The Honorable Annabella wrote:
But the original discussion statement that women get paid less as an entire group because they are less productive as an entire group without any evidence and with dismissing gender discrimination as any factor in the pay differential. Not hiring women as a class or promoting them or paying them equal because you believe they will ask for accommodations that men won't despite having no evidence to the contrary is sexism.
Sure. But it's equally sexist to assume that inequalities in pay are purely the result of men not wanting to pay women the same wages for the same quality/quantity of work.
I'll also point out that the statistics that we often here about this are equally "rigged". When you read about womens pay not equaling mens in the same fields, what's often completely missing is the "years in" component of pay. I'll see if I can dig up the study, but IIRC it came up the last time we had this discussion (which was awhile ago and was triggered by some article detailing the gap between wages for men and women). The counterstudy basically showed that the gap could be almost entirely explained purely by calculating the average years on the job differential. As mentioned earlier, men tend to hire into a field and work continuously for their entire careers. So the "average" male working in a given field will always have more total years experience in that field. Working on the assumption that everything else being equal, workers are going to expect (and tend to receive) pay increases each year they work in a given field, this is a significant factor, and one that's completely ignored by the womens rights activists when they argue about pay equality.
That's what I was addressing (and what I assume the earlier posters were touching on as well). While it's certainly reasonable to expect that a woman should be able to take time off to have/raise children, or work shorter hours, or whatever, it's absolutely unreasonable to expect that she be paid exactly the same as someone who's worked continuously in the field the whole time. It's fallacious to simply count up all the men in a given field and all the women in a given field, average their salaries and pounce on the difference in those averages as some sort of "proof" of sexism in the workplace.
We can talk about sexism in our culture as a whole in terms of why women overwhelmingly are the ones impacted by this, but we should *not* blame the employers for their actions, nor push draconian requirements on them in order to correct for it.
Obviously, I agree that a woman with equal skills and equal experience in a field should be paid the same as a man. And from my personal experiences, this is the case (at least in the corporate world). I have never yet seen a woman who wasn't given the same pay and promotion opportunities as the men she worked with. There are plenty of women engineers and managers at the company I work for. However, I can tell you that I've personally known at least 3 women who've taken significant amounts of time off, and/or changed their whole work priorities as a result of having children. I know one woman who was a director about 5 years ago. She'd likely be a VP today, but she choose to take her stock and investment and retire to be a mother. That was her choice. I just ran into another woman in the elevator not 20 minutes ago who took a couple years off to have children and now chooses to only work part time (for the same reason). She's got the same title and position, but you can bet that she's less likely to get promoted as someone who's here full time. She knows this and accepted it as a consequence of her decision.
While I fully agree that sexism in the workplace is a bad thing, I also feel that it's unfair to require businesses to pay one sex more then they'd naturally receive as a result of their own efforts and experience. Your choice to have/raise children should be your choice and your responsibility. The burden of that choice should be born by you and your spouse/SO, not the company that hired you. They expect to receive X amount of labor for Y amount of price. That's the "deal". Insisting that they pay more for one sex then another is also inherently sexist IMO...
Quote:
It isn't about the market. I'll be damned if I will accept being paid according to what an employer imagines about my gender rather than my own merit.
And you're right. If an employer pays you less because you "might" get pregnant, then he's in the wrong and I'll support any women fighting that sort of thing 100%. My problem is that for every one clear case of that sort of gender bias in the workplace, there seems to be a hundred claims of bias across all workplaces based on what I see as some creative statistical interpretations. The "cause" seems to quite often take on a life of it's own that has less to do with ensuring gender equality and more to do with pushing a single groups agenda.
And I'm sorry, but I don't agree with that. Regulate against gender bias? Yes. Punish those guilty of doing that? Absolutely. But manipulating statistics in order to gain power for your cause? Not cool...
