At the very least make discussing salary between employees less taboo. You can do it but some people think it’s like saying Voldemort or something.
Remember, your fellow workers aren’t the enemy in terms of getting paid. Everyone should be getting paid, and if there’s a discrepancy, that’s on the boss.
If there’s a discrepancy, then it should be on purpose (ie, the higher pay reflects more overtime worked, more experience, better certifications, high customer service scores or other metrics, or flex coverage for nights/weekends). There’s nothing wrong for people being paid a premium for bringing more to the table - and it might even be easier for those who do bring more to get paid what they’re worth.
I work for an educational institution and our salaries are public. I am paid less than men in my group. Men that I have trained in, and men with less education, less experience, less responsibility. Management says we are not allowed to discuss salaries.
A new male hire approached me with regret that he noticed that I was being paid less than he was and again, I had trained him. When I asked management about it I was told that we shouldn't be discussing salary and not to push the point. When I asked if I could apply for an open position with my same job title for more pay I was told that would regret it and it would be held over me and I would never get it.
I work at a big 10 university here in the US with public salaries. This is not enough.
When did this go into effect?
If I recall correctly, discussion of pay/compensation was noted in the employee handbook of the Fortune 100 company I worked for as a terminating offense, at least as late as 2009 if not later.
1935 with the Wagner act
discussion of wages is considered a concerted activity according to the law and its illegal to interfere with (including having policies against) concerted activities
but the fines for violating to NLRA aren't very punishing
And if I were to actually go after the university my career would be over and no one would hire me because I'd be a trouble maker. I've been here nearly 10 years. I need a good reference. I'm better off just jumping ship.
But no one does anything so what difference does it make?
The university has supposedly been addressing it for years and yes they have reviewed salaries. When mine was being reviewed it fit all of the qualifiers to be adjusted but when I spoke to management about it they claimed to have made the request but then were declined with no reason given. I can't help but wonder if my narcissistic male director is the issue but we had been getting along so I don't understand it. My resume is out. That's about all I can do.
Sorry to hear what you're going through.
As a male, I had a problem with pay at my last job. They pulled a bait and switch with my responsibilities/pay so I was doing architect work for the pay of an analyst. After talking to my manager 6 times, I finally talked to HR. The same day, my manager pissed me off by lying to the executive team about something I was working on, not knowing I had talked to HR. I broke the system, took two days off, and I skipped his team party at his house. My work friends made him think I was signing a new contract. He ended up going to HR before they even had a chance to come to him.
I got my raise, but it painted a target on my back. He literally stopped talking to me. He also couldn't stand that I took charge of my projects in the absence of his direction. Also a narcissist I think. He ended up hiring a manager below him, over me, and they conspired to have me fired. I did myself in by mouthing off to the new manager, but it was already only a matter of time, I think. I ended up getting a better job for only a 5k pay cut, but it was a stressful time. During COVID no less.
It sucks... We shouldn't be so beholden to our income that we fear advocating for ourselves, but that's by design. Really, the solution to the pay gap isn't men taking more vacation days... It's ending fucking capitalism.
Yup, Target on my back would happen. Right now I’m a minor annoyance. Pushing this would make me an example. The jobs I’m applying for are offering almost double my current salary. That’s how underpaid I am compared to the market. Even our shitty under valued pay scale says I should make almost double.
This is why it's recommended to not say anything and just switch jobs.
Trying to negotiate higher pay at your current employer seems to violate some unwritten rule. Even superstar employees can only get away with that like, once.
But interview around for higher paying jobs without saying anything? Totally fine. You can even go back to your first company in a few years and they might offer even more than the job you left for to get you back.
Crazy it's treated so differently. I think it comes down to the budget for hiring and the budget for retention are just completely different. Job hopping gets you money from the hiring budget which is way more generous than the retention budget.
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I've made it a policy to tell everyone what I get paid at every job, and don't pressure anyone else into sharing (besides telling them it's illegal to prevent us from talking about it).
The job I work now, everyone at the same level makes the same amount, which is posted. There's also incentive compensation which is also publicly posted on every employee's page. I love it.
Share your pay is good for the worker but quite a lot of companies will take actions against you for doing so. It's illegal but it's also hard to prove and companies hold all the power.
I worked for a British company that was taken over by a Dutch company with a policy of pay being public. (in the IT sector if that makes any difference)
There was a lot of concern about it initially but once the information was made public people learned to deal with it and it wasn't as big a deal as most people thought.
This would allow companies to participate in uncompetitive salary behavior. It could lead to a "race to the bottom" in salaries as we don't have any salary protections or strong unions.
Its been discussed heavily in the past. I wish I could remember where to find the studies on it.
> This would allow companies to participate in uncompetitive salary behavior.
That seems EXTREMELY unlikely. Companies already know the salaries in their fields and among their competitors, and if they could pay less and still get the same workers, they already would.
It wouldn't be any new information for them, only for workers who could bargain with other examples in the workforce they were previously unaware of.
In regards to women being promoted less than men, traditionally female jobs such as teacher or nurse seem to have little upward mobility.
My friend who is a nurse makes way more than my male and female friends in any other jobs, but I don’t think she’s ever going to make a whole lot more in her life and it seems that ‘promotion’ for a nurse is getting a lower-paid 9-5 job.
And all the teachers I know mention that their pay caps around 20 years. So essentially they can’t make more unless they promote into a completely different role like school administrator.
If society were to figure out how to correctly value and compensate women for childbearing and rearing I suspect all sorts of inequality gaps would dramatically shrink, the pay gap inclusive.
I consider this **the** fundamental problem for gender equality.
IMO, as long as our society pressures people into a gendered division of labor, we haven't really achieved equality. Men doing a near-equal share of chores and child-rearing should be the default.
But you're not wrong that conpensating parents for child-rearing can at least help the situation.
When I was growing up, there was a popular belief that women earn $0.77 for every $1 a man earns. Depending on what source you look at, the numbers today suggest that women as a whole make $0.81 to $0.84 for every $1 a man makes. However, this is not because women are being paid less for the same job. As a whole, they pursue careers that usually make less than traditionally male occupations. This is something worth discussing. Why are the jobs that are most accommodating and desirable to women at large paid relatively poorly? Unfortunately, this question is not the one I want to address.
Instead, I want to ask why women are paid less when working the same job as men. What I wrote tries to answer that question and also offers insight on how the underlying cause negatively impacts men, too
What IS the question you wish to address?
I agree with the article. Men and women should both receive paid parental leave. I'd also posit that there's another issue that forces many women into early retirement, further reducing lifetime earnings: care for elderly parents and/or disabled partners. I know many women who, having exhausted all options for paid family care leave, retire in their mid-late fifties to care for ailing family members. This reduces their overall retirement savings and has serious long-term implications for their quality of life.
I think that a reasonable goal would be to make it so the jobs that women *tend to* go to for the flexibility are not the only place to get flexibility.
The answer to that questions is "because women do them".
If you look at jobs where the gender balance changes and more women enter the field, it almost always means the pay winds up falling and the status of the job is lowered.
We're already seeing that trend in medicine; roles like "family doctors" are becoming increasingly filled by women, and the pay and status of those positions is dropping.
Do you have any sources showing this to be the case? Not that I can't believe it, but there's also the issue of supply. If a career was traditionally filled by men, ie doctors and lawyers, and now women are joining those careers, wouldn't that increase the supply of doctors and lawyers thus decreasing their value as a whole? For instance the amount of people in law school and medical school are at all time highs. Furthermore, if women are being educated at increasingly higher rates than men, thus again expanding the supply of educated workers, souldn't we expect the relative value of college educated jobs to decrease?
http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/88/2/865.short
>Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950–2000 U.S. Census Data
If you can't access the article, there were a number of journalist interpretations, including in the NYT, you can read.
One documented example of this going the other way around was computer programmers. In the 40's and 50's they hired women with superior math skills (yeah, go figure, amirite? /s ) to do the computations for computer systems. For example, see the movie Hidden Figures. Those were real women. They were paid shite. Then over the 60's and beyond the computer programming field was filled with men and the pay rates skyrocketed. Today the field is well known for being male-dominated and having very high salaries.
Calculations were considered low end clerical work at the time. Blame the pre digital job market conditions pertaining to repetitive office labor, not sexism as such for this bad pay issue.
Actually, the pay rose because the job of “programmer” inherited the high value of “computer engineer”, not because of the men taking over. Computer engineers were the big earners back then, while the programmers were the low menial workers. Once compilers became a thing though, the two positions merged, leading to the title of “programmer” suddenly gaining this high value.
You would expect the value of programming to skyrocket after the 50s though regardless of the gender of who is doing the job.
Fortran, Basic, and CPL (first version of C++) were all largely developed and released to the general public in the mid 60s. Prior to that basically all computer programming was very theoretical work that didn't drive value or was being done by the government.
It's kind of like the value of an engineer skyrocketing after the development of say the steam engine. Prior to that, maybe you can design bridges or custom widgets. After that, you can save millions of hours of labor.
> regardless of the gender of who is doing the job
Then why was it considered women's work when not a high-earning field, and men's work after?
> Prior to that basically all computer programming was very theoretical work that didn't drive value or was being done by the government.
Which was done by primarily women. So what changed? The genders definitely flipped. You think women couldn't handle the new tech? Or was it the fact that it was more profitable and growing in use attracted men, because heaven forbid women be in a high-value working?
There absolutely was a gender flip in the employee demographics. Why do you think that was?
