Decent and honest is enough for a male friend, but not enough for a romantic partner. I would never want to be with a man who treated me the way he would treat just any random stranger.
If we statistically control for factors that are likely to influence wages – e.g. education, experience, age, etc. – the gap shrinks, and women with similar qualifications to men earn around 94% of what men earn. Some of those controls might themselves be confounded variables (that seems VERY LIKELY and many books could be written about the subject), but given basic statistical precautions, it’s easy to see that the wage gap is closer to 5% than it is to 25%.
This is an extremely well-known finding from labor and wage research.
The 22% figure is what people get when they control for literally nothing, and that’s just a ridiculous way of approaching the issue. Even if men and women were paid perfectly equally for exactly the same work, when 87% of petroleum engineering majors are men, and 88% of social work majors are women (true percentages), there’s going to be a wage gap, but one based totally on personal career choices. Anyone who doesn’t attempt even the minimum amount of effort to control for stuff like that just isn’t doing right by the numbers.
The 6% (statistically controlled) wage gap is plenty bad enough, especially if it’s an understatement from some confounded controls. That’s the number people should be focusing on first.
We could have a conversation about how much anything is “based totally on personal career choices.” But I agree that the numbers don’t compare apples to apples.
You could compromise, and leave the lid down and the seat up…
I’m not sure how that particular Salon article spawned this seemingly unrelated question, but I agree benevolent sexism is a problem at its most extreme. Indeed, there’s good indication that cultures that embrace benevolent sexism are unequal in a lot of respects. That said, I’m not going to lose my shit over someone holding open a door for me (or not.)
I’m married to a feminist man, and I honestly cannot remember a single time the words “I’m a feminist” came out of his mouth. His commitment to women’s equality is evident in the way he shares household responsibilities, in the way he wishes to share child-rearing duties, in how he talks about women he knows, in how he validates my frustrations when I encounter misogynist attitudes. In return, I give him a safe space to be sad or scared or insecure, ensure that the burden of breadwinning does not fall entirely on him, and make sure he knows every day that I appreciate him for what he is, and that his worth is not defined by how well he measures up to some arbitrary standard of manliness. I think that’s what people often miss about egalitarian relationships - they are reciprocal. We both get something out of this. We are a team with the advantage that our roles in each others’ lives, and in the rest of society, are not limited by gender stereotypes. That is our feminism.
Pulling out chairs (or not) is at the bottom of the priorities list in this scenario. I feel like a man who identifies as a feminist would intuitively understand that.
What gets me about chivalry, and this is not an ideological opinion but a personal preference is that if someone treats me like a cherished, precious thing, I want it to be because I am special, not because I am a woman. When someone treats every single woman they’re interested in like some goddess on a pedestal (and I have met such men), it has a negative impact in two ways. 1) It dilutes the meaning of their attentiveness - it’s not a personal reflection of me, but of their views of women as a monolithic entity 2) It sets me up for failure, because I am not always or even often a quiet, delicate, fragile goddess from above, and eventually that idealized image is going to shatter.
I think when we talk about the 22% wage gap, what we’re really questioning is why there is such a disparity in educational experience, hours worked, etc., why the burden of childbearing falls so consistently on women and why she doesn’t have the same opportunities for career advancement as men. When we dismiss the 22% as an absolute apples-to-apples comparison on the basis of confounding factors (which is absolutely statistically relevant, this is not a criticism of your analysis, Hellestal, just a general observation) we’re kind of missing the point. These ‘‘confounding factors’’ which are so often dismissed are the meat of the problem itself.
Just as a point of observation, I’ve worked in the non-profit management field for a long time, at many different organizations. While the field is absolutely inundated with women, men are statistically overrepresented in executive positions. In my graduating class of 144 at Penn, three were men. Exact same degree as the rest of us, hired more quickly and with a higher starting wage (we talk about these things openly, being social workers.) About half of my executive directors and administrative colleagues have been male. I could posit thirty factors going into this, from unconscious assumptions about male competence to women being socialized not to negotiate salaries. I think it would be foolish to chalk it up to a single factor. But none of these factors exist without a broader social context that results in relatively poorer outcomes for women even in a field that is dominated by women.
The feminization of social work is an interesting subject in and of itself, as it basically started in the late 1800s with a bunch of upper-middle class bored white women. Since they no longer had the main responsibility for child rearing (having nannies and such), and they were blocked from most educational and career pursuits open to men, they felt useless. So they decided to make the world a better place as Friendly Visitors, going into the homes of the destitute and offering them moral instruction. Of course, this started from a place of profound ignorance that assumed poor people were poor due to some defect of character, but eventually, the profession evolved to look at these issues within their broader sociopolitical context. IOW, the feminization of social work is itself rooted in the oppression of women, who used their relative privilege in the service of social change.
I agree.
