Posted on 11/23/2004 1:23:31 PM PST by Dustin Hawkins
A recent Business Week article solemnly confirmed “it will be 50 years before women achieve equal pay with men and nearly 100 years before they gain equal representation in Congress.” In other words: there they go again.
Perhaps Amey Stone (Business Week senior writer) would offer up some “analysis” as to why this is, especially considering her piece was under Business Week’s variety topic “news analysis.” But, alas, the article was analysis-less and instead offered but a depressing plethora of figures to prove how unfairly women are treated in the workplace, poorly paid compared to their male counterparts, and so on. It’s the story that keeps on giving!
Is it true that women make 76 cents for every dollar a male earns? Yes, probably. Does anyone ever bother to ask the question, now stay with me here, why? Apparently not (or apparently at least not the women who are permitted to “analyze” why women make so much less money than men.)
To start, it may have been nice to mention that these statistics refer to all men (in all jobs) compared to all women (in all jobs) averaged out. But it doesn’t, leaving open the opportunity for crazed feminists to begin fantasizing about the many ways that chauvinistic greedy men are ruining their lives in the workplace, keeping women down, or hiring them for “equal work but less pay.”
The only fair way to analyze the comparable wages of men and women would be to do a full scale study that evaluated: education, skills, experience, training, employment recommendations, and production capabilities. If this were to happen the disparities would be limited, would vary from job to job, and in some industries favor women over men. The limited industry-level studies that have been done have concluded this. But no broad detailed study exists, so questions must be raised about the broad studies that do exist and are cited often (are we listening Amey? Asking questions? Drawing logical conclusions?).
Ok, so why do men have greater earnings than women? Actually, the correct way to phrase the question is: why does the average wage of all men outweigh the average wage of all women? Simply answered, men are willing to work harder, longer, and in more stressful environments than are their “female counterparts.”
More men than women are willing to work 40, 50, or even 60 hour weeks. More men are willing to work long nights, longer weekends, and endless holidays. Men are more aggressive in the workplace, are more money-as-a-goal oriented and have a higher desire to, as one survey asked, “one day be CEO of their company.” (Most women were not inspired to be such). In other words, men want it and women do not. (Pipe down; this does not refer to all women, just the “average” of all women compared to the “average” of all men.)
Women are more sensitive. They would rather be schoolteachers or administrative assistants (secretaries) rather than engineers or businessmen - or for the overly sensitive: “businesswomen”. Those jobs let you go home early. On college campuses, women flock to degrees dealing with the humanities, social services, or education. Men tackle degrees in business, economics, the sciences, and engineering.
Some of those industries do not pay so well, and others pay quite well, but it just so happens that women disproportionately get degrees leading toward jobs of the former sort, and don’t get degrees leading to jobs of the latter sort. It is no ones fault, it is just nature. Women like kids, men like computers. And, rightly or wrongly, the computer industry pays better than the kid industry.
If women disproportionately get degrees for jobs that they know pay less, while men disproportionately get degrees for jobs that they know pay more, it should not strike too many people as odd that men, and here comes the kicker, make more money, on average, than women! Yet every year, somber report after somber report enlightens us all to the fact that the average income of women, who for the most part choose to work in lower paying industries, make less money than men. Can we at least stop acting “surprised” or “saddened” every time this same story resurfaces (and the logical conclusions ignored) and just acknowledge that if women want to “catch up,” what they need is a career change?
Whenever someone sadly notices that women “lag behind” in wages, or in number of CEO’s running a Fortune 500, or in percentage of geeks that make up Silicon Valley, it has less to do with some wild anti-female conspiracy, and more to do with the fact that women just don’t want it enough. Running a corporation, creating software, and making money doesn’t seem to interest women in the way it interests men. Women don’t like the hassle; they want to be home early to be with the kids and tuck them in at night or to watch Oprah. Men will deal with the stress because they like the financial rewards that come with it. Besides, if there was some widespread anti-female conspiracy, we men would be far more creative than mere wage harassment.
Before women's lib all they had to do is bat their eyelashes and the world was theirs. Now they have to work.
If women do the same work as male employees for 76% of the mens' salaries, why don't corporations just fire all their men, hire women, and save 24% on their wage expenses?
I wonder what the statistics are per job, per capita...
i.e. does a woman engineer make less than a male engineer? i highly doubt it or else there would be a flood of law suits, but it would be nice to know.
Interesting survey which backs at least some of what you say indicated that the most important thing to men in their job was power/prestige and to women it was feeling that their work was important. I'll leave it to others to draw conclusions from that. Another interesting dynamic is that kids not only lead women to jobs that have less hours or more flexible hours, they often lead them to leave the workforce for years at a time and then re-enter. While it may seem unfair that a female CPA gets paid less than the male CPA for doing essentially the same work, employers rightfully value employees who have been with them longer. It seems much more fair when you add that the male CPA makes more because he has been there 5 years and has clients that come to his firm because of him and the boss can count on him to be there.
Indeed. In fact the author of this piece missed some other aspects of this issue that he could have mentioned. Women put more pressure on men to go get high-paying jobs than men put on women.
If your wife wanted to quit her IBM job and go be an artist instead, you'd more than likely support her decision, because that's just what guys do. But if a guy wanted to quit his high-paying computer job to go be an artist, the wife would more than likely have the proverbial cow.
Sure there are exceptions, but I think as a general rule this holds true.
Another piece of anecdotal evidence about the pressure that women put on men to earn more than they get: when your buddy tells you he met a new girl, what's the first thing you he gets asked? 90% of the time it's: "What's she look like?"
When your girl pal tells you she met a new guy, what is the 1st thing she is asked 90% of the time? "What's he do?"
look at the Libertarian suing for a recount in Ohio. Definetely stay Neo. Besides, it sounds more cool.
RE: “it will be 50 years before women achieve equal pay with men and nearly 100 years before they gain equal representation in Congress.”
Simple solution is for women to study engineering, hard sciences, business and law, as opposed to the current pattern, whereby they are the minority in these fields of study. Also, don't have kids and never live off of a male income as a dependent. Etc ....
RE: i.e. does a woman engineer make less than a male engineer? i highly doubt it or else there would be a flood of law suits, but it would be nice to know.
I know, and the answer is no. Salaries in all but the most rinky dink family run privately held firms are narrowly prescribed by grade and grade is narrowly determined by skills, experience and education. I have hired both men and women and there is absolutely no difference in terms of salaries. As mentioned, there simply are fewer women who pursue engineering and more who become program managers in non profits.
Fair question, a quick google search may have just turned up your answer. Check out this study by the National Science Foundation. Once they controlled for relevant facts, like the finding that women engineers were less likely to actually have a degree in engineering and that they had less experience, the difference in salary was only 2%. The variables in their study did not explain that 2% but that doesn't mean that nothing does.
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/issuebrf/sib99352.pdf
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