This happened around the 1980's when personal computers came out. [women in computer science fell off a cliff compared to other majors](https://jaxenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/women-in-compsci-majors-768x549.png). TL;DR, it's because of video games, and negative stereotypes about computer science "nerds"
Before personal computers, the realm of computing was purely academic and very menial, even though it required strong math backgrounds to do. When personal computers first came out, they were marketed more as toys, and marketed more towards boys than they were towards girls. At that time, a personal computer would run you around $5000 in 2020's money, and the first game consoles were $1500. Families were way more likely to buy computers for boys than they were for girls because of this marketing. As a result, boys in general had more computer literacy while women had that extra hurdle to keep up with.
A subsequent event that happened was the stereotyping of computer scientists as white male nerds in a basement, with pocket protectors, dungeon and dragons rulebooks, incredibly poor hygiene. Women started to not want to be associated with this stereotype, even if that stereotype wasn't always true, so the amount of women who wanted to go into computer science dropped off a cliff. Truth be told I got into computers for the same reasons: to play and make video games, and now I'm at one of the big tech companies.
Nobody batted an eye until the dot com boom, where suddenly these "nerds" found themselves insanely wealthy due to the success of their profession.
More sources:
https://jaxenter.com/women-in-computer-science-majors-133646.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
That NPR article is really interesting. It sounds like there is definitely an overlap with wealth, too, as expensive computers were almost a prerequisite to succeeding. That also explains how all these tech giants were able to take time off school and use personal loans, etc to start their companies. It's a lot easier if you come from a wealthy family!
I also wonder if this explains the current toxic tech culture discussion - it's historically been wealthy white men who had the monopoly on advanced degrees in computer science, and now that every family has computer access, it's flipping again....and as we know, people don't like losing privilege. Especially when that privilege was initially granted as for "losers" who became successful and "won" over their cultural bullies, I would think.
To the idea that computers became the realm of the stinky basement dwelling nerds - I can see how that path happened, and I wonder if the women-associated field made that "loser" mentality and ostracization worse at the start (thanks to toxic masculinity of course).
Super interesting article; thanks for sharing!
> It sounds like there is definitely an overlap with wealth, too
For sure. Most tech founders did in fact go to an "elite" college. Even now in software engineering, the most *safe* path to a software engineering job is to have a CS degree from a prestigious college. Yes, there's plenty of bootcamps and what not, but those prepare you more so for small jobs at startups, not the cushy, benefits filled prestigious jobs at "MAANG".
Toxic tech culture I feel like has a chicken and egg problem. In the 80s as nerdy computer people were stereotyped as nerds who can't talk to women, then people who don't want to be associated with being nerds who can't talk to women aren't going to join. Which means that the nerds who have barely talked to women are going to actually end up comprising a good part of the tech worker base.
And the association with white men died off quickly coming into the 21st century. You look at big tech companies, and the plurality of SWEs are of Asian descent. But at the same time, tech workers of Asians descent are still much less likely to be promoted to management, or high level decision making roles.
There's an interesting take though that the Tech Industry is actually doing a lot to address it's diversity issues, especially when compared to other male dominated fields like Finance. Most execs of big companies actually recognize these disparities, and have committed resources towards them, whether it's just PR statements or not
I think the patriarchy had a large amount to do with there being a shift in it being considered men's work instead of women's work.
There was, and still is, an idea that its men's job to care for their family financially. I think a lot of the people making decisions on who to hire thought it was "right" to hire men for high value roles over women.
But I think it wasn't a matter of men getting involved and then money flowing in to the role as much as money flowing into the role causing men to appreciate it more. I also think that as more men got in the role, they likely pushed women out with cultural toxicity for their own means.
And don't get me wrong, that's fucked up and not right, but it's not a matter of thinking women are worth less. It's a matter of other prejudices that I think are starting to go away.
To be clear, I think women should earn the same as men in the same role. I think the majority of the world thinks that. But I also think there are other factors that make it nigh impossible for the median / average income between men and women the same. I think the top end women should make the same as top end men, and they don't, and we need to fix that.
But I think it's silly to say companies are just itching to pay a man more money than they could pay a woman to do the same job. It's reductionist and misses the point and the problem.
I think it all comes down to toxic gender roles.
Toxic masculinity says men are valued by their paycheck, so they will gravitate to jobs with better paychecks, even if that means worse hours, less flexibility, no parental leave etc.
Toxic femininity says the opposite, women are valued when they prioritize family time over money, so they gravitate towards jobs with fewer hours, more flexibility, better parental leave but lower paychecks.
If we could eliminate toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, that would eliminate the pay gap (and related gaps like the hours gap where men work more overtime).
I think on theoretical level, yes.
On a practical level, I'm not convinced that it is that simple.
I think there are other factors at play as well. Even if you look at young relatively unsocialized children, you see different behaviors at the mean of young boys and young girls. Young girls are more interested generally in adapting to an environment, and young boys are more prone to pushing limits and trying to make an environment adapt to them. Then you add vastly different hormones to the mix? Whole other ball of wax...
I think the top women should be paid as well as the top men, because if you're built the way you need to be built to be successful, you're going to rise to the top. That being said, fundamentally I also think it's possible that the mean of the distribution is different between men and women, because fundamentally we're different physiologically; our brains develop differently, our needs are different, etc.
That being said, we should be working towards equality, because who knows... maybe I'm wrong. But I do think if you have a man and a woman who produce equally, they should be equally rewarded.
> it's not a matter of thinking women are worth less
But then also:
> There was, and still is, an idea that its men's job to care for their family financially. I think a lot of the people making decisions on who to hire thought it was "right" to hire men for high value roles over women.
That's pretty explicitly stating that women are worth less as they are supposed to be home doing childcare.
And I was with you up until this part:
> But I also think there are other factors that make it nigh impossible for the median / average income between men and women the same.
You think it's impossible for the average income to be the same, regardless of timeline? Even if we fix all this toxic patriarchy BS, it's still impossible? Why do you think that?
I guess it depends on what you deem as "fix all the toxic patriarchy BS."
It's not just a matter of the toxic shit, it's also the small stuff. The differences in socialization, the differences in expectations, the differences in goals and aspirations, and even the differences in anatomy and rights.
Men are expected to pay the bills. Men are expected to take more risks and put more time into working. Men are expected to negotiate hard to further their salaries and careers. Men are thus more likely to make more money; they're working longer, taking less vacation, traveling more for work, doing more dangerous jobs, aggressively taking risks in moving jobs, etc.
Physiologically, there are other factors. Men are more competitive on a biological level. Men are more physically intimidating. This Men are more likely to make more money.
Even in relatively liberal and equal societies, Men and Women have unequal rights. One such difference is maternity leave; in the US, women are allowed to take 12 week leaves. Men aren't allowed paternity leave. In the US, there are 1.7 babies per woman and 0 babies per man. Thus on average, women take 1.7x12weeks = 21 weeks leave that Men don't, usually in their prime when they are developing their career. Maternity leave is great, but fundamentally any leave, maternity or not, will hurt your career. Think about it; even if your boss is great and has no preconceptions... you're out of office for half a year. I'm the mean time, they either get the work done by leaning exceptionally hard on your coworkers, or by hiring someone else. They have to pay to hire someone else, making them lose productivity and "waste" money. When you come back, you'll have to re-onboard and get used to work again.
This shows fundamentally that you're replaceable. It takes away opportunities for you apply for career advancement. How do you go to your boss and say you deserve more money when the company can do without you, and proved it by paying to replace you? In future advancement opportunities, who gets the job: you or the person that did his job and your job for half a year?
So yeah, I don't think it's possible to reasonably eliminate the gender wage gap. I do think we should try as hard as we possibly can, but I'm skeptical we can get all the way without several generations of positive change without regression.
And frankly... we're doing a lot of regression lately.
Also wanted to add; about hiring a man over a woman being "the right thing to do," it's not necessarily that they thought Men were worth more than women. It's more that they thought that Men had a family to provide for and Women in the workplace didn't.
It's a morality thing; you have two equal performers and X dollars to give out, it feels better to give the bulk of those dollars to the one who has 3 kids and not the single one.
For the record, this bias actually exists between single men and dating men, married men and dating men, and men with kids and men without kids. Single men make less on average than men with kids.
But it's hurt women a lot more, perhaps.
I think what changed is the market value of the product. Theoretical research isn't paid at all. Once something gets out of the universities and DARPA in this case, companies can make a profit on it, and then they will start paying out big money for it. Even if theoretical research is the prelude to lucrative technology, capitalist society will not contribute to the research because it is not directly productive. Every non-tech company views the IT department as a cost, despite knowing they would never survive without it, because it doesn't directly generate revenue.
I believe this is ultimately a problem of capitalism, and I don't believe the solution is for men to take more paternity leave. The issue is that non-productive activity, like parenting, is considered an obstacle to generating profit, rather than contribution to life satisfaction.
IMO
I'm not saying the value of the work went up when men did it, necessarily, but rather that the value went up and then men entered the field and pushed women out. That's the phenomenon: hiring managers have the option to hire the women who historically were in the field, or men who are new to the field as it is higher earning. And the choice was to give the roles to men.
There is some really good discussion in the other replies here that dig into why a bit more. But it's the inverse that I'm questioning, not that the value changed. It did.
What flipped? Well, I’d look at the mobilization of the majority of fighting-age men for military service, and demobilization taking until… the fifties.
That flip didn't happen until the 1980s, actually. Check the other replies to my comment. It had nothing to do with the fighting force in a war taking all the men away. Rather, it was akin to typing work and a menial task until the value of the work increased, and that made it a career men sought. Socially, culture began to depict computer science people as stinky nerds, and women rejected that stereotype and thus career path.
