Feminism?
- Thread starter FiftyBelowZero
- 559 comments
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- Happyville
- WhoosierGirl
I would love to live in a world where this is true, even in a 100% male workforce this would not happen. How many of you men have left a job because you where not paid as much as a less productive coworker?
Do you walk into your bosses office and ask him if you can look at payroll? How do you know what your coworkers are being paid?
- 33,155
- Hammerhead Garage
That's what unions and collective bargaining are for.
- 11,119
- Central Coast, NSW
- Com_Fox5
- EelX 5
but why though? Was the less productive coworker working longer hours, was he more aggressive (or in this case passive aggressive) and asking for pay rises. What was his job position, was he in a more higher paying position? Was this a job that paid by how much work you did instead of hours or any other kind of wage?
- 13,859
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- Neomone
Or was this just a job where he happened to be older and mailed it in every day, not giving them a reason to fire him but not excelling either. And despite (or because of) being younger, smarter, and doing twice the amount of work you still earned 75% of his wage.
Wage disparities rarely make sense. Companies try to keep wages secret purely so that they can pull this kind of BS. And it apparently works, because people like you think that companies are actually trying to pay according to some principle of fairness instead of simply the least amount of money they can get away with.
You'll see when you enter the professional workforce. It's not fair and it rarely pretends to be.
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- Com_Fox5
- EelX 5
While paying by age is a thing (I know I got a sudden pay rise in my old job when I got older). Problem is that most jobs don't do wages based on how good you're going, you can work as hard as you can and be paid less than others but it isn't because you're getting less wages because you're women and any form of minority. There are other factors into this. This more proves an earnings gap than a wage gap which I won't debate as I think there is an earnings gap.
Another problem with this wage gap is that it's actually illegal (at least in America) to actually pay someone less based on your gender ever since 1963 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_of_1963 you can actually take legal action if you believe the reason why you're being paid less is because the company doesn;t want to pay you less because of discrimination and not because of any other factor.
I want to address this point:
I agree that they'll try to pay people as less as possible, that's why immigrants taking peoples jobs has been a problem but how does this prove some sort of wage gap, I think it supports the contrary as if you could get away with giving a women less wages why would you ever look to hire a man if he'd cost more than it would be to ever hire a women (or any other minority) if you get away with paying them less?
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- Neomone
You replied to a post that said "How many of you men have left a job because you where not paid as much as a less productive coworker?" with "But why though?"
Now you're not debating it? Ok. Whatever.
Why are you bringing the gendered thing back into a response to a post that was demonstrating that unfair wages are also a non-gendered problem? I'm not sure what you're arguing against here. You were trying to make the point earlier that somehow the higher paid colleague was earning those extra wages in some non-obvious fashion, now you're saying that yeah, companies are as unfair as they can get away with.
As for why there's a wage gap...just think about it. It'll come to you. What differences would a company see from equally skilled men and women? There are some significant ones.
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- Windsor, Ontario, Canada
- Johnnypenso
A very common scenario IME in a unionized setting.
Logically then, if they can get away with paying women less, then why aren't businesses filling up their payrolls with women to reduce costs and increase profits? The unemployment rate among men must be huge in the western world with so much cheap female labour available.
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- Spurgy777
The bonus is, if you just hire women, they can't be paid less that their male counterparts because there aren't any
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- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
I'm not sure I'd call that sound logic.
- 22,551
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- HamiltonMP427
So people really believe that they get an hourly wage or salary difference based on gender? Even though if discovered it'd be breaking various laws and thus cause a potential larger payout then just paying the correct wage in the first place?
I understand the average over time earnings being different but there are many variables to that and it's not simply because women are women and men are men. I don't see too much of that being talked about though.
I understand the average over time earnings being different but there are many variables to that and it's not simply because women are women and men are men. I don't see too much of that being talked about though.
