What's inside the gap?

TheTinMenBlog · 2022-12-09T13:13:29+00:00

The Pay Gap.

It’s where our baffling, often frustrating but always good fun, journey into understanding men and women’s issues begins.

It is in many ways, the poster child of gender equality as a whole, and the issue on which so many gender equality advocates cut their teeth and first dip their toes.

Its appeal is obvious; a premise that is short, sweet and outrage inducing.

“Women are paid less than men!” The familiar slogan I continually hear.

And whilst it is true (at the median), to understand the gap better, we must investigate… why?

Which women are paid less?

What hours do they work?

Do women do as much overtime?

What jobs and industry sectors are women disproportionately in?

Do they work more dangerous jobs?

How does this gap intersect with parenthood?

These are all good questions, honest and well meaning questions, but ones I rarely hear asked.

These questions are not intended to antagonise, they are in fact, essential.

As how can we close a gap, if we don’t know what’s causing it?

Regardless, the widely misunderstood pay gap continues to be used to advance public policy agendas, to shape discourse, cause outrage and finds itself at the heart of campaigning.

So let’s take a closer look at the gap, and the fine print beneath.

~

[1]

[2]

US Census Bureau

Images by Christopher Burns, Adam Nir and Gradienta on Unsplash

niblizx · 2022-12-09T13:46:18+00:00

Should also add the role of high paying jobs where workers can not easily substitute for each other (i.e. lawyers at elite law firms) in making it challenging for people with primary childcare duty to maintain the same wage growth as those without: https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explained

Funny enough, recently, women in US cities like NYC and DC make more than men.

webernicke · 2022-12-10T01:04:04+00:00

Chuckled at the pay gap being the "final boss of the Patriarchy."

The Patriarchy is an endless run game to feminists

Cerberus11x · 2022-12-09T18:35:57+00:00

How do you guys hit it out of the park every time.

frackingfaxer · 2022-12-10T04:56:07+00:00

I also speculate that a lot of the pay gap has to do with the gender gap in high-paying professions being more pronounced in the old generations. We will doubtlessly see these gaps narrow significantly as these older men retire.

For instance, in Canada, men are around 54% of lawyers. However, among newer/younger lawyers, those having practiced for 5 years or less, the gender divide is pretty much even. Where I live, in Ontario, women are actually the majority of these newer lawyers. Therefore, gender parity in this respect may just be a matter of waiting for the older mostly male lawyers to retire.

boomboxspence · 2022-12-09T17:49:06+00:00

Isn't there also a pay gap for short men?

danielnogo · 2022-12-10T12:43:34+00:00

You would think feminist and women would be happy to hear that the pay gap is a myth, after all, doesn't that mean they've won and that they've achieved equality that they claim to want? I think that about all the myths and fabrications and misleading claims feminist make, wouldn't it make you happy to learn that women are actually equal to men and that nothing is holding you back? What you will find though, is that nothing makes them unhappier than to hear they are actually equal. They will hold onto these myths til the end of time, for myriad reasons, one of them is that feminist that make their living from feminism would be out of a job if they had nothing to complain about. Two, women that use the patriarchy as a way to turn themselves into a victim can use it as an excuse for why they haven't achieved what they feel they should have. After all, if there's a conspiracy of men out there just itching to pay you less and hold you back in your career, nothing can be your fault.

Tevorino · 2022-12-09T21:38:04+00:00

As always, you are a master of the art of presentation.

Many of us know how to put together a sound argument, that would convince a reasonable, fair-minded individual, who is fully literate and has a good attention span. Yet, those personal qualities are not requirements for holding an opinion or for voting, nor are they particularly common these days.

It takes a special skill to distill an argument down to just its most essential points, and then present them in a way that quickly, and powerfully, gets them across to those with short attention spans and high bias against the point being communicated. I admire and envy your talent for doing this.

Moist-Quiet-647 · 2022-12-10T11:06:52+00:00

Mild disagreement here.

Everything this infographic says is true, but the feminist counter-argument to these facts is that adjusting for "job title, education, experience, industry, job level, and hours" as well as marital status and number of children, doesn't mean much because the gender gap in those areas is also a consequence of patriarchy.

I'm not sure if we can answer that, but I think the wage gap is a relatively minor issue within the gender inequality debate, we should much rather focus on why money entails status for men but less so for women, or the general wage gap rather than the gender wage gap, especially the extremes of it (the super-rich and the super-poor).

Georgist_Muddlehead · 2022-12-09T17:43:54+00:00

How important would a wage gap be anyway? In many marriages, the husband earns a lot more than his wife. He is quite likely to earn a higher rate of pay and he is likely to work full-time for most of his life, whereas his wife is likely to do part-time or no work for some years whilst she raises the children. Is there a consumption gap in these marriages? Many things they share (e.g. the house they live in, the spending on their children). When it comes to discretionary spending on each other, does this tend to be unequal? (In the marriages in my extended family, there was a big earnings gap, but not a big consumption gap)

DarkFlyingApparatus · 2022-12-10T10:39:39+00:00

''The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.'

This is exactly the problematic view on why talking about the wage gap is still important. It goes further than this.

Because yes, the wage gap often gets wrongly interpreted as 82 to 1 for equal jobs/ experience, but that is not what the wage gap is really about. It is to show that on average women still earn less than men which means on average they are still less financially independent.

Reasons for this wage gap are these so called ''individual choices'' that are still made today.
But are these choices really made from a free and equal societies view? Or are there other reasons behind these choices that influence this difference between men and women that can be addressed?

For example:
The societal biases of ''men are better at technology and logical thinking'', ''women are better with people'' still plays a rol in unconsciously teaching them to children (pushing them towards certain toys and interests) to recruiting adults.
This results in more men in ''male jobs'' which on average pay more than the more traditional ''female jobs.

Therefore, in a marriage between a man and a women there is a significant chance the husband already earns more than the wife. The best financial decision for them as a couple would be fore the woman to work less and take up most of the unpaid household work and childcare (would you look at that, another societal bias that women somehow all want this) since the man already gets more per hour. Meanwhile the husband might get a raise at work because he has to support a bigger family now and the wife's career growth rolls to a stop, creating even a bigger ''wage gap'' between them.

Now this would all be fine if all marriages continued happily until death, or if the unconscious gender biases only effected heterosexual married folks. But this is not the case.

The wage gap is a tool to measure the difference in average financial independence differences between men and women. And we should use it as inspiration to look for solutions on closing that gap (Like equal standardized parental leave for example).
Because right now we are stuck in a loop of biases that get affirmed because of said biases, and yes, this still hurts women.

dr_pepper02 · 2022-12-27T11:00:50+00:00

It’s bit of academic dishonesty, what they do is frame the issue in a way to play to one’s emotions, because before 1963 it was legal to pay a woman less. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits wage discrimination yet feminists never mention that.

Impressive-Strain237 · 2023-05-18T21:16:22+00:00

I don't agree with this. I don't deny the math, but the reasoning behind the numbers is questionable.

Do women choose lower-paying jobs because of innate biological differences between the men and women instead of cultural? Personally, I think it's mostly cultural. But regardless, our society undervalues women's jobs because we undervalue women's labor.

That's not me saying we don't undervalue men in our society in many ways. We do. And the feminist movement doesn't talk about it enough. And that's a serious problem. But I'm not about to diminish the things women go through just because they might diminish what I go through. I'm just not.

Title	What's inside the gap?
Author	TheTinMenBlog
Upvotes	240
Comments	33
Date	December 9, 2022 1:13 PM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/zgx15m/whats_inside_the_gap/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/whats-inside-the-gap.1142328 https://theredarchive.com/post/1142328

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