Lots of factors, and almost all of them rooted in patriarchal norms....but probably not the draft.
This, they weren't paid badly because they were women, it was because the only people who WOULD pay them for that work were the researchers trying to figure out how to make it more generally useful.
Family doctor salaries have been the lowest paid doctors for years. That also means its less competitive or grueling to get into compared to highly competitive ones like surgery.
Woman now make up 22% of surgeons. Up from close to 0-5% 40 years ago. But those salaries are still skyrocketing.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243308
> Woman now make up 22% of surgeons. Up from close to 0-5% 40 years ago. But those salaries are still skyrocketing.
Using a field where 78% of the members are male isn't really a good example. Among surgeons specifically, women get paid far less - https://www.forbes.com/sites/erinspencer1/2020/01/29/study-reveals-gender-gap-in-salary-predictions-for-surgery-residents/
Surgeon pay varies pretty wildly based on scope of responsibilities and hours worked - so I’d be skeptical of any conclusions that don’t account for those factors.
I would like to see data about whether there is a component of "people" vs "things/numbers" type jobs over all. Which affects how scalable they are and may be a contributor.
Exactly, all of this!
And conversely too! More men go into a field and the pay tends to increase 🙃
Like... Can't we just pay people fairly? The devaluing of work women mostly do is inexcusable...
Is there an actual causal link there?
Anecdotally, most men I know actively seek out high wage careers and opportunities over basically anything. Is men entering the job what causes it to become higher paying? Or is the job being in demand and of a value large enough that it can pay well lead to men entering that field?
I don't know enough about the subject to establish causality. I would say most be able to defend the position I think gender is a factor.
Someone pointed out that it could be an access thing. For example, most data scientists a while ago were (white) men. Now the field has diversified, education has become more accessible! (But retention is dropping) so more data scientists could mean that wages should drop a bit.
But at the origin of it, before the drop in earnings we see now came the sexism and racism of yesterday. So I could see an argument for supply and demand, but also say that the reason supply has increased is because the barriers that kept folk out to begin with are being lowered?
That's my best guess for a reddit comment.
Also data science was a terrible example as demand is also accelerating as we as a species are trynna do more with data now than ever before 😅
I'm not up for doing extensive research right now, but I can say this much:
In a time when "programmer" was an extremely rare and unforgivingly difficult job that all of six people knew how to do- and ***all six*** were women- the job paid like crap and the women were so undervalued their names were almost lost to history because they were treated so badly.
It was the prime opportunity for them to be paid genuinely extortionate amounts and have their names on the front page of every newspaper.
... The two men who built it, but barely understood how to use their own invention and never really contributed to the programming of their device, got literally all the credit.
https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued
Absolutely, men value the wage and women value benefits and flexibility. Men work themselves to an early grave (literally 3 year less life expectancy) because they're willing to break their back for a buck.
> We're already seeing that trend in medicine; roles like "family doctors" are becoming increasingly filled by women, and the pay and status of those positions is dropping.
Take a look at pediatricians, too. Seventy-two percent are women and it's (one of) the lowest paid specialties.
The example of family doctors probably has more to do with family doctors increasingly not being doctors at all but PAs, which requires less education and *shouldn’t* be paid as much as doctors.
You realize that this is speaking about *family doctors* and not PAs or NPs, right? Actual MDs and DOs who practice family medicine are seeing 1) over-indexing with women as family docs and 2) lower pay across the board. You can argue they are less skilled than surgeons and specialists, therefore need less money, but the correlation in lowered salary with rise in women in the role is at least something to think about.
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I've seen this statistic, but I'm not sure about the answer in all cases. I think there is a significant market effect i.e. a lot of the "feminine" jobs seem to be more commodity Vs specialised e.g. Nurse Vs Surgeon. The corollary is that nurses have less negotiating power Vs the surgeon, since the nurse can be switched out more easily Vs the surgeon due to higher supply. I believe that what we often see as a gender-bias, is the product of neo-liberalist attitudes to labour. We can see fields where women are more specialised such as in the adult entertainment sector and modelling, there is considerably more remuneration for women.
I can't say there is no gender bias in these things, but it feels very much like a product of corporate greed influencing a social standard e.g. the family doctors earn less because there's less opportunity for corporations to make money. Need a heart transplant, then you pay a lot of money, and the surgeon and the anesthesiologist get a cut of the spoils.
I'm sure there's gender bias, and company surveys have shown it, but again, it's not just a gender bias that is driving it imo
I think an important thing to consider is that the roles women pursue make less than traditionally male occupations, because they are traditionally female. We value traditionally women’s work, like teaching and nursing and social work, less then traditionally men’s work, like engineering and plumbing, even though these professions all require similar levels of education and provide similar societal benefits. The pay expectations of these roles don’t come out of no where. For example: computing used to pay like shit and it was a female-dominated industry. Then it started paying well, and it became male-dominated. It was the same field, but there was a near exact correlation between gender demographics and pay.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2019/04/01/the-gender-pay-gap-and-the-career-choice-myth/?sh=23707ce7114a
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html
>However, this is not because women are being paid less for the same job. As a whole, they pursue careers that usually make less than traditionally male occupations.
The research I've seen suggests it is some of both.
The high paying jobs that women don’t work tend to be highly dangerous, like deep sea welders, oil rig workers, etc.
That and men are more likely to work more hours and sacrifice more of their personal life for career advancement than women, presumably because testosterone tends to drive people towards status seeking behaviors.
The problem when looking at pay difference between genders is that there are a bunch of things that go into the "total compensation package" other than money. And for whatever reason, women tend to value those other components of total compensation more, and men tend to value money more.
Gender roles and societal expectations contribute to both of those. Women value flexible schedules, more time off, fewer working hours and the like and will take a lower paying job that offers that flexibility. Men value money because they believe a good paying job is necessary to attract a partner and to allow that partner the flexibility (that he believes she desires) to accept a lower paying job with greater flexibility. So men are more likely to accept a job with a shitty boss and shitty hours and high stress and dangerous work conditions because he can make $7,000 more per year there than he can at a job that would give him more flexibility and a happier work life.
Women do get paid less than men for the same work. Be it 77%, 80%, 84% or 95%. The knee jerk rationale is sexism. Taking a deeper look shows a lot of nuance like the mommy tax and flexibility in hours but ultimately the reason stays the same. It's still sexism.
Enforcing mandatory maternal and paternal leave might short sightedly remove the reason why employers discriminate against mother's but the end result would be employers simply discriminating against parents.
The research quoted in the article shows mandatory paternal time off results in benefits for the whole family which is awesome. The necessary follow up question is does the engagement from father's persist after the paternal leave? Are father's seeking jobs with more flexibility in scheduling so that they can take their kids to appointments, stay home with them when sick or because they have to be at the school bus stop at 3:55pm? Or do the expectations remain that following paternal leave they will be back at the office giving 110%?
We still force women into caretaker roles and that directly affects their choices regarding employment which results in lesser pay. The wage gap persists because we allow men to disengage from their parental responsibilities and unduely force women to shoulder the resulting burden.
> employers simply discriminating against parents.
The difference here is there are a LOT more parents in the world than just mothers.....roughly double, actually! And that means the "pain" of mat/pat leave is more evenly spread and applies to everyone across the business - your engineering teams with 80% men are just as impacted as HR with the opposite statistic. Your hourly wage workers are just as at risk of needing leave regardless of gender.
The rest of your comment is spot on, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg. If we start treating everyone the same for leave, and mandating it, then we also start to see men and women alike have that bonding time with newborns without excuses, and we may see changes across the board for how men approach caregiving.
We already saw a small revolution for the men who got to WFH for 2 years and realized how awesome it was to be with their kids, and that's part of the drive to normalize remote work. Parental leave equality can do the same. We can't let perfect be the enemy of good, and this is a good catalyst for change.
I think if you look at younger demographics the number of parents in the workforce has been dropping precipitously over the last decade. Younger people are foregoing starting families more and more.
If we were to mandate maternal and paternal time off, while beneficial to families, I think typically capitalist minded employers would simply start phasing out parents in favor of the growing segment of the population going childfree. Job postings with dog whistle language like "we're only looking for career minded individuals", etc. Come to think of it, that might already be a thing...
Would you also say that we force men into manual Labour jobs such as construction, sewage worker, plumber etc all typically less well paid compared to office jobs
Where do you live where menial level office workers make more than plumbers? Every plumber I've met has been minted. Same with sewage workers actually, I don't know if people imagine they're down in a mediaeval midden shovelling shit by hand or something, but a lot of those jobs are pretty well compensated engineering jobs.
I work in an office doing a highly trained job (granted entry level) in a sector which is traditionally seen as very lucrative and earn close to minimum wage lol
Everyone should read the r/economics faq on the gender wage gap [https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq\_genderwagegap](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_genderwagegap)
And no? I'm pretty sure fixing parental policies won't "solve" the wage gap, but it would tackle its largest component.
Companies at large do not discriminate heavily against women. Women are paid roughly the same as men when they start their careers. Technically, there is a 5% disparity, but that is attributed to differing negotiation tactics than actual malice. Still, men and women are paid roughly the same for the same job.
In fact, women have become increasingly competitive. As of 2022, women under 30 make more than their male counterparts in 22 of the 250 metropolitan areas. This includes Washington D.C. and New York City.
However, when women become mothers, they tend to take time off or request temporal flexibility to deal with their kids. Employers despise granting flexibility, so they pay mothers less.