- 11,119
- Central Coast, NSW
- Com_Fox5
- EelX 5
I was asking why would it be the case to be less paid, you replied with companies being cheap and are able to pull BS which while I can agree discrimination isn't one of them.
I'm trying to argue that companies can't actually pay wages different based on discrimination now I might've misread the beginning of the discussion I tend to do that but I've hardly seen any evidence of a wage gap based on discrimination again minority. An earnings gap yes but thats not from discrimination.
As for your questions, if there was a wage gap if a company saw an equally skilled men and women, they would obviously choose the women because they can pay her less than the man but this doesn't happen...
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- Johnnypenso
I'm also not aware of any cases of widespread wage discrimination being brought forth after hours worked, chosen jobs/trades/careers are chosen, experience, age and other factors are taken into account.
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- 9,401
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- mustafur
The problems around the Gender wage gap theory is it relies on poor statistics to make it stand up, i would like it if more things where accounted for to make up the conclusion and also making sure the roles they are comparing are identical.
I've seen ones based on the real estate industry as a whole only for you to realise males dominate the much higher earning sales roles compared to the clerical roles more dominated by women.
Now fixing that requires no fix because at the end of the day it's a persons choice on where they want to work and social scientists need to understand this.
You can lead a Horse to Water but you can't make them drink it.
I've seen ones based on the real estate industry as a whole only for you to realise males dominate the much higher earning sales roles compared to the clerical roles more dominated by women.
Now fixing that requires no fix because at the end of the day it's a persons choice on where they want to work and social scientists need to understand this.
You can lead a Horse to Water but you can't make them drink it.
- 13,859
- Adelaide
- Neomone
I should be clear that I'm not personally 100% sold that there's a wage gap as commonly portrayed in the media. I happen to work in the sciences, which gets a lot of stick for being non-inclusive of women, and yet I don't really see it if you put aside the hangovers from 50+ years ago when women were chained to the stovetop. When I went to university the course was 60:40 in favour of women, and while the real job market is probably 60:40 the other way it's not exactly a big deal. While these things are never going to be equal, I'm not sold that at least in my neck of the woods that they're so inequal that they're worth making a fuss about.
On the other hand, I do work with the people who make the financial decisions for the company. They do think of things like the fact that if you're hiring graduates then a woman is more likely to abandon her career to raise her children. That a woman will likely take extended maternity leave several times over the course of her career. That investing in training and resources is a greater risk. Whether these things are true or not is sort of beside the point, this is the sort of things that they think and why they might choose to employ a man over a woman. Even were it to seem more expensive, to the company the salary is only the start of the costs that they have to pay for an employee.
It's actually one of those things where I'd love to see them standardise maternity/paternity leave across the genders. Not because women don't require more recovery time after pushing a bowling ball out their wazoo, but because if it's standardised then it's not a weapon that can be used against them. I think at the moment there's a lot of financial decisions that are based either on governmental edicts or cultural statistics that lead to a greater disparity between the genders than there should be.
TLDR: Just because I don't personally see it in my trade, doesn't mean that there aren't ways that a company could push a wage gap and call it good for business.
- 767
- Happyville
- WhoosierGirl
Union workers only make up 11% of the workforce in the United States.
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2532788
Conclusions and Relevance Among physicians with faculty appointments at 24 US public medical schools, significant sex differences in salary exist even after accounting for age, experience, specialty, faculty rank, and measures of research productivity and clinical revenue.
An interesting paragraph from this article,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-better-pay/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.7afb05f85134
In a 2005 study, Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of “Women Don’t Ask,” famously showed people videos of men and women asking for a raise, using the same words. Among male viewers, the men’s negotiating style won approval, while the women registered as too demanding.
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- Com_Fox5
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http://blog.acton.org/archives/9291...l-a-myth-and-a-potentially-dangerous-one.html
Thats the most recent one I found, just to try to be up to date.
That would make sense. As to why if it was real men would still be hired.
