Another problem in the mix is the constant drumbeat over ‘Equal Pay For Equal Work”.
Many of the women in today’s work force were raised under the NOW banner & they firmly believe that ‘equal work’ can be measured and quantified in the white collar jobs. I say it cannot.
Unless you are making widgets & there is an actual count of your hourly/daily/weekly production of widgets, there is no accurate way to quantify the ‘equal work’ portion of the formula.
I have worked in both blue collar & white collar jobs, and I have been a full charge bookkeeper for the majority of my life. I still have clients. I have worked for a number of small businesses as a self-employed person. I have seen up close & financially how much a small business struggles to make ends meet & have profits for growth.
Then there is the age old problem of ‘working’ women who want to take off for trips to the doctor or to the dentist for their offspring. The dad rarely takes time off, but the women are gone with nary a thought as to how that absence affects the workplace & who might have to make up the workload she has left behind to tend to her ‘little ones’. Then, when promotions are being considered, the women get left behind because they are not dependable to be there 8+ hours a day & to put their loyalty into the company where they want such Equal Pay ahead of their children.
I say-—have kids, and be prepared to not get promoted until they are 20 & out of the house. Until then, I cannot DEPEND on you as an employee 52 weeks a year & whenever there is any kind of work crunch which has an unmoveable deadline. You will beg off because of ‘the kids’.
I cannot ascertain exactly how YOUR work is EQUAL on a apples to apples basis, since you are gone at random times all year long—for the kids. What you also don’t realize with YOUR absence is that those who don’t have kids had to work harder or stay longer to cover the work you left behind when it all HAD TO GET DONE in a timely manner. You don’t realize one little bit how angry those people are at YOU, when you are all on a equal pay scale & YOU are NOT pulling your fair part of the wagon load.
In short—THEY CANNOT HAVE IT ALL!!!
The problem with “having it all” is that the timeframe for building a career coincides with the timeframe of a woman’s fertility.
Even if she goes ahead and has kids and puts them in daycare,
she’s not “having it all”, because kids raised by others aren’t really your kids.
A couple of us took it upon ourselves to study these figures a little more in depth to post on our department bulletin board. Without breaking a sweat, we found women used more health insurance, sick days, personal days, commuted shorter distances, put in less overtime and all the things you mentioned and, most of all, actually did different work which they considered the same (being a flag girl on road construction site is not the same as tying rods and laying payment no matter how much they might wish it was) . . . and showed the real figure was more like 93 cents per dollar. We noted, with a little deeper research, we could probably find the additional seven cents.
But the point was made back in 1984. My, how they hated our fact heavy bulletin board which made their emotion heavy bulletin board look cheap and whiny.