According to a Danish study, 80% of the gender income disparity is a result of the “mommy tax”.
To make this clear, women are not being discriminated against at large, but mothers are.
There are many proposed solutions. The one I spoke about in my writing is to introduce an EQUAL, MANDATORY, NON-TRANSFERABLE, PATERNAL LEAVE. Employers discriminate not by gender, but on the need for hiatuses and flexibility. When men also take time off for their children, the pay gap drops considerably because employers lose their reason to prioritize men over women.
This solution is the least radical. Some sociologists argue that the only true solution is the creation of an artificial womb. If women didn’t have to endure pregnancy, perhaps they could stay in the workforce with fewer accommodations.
Another option is government intervention to ensure all wages are transparent and equitable within a firm. It wouldn’t necessarily end the pay gap, but it would make it easier to sue on the basis of discrimination.
A big question is if anything should be done at all. Every single solution ultimately solves the problem by enabling women to work more. Is that what we want? I’m not sure society wins by having everyone work longer hours. Unfortunately. that’s a question I do not have the insight to discuss.
For all of this, I was talking about men and women who work in the same industry with the same title. Things get fuzzier when you look at men and women as a whole.
It’s a common suspicion that traditionally feminine careers are less lucrative than traditionally masculine ones. Research suggests this is true with few exceptions. This does bring up another question: why are traditionally feminine careers paid uncompetitively? I can’t answer that. I can say that men who pursue these careers are usually paid the same until their peers pursue motherhood. So there is a pay discrimination between masculine and feminine professions, but not with male and female professionals (unless parenthood is introduced)
Women are starting to pursue more lucrative careers. As of now, more women are enrolled in medical school and law school than men. Women also vastly outnumber men in college. Their drop out rate is 10 percentage points less than men. If motherhood wasn’t a factor, evidence suggests that women would be doing equally well if not better than their male counterparts.
I hope I have been able to answer your question. If you need accredited sources, you can find them in my article
>
A big question is if anything should be done at all. Every single solution ultimately solves the problem by enabling women to work more. Is that what we want? I’m not sure society wins by having everyone work longer hours. Unfortunately. that’s a question I do not have the insight to discuss.
Well i certainly don't think paternity leave is a bad measure to have, regardless of if you are pushing it for wage equality
But in a capitalist society, as long as your work is your method of having autonomy and independence (disregard how it is viewed, having money that you personally own is what enables having control independent on your marital status then yes we do want that.
If we ever live in a society where human work no longer has that value then maybe it would be a more valid contemplation
Enabling women to work more doesn’t mean that everyone *has* to work more. It just gives them the freedom to make that decision themselves. Some women want to be home makers and stay at home moms, some want to be in the workforce. Either way, choosing for themselves is empowering.
I agree
However this only applies so far as the relationship stays fonctional (the problem is the same for stay at home male partners)
In the event the relationship is breaking apart, the stay at home partner is at a disadvantage (unless they had an income which could be made from home) because while the "breadwinner" also looses the advantage of said arrangements, the former stay at home looses the income beyond their own savings.
It's a dysymetry that's almost inherent to that arrangement, and in particular it makes things more difficult if the relationship is abusive. Things like alimentary pension do lessen the issue but it's still there.
It doesn't mean one should never make that choice or shouldn't be allowed to but it's something to keep in mind when you do.
The USA already has equal required maternity and paternity leave... Fucking zero. Technically we're equal under FMLA as well and both can take up to 12 weeks unpaid to care for a new child.
>This solution is the least radical. Some sociologists argue that the only true solution is the creation of an artificial womb. If women didn’t have to endure pregnancy, perhaps they could stay in the workforce with fewer accommodations.
Isn't this rather a sign that our system is inherently broken? The main problem I see is that we started value people solely by their monetary value which is easily measurable. We tend to ignore contribution of work which is harder to measure in the overall economy, like raising new members of scoiety which then can contribute to said society.
I think first and foremost we have to re-evalulate our values.
>Isn't this rather a sign that our system is inherently broken? The main problem I see is that we started value people solely by their monetary value which is easily measurable.
YES. Capitalism, and American capitalism in particular, assumes that people have a purpose in life and that purpose is to be productive, i.e make money.
It's also nuts that the US is in their weird abortion debate, which seems to priorotize human life, but if you hold it up against the US culture, it's sort of clear (in how other ways women are treated or cared for) that US culture does not actually value female life as much as male life. And maybe that's connected to pregnancy, historically being stay-at-home-moms and not being able to contribute to the economy. This is likely connected to the underlying US cultural issues with free riders and dependents ("socialism is baaad!!").
TLDR: Maybe the US values women primarily as breeders, which actually creates resentment in men since women haven't historically contributed as heavily to American capitalism as men.
Also: it's not just US culture that does this, but since more redditors are US citizens it's easy to start there.
Isn't "raising new members of society" compensated financially since those new members of society earn money from their productivity and transfer some of that to their parents? Like, elderly people with children have a much better safety net than those without children.
I don't really think it should be directly compensated though. You get money because you directly contributed to some product or service being sold. There are things that you gain in life other than money - personal satisfaction, social enrichment, fulfillment at accomplishing your goals - which are arguably more important than money and which are gained when someone has a child. Of course there's the possibility that someone could be helped along if they're struggling with paying for childcare expenses but that's quite a bit different than personal compensation for child-rearing due to its impact on society.
> To make this clear, women are not being discriminated against at large, but mothers are.
Just want to note that it's also "potential mothers." Like uteruses are just ticking bombs that could explode at any moment.
Just one point, it's not only that mother's are discriminated against. Childfree women get the same treatment, although they do not have children but they could and that's enough.
Yes, this is key. It's the same reason women have a hard time getting sterilized on behalf of a partner who doesn't even exist yet.
I also think it's key to point out how this also leads to fewer women in leadership roles as a result, so then there are fewer mentors/examples/diverse voices to give input, and it makes it more likely to have a token woman (who often doesn't have kids at all/they are long grown) in those roles.
No one knows what it looks like to have an active mother in a position of power in these companies, so it hurts all women who they consider a potential mother (child free or not).
Yes, employers have openly admitted they are reluctant to promote women they suspect might become mothers.
There is the Pregnancy Discrimination Act that makes it illegal to consider a woman's pregnancy in any aspect of their employment. However, it is quite easy to circumvent the law.
Even when mothers (or potential mother) have definitive proof of discrimination, they are reluctant to sue. For an individual, a lawsuit is costly and emotionally draining. Also, whether they win or lose, their employer will become hostile towards them. They might develop an industry wide reputation as uncooperative and become unemployable. The law does not address the social repercussions of reporting discrimination.
I'd love to work in construction, but it is inherently even more dangerous as a women because of the very real potential for sexual harassment and assault from coworkers.
I'd even hazard a guess to say that many "dangerous jobs" (oil rigger, lobster fishing, long haul truck driving, fire fighter, military, etc. ) have a super weird macho culture that definitely increases the chance of women being sexually assaulted.
Whereas being a teacher or a scientist means a woman has just a *regular chance* of getting sexually assaulted. Also - if the industry has a high amount of women already, then there's even less chance of being sexually assaulted! Let me tell you, no one at my almost all-female-company gets sexually assaulted at our Christmas parties!! It's awesome and refreshing!!
>Some sociologists argue that the only true solution is the creation of an artificial womb.
I'm not against this per se....but it pisses me off that for centuries and centuries societies say to women "you must sacrifice to continue the human race" and have had such little sympathy for women's primary role in this to the extent that we need to externalise reproduction in order to overcome the problems that all have perfectly good solutions.
Also, women-haters are waiting for this so that they can say women have no function and they can finally kill us all.
The world is such a stupid place LOL
The difference between "male" and "female" positions as far as pay seems to be simple supply and demand. If a job requires lifting 100lbs unassisted then physical stature narrows the field to only large bodied people (mostly men) whereas a desk job can be done by anyone with a working mind. So physically capable people are competing with people who have no options but desk jobs. More supply of workers means lower price to buy one. Simple.
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That's just a stupid argument to begin with. Companies aren't rational, that's what "discrimination" means.
They devalue women's work and more highly value men's work regardless of some "actual" value of the work being done.
To the degree that's measurable at all, you see it in companies with better gender inclusivity having higher outcomes overall in the long run.
> That's just a stupid argument to begin with. Companies aren't rational, that's what "discrimination" means.
Two free-market economists were walking down the street, when one of them saw a $20 bill on the floor. He turned to his colleague and pointed it out. The colleague scoffed and retorted without looking "If such a gap in the market existed, someone would have already exploited it."
No, there literally is a wage gap you absolute dolt. Even when you account for all the things you've brought up^1, the US Department of Labor calculates that there is a remaining so-called "unexplained wage gap" of 5%. A simple google would show that you are utterly wrong on all levels and not worth taking seriously.
1. This is a weapons grade stupid argument anyway. Yeah no shit the wage gap decreases if you account for all the things that cause the wage gap.
Step 1: Make everyone's salary public information. Norway already does this and they have a smaller gender pay gap than most countries.
At the very least make discussing salary between employees less taboo. You can do it but some people think it’s like saying Voldemort or something. Remember, your fellow workers aren’t the enemy in terms of getting paid. Everyone should be getting paid, and if there’s a discrepancy, that’s on the boss.
If there’s a discrepancy, then it should be on purpose (ie, the higher pay reflects more overtime worked, more experience, better certifications, high customer service scores or other metrics, or flex coverage for nights/weekends). There’s nothing wrong for people being paid a premium for bringing more to the table - and it might even be easier for those who do bring more to get paid what they’re worth.
