Hm, that’s only through 2020. I saw a lot of minimum wage jobs jump during COVID but these people are back to getting shit wages now that the job market has stabilized. Was it that COVID jump that is reflected in this chart as an apparent increase?
The chart goes through 2022 (it’s just crummy labeling), but it might indeed be some kind of post-covid effect.
Yeah, I thought I might be looking at the chart wrong. I’ve been complaining about wage suppression for decades, so I understand it to be a thing. Just what I’ve personally seen in SE Michigan where I live, for a minute they were hiring at $18/hour, $20/hour and then those gains were immediately lost as soon as the job market stabilized.
That’s interesting, and gets me thinking that maybe we are noticing the same thing and thinking of it from different perspectives. When I was a kid, I thought adults were the ones that are not supposed to be vulnerable. I didn’t make the distinction of women are supposed to be vulnerable / men aren’t, and rather thought that it was an adult vs. child thing.
Since you mention Madonna, I didn’t view her as vulnerable back in the 80s. She came across to me as someone who didn’t care what the old people thought, and would continue to do her thing no matter what. But then the 90s came around, her style of music changed, and she appeared in movies like A League of Their Own and Evita, and she no longer appeared to me as this magical adult that wasn’t vulnerable. Maybe we’re noticing the same things, and just thinking of them in different terms.
By the way, that was kind of a crummy summary article I linked to, the actual publication has more detail.
A lot of women’s social capital is built on revealing potentially compromising things about yourself so that other women can feel good about supporting you. It’s a bit precarious.
Yeah.
I think a lot of the problem is that people are taught that the two have to be distinct: that in order to be a proper man, one has to do things that women can’t, or to do them somehow in a fashion in which women can’t possibly do them. People aren’t taught just how to be good people.
This used to be true for both men/boys and women/girls (and there was assumed to be nobody else.) Girls and women were taught that we had to do things that men weren’t doing, and shouldn’t do things that were considered masculine. More recently, it seems to me that it’s been less true for girls and women, who are more often being taught to be the best humans they can aside from gender — but there are still a lot of people telling the boys and men that they can’t just be good humans, they have to be specifically masculine. And just being good while being male isn’t supposed to count; though I know some men for whom it seems to work just fine.
So, apparently, is a drive to cross such borders. All human societies do seem to have that distinction; and all the ones I know enough about, and I suspect the others also, have people crossing them; and many of those societies, if they’re looked at without blinkers, have institutions/customs acknowledging that crossing.
A drive to attack or even murder people perceived as outsiders who are or are perceived as being in one’s way is also pervasive and instructive in humans. Societies devise various ways to counter this — or to encourage it.
Agreeing with every bit of that.
I am a woman. I don’t need to be doing a damn thing the society defines as feminine to be a woman. I can be doing a lot of things the society defines as masculine and I’m still a woman. And I sure as hell don’t want to be told that I have to do the first and not the second — or that my not doing so somehow means that someone else, whichever of those things they’re doing, can’t be a man.
All these wage figures are inflation adjusted, right?
I mean, the median family income in the USA in 1970 was less than 10,000 a year.
I have read that women generally get paid less because at times they must make time for their young children. Also difficult physical jobs pay more and men are, by and large, stronger.
Yes, the chart says “in 2022 dollars”.
Right, but when two people decide to have a baby, and one person has to absorb all of the professional cost of that decision, there is a problem.
But in reality, there are some ways in which women are disadvantaged that cannot be fixed by men. It can be alleviated somewhat by pro-family legislation, but it wasn’t until I actually had a child that I realized just how dramatically skewed the burden was on women when it came to giving birth and caring for children. I’m just talking about the sheer physical burden of pregnancy and childbirth, and then the time required if the woman chooses to breastfeed. Even in the most egalitarian of households, it’s hitting women hard. I still haven’t fully recovered after childbirth five years ago. When people congratulated us on our new baby, my husband would often joke, “I contributed!”
I’ve been seeing those excuses all my life.
To a large extent the working world — and to some extent still also the rest of this society — discourages men from taking care of their children. (And then complains that there aren’t enough men present in children’s lives.)
ETA: It’s true that pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding are coded female by nature. But who picks up the sick five year old from kindergarten in the middle of the work day isn’t.
And jobs involving heavy physical labor often pay shit. Most of the best paid jobs aren’t physical labor jobs.
Plus which, some of the jobs coded female in much of the last century involved more physical labor than some of those coded male.
In which most other people’s wages may have relatively increased somewhat — but not five times or more.
I know this isn’t an IMHO anecdote thread, but I had 2 cents that seemed vaguely tangential:
I’ve posted before in the Dope about how I had a delusional-conspiracy-theorist-extreme-religious-controlling mother when growing up (actually, I mentioned her kind of excessively, without even realizing it or intending to, until a Doper pointed out that I brought her up too often, and so I stopped.) And for pretty much my whole life, I wanted to avoid her and be nothing like her. She was kind of the stereotypical opposite of a mother in most ways. And as of right now, I’m close to No-Contact with her.
However…..weirdly enough, I ended up turning into a somewhat mother-ish man, as ridiculous as it sounds - not like her, but more like traits that are associated with conventional, normal, mothers. To the point that classmates in college teased and nicknamed me “the mom” for doing things like giving them napkins while eating, or being nurturing, or pushing in chairs at the table, or being a good listening ear, or discussing nutrition in everyday diet, or various other small behaviors that made them joke “You’ll be a good mom someday, Velocity.”
