were there and we were part of the show.” Baden-Powell was outraged when he spotted them – but after talking, he left them with a promise to think about incorporating girls into the Scouting movement.
The result was the Girl Guides, which ran from 1910 to 2017 as a single-sex organisation. It’s been criticised for reinforcing stereotypes (certainly, I was uninspired by arranging biscuits for my Hostess Badge as a Brownie in the 1980s). And in 2007, all sections of the Scouts were finally opened to girls.
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So why the need for the Guides at all?
While the Scouts is now mixed sex, it’s still male-led: there’s a glass ceiling when it comes to Scouting management. For the girls themselves, just being in a female-only organisation can be of benefit. “It is nice just being yourself and not needing to worry about boys,” said one Guide, when the girls-only policy was challenged in 2012.
The Guides has been stalwart in putting girls first, campaigning against gender stereotyping and raising awareness on girls’ mental health. But in 2017, a new policy on trans inclusion, developed with advice from the LGBTQ charity Stonewall, declared that anyone who identifies as female can take up any role within Guiding, from the Rainbows up to leadership.
Girlguiding leaders are now told to make the privacy of transwomen and transgirls a priority: “It is not a requirement – or best practice – to tell parents that a trans person, including those who are pre-operative, will be attending a residential event,” says the guidance on supporting trans members.
This means that Girlguiding has become, with one stroke, mixed sex.
Some members are, understandably, not happy with this fundamental change to the organisation. A group of parents and volunteers wrote a letter to the Sunday Times protesting that the policy “poses safeguarding risks, reinforces gender stereotypes and denies informed parental consent”. Two of the leaders who signed the letter have been expelled from the Guides – and their units closed down, since there is no one else available to run them.
Girlguiding has defended its policy, stating that “simply being transgender does not make someone more of a safeguarding risk than any other person”. This is true – but it is not the point.
Being trans does not make someone a risk, but being born male does. In 99 per cent of rapes and sexual assaults, the perpetrator is male. Turning a female-only organisation into a mixed-sex one will, by definition, introduce safeguarding risks.
Trans activists claim that being trans is so difficult and painful, no one would ever fake it. But that is simply, and obviously, untrue. To accept that should not, and does not, undermine those experiences that trans people report.
When self-identification is the standard, all you have to do to “identify” as a girl or woman is say that you are one. No physical operation, hormones or even professional psychological diagnosis is required. If that sounds like an easy system to game – well, it is.
Marie Dean, convicted as a man for burglary and voyeurism offences (breaking into teenage girls’ rooms and dressing in their clothes), identified as a woman while incarcerated and lobbied for transfer to a women’s prison. The request was denied. Rapist Karen White’s request, however, was successful: White, who retained a penis and testicles, sexually assaulted four female inmates.
Everything we know about sexual violence says we should treat males seeking access to female-only groups with extreme caution. We know that male children are a danger to female children: about a third of girls have been sexually harassed in school; about a quarter have been subjected to unwanted sexual touching. We know that abusers seek out positions of trust, which offer both alibi (they are a pillar of the community!) and access to victims. David Challenor, for example, who tortured and raped a 10-year-old girl, was a Scout leader.
As a single-sex organisation, the Guides had a defining purpose. As a mixed-sex one, it has no need to exist alongside the Scouts. It no longer offers a female-only environment where girls can thrive. It can no longer challenge stereotypes: just watch the CBBC documentary I Am Leo to see how, under the doctrine of gender identity, being a girl becomes a matter of having long hair and liking the colour pink.
Just over a century after those young girls at a Scouting jamboree refused to conform to their gender and claimed the right to a movement of their own: Girlguiding has given up on girls.
Microeconomics is that part of economics that looks at the world from the perspective of consumers and firms — asking how they make their decisions and how those decisions come together to make different kinds of markets. You do that by building models of different situations that explore the results of different types of conditions.