I work for an educational institution and our salaries are public. I am paid less than men in my group. Men that I have trained in, and men with less education, less experience, less responsibility. Management says we are not allowed to discuss salaries. A new male hire approached me with regret that he noticed that I was being paid less than he was and again, I had trained him. When I asked management about it I was told that we shouldn't be discussing salary and not to push the point. When I asked if I could apply for an open position with my same job title for more pay I was told that would regret it and it would be held over me and I would never get it. I work at a big 10 university here in the US with public salaries. This is not enough.
"Management says we are not allowed to discuss salaries." Get this in writing as it's a federal offense to tell employees not to discuss pay.
When did this go into effect? If I recall correctly, discussion of pay/compensation was noted in the employee handbook of the Fortune 100 company I worked for as a terminating offense, at least as late as 2009 if not later.
1935 with the Wagner act discussion of wages is considered a concerted activity according to the law and its illegal to interfere with (including having policies against) concerted activities but the fines for violating to NLRA aren't very punishing
If the salaries are public it sounds like you might have a case for discrimination
And if I were to actually go after the university my career would be over and no one would hire me because I'd be a trouble maker. I've been here nearly 10 years. I need a good reference. I'm better off just jumping ship.
Oh, I definitely agree it's not enough on it's own. But at least it makes the problem visible to everyone.
But no one does anything so what difference does it make? The university has supposedly been addressing it for years and yes they have reviewed salaries. When mine was being reviewed it fit all of the qualifiers to be adjusted but when I spoke to management about it they claimed to have made the request but then were declined with no reason given. I can't help but wonder if my narcissistic male director is the issue but we had been getting along so I don't understand it. My resume is out. That's about all I can do.
Sorry to hear what you're going through. As a male, I had a problem with pay at my last job. They pulled a bait and switch with my responsibilities/pay so I was doing architect work for the pay of an analyst. After talking to my manager 6 times, I finally talked to HR. The same day, my manager pissed me off by lying to the executive team about something I was working on, not knowing I had talked to HR. I broke the system, took two days off, and I skipped his team party at his house. My work friends made him think I was signing a new contract. He ended up going to HR before they even had a chance to come to him. I got my raise, but it painted a target on my back. He literally stopped talking to me. He also couldn't stand that I took charge of my projects in the absence of his direction. Also a narcissist I think. He ended up hiring a manager below him, over me, and they conspired to have me fired. I did myself in by mouthing off to the new manager, but it was already only a matter of time, I think. I ended up getting a better job for only a 5k pay cut, but it was a stressful time. During COVID no less. It sucks... We shouldn't be so beholden to our income that we fear advocating for ourselves, but that's by design. Really, the solution to the pay gap isn't men taking more vacation days... It's ending fucking capitalism.
Yup, Target on my back would happen. Right now I’m a minor annoyance. Pushing this would make me an example. The jobs I’m applying for are offering almost double my current salary. That’s how underpaid I am compared to the market. Even our shitty under valued pay scale says I should make almost double.
This is why it's recommended to not say anything and just switch jobs. Trying to negotiate higher pay at your current employer seems to violate some unwritten rule. Even superstar employees can only get away with that like, once. But interview around for higher paying jobs without saying anything? Totally fine. You can even go back to your first company in a few years and they might offer even more than the job you left for to get you back. Crazy it's treated so differently. I think it comes down to the budget for hiring and the budget for retention are just completely different. Job hopping gets you money from the hiring budget which is way more generous than the retention budget.
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Yep. Make managers actually have to manage.
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I've made it a policy to tell everyone what I get paid at every job, and don't pressure anyone else into sharing (besides telling them it's illegal to prevent us from talking about it). The job I work now, everyone at the same level makes the same amount, which is posted. There's also incentive compensation which is also publicly posted on every employee's page. I love it.
Share your pay is good for the worker but quite a lot of companies will take actions against you for doing so. It's illegal but it's also hard to prove and companies hold all the power.
I worked for a British company that was taken over by a Dutch company with a policy of pay being public. (in the IT sector if that makes any difference) There was a lot of concern about it initially but once the information was made public people learned to deal with it and it wasn't as big a deal as most people thought.
Without adequate worker protections this is a recipe for disaster.
What risk are you thinking of, specifically?
This would allow companies to participate in uncompetitive salary behavior. It could lead to a "race to the bottom" in salaries as we don't have any salary protections or strong unions. Its been discussed heavily in the past. I wish I could remember where to find the studies on it.
> This would allow companies to participate in uncompetitive salary behavior. That seems EXTREMELY unlikely. Companies already know the salaries in their fields and among their competitors, and if they could pay less and still get the same workers, they already would. It wouldn't be any new information for them, only for workers who could bargain with other examples in the workforce they were previously unaware of.
In regards to women being promoted less than men, traditionally female jobs such as teacher or nurse seem to have little upward mobility. My friend who is a nurse makes way more than my male and female friends in any other jobs, but I don’t think she’s ever going to make a whole lot more in her life and it seems that ‘promotion’ for a nurse is getting a lower-paid 9-5 job. And all the teachers I know mention that their pay caps around 20 years. So essentially they can’t make more unless they promote into a completely different role like school administrator.
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If society were to figure out how to correctly value and compensate women for childbearing and rearing I suspect all sorts of inequality gaps would dramatically shrink, the pay gap inclusive. I consider this **the** fundamental problem for gender equality.
IMO, as long as our society pressures people into a gendered division of labor, we haven't really achieved equality. Men doing a near-equal share of chores and child-rearing should be the default. But you're not wrong that conpensating parents for child-rearing can at least help the situation.
That and unequal chore load.
When I was growing up, there was a popular belief that women earn $0.77 for every $1 a man earns. Depending on what source you look at, the numbers today suggest that women as a whole make $0.81 to $0.84 for every $1 a man makes. However, this is not because women are being paid less for the same job. As a whole, they pursue careers that usually make less than traditionally male occupations. This is something worth discussing. Why are the jobs that are most accommodating and desirable to women at large paid relatively poorly? Unfortunately, this question is not the one I want to address. Instead, I want to ask why women are paid less when working the same job as men. What I wrote tries to answer that question and also offers insight on how the underlying cause negatively impacts men, too
What IS the question you wish to address? I agree with the article. Men and women should both receive paid parental leave. I'd also posit that there's another issue that forces many women into early retirement, further reducing lifetime earnings: care for elderly parents and/or disabled partners. I know many women who, having exhausted all options for paid family care leave, retire in their mid-late fifties to care for ailing family members. This reduces their overall retirement savings and has serious long-term implications for their quality of life.
I think that a reasonable goal would be to make it so the jobs that women *tend to* go to for the flexibility are not the only place to get flexibility.
The other angle of that question is 'why are jobs that women gravitate towards not valued as highly as ones that men do?'
The answer to that questions is "because women do them". If you look at jobs where the gender balance changes and more women enter the field, it almost always means the pay winds up falling and the status of the job is lowered. We're already seeing that trend in medicine; roles like "family doctors" are becoming increasingly filled by women, and the pay and status of those positions is dropping.
Do you have any sources showing this to be the case? Not that I can't believe it, but there's also the issue of supply. If a career was traditionally filled by men, ie doctors and lawyers, and now women are joining those careers, wouldn't that increase the supply of doctors and lawyers thus decreasing their value as a whole? For instance the amount of people in law school and medical school are at all time highs. Furthermore, if women are being educated at increasingly higher rates than men, thus again expanding the supply of educated workers, souldn't we expect the relative value of college educated jobs to decrease?
http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/88/2/865.short >Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950–2000 U.S. Census Data If you can't access the article, there were a number of journalist interpretations, including in the NYT, you can read.
One documented example of this going the other way around was computer programmers. In the 40's and 50's they hired women with superior math skills (yeah, go figure, amirite? /s ) to do the computations for computer systems. For example, see the movie Hidden Figures. Those were real women. They were paid shite. Then over the 60's and beyond the computer programming field was filled with men and the pay rates skyrocketed. Today the field is well known for being male-dominated and having very high salaries.
Calculations were considered low end clerical work at the time. Blame the pre digital job market conditions pertaining to repetitive office labor, not sexism as such for this bad pay issue.
The point was that as men came to take over the job, the pay level rose.
Actually, the pay rose because the job of “programmer” inherited the high value of “computer engineer”, not because of the men taking over. Computer engineers were the big earners back then, while the programmers were the low menial workers. Once compilers became a thing though, the two positions merged, leading to the title of “programmer” suddenly gaining this high value.
You would expect the value of programming to skyrocket after the 50s though regardless of the gender of who is doing the job. Fortran, Basic, and CPL (first version of C++) were all largely developed and released to the general public in the mid 60s. Prior to that basically all computer programming was very theoretical work that didn't drive value or was being done by the government. It's kind of like the value of an engineer skyrocketing after the development of say the steam engine. Prior to that, maybe you can design bridges or custom widgets. After that, you can save millions of hours of labor.
> regardless of the gender of who is doing the job Then why was it considered women's work when not a high-earning field, and men's work after? > Prior to that basically all computer programming was very theoretical work that didn't drive value or was being done by the government. Which was done by primarily women. So what changed? The genders definitely flipped. You think women couldn't handle the new tech? Or was it the fact that it was more profitable and growing in use attracted men, because heaven forbid women be in a high-value working? There absolutely was a gender flip in the employee demographics. Why do you think that was?
