THE WAGE GAP MYTH, PART 3:
How do I fix this thing which may not even be broken? Part Deux.
Please start here in order to get context for this discussion ... or, just jump in with no background, and leave inappropriate, uninformed comments!
Option #4: Fight it
You're going to hate this one, if you feel that employers should pay everyone equally regardless of their cost and ROI to the company.
If you want women on average -- across all professions, ignoring experience and work preferences and maternity -- to earn the same wages, then options #1 and #3 are not only Right Out, but it becomes your job to "educate" your female friends that they've chosen the wrong careers, that having babies (and, god forbid, staying home and raising them) will set them back professionally, that they have to become far more greedy and hard-ass professionally, and that they need to stop taking advantage of any of the potential benefits of gender differentiation or playing into ingrained gender roles.
#4a: Change thousands of years of societally- (and possibly biologically-)ingrained role-modeling.
As long as women choose "superior providers" as mates (and they often do, even if you don't believe in Darwin), guys will need to make more money than other guys to get the genetic-selection pay-off, setting up an "income arms race" in just one gender ... maybe you should make different choices in spousal attributes.
You probably need to evaluate the "genderness" of every human interaction in your life. If you are a female, pick up the check for that date that YOU asked out based on looks and/or fertility and/or potential domesticity. Don't fight for custody to the extent it may impact your career. Don't buy your daughter a doll; get her a Tonka truck. Get on her case when she gets a C in math and an A in English Lit. Don't let her read fashion magazines (60 sexy ways to please your man!). Watch women's sports (or don't accept that paying a lot of money for a men's sporting event is a good use of societal resources). Stare at men's crotches when speaking to them. I'm sure the list could go forever, and I'd guess that so much of this is implicit in our nature and/or nurture that we don't even realize we're doing it. Good luck with that.
Personally, I think gender roles are somewhat a byproduct of biology, and you can't trump that without some gene editing ... but either way, you cannot get the feds to legistlate this component away, assuming it's even driving wages (which, I think, is what most women assume when they infer why women make less than men ... even though it may be among the smallest factors of a very small gap). But if parenthood makes women want to nurture instead of career climb while making men want to double down to provide for their families, then there will be a gap that you can only eliminate by paying a women more than she is worth.
#4b: Don't have kids, and discourage your women friends from having kids
If this bit pisses you off, I think the assumption is that it's society's job to help people make and raise kids ... in that sense, I believe you are oppressing me, as well as the planet, and you can go knob yourself. "Let's work out this food/air deal. Then go back to your rutting." (Bill Hicks). I don't think there should be any incentives for having children, not just because I don't want to pay (even more than I do already) for your screaming brood that will be sitting next to me on my next flight, but because babies will keep coming no matter what you do, and at a rate that will ultimately over-tax our resources (and has on many fronts already). Subsidizing that behavior, even thought it is culturally expected -- just like equal pay for equal work is expected -- may in the long term not be in our best interest. There, I have now offered up an opinion (without supporting data) which you can get legitimately pissed at me for.
Even if you are single and childless, and employers are doing a surprisingly good job of not imposing a penalty on maternity, don't be surprised if some fields or companies are amortizing the costs of all maternities over the female population, given that they can't ask your maternity plans. Not telling your friends to choose between careeer and family is potentially hurting your income. They're proabably also hurting your chances of promotion:
Concerns that women will ... spend more time away from the office ... can create a labor market where it’s difficult for women to achieve to the most advanced and highly paid positions.
Really, if you want people to be paid an equal proportion of their value to a company after costs, which seems like a reasonable goal, stop cranking out kids. Unless you want companies to be able to determine (and enforce) whether you plan to have kids, baby-making females are actively lowering wages for childless females, so in some respect, women are their own problem here. If you believe women you should get compensated just as much for producing less and costing more, then I think what you want is an unlevel playing field, which is exactly what you were complaining about before I started typing.
Critically, don't agitate for increased costs to companies to cover baby making. That just reduces the value of a woman to the company. If you want family leave, it's going to have to come from the government (a given in most industrialized countries). Either method seems unfair to the childless ("But I don't want an unfair advantage ... I just want my fair advantage"), but by externalizing corporate costs to the taxpayer, you remove much of the math from the equation of what each gender costs a company (in about the same way energy companies don't have to factor in the costs of superfund sites because frackers get exempted from the clean water act and taxpayers will ultimately foot that bill).
