5:24 p.m. - 2024-03-21
The Ladies Lounge

The wind and the rain are back today, rattling my loose tiles and watering everything that’s had a few days of warm sunshine earlier in the week respectively. I concluded a business deal with a Welsh dude today and some merchandise should be winging its way from Cardiff tonight by courier. Hopefully it will arrive tomorrow as that fits with tomorrow’s plans. I seem to do quite a few deals with Welsh people. It's a good hunting ground for the type of projects I am interested in.

Equality stories always make good news headlines and here in the UK, a big story is currently gaining interest regarding women's state pension age. For long and weary, the ladies have been campaigning for equal rights and treatment at all levels of society. I'm all for that. When the Government decided to give women equal status regarding state pension entitlement, there was a bit of drama at the time over ten years ago. Now that the repercussions of that are being felt in real terms, lots of women are facing the reality of having to work five and maybe even seven years longer than they had planned.

I suppose that's equality working for you and it is unfair in some instances, but Governments move the goal posts for so many things throughout our lifetimes. Planning for retirement is a serious business. State pension age has gone up from 60 to 67 in my life time most recently due to the Pensions Act 2014. That's seven years extra income I have to find when the time comes from when I originally planned to retire. Currently, its 68 for anyone born after 1977. You can bet your boots within the next ten years, all UK residents will be in their 70s before they are entitled to state pension. It paints a grim picture of an ageing workforce of 70+ year olds still expected to be fit physically and mentally to do a job of work. I mean who will look after the grand children when childcare becomes too expensive to afford ( It already is) or unobtainable?Anyway, the compensation culture is in full swing regarding ladies retirement age and I hope they have a successful outcome to their campaign.

On the other side of the world in New Zealand, an art exhibit called The Ladies Lounge is gaining interest. The exhibit is women only so men who buy a $35 ticket to gain entry to the museum where it is displayed are not permitted entry. One dude has now gone to court citing this is discriminatory to men. He suggests at very least, men should get a ticket discount because they aren't allowed to see the same exhibits as women.

So is this dude missing the point of this Art Exhibit and the statement it makes, or does he have a valid point in that men are being actively discriminated against? Women in New Zealand only won the right to drink in bars and lounges with men in 1965. That isn't so long ago.
Where I grew up, there were still several bars in town where women were banned from entry. There were regular stories in the news of women being arrested for public order offences after being denied entry to the men only bars. This was in the mid to late 1980s. It was well into the 1990s before these few men only bars were forced to open their doors to women or loose their license to sell alcohol. Some didn't even have women's toilet facilities. Nowadays most pubs have baby changing rooms.

So, progress often comes at a cost to someone in life and more often than not its the everyday man and woman in the street who pays the price for such progress. I wouldn't want to have my career still ahead of me these days, or be bringing up a young family. I can see M still working in her seventies to pay off the mortgage, her kids university fees, and god forbid her kids will still be living at home in their forties because they can't afford to rent or buy a place of their own. And state pension age for her kids will be 85 by that time, well that's if the Government doesn't abolish it completely. Have a happy retirement everyone and start giving your private pension some serious consideration!