Wage Gap Myth Exposed — By Feminists

[Kheldarson]

But if you're trying to say that women, as a whole, should be earning the same as men, as a whole, regardless of their individual backgrounds and life choices, then I disagree. There is no proof that the earnings gap between men and women - how high or low it may actually be - is caused by sexism.

What folks are saying is that when two people with the same qualifications get a job, they should be making the same wages. Currently, that's not the case, with a disportionate number of women getting the shaft. The goal is to figure out why that is. True, there's no hard proof for sexism, but there's no hard proof that it isn't either.

And when you pull out to the aggregate, when comparing types of jobs taken, you do have to take societal views into account. Like why are teachers paid so low? One answer has to do with who traditionally took said jobs and what the expectation was for them (i.e. the school marm was paid a stipend, but was generally expected to be married or be looking to marry into the community so a man could help care for her over the stipend).

[Canarr]

What folks are saying is that when two people with the same qualifications get a job, they should be making the same wages. Currently, that's not the case, with a disportionate number of women getting the shaft. The goal is to figure out why that is. True, there's no hard proof for sexism, but there's no hard proof that it isn't either.

That's an unfounded claim to make, with no evidence to back it up. And saying, "Well, you can't prove it isn't!" is not really an argument.

And when you pull out to the aggregate, when comparing types of jobs taken, you do have to take societal views into account. Like why are teachers paid so low? One answer has to do with who traditionally took said jobs and what the expectation was for them (i.e. the school marm was paid a stipend, but was generally expected to be married or be looking to marry into the community so a man could help care for her over the stipend).

No argument here; I actually said so myself: Yes, jobs like teacher and nurse are underpaid, and I don't really care which gender holds the highest percentage of them. We - as a society - absolutely should pay better wages to the people educating our children and caring for our old and infirm.

But: whether or not sexism centuries ago is the reason for the low pay of teachers today is still no proof that today's female engineers make less money than their male counterparts because of sexism.

So - can anyone actually supply proof?

[Rageaholic]

Even if you still think a "wage gap" exists, it's not the 23 cent difference we're led to believe, in actuality.

I think it's closer to 5-10 percent. IIRC, the 23 doesn't take into account earnings (women on average still work less than men).

[s_stabeler]

But: whether or not sexism centuries ago is the reason for the low pay of teachers today is still no proof that today's female engineers make less money than their male counterparts because of sexism.

Yes and No. This is where you get into issues of societal or institutional sexism. Basically, it's possible that the issue isn't overt sexism- in the same sense that Horatio Nelson wasn't exactly racist, but saw no real issue with slavery. (basically, he never really thought about it.)- that is, there can be the unconscious bias caused by the historic sexism. female engineers may well get paid less because it's considered a man's job- and so a female engineer has to fight the idea that she only has the job to meet diversity quotas, rather than her actual ability at the job.( Which is why affirmative action needs to be done carefully, if at all- it can cause the stereotype that someone only has their job because of the quotas, not because of their actual ability.) Not to mention that sometimes, even if a woman's work is just as good, she will be judged harsher than a man in the same job.(that, and somewhat more prosaically, in a field dominated by testosterone, you can sometimes get resentment that they have to quit making the off-colour jokes which tend to abound. It's why there's a stereotype in fiction of female engineers being at least somewhat tomboyish ( a tomboy would be less likely to be bothered by off-colour jokes, and since they can almost count as an "honorary man" then the macho "look at me, i'm doing such a macho job" types find tomboys less threatening.(essentially, the kind of person who thinks it is a bad thing that a woman can do the job)

[Kheldarson]

That's an unfounded claim to make, with no evidence to back it up. And saying, "Well, you can't prove it isn't!" is not really an argument.

But that's what they're searching for? I wasn't claiming it as a sole reason, just as a potential and saying that "Well there's no hard proof it is sexism!" doesn't negate the fact that it could be.

That's why we do research. To figure out causes.

But: whether or not sexism centuries ago is the reason for the low pay of teachers today is still no proof that today's female engineers make less money than their male counterparts because of sexism.

So - can anyone actually supply proof?

Again, they're still researching. This is basically a fledgling area of study.

