Posted on 04/22/2015 10:05:46 AM PDT by MichCapCon
The claim that women make less than men is one of those claims that is true but not in the way that people want you to believe. The true part is that women earn less than men. The untrue part, and this is the piece union leaders would like you to believe, is that women with the same work history, the same educations, and working in the same fields as men earn less than men. The earnings data is quite clear that this is simply not true.
What does all this mean? It means that the (very real) male-female wage difference isn't due to gender discrimination in the workplace. At worst, it might be due to gender discrimination in schools where boys may be encouraged to go into more technical fields while girls may be encouraged to go into more social fields. But there isn't compelling evidence of discrimination there either. The evidence suggests that the reason for earnings differences is most likely personal choice. Women (on average) tend to enjoy studying and working in fields that involve human care and interaction, like social work, nursing, and elementary education. Men (on average) tend to enjoy studying and working in fields that involve mathematics and abstract reasoning, like engineering and statistics. Because jobs that involve mathematics and abstract reasoning tend to pay more than jobs that involve human interaction, you find men earning more. The reason isn't gender discrimination. The reason is differences in preferences for work and fields of study.
When a couple has children, women (on average) tend to be the ones who suspend their careers to care for the home and children. While the woman's career is in hiatus, the man is accumulating work experience. Consequently, the man often ends up earning more than the woman — again, not because of gender discrimination but because of life choices the couple makes in keeping a home and raising a family. There are many other life choices that the genders make differently that also contribute to differences in wages. For example, men (on average) tend to dislike dangerous work, like logging and deep-sea fishing, less than do women. Of course, dangerous work pays more. But this isn't because dangerous work involves men. It's because dangerous work involves danger.
All of these facts are true on average. And that's the important point. There are many women who, for varied reasons, earn more than men. Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and Meg Whitman, the current CEO, are good examples. So too are Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, and Christy Walton. There are also many men who, for varied reasons, earn more than women. To answer the important question of whether employers discriminate against women, we have to compare women and men with the same educations, work histories, and fields of work. When we do that, we find that women and men earn the same.
In the end, union leaders contradict themselves. Union leaders are quick to say that greedy corporations will do whatever they can to pay employees less. This is why unions claim to support the minimum wage and employer-paid vacations. But if it is true that women earn less than men because of gender discrimination, then by the unions' own argument, we should observe these same greedy employers employing only women because women are cheaper. That they aren't should tell us that there is more to the story than union leaders would have us believe.
OK, I'll be the a-hole that answers the question.
1) Having women in the workplace introduces a sexual dynamic that is counterproductive to a team dynamic.
2) Employing young women all but guarantees that an employer will have to eat more overhead and lose productivity when it comes time that the woman decides to procreate and uses their Family Medical Leave Act entitlement and take all 12 weeks off.
Flame away.
OK.
Women should be home, in the kitchen cooking dinner over a hot flame.
In a free market there are at least three principles of wage determination at work simultaneously. One is a tendency toward a uniformity of wages for labor of the same degree of ability. A second is a tendency toward unequal wage rates for labor of different degrees of ability-primarily intellectual ability, but also other abilities as well. And a third is a tendency toward the inclusion of discounts and premiums in wage as an offsetting element to the special advantages or disadvantages of the occupations concerned. The combined operation of these three principles helps to explain the full rage of the various wage rates we observe in actual life.These principles serve to keep the various ocupations supplied with labor ih the proper proportions.
I’m female and I agree.
Ya FORGET Barefoot and PREGNANT(ya DID get the Kitchen part right though)!
Vive la diffe`rence
Either Williams or Sowell posited this long ago.
If minorities and women get paid significantly less for the same quality of work,
where are the companies composed solely of black women employees whipping their competitors because of the huge salary advantage?
When women went into the workforce, it created a shift in the supply of available labor, that put downward pressure in wages, one of the results being is that it became harder to support a family on just one wage, it started to take two wages, where before one would have sufficed.
This movement started out years ago as “Comparable Worth”, trying to relate the value of jobs traditionally done by women to those done by men. So questions such as: is a secretary performing work of equal skill to an auto assembly line worker? And on and on.
That became so cumbersome and difficult to present in a rational manner, I think the movement morphed into the equal pay for equal work cry we hear today. But there seem to be ample studies to show that pay is generally equal for the same work, it’s just that many women’s career paths are not as unbroken and seniority and experience are not acquired as rapidly as with men.
Barefoot, pregnant and chained to the stove, but the chains are long enough to reach the piano so she can entertain my friends when I bring them over.
From personal experience.
My wife, now ex, successfully brought an EEOC claim against her current (at that time) employer.
She charged that she was being paid less commissions for doing the same sales job as her male counterpart. And she was being paid a lower %, even though she was actually selling more than him.
This is where it gets interesting.
She was hired as an office manager, not a salesperson. The salesmen they typically hired had degrees in Optics or Optical engineering, she had no degree. She kinda fell into the roll of a sales rep because she was really good at it. It turns out that the engineers they hired weren’t all that great at sales.
Businesses are dynamic, individuals are dynamic and things change soo often that using static numbers can be very misleading. Please understand, I don’t believe on-balance women are paid less than men, does it happen? sure. Is it some vast conspiracy against women?, not likely.
My wife won her case because their were tons of documents that showed the discrepancies. Discrepancies that went back for years and years. She did attempt to resolve this directly with her boss on a number of occasions but was told that since she didn’t have the Engineering degree, there was nothing that could be done.
Thomas Sowell has made that point many times over the years.
Liberals retort would be :
They put their biases over making $$$
It’s so hard to just say these things in this day and age... and it’s comforting that FReepers understand my underlying values.
If a free market would let the price of labor discover itself, we wouldn’t need a cabinet level department to make corrections. If you think employees have the ability to determine what they are willing to work for, and employers have the ability to determine what they are willing to pay, and the whole thing will just work itself out, well, you’re no Paul Krugmyn.
Feminists push the “women make less than men” unacceptable-discrimination model for a very self-serving reason: so that companies will feel the need to OVER-PAY women rather than risk a discrimination lawsuit.
Then women simply won’t get hired in the first place.
Not enough women or minorities in your work force becomes statistical proof of discrimination these days.
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