Problem is that (although I might've missed it) is that it doesn't show how they calculated the different age, experience, specialty, faculty rank and measure of research for each individual man and woman to make it equal and feels more like just a massive indifference in the fields that are majority women and majority men which has been proven.
Same words but according to this doesn't apply different tone which can be seen as too demanding if done wrong or how have both worked to get the raise which can also be seen as too demanding if you the employer doesn't think you deserve the raise, also doesn't apply for where each of the places are.
Even still, this doesn't prove any wage gap and more proves an earnings gap.
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- Neomone
You might have missed it because that's an abstract, not the full journal article. Generally you have to pay money to get access to the full article and see anything beyond the basic outline and conclusions. There are ways to obtain access without paying, if you belong to a university for example, or at some major libraries. There are even ways to pirate such things, but I'm not about to describe those here.
Again, you should probably read the study before you start making assumptions about how they did their job wrong.
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- Com_Fox5
- EelX 5
I did read both studys, the first one showed how much each is getting different pay but it doesn't explain how it was able to get the mean through the different fields which is what I find interesting. Though like you said if it is revealed behind a pay wall, it would be interesting but I'm not going to pay or pirate that information out.
For the other one, it talks about how the girl who went to ask a raise "wanted to throw up" showing that she wasn't at all confident which could lead to a factor of the refusal not just her gender.
- 13,859
- Adelaide
- Neomone
I think you missed the meaning of "read the study". Reading the abstract is not reading the study. One does not describe detailed methods in the abstract, as it's purpose is to be a concise summary of the paper.
I don't think you understand what a scientific paper is or what information one contains. If you would like to browse some freely available papers to get an idea, you can look at https://arxiv.org/. It is a pre-print hosting service where authors may upload their papers if they wish to allow unrestricted public access. It does tend to host mainly pretty hard science and math however.
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I don't see a study in that article, or linked from it - I don't see anything that all that attempts to fully account for the gap (which is what I asked for). The most it does is the author gives two arguments (without backing them up with evidence) for why they think discrimination isn't a factor:
1) If discrimination was a factor, it would be obvious - it isn't obvious, therefore it isn't a factor (what?)
2) No one has proved discrimination is definitely a factor - therefore it definitely isn't (the same fallacy Johnnypenso was probably getting at above).
To be clear, with what you said above you weren't just being sceptical towards claims made about the wage gap - which many people in this thread have reasonably done - you've made a claim of your own ("it isn't because you're getting less wages because you're women and any form of minority"). You need to have something to back that up, just refuting the opposite claim isn't enough.
When claims have been made/pointed to that you don't agree with, you've been insistent on wanting the full detail on how those arguments are being made, and how studies are accounting for the wage gap (perfectly reasonable). But going by what you linked it above it seems that for claims you do agree with, that standard is dropped, and a handful of arguments that feel right will do. If so that would be a clear double-standard.
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- WhoosierGirl
That is an example were female physicians made up 34% of the workforce, this is were female RN's (Me
) make up 93% of the workforce.http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2208795
Huh? Here it is again
In a 2005 study, Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of “Women Don’t Ask,” famously showed people videos of men and women asking for a raise, using the same words. Among male viewers, the men’s negotiating style won approval, while the women registered as too demanding.
This was an experiment where she showed random people videos of men and woman asking for a raise using the same words. She found the the male viewers thought the women were too demanding compared to the men., this had nothing to do with deserving a raise or where they worked.
It's interesting to me that the part the article that stood out the most to you was a woman's nervousness. What stood out to me was....
Research shows when companies remove ambiguity from wage-setting, such as establishing clear pay ranges for workers at every level, disparities between the sexes start to disappear.
Labor economists at the University of Chicago found in a 2012 study when “salary negotiable” appears on a job listing, women negotiate more than men. The opposite was true, however, when the phrase vanished.