It was kind of like I subconsciously turned into the mother I had wished I had but didn’t have, but with absolutely zero intention of being “feminine.” It didn’t even occur to me that any of these behaviors were ‘motherly.’ I was just treating people the way I wished I’d been treated. I was also homeschooled, too, and so I missed out on a great deal of social interaction during the K-12 age, so I didn’t know how men were supposed to act. I just did what seemed right. Which wouldn’t be strange for a woman, but is odd in a man.
I don’t have much to add. I’ve made a lot of the same points as the author on this board previously, and got a lot of the same sort of pushback he mentions. You can see it here in this thread, including the thought-terminating cliché about how equality feels like oppression, and the weird double standard where every other group is assumed to benefit from role models who resemble themselves, except young boys, who are somehow expected to rise above this natural aspect of human psychology.
I do think this is a valuable point:
In the past, society provided young people with a road map for how to achieve the things they wanted out of life: security, connection, respect, status, a family. For many people this sucked, because it was rigid and forced them into roles they didn’t fit, like the women forced to leave work when they married, whether they wanted to or not. It’s great that we allow far more possibilities now, rather than forcing people into rigid boxes (I’m personally grateful to all the women who fought against sexism so that my generation could have careers and be independent). But we have torn up the old road map and not replaced it with anything, and men especially do not know what is expected of them, or how to achieve their goals. Possibly the emphasis on providing positive role models for girls has helped mitigate this for them.
Some of the traits labelled as toxic masculinity can be positive in small doses, or when appropriately channelled. Eg suppressing emotions allows you to stay calm in a crisis. Aggression and competitiveness spur greater achievement, most obviously in sports, but also in other areas of life. Bluntness and less concern for upsetting others allows for the speaking of uncomfortable but important truths. The author already mentioned how risk taking can be advantageous, and it’s usually fathers who provide ‘tough love’ to kids when it’s necessary.
Some of this is compositional effects. Only 15.2% of men had a college degree in 1979, while by 2022 it was 35%. It’s not strictly true that all college graduates earn more, but if you moved the 20% most skilled people in the best paid jobs out of the non-college group, you are going to see average wages for that group fall.
Yeah, it’s come up repeatedly in the “how to increase population growth” thread. Both how much of a burden is for women, and how much society tends to underestimate how much of a burden it is. Thus the various plans across the world on the theme of “let’s pay women to have more children” that are instantly dead in the water since they don’t begin to even cover the purely financial side of things, much less the non-monetary costs like lost health and time.
Yeah, there’s plenty of jobs that women historically got stuck with because they were cleaning or food-preparation tasks that logically should have been handed to men. And not just the last century. Lots of such jobs that involved pounding, scrubbing or grinding things got traditionally assigned to women, when in terms of efficiency the gender with higher upper body strength should have been the one beating rugs and so on.
Hard to find a task more upper-body strength oriented than “whack it with a stick”, after all.
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing. Do you find yourself wanting to be a parent and fill a nurturing role for a child?
I remember in college a male housemate told me I would make a terrible mother because I didn’t like cleaning.
I wasn’t the sort of person who seemed maternal or suited to that role. I don’t even particularly like children, though I’m getting used to being around them ever since I had a kid and there are playdates, etc. And you know my own mother didn’t have a maternal bone in her body.
But I have always wanted to be a mother. I can’t really explain why this is. I had no experience with children. I was the kind of person who felt disappointed when a social event included kids. No, I don’t want to hold your baby.
But for whatever reason I really wanted to be a Mom still, rightly concluding that it’s different when you have your own kid - and it is. I 100% love being a mother, even after the craaaazy week I’ve had. I’m not sure why I thought this was a good idea, but it was truly the best idea I ever had.
Are you suggesting that those fields are dominated by women is [i]because[/i] the fields pay lower than some amount?
That feels like a very backwards interpretation of cause/effect to me.
That does historically tend to be how it has worked. If wages and status rise for a job, the women are forced out (that happened with programmers, for example). If wages and status fall then men leave the job and women replace them (happened with secretaries).
I think what happens is that women start to get into a field, and once women hit a certain threshold in a given field, men are no longer interested in pursuing it, and the wage suppression follows.
Social work, however, has always been feminized. It started with the friendly visitors, basically rich women volunteering to go into people’s homes and teach them how to not be degenerates, and out of that sort of grew the immigrant-focused community centers, the settlement houses. But it was all women doing this work, and a lot of times they were doing it for free. It’s not hard to imagine how “won’t someone think it the children?" was considered the purview of women.
A few men do go into nonprofit work, but it’s usually in executive positions, with finance and HR degrees, not as trained social workers. Finer men you will not meet.
I think a lot of the difference is that men prioritise achieving high pay and status through their career more than women, and this influences the choices they make when selecting an area to work in, willingness to work extra hours, taking a chance on a start-up vs established company, changing jobs frequently in order to get a pay rise, etc. IOW, men end up with higher pay because they made choices to get that higher pay. (And conversely, more women choose to prioritise spending time with kids, flexibility, and things like making a difference in the world by working for a non-profit.)
This is partly about societal expectations, and partly the practicalities of pregnancy and breastfeeding, and probably partly built in by evolution.
I think this is an overlooked point in social justice in general. So much of the conversation is held between people who are educated and comparatively wealthy, and thus tends to focus on the concerns of educated and wealthy people, like representation among CEOs and at elite universities. But these make little difference to the majority of the working class. Economic policies are far more influential there.
It is? Why did no one ever tell me this?
You can kind of get by if you just play the supportive role and never actually talk about your problems, and that’s more or less what I did for most of my childhood.
But yeah. At my current place of work, the last time I was in the office, we commiserated about the challenges of perimenopause/menopause and then comforted the 23 year old who was then afraid to get old. Solid bonding right there. The thing is you can’t be too messy about it and your vulnerable thing has to be relatable.
It took me a while to figure all this out.