So I just have a few questions. No, I’m not a MRA… in fact, I’m asking these questions to combat those types of people. Here are the questions:
What do I say when people claim that women would make as much as men in the same position if they didn’t take time off for carrying and caring for children?
What do I say when people say that there would be more women in power if there were more women that wanted those jobs?
What do I say when people say that they only see men in positions such as waste management?
For taking time off for caring for children, there are two major factors, and it’s all a little chicken-and-the-egg.
The first is that women make less money, so when a family is looking at giving up an income, it tends to be the woman’s. Likewise, if someone is going to be seen as a poor performer for taking days off (to take care of sick kids, etc.) it’s going to be the person with less earning potential.
Day care is enormously expensive-- in my area it’s $1,900 a month for an infant. For many families, it doesn’t add up financially. Subsidized day care helps, as does flex time and alternative work schedules that allow families to share the burden. But even families with day care face extra expenses that make it hard for parents to stay in work. Sick kids, for example, can’t attend a day care center. My work helps out with that by providing a number of days a year of on-call nanny care.
So in short, as long as women’s careers are more disposable, they are going to be the ones to take time off for kids. The only answer to that is to reduce the amount of time that is necessary to take off.
The other factor is just getting companies to accept men doing what needs to be done for their family. Nobody blinks an eye if I have to take a day off to take care of a sick kid, but my husband gets flack when its his turn. Nobody minds if I take six weeks of maternity leave, but my husband looks bad if he takes more than a week.
As long as men get penalized more for taking care of their families, women are going to be the ones to do it.
You could point out that there are several other factors in play. On average, men do better than women in areas like math and spatial relations, so math-intensive professions like engineering are going to find men over-represented, and the top perfomers are going to tend to be men.
You could mention that men are more competitive than women, on average, and so will tend to be over-represented in leadership positions.
You could point out that there are, in fact. women in such positions, but their generally smaller size, lesser physical strength, and tolerance for unpleasant or outdoor working conditions mean that women are going to be drawn to lesser-paid but less physically demanding jobs.
Of course, if you debating someone who doesn’t understand what is meant by “averages” or thinks anecdotes outweigh data, it may be a lost cause.
There are carefully researched and constructed models that take into account things like hours worked, seniority, degrees, interruptions, career choices, and so forth. IIRC women earn about 30% less than men as an overall average, but when factors like these are taken into account, there’s still about 9% unaccounted for – in other words, apparently the result of plain discrimination. If you look for research about “wage gap” you tend to find them.
Any job requiring some brute strength will become majority men for the simple reason that on average men are physically stronger than women, even after adjusting for size. It’s not that NO women can do those jobs, but the pool of woman candidates is much smaller than the pool of men candidates.
Speaking as a woman who has done some work in construction and outside both summer and winter some cultural factors come into play as well. Men are encouraged to endure adversity and put up with discomfort and even some actual pain to get a job done, and will brag about their ability to endure same. Women are encouraged to avoid adversity, discomfort, and pain and will complain about it. On average, of course. Any woman engaged in such labor as “waste management”, construction, outdoor work, etc. will have to “man up” about it - that is, treat it as a man would. Put up with the discomfort and pain and STFU about it. That doesn’t mean ignoring actual injury, it means don’t frackin’ whine about the cold when you’re shoveling snow. We know it’s cold. Everyone is cold. Dress warm and do the job.
Finally - such jobs often require uniforms that, being developed for men, tend to make a woman wearing them look “mannish”. It’s entirely possible that some of the “men” observed by bystanders and passers-by doing such work are actually women but their work clothes are such they tend to obscure their gender.
Rationalwiki editors need to lay off the strawman conservatives. :rolleyes:
The general argument is that sexism and the glass ceiling are no longer the major factors in determining the cause of the pay discrepancy. And, amazingly enough, if you compare actual data the discrepancy drops to something like 5% instead of 20%.
Are they still a factor? No shit. But not THE factor.
Incorrect. There is no pay gap anymore. College-educated women who are not married and do not have children actually earn MORE than college-educated men who are not married and do not have children.
Yeah, the way to refute a point about an analysis looking at all possible factors over time is to pull out one looking at a very recent and limited case.
Thank you girls and guys. It might go without saying that I had met someone that’s presented these topics to me. I just wanted to be able to give the best arguments I could next time I see him.
It sounds like your target audience thinks women get paid less by choice. You need to convince him that the deck is often stacked against women, so the choice is heavily influenced, and that this doesn’t just affect women – when women have fewer (real) choices, that means men have fewer choices as well.
My wife had a generous (by American standards) maternity leave package, whereas I had whatever vacation days I was willing to take. The high cost of childcare meant that one of us was discouraged from working, and the lack of any equivalent paternity leave for me meant that we basically had no choice. If I wanted to pause my career while my wife worked, we would have been fighting against the system. If the system were to change, say, with mandatory and equal parental leave and heavily subsidized childcare, I could have chosen to stay home with the kids without a big financial hit, or we both could have worked. And if we were both working, I could take a lower-paying job that I enjoyed more versus trying to maximize my earning potential.
You ask why women don’t want those jobs. Who wouldn’t want to fight uphill to thrust herself into a male-dominated culture that was hostile to women? Slight statistical advantages in math and spacial reasoning don’t explain why there are so few women in STEM fields, so we have to look at the culture. The same goes for management career paths that might be male-dominated. If women don’t want to fight for those jobs, we should ask ourselves what we can do to make them more appealing. Again, this helps men in the long run by giving us more choices – if I want to do a job that’s more traditionally associated with women, like, say, teaching elementary school, I benefit from getting women out of those jobs and into STEM jobs. More teaching slots for me!
I think we can ask ourselves what we can do to make waste management more attractive for women (again, it’s a male-dominated culture that women probably don’t have much interest in wading into), and we can also ask ourselves why men would be so willing to do physically demanding labor in lousy weather for money. If it’s out of necessity to support a family, then we’re back to men not really having many choices. If it’s because you can earn mad spending money for motorcycles and partying, well, this may be my latent sexism but I’m not sure society can do much for that.