Microeconomics comes complete with its own set of vocabulary, which can sometimes be confusing. To get a true feel for microeconomics, three key terms must be defined and understood. Those terms are:
Utility: Utility is the value people get from making a choice. You can find out how much utility a consumer gains by working it out from the choice they make. Consumers optimise — get the best level of utility they can, given that they have to do so within a budget constraint.
Profits: Profits are what’s left over from a firm’s revenue once all relevant costs have been accounted for. Firms try to make as much profit as they can, and they do this by producing until marginal revenue — the revenue gained from adding an extra unit — equals marginal cost – the cost of producing that extra unit.
Markets: Markets are places where consumers and firms trade. In a model of a market, consumers optimise their utility and firms try to maximise their profits. The price and quantity in the market will be the affected by lots of things — from the number of firms in the market to the income, or valuations of consumers.
The prisoner’s dilemma can help you better understand microeconomics. In the prisoner’s dilemma, two people are arrested for a crime and put in separate rooms so that they can’t communicate. The authorities make the same offer to both, one that means that their best option if they could communicate is unattainable. Because neither party can fully trust the other they will default to a Nash Equilibrium that is not as good as the collective best outcome.
In strategy, a Nash Equilibrium is the condition where each player is doing the best they can, given that all other agents are also doing the best they can. A Nash Equilibrium is the best any individual player can do, but it’s possible that a better collective outcome could exist if players were better at co-operating with each other.
So, what’s the Nash Equilibrium used for in cases like the prisoner’s dilemma?
Cartels: If cartels could make legally binding contracts then it is possible that they could co-operate and act as a single monopoly. But since cartels are illegal, no one can make that contract, therefore the members can never fully trust each other.
Organised crime: Organised crime is an attempt to beat the prisoner’s dilemma. The syndicate uses its power to ensure that none of its members have an incentive to cheat.
Understanding why markets fail is a key element in understanding microeconomics. Markets can fail for a number of different reasons, but the two most common are when a market provides something society doesn’t want, or doesn’t provide something society does want. Other reasons include the following:
Information: If consumers and producers do not have complete information then the problem is called asymmetric information. A lemon market — a market where there are lots of low quality products and you can’t tell before buying what the product quality is — is one example.
Too Few Property Rights: If no property rights are assigned then the good is called a common good and individuals will have an incentive to over-use it — as no one is paying for using it! The Tragedy of the Commons is an extreme example of this situation.
Too Many Property Rights: If a product depends on other things — for example earlier research — and there are property rights assigned to each of those things, then a market can fail because paying for the use of those properties is too high a fraction of total cost. This is called the Anti-Commons effect.
Public Goods: Public goods are not excludable, which means you can’t exclude anyone who hasn’t paid for the good — an example is street lighting. Markets find it hard to price these goods, so they tend to be produced collectively or through philanthropy
Externality: An externality is a cost or benefit that falls on a third party; for instance, if you buy land and build a factory but someone nearby is affected by your emissions.
Microeconomists compare different types of market depending on the number of firms in the market, the ease of entering the market and the degree to which products sold are similar. There are four main types are:
Perfect Competition: A very large number of firms sell to a very large number of consumers. Firms make an identical product, and consumers are perfectly informed about prices and quantities. An example might be a fruit and veg market.
Pure Monopoly: A pure monopoly is the only firm selling in a market, and there may be high entry or exit costs. Monopolies will produce less for a higher cost. Consumers will get worse welfare under monopoly, and society as a whole will take some part of the loss – a deadweight loss.
Oligopoly: Oligopolies are markets where there are only a few competitors, and probably high entry costs. Oligopolies will tend to produce more than monopolies but less than forms in perfect competition – the result depends on how firms compete with each other.
Monopolistic Competition: In a monopolistically competitive market firms make different products from each other. As a result they behave like monopolies in the short run and competitive firms in the long run. Firms in monopolistic competition have to consistently invest in their product to keep themselves making higher profits.