Conventional wisdom, the kind that climbs bestseller lists, suggests women in pay talks should be kinder, gentler, a team player.
“But the emphasis should be on the employer,” said economist Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Women shouldn’t have to contort themselves into pretzels and go through all these social gyrations to be taken seriously.”
Boston’s lesson plans don’t encourage women to embrace stereotypical femininity in pay talks. Its success rides on one persistent finding: Women will negotiate as much as men, even harder than men, if they receive social permission to do it.
Danoff
Premium
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...with the obvious take-home conclusion being what... that everyone is sexist?
You can't just take words and transpose them between individuals with different characteristics and expect them to be received identically. We have eyes, we profile, we intuitively understand the statistics of what we've experienced in our lives and we know that if we hear something coming from one person it fits our experiences and if we hear the same thing coming from someone else it's way outside our experiences.
Ask yourself this, if one were to insert this premise, would it be true:
"If men and women are received differently using the same script, one more negatively than the other, the person judging them differently is demonstrating harmful sexism".
Let's take it a step further:
"If men and women are received differently using the same script, one more negatively than the other, the person judged more negatively could not have done anything differently to be received in the same way".
To adjust that to the current situation:
"There is nothing those women could have said to receive approval of their negotiating style".
True?
I won't walk up to a couple with a 4 year old girl and say "you have a beautiful daughter"... because they'd think I'm a pedophile. My wife could do that and they'd love it. It's not because they hate men, and it's not because I'm incapable of expressing that sentiment. It's because men don't generally express things using the exact same words as women, and when you try, it isn't received the same because the sexes are not identical.
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- Neomone
No, but one could presumably craft a relatively gender neutral set of phrases. I mean, they're talking about working salary which isn't really a gendered thing. If it is true that there are some things that can't be said as a particular gender when talking about salary, I don't think that's particularly a good sign. This isn't Japanese where there's explicitly gendered language. One should be able to say "Boss, I'd like a raise, and I'm worth it because x, y and z" and have the speakers gender be irrelevant.
Danoff
Premium
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- Mile High City
I don't think so. Your premise is that there exists a phrase about this particular subject which should be received identically from men and women from someone who is not sexist. I'm not sure that premise is true. I'm equally not certain that that phrase, if it exists, was used in the study.
I agree with you that if someone says "the stress analysis revealed that the margin of safety for this particular cross-member is 2.5x" should be taken equivalently from men and women. But something like "I'd like" is a bit more loaded. I don't think men and women express that they want something from someone else in exactly the same way using exactly the same words.
In my experience (and now we're fully outside the realm of science), men tend to use harsher language than women. I tone down my interpretation (overall, not for every individual) of statements from men as compared to women. That's not because I think women have to or should communicate in a particular way, it's because, for whatever reason, they seem to choose to communicate differently. So if a man says "I'd like" something, I'll interpret a blunt statement like that with a little less severity than a woman saying the same thing. This is true if I know basically nothing about those people. Every piece of information I get, and every interaction I have, adjusts that calibration for that individual. If I've spent even 10 minutes with someone I'm already interpreting them much differently.
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- WhoosierGirl
Is that what you think my take-home conclusion would be? Are you using prior experience to make that assumption?
Why not? I would think it would be very reasonable to think one could separate a prior life experience from a current one in a professional manner. If a female and male worker came to you both asking for a raise and both had identical reasons and pitches, why would you need to profile them? Why would prior experiences with either sex matter? They would either deserve the raise on merit or not, do you agree?
In the case of the study, if you believe prior experiences plays into why there is a difference, if you eliminate all "ism's" what do you think the "experiences" are that make someone favor one sex more than another?
No, all they did was give an opinion, I would love to know why it swings toward the negative for us. Sure we could but, what should a woman say or do differently than a man to get a positive response? I'm not asked to do anything differently than my male coworker while working, why should I have to change tack when asking for a raise?
How is "I'd like" a bit more loaded coming from a female?
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