This is actually rather rare, these days, and is getting more rare. The usual statistics generally show that women as a group are earning less than men, but the reasons for that include the fact that women frequently are employed at jobs that pay lower (hence the movement from around ten years ago to arbitrarily declare certain “female” jobs to require the same pay as some “male” jobs, regardless of market demand). In those cases where women in the same occupations actually earn less, it is most frequently a case of the women taking time out to stay home with children. (One can argue that this, itself, is a remnant of the patriarchal past, but I suspect that most couples make that decision jointly, so that in most cases the women are choosing to help perpetuate that aspect of patriarchalism–and if they can choose, then it is no longer a matter of some male domination.)
Well, I don’t have time to research the hell out of this years report’s, but last year for a sociology project we ( my college Soc. Class) found government and other research showing that woman generally made .75 cents less than men in the same job, doing the same work, for the same amount of time. Whether we like it or not, the good ol’ boys still run most of the job world.
Absolutely true. However, the “good o’ boys” who are running the show are simply a very small subset of the world who happen to hold power, not an institutional empowerment of masculinity.
As to your .75/hour difference, I'm afraid I'd have to see the reports. There are an awful lot of variables that go into setting wages and a simplistic "men get more because they're men" leaves out most of those factors. .75/hour difference is $1530 a year–significant at McDonald’s wages (where women are very likely paid the same simply because the corporation and its franchises may have rigidly structured the pay scale) but for a $50,000/year accountant or $60,000/year mid-level manager it could easily mean a difference in bargaining skills or any number of other factors.
I am not claiming that there is no residual prejudice against or unnecessary obstacles to women in the work force. I am simply noting that the oft-made claim of women being paid less than men is more complex than a simple cry of “patriarchy” will support.
Are you complaining about 3/4 of one cent difference in pay for women vs. men? If a man is making $10/hour, and works for 8 hours he would be paid $80. If I understand your research, a woman in the same job would have been paid $79.25 for the same work, a difference of a whopping .03% (no, not 3%, .03%) I think that falls well within the range of chance, and is not an indication of any discrimination.
Actually, that isn’t right either, the woman would have been paid $79.9925, for a difference of .009%. Either way, it doesn’t look like there is any discrimination taking place.
There’s no point to protest if you are male and want to be sexually selected. Females select counter-intelligence sexually. I don’t understand how this is an emergent trend. If you speak intelligently, you are sexually deselected and cannibalized for sex gossip. If you act intelligently or consistently, you will be sexually deselected and cannibalized for sex gossip. I’m not aware that the world has worked differently. Females begin to select slightly differently when they are not as sexually viable; but the cultural damage still remains. It’s a joke really, someone says something mildly consistent and the female will either keep it for gossip, or a male will use this opportunity to get laid. The very act of protest is deselective. I think this lady needs to analyse the situation a bit closer.
-Justhink
She’s not taking into account that people don’t play the game and that the vast majority of these people are male. By protesting, they are in effect playing the game and contradicting themselves. This article is rediculous.
-Justhink
Its a goverment statistic that woman make .75 cents less an hour. I belive that you can search goverment statistics online. Look it up.
here is a table showing average wages http://lmi.state.wy.us/0897/0897t1a1.htm
and here is a web site (from which the table came) explaining it all.
http://lmi.state.wy.us/0897/0897a1.htm
So, women make .0075 less per hour. At a fourty-hour week, that's .3 or 30 cents. Multiply that by 52 weeks (assume no vacation) and that’s $15.60 a year. Uncle Sam takes more than that. Screwing up your till once for a good amount can take more than that.
Ahhh, finally we have conclusive proof that women earn less than men, and that the reason for the difference is discrimination! :rolleyes:
Once again I will quote my original statement. I am not and never was trying to say that woman are discriminated against in some huge way. I’m not sitting at my computer burning my bra and hating men. I agree that the media has related some backlash of sexism, by comparing men to trash bags in commercials. I agree. I agree. I agree.
I am coming in very late to this thread, and with none but the merest glimpse at page 1.
As some of you may know from previous threads on sex/gender themes, I dislike the use of the term “patriarchy.” Before women had the vote and full legal rights, use of the term was justifiable; but for most of the twentienth century, and especially for the last 50 years or so, the
term obscures more than it illuminates. And I don’t doubt in the least Tom that a similar desire for clarity lead you to respond to teneisha above.
That said, I want to dispute just a few of the things you’ve suggested in your last. Yes, women’s earning less in the same occupations is “frequently a case of women taking time out to stay home with children.”