And s_stabeler said it best: we're looking at institutionalized sexism. The type that makes folks say "Oh you're staying home with the baby, right?" when a women gets pregnant. Or a teacher tell a girl she should be in home economics and not shop. What researchers are trying to figure out is if those ideas influence pay rates.

[Canarr]

But that's what they're searching for? I wasn't claiming it as a sole reason, just as a potential and saying that "Well there's no hard proof it is sexism!" doesn't negate the fact that it could be.

That's why we do research. To figure out causes.




Again, they're still researching. This is basically a fledgling area of study.

And s_stabeler said it best: we're looking at institutionalized sexism. The type that makes folks say "Oh you're staying home with the baby, right?" when a women gets pregnant. Or a teacher tell a girl she should be in home economics and not shop. What researchers are trying to figure out is if those ideas influence pay rates.

I'm not saying that sexism doesn't exist, or isn't a problem - it does, and it is, no questions asked. I'm merely questioning the wage gap claim without proof.

And, honestly... "fledgling area of study"? Gender Studies has been established at universities in the US and in Europe for how many years now? 10? 15? More? I would expect their studies to have progressed at least somewhat beyond the "fledgling" state by now, wouldn't you?

Now, I get that lack of evidence doesn't equal evidence of lack. But I do have to ask the question: just how long can you go looking for something without results before people can tell you, that just maybe there isn't anything to be found?

Then again, maybe women are just smarter then men, in the regard that they've already realized what men are just slowly coming around to: that working ever more and longer hours in ever more stressful jobs for more money isn't really the way to greater contentment in life?

I read a comment in the British Guardian with some interesting views on that:

Headhunters privately bemoan the difficulty of getting good people of either sex to step up into lucrative but demanding private sector jobs, too. Older men who always assumed that spending long periods of time away from their small children was the right thing to do, meanwhile, find themselves grumpily trying to hire younger ones who feel very differently. Half of American fathers with one child said they wouldn’t take a job offering a worse work-life balance in a survey by management consultants McKinsey.

And if that’s unsurprising, given these men are far more likely than their fathers were to have wives who work full-time and family lives that feel stretched as it is, it’s not just exhausted parents who are rebelling; it’s the young and supposedly hungry. One study for the US-based Pew Research Center found 24% of men and 34% of women under 32 actively rejected the idea of one day becoming a boss or a senior manager.

Kevin Roberts was right, in other words, that something odd is going on. But it has at least as much to do with class – it’s easier to turn down a promotion if you don’t need the money – and age as it does with gender.

Dismissing millennials as spoiled kids who need to just knuckle down to work, meanwhile, ignores the fact that there’s a certain logic to their choices. In an era of insecure employment, even selling your soul to the company is no real guarantee of a job for life. Why not choose, then, to be happy?

And as any economist will tell you, money is no guarantee of that. There’s a mountain of research showing that, once over a certain minimum, increased income isn’t reliably associated with increased happiness. The evidence is so strong that the puzzle is almost why more comfortably-off people don’t choose time over money, until you realise how much many men’s sense of self-worth and status in a family historically relied on being a good “provider”.

And that, intriguingly, is the one huge shift in the lives of younger working Britons. Couples may need two salaries now to get a mortgage, but there’s less guilt involved in dodging a promotion you secretly can’t face if yours isn’t the only salary coming into the house, especially if, as is the case for many British couples, she earns the same or more than he does. So if his job is his vocation, why leave it behind for a management role where all he does is go to meetings? And if it isn’t, why not spend as little time there as possible?

Of course some men will recoil in horror at the very thought of stepping back, as will some women. For others, it’s a financial luxury they’ll never be able to afford.

But the door is now tantalisingly ajar for some in a way that it hasn’t been before. Men whose fathers never dared question whether they were happy in their jobs, for fear of where the answer might lead them, now have at least a chance to think about it, and that has consequences for employers. Something has to give when a chunk of the workforce is pulling one way and the business is pulling in another – but what? The really sad thing about the Roberts affair is that we’ve ended up having yet another hoary old row about What Women Want, when hiding underneath it all along was a much more interesting conversation about what people do.

[Canarr]

On a somewhat related note: apparently, one can also blame boys' increasing problems in school on the wage gap.

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and...11-gqqhyj.html

How? Well...