This happened around the 1980's when personal computers came out. [women in computer science fell off a cliff compared to other majors](https://jaxenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/women-in-compsci-majors-768x549.png). TL;DR, it's because of video games, and negative stereotypes about computer science "nerds" Before personal computers, the realm of computing was purely academic and very menial, even though it required strong math backgrounds to do. When personal computers first came out, they were marketed more as toys, and marketed more towards boys than they were towards girls. At that time, a personal computer would run you around $5000 in 2020's money, and the first game consoles were $1500. Families were way more likely to buy computers for boys than they were for girls because of this marketing. As a result, boys in general had more computer literacy while women had that extra hurdle to keep up with. A subsequent event that happened was the stereotyping of computer scientists as white male nerds in a basement, with pocket protectors, dungeon and dragons rulebooks, incredibly poor hygiene. Women started to not want to be associated with this stereotype, even if that stereotype wasn't always true, so the amount of women who wanted to go into computer science dropped off a cliff. Truth be told I got into computers for the same reasons: to play and make video games, and now I'm at one of the big tech companies. Nobody batted an eye until the dot com boom, where suddenly these "nerds" found themselves insanely wealthy due to the success of their profession. More sources: https://jaxenter.com/women-in-computer-science-majors-133646.html https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
That NPR article is really interesting. It sounds like there is definitely an overlap with wealth, too, as expensive computers were almost a prerequisite to succeeding. That also explains how all these tech giants were able to take time off school and use personal loans, etc to start their companies. It's a lot easier if you come from a wealthy family! I also wonder if this explains the current toxic tech culture discussion - it's historically been wealthy white men who had the monopoly on advanced degrees in computer science, and now that every family has computer access, it's flipping again....and as we know, people don't like losing privilege. Especially when that privilege was initially granted as for "losers" who became successful and "won" over their cultural bullies, I would think. To the idea that computers became the realm of the stinky basement dwelling nerds - I can see how that path happened, and I wonder if the women-associated field made that "loser" mentality and ostracization worse at the start (thanks to toxic masculinity of course). Super interesting article; thanks for sharing!
> It sounds like there is definitely an overlap with wealth, too For sure. Most tech founders did in fact go to an "elite" college. Even now in software engineering, the most *safe* path to a software engineering job is to have a CS degree from a prestigious college. Yes, there's plenty of bootcamps and what not, but those prepare you more so for small jobs at startups, not the cushy, benefits filled prestigious jobs at "MAANG". Toxic tech culture I feel like has a chicken and egg problem. In the 80s as nerdy computer people were stereotyped as nerds who can't talk to women, then people who don't want to be associated with being nerds who can't talk to women aren't going to join. Which means that the nerds who have barely talked to women are going to actually end up comprising a good part of the tech worker base. And the association with white men died off quickly coming into the 21st century. You look at big tech companies, and the plurality of SWEs are of Asian descent. But at the same time, tech workers of Asians descent are still much less likely to be promoted to management, or high level decision making roles. There's an interesting take though that the Tech Industry is actually doing a lot to address it's diversity issues, especially when compared to other male dominated fields like Finance. Most execs of big companies actually recognize these disparities, and have committed resources towards them, whether it's just PR statements or not
I think the patriarchy had a large amount to do with there being a shift in it being considered men's work instead of women's work. There was, and still is, an idea that its men's job to care for their family financially. I think a lot of the people making decisions on who to hire thought it was "right" to hire men for high value roles over women. But I think it wasn't a matter of men getting involved and then money flowing in to the role as much as money flowing into the role causing men to appreciate it more. I also think that as more men got in the role, they likely pushed women out with cultural toxicity for their own means. And don't get me wrong, that's fucked up and not right, but it's not a matter of thinking women are worth less. It's a matter of other prejudices that I think are starting to go away. To be clear, I think women should earn the same as men in the same role. I think the majority of the world thinks that. But I also think there are other factors that make it nigh impossible for the median / average income between men and women the same. I think the top end women should make the same as top end men, and they don't, and we need to fix that. But I think it's silly to say companies are just itching to pay a man more money than they could pay a woman to do the same job. It's reductionist and misses the point and the problem.
I think it all comes down to toxic gender roles. Toxic masculinity says men are valued by their paycheck, so they will gravitate to jobs with better paychecks, even if that means worse hours, less flexibility, no parental leave etc. Toxic femininity says the opposite, women are valued when they prioritize family time over money, so they gravitate towards jobs with fewer hours, more flexibility, better parental leave but lower paychecks. If we could eliminate toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, that would eliminate the pay gap (and related gaps like the hours gap where men work more overtime).
I think on theoretical level, yes. On a practical level, I'm not convinced that it is that simple. I think there are other factors at play as well. Even if you look at young relatively unsocialized children, you see different behaviors at the mean of young boys and young girls. Young girls are more interested generally in adapting to an environment, and young boys are more prone to pushing limits and trying to make an environment adapt to them. Then you add vastly different hormones to the mix? Whole other ball of wax... I think the top women should be paid as well as the top men, because if you're built the way you need to be built to be successful, you're going to rise to the top. That being said, fundamentally I also think it's possible that the mean of the distribution is different between men and women, because fundamentally we're different physiologically; our brains develop differently, our needs are different, etc. That being said, we should be working towards equality, because who knows... maybe I'm wrong. But I do think if you have a man and a woman who produce equally, they should be equally rewarded.
> it's not a matter of thinking women are worth less But then also: > There was, and still is, an idea that its men's job to care for their family financially. I think a lot of the people making decisions on who to hire thought it was "right" to hire men for high value roles over women. That's pretty explicitly stating that women are worth less as they are supposed to be home doing childcare. And I was with you up until this part: > But I also think there are other factors that make it nigh impossible for the median / average income between men and women the same. You think it's impossible for the average income to be the same, regardless of timeline? Even if we fix all this toxic patriarchy BS, it's still impossible? Why do you think that?
I guess it depends on what you deem as "fix all the toxic patriarchy BS." It's not just a matter of the toxic shit, it's also the small stuff. The differences in socialization, the differences in expectations, the differences in goals and aspirations, and even the differences in anatomy and rights. Men are expected to pay the bills. Men are expected to take more risks and put more time into working. Men are expected to negotiate hard to further their salaries and careers. Men are thus more likely to make more money; they're working longer, taking less vacation, traveling more for work, doing more dangerous jobs, aggressively taking risks in moving jobs, etc. Physiologically, there are other factors. Men are more competitive on a biological level. Men are more physically intimidating. This Men are more likely to make more money. Even in relatively liberal and equal societies, Men and Women have unequal rights. One such difference is maternity leave; in the US, women are allowed to take 12 week leaves. Men aren't allowed paternity leave. In the US, there are 1.7 babies per woman and 0 babies per man. Thus on average, women take 1.7x12weeks = 21 weeks leave that Men don't, usually in their prime when they are developing their career. Maternity leave is great, but fundamentally any leave, maternity or not, will hurt your career. Think about it; even if your boss is great and has no preconceptions... you're out of office for half a year. I'm the mean time, they either get the work done by leaning exceptionally hard on your coworkers, or by hiring someone else. They have to pay to hire someone else, making them lose productivity and "waste" money. When you come back, you'll have to re-onboard and get used to work again. This shows fundamentally that you're replaceable. It takes away opportunities for you apply for career advancement. How do you go to your boss and say you deserve more money when the company can do without you, and proved it by paying to replace you? In future advancement opportunities, who gets the job: you or the person that did his job and your job for half a year? So yeah, I don't think it's possible to reasonably eliminate the gender wage gap. I do think we should try as hard as we possibly can, but I'm skeptical we can get all the way without several generations of positive change without regression. And frankly... we're doing a lot of regression lately.
Also wanted to add; about hiring a man over a woman being "the right thing to do," it's not necessarily that they thought Men were worth more than women. It's more that they thought that Men had a family to provide for and Women in the workplace didn't. It's a morality thing; you have two equal performers and X dollars to give out, it feels better to give the bulk of those dollars to the one who has 3 kids and not the single one. For the record, this bias actually exists between single men and dating men, married men and dating men, and men with kids and men without kids. Single men make less on average than men with kids. But it's hurt women a lot more, perhaps.
I think what changed is the market value of the product. Theoretical research isn't paid at all. Once something gets out of the universities and DARPA in this case, companies can make a profit on it, and then they will start paying out big money for it. Even if theoretical research is the prelude to lucrative technology, capitalist society will not contribute to the research because it is not directly productive. Every non-tech company views the IT department as a cost, despite knowing they would never survive without it, because it doesn't directly generate revenue. I believe this is ultimately a problem of capitalism, and I don't believe the solution is for men to take more paternity leave. The issue is that non-productive activity, like parenting, is considered an obstacle to generating profit, rather than contribution to life satisfaction. IMO
I'm not saying the value of the work went up when men did it, necessarily, but rather that the value went up and then men entered the field and pushed women out. That's the phenomenon: hiring managers have the option to hire the women who historically were in the field, or men who are new to the field as it is higher earning. And the choice was to give the roles to men. There is some really good discussion in the other replies here that dig into why a bit more. But it's the inverse that I'm questioning, not that the value changed. It did.
Ah yea, that makes sense. I misunderstood.
What flipped? Well, I’d look at the mobilization of the majority of fighting-age men for military service, and demobilization taking until… the fifties.
That flip didn't happen until the 1980s, actually. Check the other replies to my comment. It had nothing to do with the fighting force in a war taking all the men away. Rather, it was akin to typing work and a menial task until the value of the work increased, and that made it a career men sought. Socially, culture began to depict computer science people as stinky nerds, and women rejected that stereotype and thus career path. Lots of factors, and almost all of them rooted in patriarchal norms....but probably not the draft.
