Rats. I meant tracer, not Scylla.
[sub]Hangs head in shame[/sub]
A well-reasoned argument, but it relies on the unsupported assumption that the antifemale sexism you refer to is endemic, which makes it a somewhat circular argument.
I can think of two factors that I argue are a much bigger part of the reason why far more women than men work part-time in paid emplyment:
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Far more women than men can do so, because they don’t need a full wage due to having a second source of income (either public money or a partner who will financially support them).
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More women than men don’t have the time to take full-time paid employment because they have too much of their time allocated to other work (e.g. childcare, etc) to allow them to fit full time paid employment in as well.
Your argument also does nothing to explain the large different between the average hours worked by men and women in full-time employment. How many hours do you have to work per week to be considered full-time from the POV of employment law in the USA, btw?
That’s a marvellous example of the difference between correlation and causation. Can you provide a cite for it, so I can use it and support it?
The answer to your question is “Yes”. There are a number of such studies. Those I am aware of in the USA are for specfic fields of work, but there is one from the UK for work in general. Since it showed that antifemale sexism isn’t the cause and that men and women who work the same hours in the same job with the same experience, qualifications, etc, get the same pay, the government that commissioned the report promptly buried it.
The largest difference I have seen from any report comparing the pay of women and men doing the same work, etc, i.e. taking into account all factors that affect pay, is less than 2%. A plausible explanation is that there is a slight tendency for men to negotiate pay more strongly than women (the study covered a professional field, where salaries are quite often open to negotiation).
It’s not confusing, really - the 60/72/76/insert whatever figure you want here percentages are not about determining the truth. They are about biopolitics. Their purpose is to further promote the idea that men are privileged and women are oppressed. They make perfect sense in that context.
I have a couple of objections to that:
- Women are not “we” to anyone other than someone sexist enough to wholly define people by their sex. Women aren’t even really a coherent group - the only thing all women have in common is their sex.
- Having a lower wage is not the same as “second-class economic citizenship”, because it completely fails to take into account other sources of income. To give a personal example, a coworker of mine works 12 hours a week, while I work, on average, 42 hours per week. I have a rate of pay 16% higher than hers, because I do a more skilled job. Her income is is only 24.6% of mine, obviously…but it’s actually 148% of mine. It’s 6 times higher than your argument would make it because she doesn’t pay any tax and she has 2 additional sources of unearned income (public money and an ex-husband). An extreme example, but a real one.
A more typical example would be a het couple, with the man earning £250 a week but taking home £200 and the woman earning £60 a week and taking home £60. Right away, your argument assigns an extra £50 a week to the man, despite the fact that he never has it - it’s deducted from his pay before he gets it, as tax. The man pays the mortgage, utility bills, food bills, etc, the woman picks up odd bills and whatever’s left goes into a joint account. Actually, in most het couples I know where the woman works part-time, his money is shared and her money is hers alone, but I’m taking an optimistic view here.
In reality, the man and the woman both have maybe £50 a week each, but you assign £60 to the woman and £250 to the man.
In short, IMO your argument does not reflect reality. You even ignore all taxation!
A radical option would be to have a society that treated fathers as parents rather than optional extras, wallets or potential abusers.
If fathers were considered to be parents just as much as mothers, the difference in time spent out of paid employment due to parenthood would be very small and would therefore have minimal effect on pay.
So…are you willing to lobby for a massive decrease in the status of mothers relative to fathers?
Women usually get the choice of whether or not to be a parent. Men never do. That is an extreme imbalance of power in an area of primal importance. IMO, your complaints about there being a relatively tiny downside to such an huge amount of power are like a medieval aristocrat complaining that it is difficult to get hold of fine wine when harvests have been poor.
A radical option would be to have a society that treated fathers as parents rather than optional extras, wallets or potential abusers.
If fathers were considered to be parents just as much as mothers, the difference in time spent out of paid employment due to parenthood would be very small and would therefore have minimal effect on pay.
So…are you willing to lobby for a massive decrease in the status of mothers relative to fathers?
Women usually get the choice of whether or not to be a parent. Men never do. That is an extreme imbalance of power in an area of primal importance. IMO, your complaints about there being a relatively tiny downside to such an huge amount of power are like a medieval aristocrat complaining that it is difficult to get hold of fine wine when harvests have been poor.
My apologies for the duplicated post - I received an error when posting it, so I assumed it hadn’t been posted and reposted it.
“Men don’t get to choose to be parents”? What the hell does that mean? Men get to be parents; we also get to have full-time jobs while we’re doing it. Men also get to choose whether to work extra hours or not, and can even decide to stay home (we hardly ever do – it’s not “manly”). When a woman has a child, she’s expected to stay home, reduce her work hours, or cram it all in somehow, but unless she (and or her husband) is stinking rich and hires a nanny, she has no one to leave it to.
Yes, indeed, if men were REQUIRED to spend time at home when they have children, and were not allowed to slough off most of the child-rearing duties on women, “the difference in time spent out of paid employment due to parenthood would be very small and would therefore have minimal effect on pay.”
Face it. For most men, being the breadwinner is more important than kissing boo-boos, and they won’t give it up.
Bravo.