Boys do relatively poorly at school and university not because they are dumber than girls or because they find it harder to sit still (board tables, executive suites, parliamentary chambers and cabinet rooms seem untroubled by men unable to sit for long periods of time), but because they can. Think about it. Boys are not stupid, they look at the world and they see that their gender gets a relatively easy ride thanks to patriarchy. They kick back at school a bit because – quite sensibly – they see that they simply don't need to work as hard to get ahead. If we compare lifetime female earnings with lifetime male ones, this strategy appears to pay off for most of them but it does cost some of them a great deal in the long run. (Patriarchy is bad for more than women.)

Apparently, 6-10 year old boys already have enough understanding of the world to think to themselves, "Damn, life is great if you have a penis! Just a free ride for me! I'll be a highly paid engineer one day, so why should I bother learning math now?"

I keep looking for a "satire!" tag, but apparently, that's serious...

[s_stabeler]

Actually, to an extent, that IS the thought process. It's stupid, but kids certainly can pick up that they have an advantage, and since logic tends to not be a strong point for kids thta age...

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

Think about it. Boys are not stupid, they look at the world and they see that their gender gets a relatively easy ride thanks to patriarchy. They kick back at school a bit because...

I'm just going to stop them right there. I was held back in school for precisely this reason at an early, early age: one of my biggest biological deficiencies is in the area of self-control. No one taught it to me. I was headstrong as hell. I couldn't stop. Man, did I ever try. You can only make your mother lose it so many times before you feel something is horribly, terribly wrong with you.

School really doesn't teach that. School generally assumes self-control and punishes accordingly (bad grades, suspensions, etc.). All this, and (in a not so fledgling area of study) we pretty much know that individuals tend to have finite amounts of self-control biologically speaking. We also know point-blank that women out develop men cognitively at young age. Men catch up as both sexes age, but especially early (when people are forming ideas about how "good" they are scholastically) boys and girls of the same age are not really in the same developmental boat but they are in the same classes.

Sorry for the mini-rant but feminism... please don't. Patriarchy as a concept is extremely useful in a sociological setting. But as an explanation for performance gaps, especially in an era of increased scientific visibility and rather brutal statistics from schools, it has as much place in the conversation as god does in natural selection. Boys deal with things like the baby talk gap, increased susceptibility to a number of cognitive disabilities, often competing societal demands on masculinity (jock/geek), delayed cognitive development, and a accelerated flood of hormones that max out before they ever step foot on a college campus. To me, school always reminded me of that (now completely overlinked and overused) comic http://scholasticadministrator.typep...l#.V7M8p66TuaY.

Basically, popping off at someone who may have dealt with a lot of those negative, biologically proven issues with "well you just didn't think you had to try" borders on willfully antagonistic. It speaks to a personality that, lacking the personal experience still feels the need to explain a phenomenon to the person it's affecting. It's a rich dude explaining the wage gap to a working woman. And assuming children, often the product of rather complex social environments within schools are instead reflecting adult-based social cues instead to me come of both as perhaps wishful thinking and projection.

[Canarr]

Actually, to an extent, that IS the thought process. It's stupid, but kids certainly can pick up that they have an advantage, and since logic tends to not be a strong point for kids thta age...

No. Really, no.

I mean, even if I were willing to believe the "20plus% wage gap!" claim - which I'm absolutely not - and even if I were willing to believe that 1st- to 4th-graders were able to understand money and employment and wages and competition with women beyond "girls have cooties!" - which I'm not really, either - then this article still doesn't make any sense. Why?

Well, what D_Yeti_Esquire says:

Sorry for the mini-rant but feminism... please don't. Patriarchy as a concept is extremely useful in a sociological setting. But as an explanation for performance gaps, especially in an era of increased scientific visibility and rather brutal statistics from schools, it has as much place in the conversation as god does in natural selection. Boys deal with things like the baby talk gap, increased susceptibility to a number of cognitive disabilities, often competing societal demands on masculinity (jock/geek), delayed cognitive development, and a accelerated flood

There are a number of reasons why boys struggle in school, none of which apparently figure into this author's theory of, "well, stop making it easier for them later, and they'll work harder!"

I find it baffling how someone can be so callous towards children - even if one doesn't like their gender.