That was poorly worded on my part, but I hope the underlying message was still clear.
This, and everything else, are all good points. I’d only quibble about one thing.
This is the meat of the issue exactly.
But it’s not how the issue is so often framed. It’s easy to find claims that women earn 22% less “for the same job”. Not just limited to this thread, it’s easy to find this claim all over the place. And it’s just not true when people say that, and that’s an unnecessary distraction from the important cultural issues you bring up. To add one more example to yours that I was reading about recently: Women used to be more than 35% of computer science majors, and now are less than 20%. There is something cultural at work here, but it seems more difficult to concentrate precisely on the important stuff when people are being so loose with factual claims.
It’s not that “poor career choices” pay less. It’s that female-dominated occupations pay less than male-dominated ones. If 88% of men were social workers the pay would be higher.
Yeah, I agree, people play fast and loose with the numbers. I don’t think most people understand or care how statistics work, and I think it’s also easier to claim injustice on the basis of ''22% less for the same job" than to delve into all of the factors, which are easier to handwave away if you believe there is a fundamental difference between men and women and That’s Just the Way It Is.
I tend to interpret anything astro posts related to feminism as some kind of ‘‘Gotcha Ya.’’ This is supposed to be the one where all the women confess they want it both ways, or something. But then I look at the articles he’s reading and wonder if he’s really trying to understand. I agree it can be confusing, especially since women, not being one monolithic entity, have a wide variety of opinions, even as self-identified feminists, about what things matter and what things don’t. And then there are some issues in which we really don’t know what to think. Personally, I care way more about sexual assault and access to reproductive health care than the Fearless Girl statue or whether someone behaves in a chivalrous manner. I recognize that these things are all related but I tend to place my energy into issues that feel mission critical.
It’s an evolution for some of us though. When you’re first educated about systemic oppression, everything looks like systemic oppression, and maybe you care about seemingly minor things for a personal or visceral reason, or maybe you just get sick of fighting every battle and choose the things that matter most to you. The point, I guess, astro, is that women who identify as feminist are going to feel all kinds of ways about this, and I don’t think there’s any one response that we can identify as reflective of ‘‘true feminism.’’ For me, it is an equality much deeper than holding open the door for a man.
Fixating on this issue, particularly as indicative of ‘‘what women really want’’ reflects a massive misunderstanding about what feminism means. What I want is to be pregnant without worrying I’m going to die because of some archaic abortion law, to be taken seriously when I report being sexually assaulted instead of blamed and villainized, to not bear 100% of the responsibility – and the career penalty – for taking care of children, and for my concerns not to be discounted, minimized or trivialized by men who have never lived those realities. I really don’t give a damn about someone pulling out my chair.
I am not a feminist by any means. I also hold doors open for women. And men. And pay for meals, unless I was told specifically beforehand that other person would be paying. And try to be protective, though frankly, I am useless in a fight, being a devout coward. And lift heavy objects.
The issue in the OP is not one of feminism, but one of common courtesy.
Put it another way, if a behaviour would be seen boorish in a non-date context, why would it not be so in a date? And if the person reacts badly to it, then the answer is not to go on future dates with them.
It’s probably more accurate to say that many feminists still lack the confidence to be the one initiating dates or proposing marriage or otherwise taking the initiative, rather than be the one asking men out.
So feminists are meek, submissive, strait laced traditionalists? Too scared to take initiative?:dubious:
That’s not how markets work.
I am going to have to ask for a cite for your second assertion. There are lots of examples of jobs going from male dominated to female dominated. How much has the monetary compensation and perceived value of said jobs changed. I am sure you can provide copious cites and peer reviewed studies.
Don’t you mean if 88% of social worker were men? If 88% of men were social workers, there’d be so damn many social workers, they’d have to be paid not to work.
Although this post was not addressed to me, I will answer anyway. Here is an article from The New York Times that discusses research into this phenomenon: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html?_r=0
A comprehensive study conducted by researchers from New York University, the University of Haifa, and the University of Pennsylvania “found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.”
The article does not ignore issues of “choice” or social factors. But this study certainly seems to suggest that when women begin to dominate a particular occupation, salaries decrease. Food for thought.
+1. Or, if we make it one for every date I had where “the gentleman” did something that would be considered terribly boorish in other contexts and expected it to get him brownie points… we have enough brownie points to get a whole team of Girl Scouts their cookie badges.
QFT
Thanks for doing the research, I’ve seen this documented, too, but probably couldn’t have find a good source quickly.
Secretary is maybe the most striking example.
And then there are also tons of examples of very similar jobs with different sex ratios and different pay scales. There was an example I saw about a company that paid the men who sewed shoes more than the women who sewed sneakers.
I agree that men holding doors open for women can be benevolent sexism. But how about we work on eliminating all the other kinds of sexism first and put benevolent sexism at the bottom of the list.