It means that if she gets pregnant, then whether or not you become a father is wholly her decision, not yours. It means that if she has the child against your wishes, you are still liable for child support. It means that if she terminates the pregnancy against your wishes, you’re S.O.L.
What decade is it at your house? While my wife and I decided on a “traditional” arrangement we are also keenly aware of how unusual that is. I have friends where the child care arrangements fall to the man - because he has more flexible leave policies than she does, and because she makes more than him, so he’s the one always cramming and running. I have friends who have middle class government jobs (hardly “stinking rich”) and hired a nanny to help out.
Great god almighty. I hope you don’t have children. I’d hate to think of the emotional damage they’d receive from someone who considers them a second hand duty and not the main focus of their lives.
:smack:
I’m trying very hard not to swear here. My children are more important to me than anything else on this planet. Far more important than my day job. My job pays for my life but it is not my life.
Do me a favor and don’t ever breed, okay?
Question:
Was the amount of money paid to single mothers who request (nay, expect!) child support, and the subsequent loss to the father, included when the research was done into equal pay?
Considering how many “mothers” have a child simply to get some extra cash from both the government and estranged fathers, I would consider that to be an income, and therefore should be taken into account when totalling up the salaries.
I feel this would balance things out somewhat…
porkchop:
Regarding your first paragraph, there have been many debates on precisely that subject in the Great Debates forum. For instance, this recent thread. May I suggest a search through that thread and that forum (preferably using the link in my sig so as not to stress our poor little hamster) rather than hijacking this thread?
Regarding various of your other comments, personal insults are not appropriate for this forum. If you simply must resort to such childish (ha!) tactics, take them to the BBQ Pit.
Minty Green -
You’ll have to be more explicit. Which part of my post qualifies as an insult? (As opposed to, say, a diatribe, or a harangue or an opinion). Which part constitutes “hijacking the thread” as opposed to a direct reply to a previous post?
Playing along, for the sake of not jumping to any conclusions:
Let’s keep this forum a little less hostile, shall we?
Oh, and the hijack is simple. Cecil’s column, and this resulting thread, is about the wage disparity between men and women, not a debate about abortion rights. Since your discussion of who gets to make the abortion decision and the payment of child support have nothing to do with gender disparity in wages, it’s a hijack. Feel free to take it to Great Debates if you wish to discuss the subject further.
Right. Thanks for clearing that up. Do have anything to offer that’s relevant to the discussion at hand?
Nanite2000,
I don’t know for sure whether wage surveys include child support, but I suspect not. In the USA at least, child support is explicitly excluded from wage calculations in many instances (applying for financial aid for college is an example, IIRC).
I’m not sure that’s relevant, however, since the question is usually “do women receive equal pay for equal work?” Asking if child support is the same as wages is kindof akin to asking if I should be paying my wife a salary for raising the kids. (Heck, maybe I do already - she already controls all the money that flows through the house. I’ll have to ask.)
Thank you angilion and Nametag. I was struck by the final line of the column, that the choice facing women is stark: kids or cash. There was a startling lack of commentary on the fact that men do not have to make this choice. Sure, a man might have to consider the impact of losing all or part of a second salary when he decides to have children, but that’s really about the expense of children, not about the wage status of women or men in the workforce. (There was also no commentary on some anecdotal evidence that men who have children are actually paid better since now they have a family to support–used to be a common justification pre Equal Pay Act–sorry no cite but I have wage-paying work to do to pay for my childcare).
Furthermore, there was no recognition that many times women cannot (or can barely) make enough money to pay for the childcare needed for them to work. And childcare should be expensive–good childcare is worth it–yet not when women do it for their own children–and when men do it it is considered pathological.
And, the bottom line is that it’s o.k. to pay women less as long as you can point to some stupid factoid about the job that is different.
I must stop before I send this to the Pit.
Well, if that’s the case, why don’t you quit your job and stay home with the kids? Let your wife go out and support you both? It wouldn’t be because you can earn more than she can, would it? I thought you said men and women have equal pay!
You not only missed every point I made, you answered every statement with an untruth, and also attributed to me the attitudes I criticized in other people. Thanks so much.
“Traditional households” are unusual? So? In the average married couple, women do at least 50% more housework than men, and devote at least twice as much time to active child care. That’s including women who work full time.
it might interest you to know, by the way, that the U.S. Census attributes the wage disparity between men and women to the fact that the economy is dominated by small businesses that tend to hire large majorities of one sex; male-dominated companies pay more to all of their employees than female-dominated companies.
Your suggestion that men get to choose how to allocate their time to family and paid employment, but women do not get that choice relies on applying very different standards to pressures on men and women. Just as women are expected to allocate more time directly to family and less time indirectly to family through paid employment, men are expected to do the opposite. Paid employment is also a form of family support, childcare, etc, because the money earned is largely spent on things that are part of raising a child, like providing them with a home, food, etc.
As for men not being able to choose to be parents, it means that men are not able to choose to be parents. If you think otherwise, please explain how a man can choose to be a parent. As for choosing not to be a parent, the only choice that is guaranteed to be effective is castration. I’m sure you’re aware that the same is not true for women.
Yes, a man can be a parent. I never said otherwise. However, a man can only be a parent if a woman chooses to allow him to be a parent. It’s not his choice, and that’s my point.