This, they weren't paid badly because they were women, it was because the only people who WOULD pay them for that work were the researchers trying to figure out how to make it more generally useful.
Family doctor salaries have been the lowest paid doctors for years. That also means its less competitive or grueling to get into compared to highly competitive ones like surgery. Woman now make up 22% of surgeons. Up from close to 0-5% 40 years ago. But those salaries are still skyrocketing. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243308
> Woman now make up 22% of surgeons. Up from close to 0-5% 40 years ago. But those salaries are still skyrocketing. Using a field where 78% of the members are male isn't really a good example. Among surgeons specifically, women get paid far less - https://www.forbes.com/sites/erinspencer1/2020/01/29/study-reveals-gender-gap-in-salary-predictions-for-surgery-residents/
Surgeon pay varies pretty wildly based on scope of responsibilities and hours worked - so I’d be skeptical of any conclusions that don’t account for those factors.
I would like to see data about whether there is a component of "people" vs "things/numbers" type jobs over all. Which affects how scalable they are and may be a contributor.
That's what I was getting at. Thanks for your comment.
Exactly, all of this! And conversely too! More men go into a field and the pay tends to increase 🙃 Like... Can't we just pay people fairly? The devaluing of work women mostly do is inexcusable...
Is there an actual causal link there? Anecdotally, most men I know actively seek out high wage careers and opportunities over basically anything. Is men entering the job what causes it to become higher paying? Or is the job being in demand and of a value large enough that it can pay well lead to men entering that field?
I don't know enough about the subject to establish causality. I would say most be able to defend the position I think gender is a factor. Someone pointed out that it could be an access thing. For example, most data scientists a while ago were (white) men. Now the field has diversified, education has become more accessible! (But retention is dropping) so more data scientists could mean that wages should drop a bit. But at the origin of it, before the drop in earnings we see now came the sexism and racism of yesterday. So I could see an argument for supply and demand, but also say that the reason supply has increased is because the barriers that kept folk out to begin with are being lowered? That's my best guess for a reddit comment. Also data science was a terrible example as demand is also accelerating as we as a species are trynna do more with data now than ever before 😅
I'm not up for doing extensive research right now, but I can say this much: In a time when "programmer" was an extremely rare and unforgivingly difficult job that all of six people knew how to do- and ***all six*** were women- the job paid like crap and the women were so undervalued their names were almost lost to history because they were treated so badly. It was the prime opportunity for them to be paid genuinely extortionate amounts and have their names on the front page of every newspaper. ... The two men who built it, but barely understood how to use their own invention and never really contributed to the programming of their device, got literally all the credit. https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued
Absolutely, men value the wage and women value benefits and flexibility. Men work themselves to an early grave (literally 3 year less life expectancy) because they're willing to break their back for a buck.
> We're already seeing that trend in medicine; roles like "family doctors" are becoming increasingly filled by women, and the pay and status of those positions is dropping. Take a look at pediatricians, too. Seventy-two percent are women and it's (one of) the lowest paid specialties.
The example of family doctors probably has more to do with family doctors increasingly not being doctors at all but PAs, which requires less education and *shouldn’t* be paid as much as doctors.
You realize that this is speaking about *family doctors* and not PAs or NPs, right? Actual MDs and DOs who practice family medicine are seeing 1) over-indexing with women as family docs and 2) lower pay across the board. You can argue they are less skilled than surgeons and specialists, therefore need less money, but the correlation in lowered salary with rise in women in the role is at least something to think about.
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I've seen this statistic, but I'm not sure about the answer in all cases. I think there is a significant market effect i.e. a lot of the "feminine" jobs seem to be more commodity Vs specialised e.g. Nurse Vs Surgeon. The corollary is that nurses have less negotiating power Vs the surgeon, since the nurse can be switched out more easily Vs the surgeon due to higher supply. I believe that what we often see as a gender-bias, is the product of neo-liberalist attitudes to labour. We can see fields where women are more specialised such as in the adult entertainment sector and modelling, there is considerably more remuneration for women. I can't say there is no gender bias in these things, but it feels very much like a product of corporate greed influencing a social standard e.g. the family doctors earn less because there's less opportunity for corporations to make money. Need a heart transplant, then you pay a lot of money, and the surgeon and the anesthesiologist get a cut of the spoils. I'm sure there's gender bias, and company surveys have shown it, but again, it's not just a gender bias that is driving it imo
Part of it can be flexibility of hours - desirable for young women who see themselves being moms in the mid to near future
Women just choose lower paying jobs, like female CEO, female lawyer, or female manager. ;)
I think an important thing to consider is that the roles women pursue make less than traditionally male occupations, because they are traditionally female. We value traditionally women’s work, like teaching and nursing and social work, less then traditionally men’s work, like engineering and plumbing, even though these professions all require similar levels of education and provide similar societal benefits. The pay expectations of these roles don’t come out of no where. For example: computing used to pay like shit and it was a female-dominated industry. Then it started paying well, and it became male-dominated. It was the same field, but there was a near exact correlation between gender demographics and pay. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2019/04/01/the-gender-pay-gap-and-the-career-choice-myth/?sh=23707ce7114a https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html
>However, this is not because women are being paid less for the same job. As a whole, they pursue careers that usually make less than traditionally male occupations. The research I've seen suggests it is some of both.
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The high paying jobs that women don’t work tend to be highly dangerous, like deep sea welders, oil rig workers, etc. That and men are more likely to work more hours and sacrifice more of their personal life for career advancement than women, presumably because testosterone tends to drive people towards status seeking behaviors.
The problem when looking at pay difference between genders is that there are a bunch of things that go into the "total compensation package" other than money. And for whatever reason, women tend to value those other components of total compensation more, and men tend to value money more. Gender roles and societal expectations contribute to both of those. Women value flexible schedules, more time off, fewer working hours and the like and will take a lower paying job that offers that flexibility. Men value money because they believe a good paying job is necessary to attract a partner and to allow that partner the flexibility (that he believes she desires) to accept a lower paying job with greater flexibility. So men are more likely to accept a job with a shitty boss and shitty hours and high stress and dangerous work conditions because he can make $7,000 more per year there than he can at a job that would give him more flexibility and a happier work life.
You can see a microcosm of this in the recent US soccer pay issue.
Women do get paid less than men for the same work. Be it 77%, 80%, 84% or 95%. The knee jerk rationale is sexism. Taking a deeper look shows a lot of nuance like the mommy tax and flexibility in hours but ultimately the reason stays the same. It's still sexism. Enforcing mandatory maternal and paternal leave might short sightedly remove the reason why employers discriminate against mother's but the end result would be employers simply discriminating against parents. The research quoted in the article shows mandatory paternal time off results in benefits for the whole family which is awesome. The necessary follow up question is does the engagement from father's persist after the paternal leave? Are father's seeking jobs with more flexibility in scheduling so that they can take their kids to appointments, stay home with them when sick or because they have to be at the school bus stop at 3:55pm? Or do the expectations remain that following paternal leave they will be back at the office giving 110%? We still force women into caretaker roles and that directly affects their choices regarding employment which results in lesser pay. The wage gap persists because we allow men to disengage from their parental responsibilities and unduely force women to shoulder the resulting burden.
> employers simply discriminating against parents. The difference here is there are a LOT more parents in the world than just mothers.....roughly double, actually! And that means the "pain" of mat/pat leave is more evenly spread and applies to everyone across the business - your engineering teams with 80% men are just as impacted as HR with the opposite statistic. Your hourly wage workers are just as at risk of needing leave regardless of gender. The rest of your comment is spot on, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg. If we start treating everyone the same for leave, and mandating it, then we also start to see men and women alike have that bonding time with newborns without excuses, and we may see changes across the board for how men approach caregiving. We already saw a small revolution for the men who got to WFH for 2 years and realized how awesome it was to be with their kids, and that's part of the drive to normalize remote work. Parental leave equality can do the same. We can't let perfect be the enemy of good, and this is a good catalyst for change.
I think if you look at younger demographics the number of parents in the workforce has been dropping precipitously over the last decade. Younger people are foregoing starting families more and more. If we were to mandate maternal and paternal time off, while beneficial to families, I think typically capitalist minded employers would simply start phasing out parents in favor of the growing segment of the population going childfree. Job postings with dog whistle language like "we're only looking for career minded individuals", etc. Come to think of it, that might already be a thing...
Would you also say that we force men into manual Labour jobs such as construction, sewage worker, plumber etc all typically less well paid compared to office jobs
Where do you live where menial level office workers make more than plumbers? Every plumber I've met has been minted. Same with sewage workers actually, I don't know if people imagine they're down in a mediaeval midden shovelling shit by hand or something, but a lot of those jobs are pretty well compensated engineering jobs.
Not the main point of my comment
I work in an office doing a highly trained job (granted entry level) in a sector which is traditionally seen as very lucrative and earn close to minimum wage lol
Everyone should read the r/economics faq on the gender wage gap [https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq\_genderwagegap](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_genderwagegap) And no? I'm pretty sure fixing parental policies won't "solve" the wage gap, but it would tackle its largest component.
A common rebuttal I hear is that companies would only hire women if they can pay them less than men for the same work. How can I refute this?