But it is also frequently a case of women not getting their share (relative to their numbers) of the most desirable raises, promotions, and opportunities at the workplace. Is that itself b/c women a) bear, and/or b) are expected to bear, and/or c) or are seen to bear more responsibility for childcare and other domestic duties and, on those grounds, are seen as less available for the most engrossing duties at the workplace?
Well, I’ve set up the question so that it answers itself–while at the same time showing the complexity of the issue.
That is, women’s perceived role as “natural” childcare providers and domestic managers cannot be disentagled from either the perception of women at the workplace and, in many cases, the reality. Exceptions would include those women who, through their childbearing years, establish themselves as firmly detached from child-related/domestic duties–esp. unmarried women clearly determined to remain childless. What this really suggests is that in order to achieve full (or fuller) economic equality for women, you need a different social attitude towards childbearing and domestic life. You need not only a widespread belief that fathers are or should be equally responsible for the care of their families as are mothers, but also a belief that a prosperous society ought to invest in providing decent daycare, esp. for single parents, and families too poor to afford such daycare. Until you have such attitudes and such policies–and we are extremely far from achieving them here in the US–it’s almost impossible to disentangle the extent to which a a given women with children “chooses” to earn less in her career than a male peer. In reality, unless the woman (and her partner) genuinely wants no children at all, she faces a draconian choice to have no children at all, or to do her best to compete with male peers who, on average, face far fewer domestic responsibilities than she does.
In other words, Tom, “choice” is a very loaded term here. If I could “choose” I’d live in a country where good daycare was provided publicly, as it is in many European countries, so that young women at any socio-economic level who want to seek out educational and on-the-job opportunities to maximize their marketability can do so if they choose. As it stands, most young women don’t have this choice. Instead they face a much narrower range of choices. They can choose to wait for children: though such a choice may effect their choices within a relationship; or their desire for more education/work experience may come after they’ve already had a couple of kids, and/or after divorce (in which case they find that the daycare options may be few or non-existent); or waiting may result in their waiting too long to have children. Or they can choose to not have children at all.
These choices are pretty hemmed in by all kinds of limitations–esp. when you compare them to the choices that men can make. For many reasons, and not only biological ones (which make a man’s reproductive years longer than a woman’s), the decision to have children for a man is potentially much less complicated. Most men who earn a reasonable income, if they wish, are able to find a woman willing to assume most childcare and domestic duties. But many women cannot find such male partners and, once again, therefore face a narrower range of choices given the world we live in today.
Let me also add that the idea of what “couples” choose to do together is assuming an awful lot. I don’t have exact figures at hand but most women in poverty end up there either b/c they are single mothers or b/c of divorce. (And, of course, the majority of Americans in poverty are women and children.)
Let’s put single mothers entirely aside on the grounds they could have chosen not to be single mothers. Divorce adversely impacts women relative to men: the stats are very vivid on this point. I don’t know what percentage of hitherto married women are now raising children, virtually on their own, with a major decline in standard of living from their married days, and with almost no opportunity to improve their economic lot in life. But the number is not small. Did these women “choose” that lot when they decided to let their husbands be in charge of bringing home the bacon?
I don’t have any serious opposition to your post, Mandelstam, and I think that there is definitely continued discrimination against women in many aspects of the work environment in the U.S. However, the claim that women make less for the same work in the same jobs needs a lot more explanation than a simple “men pay them less.” It also needs to be challenged when there are many examples of men and women being paid the same. Equality has not descended upon us and made the world fair, but repeating errors is harmful because people who can see the errors are liable to dismiss the rest of the discussion. An unclarified assertion that “women are paid less” is going to cause people who work in companies or industries where women are not paid less to dismiss the rest of the discussion as outmoded or untrue.
The type of behavior which seeks to pay females less for comperable work is the selective factor when females are in the ages of their peak sexual viability and attractiveness. I don’t know how many times I have to state this for it to set in 
-Justhink
Mandelstam provides a list of several choices available to women, – have a career, be a full-time homemaker etc – and then goes on to say that list isn’t comparable to the choices available to men. What choices are we talking about here? To paraphrase Tim Allen, men have pretty much two choices, a job or prison. If there are some other widely available choices I’d be interested in hearing them.
Sexist as it may sound, I think this indicates that the factors that make someone a desirable mate are different for men and women. The woman willing to assume most childcare and domestic duties is a desirable mate, even if it means she doesn’t have another career. On the other side, how many women would be pleased (or even willing) to marry a man who wanted to stay home with the children and be a homemaker? Not many is my guess.
I dunno. Until you provide some outside corroboration in coherent English that appears legitimate?
Well, then, Tom, let me just add that I have no opposition–serious or otherwise–to what you’ve just said.