If you must have a kid, and you want to minimize the wage damage, crank the kid out and get back into the field, Pearl-Buck-style, and make your hubby raise the kid. First, marry a guy who lacks career ambitions and can somehow wet-nurse a baby. Aside from minimal maternity leave (and maybe some sick days during pregnancy), the question in this case should become "why do women raise children?" rather than "why do women make less?" If you have a good answer for the former, then you should probably not be asking the latter.
#4c: Work like a man
Individually, you (as a woman) need to become one of those people who will do anything to make a buck, which might require adjusting your moral compass (data-free assertion: men are more likely to be scammers, hucksters, ponzi-schemers, and shorcut-takers, possibly -- but not necessarily -- driven by the darwinian status afforded high-wage-earners). Make your husband stay at home with the kids or sick parent, make him leave work to deal with the kid that missed the bus or needs a ride to sports practice, or to be the one that has to relieve the nanny or pick the kid up at daycare where they're charging $2/minute overtime, etc. This makes the most sense if you are the primary bread-winner, so trading job satisfaction for income becomes doubly important, and it wouldn't hurt to marry someone down the pay scale.
Even once your hubbie is the stay-at-home, you still need to sacrifice family for career if you want to offset the males who get paid to do the same. The male employee who leaves at 5pm several times a month to watch his kid play sports is not going above middle-management; it's just currently less common than the woman who has to leave to deal with all kid issues.
Get an MBA or PhD, then don't have a baby. Stick it out no matter how much you hate it:
So the highest-paid lawyers, for example, are mostly the men who’ve stuck it out at the most grueling and prestigious law firms that pay the most amount of money. The women have fallen off that elite track.
While you could certainly make the argument that bottom-line-free jobs like caretaking and teaching are at least as important as bottom-line-measurable jobs like pillaging the economy and strip-mining mother earth, there's really no way to quantify the "caring" jobs, and it's easy to say "this piece of equipment, code, process, etc. made us $10M this year, so we're going to pay more money to get more of the best of those kinds of employees." If your measure of your worth and the rewards of your job are in the form of cash, then you should go to industries where your value can be quantified. You can argue that those doors aren't as open to you as women, but there's no data to indicate that, and a lot of CA tech companies are complaining about the absence of qualified female STEM graduates when attempting to balance pay by gender.
Where I went to college, which was NOT in the most liberal state in the union (TX), the only thing we considered unusual about a women in a STEM course was that there were so few of them to unsuccessfully hit on. At least in education, where you are paying for the privilege and choosing your major freely, there are no enforced obstacles to getting a degree with massive lifetime earning potential, and the only obstacle is self-selection: women believing they aren't going to be good at or interested in engineering. That's not a legislate-able problem.
And how do you legislate against this sociological contributor? Probably by becoming the primary (or better, sole) bread winner:
The greater tendency of men to determine the geographic location of the family continues to be a factor even among highly educated couples.
Certainly, if you're still living in a patriarchal state (i.e. KS) full of good-old boys who would conceivably rather tank their business than share their wealth with women and minorities, there are plenty of lovely places you could live in a state of equality. [Note, I'm not saying that discriminatory behavior doesn't exist, but where it does exist, it raises the relative skills of the pool of unemployed females and minorities, and is self-regulating vis-a-vis wages, with some possible asymptotic wage delta reflecting a time-lag in hiring.]
Unionization closes the unadjusted gaps as well, but we’ve already decided as a society that unions and the inequalities they currently address, are passé. If you’re anti-union (because you think union people are paid more than they're worth) but pro-equal-pay, you may have some thinking’ to do.
& Remember: you women have far more retirement years than us men do, so making top-dollar -- assuming you want to be financially independent of your spouse -- should be MORE of a priority for you than us.
#5: Stop spreading the wage gap myth, as it's probably a feedback mechanism
If women are convinced they're going to get paid less, they'll accept lower paying jobs, and they will get paid less (this would explain the low unemployment rate for women in post-recession America). And if you think women choose to raise children because they BELIEVE they make less, and so it makes more economic sense than the guy staying home, and you share that false belief with others, then you are, unfortunately, part of the problem again.