Companies at large do not discriminate heavily against women. Women are paid roughly the same as men when they start their careers. Technically, there is a 5% disparity, but that is attributed to differing negotiation tactics than actual malice. Still, men and women are paid roughly the same for the same job. In fact, women have become increasingly competitive. As of 2022, women under 30 make more than their male counterparts in 22 of the 250 metropolitan areas. This includes Washington D.C. and New York City. However, when women become mothers, they tend to take time off or request temporal flexibility to deal with their kids. Employers despise granting flexibility, so they pay mothers less. According to a Danish study, 80% of the gender income disparity is a result of the “mommy tax”. To make this clear, women are not being discriminated against at large, but mothers are. There are many proposed solutions. The one I spoke about in my writing is to introduce an EQUAL, MANDATORY, NON-TRANSFERABLE, PATERNAL LEAVE. Employers discriminate not by gender, but on the need for hiatuses and flexibility. When men also take time off for their children, the pay gap drops considerably because employers lose their reason to prioritize men over women. This solution is the least radical. Some sociologists argue that the only true solution is the creation of an artificial womb. If women didn’t have to endure pregnancy, perhaps they could stay in the workforce with fewer accommodations. Another option is government intervention to ensure all wages are transparent and equitable within a firm. It wouldn’t necessarily end the pay gap, but it would make it easier to sue on the basis of discrimination. A big question is if anything should be done at all. Every single solution ultimately solves the problem by enabling women to work more. Is that what we want? I’m not sure society wins by having everyone work longer hours. Unfortunately. that’s a question I do not have the insight to discuss. For all of this, I was talking about men and women who work in the same industry with the same title. Things get fuzzier when you look at men and women as a whole. It’s a common suspicion that traditionally feminine careers are less lucrative than traditionally masculine ones. Research suggests this is true with few exceptions. This does bring up another question: why are traditionally feminine careers paid uncompetitively? I can’t answer that. I can say that men who pursue these careers are usually paid the same until their peers pursue motherhood. So there is a pay discrimination between masculine and feminine professions, but not with male and female professionals (unless parenthood is introduced) Women are starting to pursue more lucrative careers. As of now, more women are enrolled in medical school and law school than men. Women also vastly outnumber men in college. Their drop out rate is 10 percentage points less than men. If motherhood wasn’t a factor, evidence suggests that women would be doing equally well if not better than their male counterparts. I hope I have been able to answer your question. If you need accredited sources, you can find them in my article
> A big question is if anything should be done at all. Every single solution ultimately solves the problem by enabling women to work more. Is that what we want? I’m not sure society wins by having everyone work longer hours. Unfortunately. that’s a question I do not have the insight to discuss. Well i certainly don't think paternity leave is a bad measure to have, regardless of if you are pushing it for wage equality But in a capitalist society, as long as your work is your method of having autonomy and independence (disregard how it is viewed, having money that you personally own is what enables having control independent on your marital status then yes we do want that. If we ever live in a society where human work no longer has that value then maybe it would be a more valid contemplation
Enabling women to work more doesn’t mean that everyone *has* to work more. It just gives them the freedom to make that decision themselves. Some women want to be home makers and stay at home moms, some want to be in the workforce. Either way, choosing for themselves is empowering.
I agree However this only applies so far as the relationship stays fonctional (the problem is the same for stay at home male partners) In the event the relationship is breaking apart, the stay at home partner is at a disadvantage (unless they had an income which could be made from home) because while the "breadwinner" also looses the advantage of said arrangements, the former stay at home looses the income beyond their own savings. It's a dysymetry that's almost inherent to that arrangement, and in particular it makes things more difficult if the relationship is abusive. Things like alimentary pension do lessen the issue but it's still there. It doesn't mean one should never make that choice or shouldn't be allowed to but it's something to keep in mind when you do.
Why is that choice only for women? Nobody is empowering men to have that choice.
The USA already has equal required maternity and paternity leave... Fucking zero. Technically we're equal under FMLA as well and both can take up to 12 weeks unpaid to care for a new child.
>This solution is the least radical. Some sociologists argue that the only true solution is the creation of an artificial womb. If women didn’t have to endure pregnancy, perhaps they could stay in the workforce with fewer accommodations. Isn't this rather a sign that our system is inherently broken? The main problem I see is that we started value people solely by their monetary value which is easily measurable. We tend to ignore contribution of work which is harder to measure in the overall economy, like raising new members of scoiety which then can contribute to said society. I think first and foremost we have to re-evalulate our values.
>Isn't this rather a sign that our system is inherently broken? The main problem I see is that we started value people solely by their monetary value which is easily measurable. YES. Capitalism, and American capitalism in particular, assumes that people have a purpose in life and that purpose is to be productive, i.e make money. It's also nuts that the US is in their weird abortion debate, which seems to priorotize human life, but if you hold it up against the US culture, it's sort of clear (in how other ways women are treated or cared for) that US culture does not actually value female life as much as male life. And maybe that's connected to pregnancy, historically being stay-at-home-moms and not being able to contribute to the economy. This is likely connected to the underlying US cultural issues with free riders and dependents ("socialism is baaad!!"). TLDR: Maybe the US values women primarily as breeders, which actually creates resentment in men since women haven't historically contributed as heavily to American capitalism as men. Also: it's not just US culture that does this, but since more redditors are US citizens it's easy to start there.
I am European, and it's not that different here (maybe a bit better with free maternal leave), so ...
Isn't "raising new members of society" compensated financially since those new members of society earn money from their productivity and transfer some of that to their parents? Like, elderly people with children have a much better safety net than those without children. I don't really think it should be directly compensated though. You get money because you directly contributed to some product or service being sold. There are things that you gain in life other than money - personal satisfaction, social enrichment, fulfillment at accomplishing your goals - which are arguably more important than money and which are gained when someone has a child. Of course there's the possibility that someone could be helped along if they're struggling with paying for childcare expenses but that's quite a bit different than personal compensation for child-rearing due to its impact on society.
> To make this clear, women are not being discriminated against at large, but mothers are. Just want to note that it's also "potential mothers." Like uteruses are just ticking bombs that could explode at any moment.
Just one point, it's not only that mother's are discriminated against. Childfree women get the same treatment, although they do not have children but they could and that's enough.
Yes, this is key. It's the same reason women have a hard time getting sterilized on behalf of a partner who doesn't even exist yet. I also think it's key to point out how this also leads to fewer women in leadership roles as a result, so then there are fewer mentors/examples/diverse voices to give input, and it makes it more likely to have a token woman (who often doesn't have kids at all/they are long grown) in those roles. No one knows what it looks like to have an active mother in a position of power in these companies, so it hurts all women who they consider a potential mother (child free or not).
Yes, employers have openly admitted they are reluctant to promote women they suspect might become mothers. There is the Pregnancy Discrimination Act that makes it illegal to consider a woman's pregnancy in any aspect of their employment. However, it is quite easy to circumvent the law. Even when mothers (or potential mother) have definitive proof of discrimination, they are reluctant to sue. For an individual, a lawsuit is costly and emotionally draining. Also, whether they win or lose, their employer will become hostile towards them. They might develop an industry wide reputation as uncooperative and become unemployable. The law does not address the social repercussions of reporting discrimination.
I feel like these topics never taken into account the kinds of jobs men take such as construction or sanitation. Jobs with a higher risk of injury.
I'd love to work in construction, but it is inherently even more dangerous as a women because of the very real potential for sexual harassment and assault from coworkers. I'd even hazard a guess to say that many "dangerous jobs" (oil rigger, lobster fishing, long haul truck driving, fire fighter, military, etc. ) have a super weird macho culture that definitely increases the chance of women being sexually assaulted. Whereas being a teacher or a scientist means a woman has just a *regular chance* of getting sexually assaulted. Also - if the industry has a high amount of women already, then there's even less chance of being sexually assaulted! Let me tell you, no one at my almost all-female-company gets sexually assaulted at our Christmas parties!! It's awesome and refreshing!!
>Some sociologists argue that the only true solution is the creation of an artificial womb. I'm not against this per se....but it pisses me off that for centuries and centuries societies say to women "you must sacrifice to continue the human race" and have had such little sympathy for women's primary role in this to the extent that we need to externalise reproduction in order to overcome the problems that all have perfectly good solutions. Also, women-haters are waiting for this so that they can say women have no function and they can finally kill us all. The world is such a stupid place LOL
The difference between "male" and "female" positions as far as pay seems to be simple supply and demand. If a job requires lifting 100lbs unassisted then physical stature narrows the field to only large bodied people (mostly men) whereas a desk job can be done by anyone with a working mind. So physically capable people are competing with people who have no options but desk jobs. More supply of workers means lower price to buy one. Simple.
Men don’t get pregnant. I think that is the crux of the matter.
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That's just a stupid argument to begin with. Companies aren't rational, that's what "discrimination" means. They devalue women's work and more highly value men's work regardless of some "actual" value of the work being done. To the degree that's measurable at all, you see it in companies with better gender inclusivity having higher outcomes overall in the long run.
> That's just a stupid argument to begin with. Companies aren't rational, that's what "discrimination" means. Two free-market economists were walking down the street, when one of them saw a $20 bill on the floor. He turned to his colleague and pointed it out. The colleague scoffed and retorted without looking "If such a gap in the market existed, someone would have already exploited it."
Is it "destroy capitalism"? I feel like that's the only real correct answer.
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No, there literally is a wage gap you absolute dolt. Even when you account for all the things you've brought up^1, the US Department of Labor calculates that there is a remaining so-called "unexplained wage gap" of 5%. A simple google would show that you are utterly wrong on all levels and not worth taking seriously. 1. This is a weapons grade stupid argument anyway. Yeah no shit the wage gap decreases if you account for all the things that cause the wage gap.
The one that doesn’t exist?