In fact, the point I’m always most eager to contribute to debates about sexual equality is the utter counterproductivness of conceiving of the problem in terms of what individual women suffer at the hands of individual men. So much has been done to root out, or at least make more visible and accountable the most egregious discriminators (male or otherwise); so that what remains of inequality, serious as it is, is very much systemic–to do with our institutions and our way of life–and not to do with a micro-level battle between certain men and certain women.
The challenge is to convince people of all sexes (and classes) that comprehensive daycare availability is a positive social good for everyone: not least for children. The challenge is to convince people that sexual equality benefits everyone. That doesn’t mean that I believe that every single person should choose the most lucrative career they can possibly qualify for; or that a career devoted to raising a family is not worthwhile. In fact, I believe neither of those things; and if sexual equality existed then childcare would not impose a serious economic disadvantage on those who choose to do it.
But it certainly means recognizing that, as things stand now, sexual inequality remains an unrealized ideal; and very many women end up leading impoverished and/or less fulfilling lives as a result of it. (Which is not to say that men’s lives are just peachy keen; or that women’s gains need result in men’s losses.) And just as it makes no sense to obscure what inequality is with misleading statistics, so it makes no sense to separate people’s “choices” from the options that are, realistically speaking, open to them.
aramis, women who’ve devoted substantial time and effort to their career gnerally want to share childrearing responsibilities with their partner. That doesn’t often amount to finding a man who wants to be a full-time homemaker, though under certain circumstances it might. In my line of work, and in my generation, most couples do share childrearing responsiblities. They also spend a lot of money getting childcare and domestic help so that neither partner has to take off prolonged time from work. That is typically what’s required to keep competitive in professional work. If a woman can’t find that kind of arrangement, then she may well have to make a choice between children or professional ambition. Men simply don’t face that choice as much or to the same degree.
IN all totalitarian ideologies and movements (political,
religious, and ideological), if the same obtains political
power, they tend to try to eliminate all of the significant
opposition that might threaten their political supremacy.
The same was the case for communism, fascism, and religious
fanaticism. The same generally means that those groups and
individuals who might oppose them who are the most
intelligent, freedom loving, individualistic, and self
respecting are likely to be singled out for persecution and
elimination as the same represents the greatest threat to
the same. It is clear that feminism is no different in this
respect. It has singled out those male entities and
individuals for elimination and persecution which show the
most self respect, intelligence, freedom loving, and
individualism. One of the first groups to face feminist
persecution for the aforementioned reasons, in my opinion,
were returning Vietnam Veterans. It is well known that the
military and, especially military men, are an anathema to
feminists and feminist organizations for the aforementioned
reasons. It is clear to me that this same will tend to,
through the selection of base, ethically weak,
unintelligent, and corrupt males, for reproduction by
females and feminists, in the increasing debasing of the
body politic and citizenry of the USA and the UK, especially males. The same will result in the gradual but certain loss of civil
rights for all, a gradually decreasing quality of life, a
gradual but certain deterioration in the civility in the
USA and the UK,and, perhaps, as in the case of our current illegal
immigration crises, the conquest, either overt or covert, of
the USA or the UK themselves.
hmmmm, I seem to have misplaced my tinfoil hat.
cvshaw, you do realize that you seem to have contradicted yourself, right?
Returning Vietnam vets were pretty much avoided by the whole country for a number of years. Anti-war folks (male and female) often thought of them as representative of the abuses that were known to have occurred, such as My Lai, while war supporters (male, even more than female) tended to see them as the guys who had brought home our first “loss.” And even folks who were not strongly pro- or con- regarding the war were often just too embarrassed to talk about a war that had caused so much divisiveness.
One can claim that they suffered unjustly, but they were hardly the victims of any Feminist plot. Most of the anti-war attitudes were developed before the Feminist movement took hold in the U.S. consciousness and Feminism only became a movement in the U.S. in conjunction with multiple other social movements that coincided with opposition to the war.
Placing feminism opposite the military because feminism is supposed to be against individualism would tend to indicate that you have not thought this through. Despite the recent ads for “an Army of one,” individualism has rarely been among the top values cultivated by a military which depends on teamwork–resourcefulness has certainly been encouraged, but not individualism.
As to the rest: it is now thirty years since that war began to wind down; where is the defeated male from that period? Occupying the White House, serving in Congress, running most of the large corporations in the country. There is no sign that women have succeeded in overthrowing men as the dominant group in this country. And I have certainly seen no sign that only “base, ethically weak, unintelligent, and corrupt males” are being allowed to breed. If anything, the strong and intelligent males still have the pick of the women.