What was the point of all this? Or, be careful what you ask (the government) for.
This may have been a poor example, since it's so easily tinged with assumptions of sexism. [Let me be the first to say that I'd be fine with being a kept man, and would hope whoever was keeping me was making a ton of money.] But understanding data & cause-and-effect are critical skills we lack as a populace. Unless we can build up those muscles, which requires checking our assumptions (and privilege and biases and wishes) at the door, we will suffer antivaxxers, a no-fly list which will fail by design, climate change deniers, Crosscheck and other "massive voter fraud" disenfranchisement efforts, trickle down economics, poor threat assessment and security theater (e.g. take your shoes off while 95% of breach tests fail), torture that's counterproductive, blowback from repeating the same international adventurism, fake news, astroturf-roots movements, scientific suppression, and a president who can get elected on the strength of whatever feels good for him to say and/or for his audience to hear.
We also need to spend our energy where it matters: get mad at the insanity going on in DC and exert yourself learning high-paying job skills ... or get mad at those "awful" women who want to spend time with their children, and are dragging down all females' wages by association ... or make peace with your tradeoffs and fight a fight that doesn't involve fighting reality. Don't ask the government to legislate the unlegislatable, since that will create inequality. If you want equal pay for equal work, you can't start agitating for protected class status when you aren't really being discriminated against. The price of ignoring these kinds of inconvenient explanations is that you'll never solve the problem. So, ultimately, what might be an actual problem on the gender-wage front?
“What is left is a tangle of cultural norms, implicit biases, individual preferences and other, subtler forms of discrimination that are much harder to change or even to measure.”
If there are societal pressures for girls to play with dolls and become mothers, and for guys to play with dump trucks and become engineers, that's what you need to solve for, and what's "worse," you need to make that change yourself, and make the effort to point that out to people in your environment, even at the risk of becoming a pariah. If you have a big-hair girlfriend in Texas, who works in a beauty salon because she dropped out of high school and enjoys the work environment, extolling how cute her 8-year-old daughter looks in her Lil' Nurse halloween outfit (or her 15-year-old in her Sexy Nurse outfit), and you say nothing, you may in fact BE the problem, not sexist big business and an uncaring government (both of which certainly exist, but are not demonstrably the root cause of the problem of unequal wages, if that problem even exists).
Thanks for slogging through this, and please tell me where I got it wrong.
Please start here in order to get context for this discussion ... or, just jump in with no background, and leave inappropriate, uninformed comments!
Option #4: Fight it
You're going to hate this one, if you feel that employers should pay everyone equally regardless of their cost and ROI to the company.
If you want women on average -- across all professions, ignoring experience and work preferences and maternity -- to earn the same wages, then options #1 and #3 are not only Right Out, but it becomes your job to "educate" your female friends that they've chosen the wrong careers, that having babies (and, god forbid, staying home and raising them) will set them back professionally, that they have to become far more greedy and hard-ass professionally, and that they need to stop taking advantage of any of the potential benefits of gender differentiation or playing into ingrained gender roles.
#4a: Change thousands of years of societally- (and possibly biologically-)ingrained role-modeling.
As long as women choose "superior providers" as mates (and they often do, even if you don't believe in Darwin), guys will need to make more money than other guys to get the genetic-selection pay-off, setting up an "income arms race" in just one gender ... maybe you should make different choices in spousal attributes.
You probably need to evaluate the "genderness" of every human interaction in your life. If you are a female, pick up the check for that date that YOU asked out based on looks and/or fertility and/or potential domesticity. Don't fight for custody to the extent it may impact your career. Don't buy your daughter a doll; get her a Tonka truck. Get on her case when she gets a C in math and an A in English Lit. Don't let her read fashion magazines (60 sexy ways to please your man!). Watch women's sports (or don't accept that paying a lot of money for a men's sporting event is a good use of societal resources). Stare at men's crotches when speaking to them. I'm sure the list could go forever, and I'd guess that so much of this is implicit in our nature and/or nurture that we don't even realize we're doing it. Good luck with that.
Personally, I think gender roles are somewhat a byproduct of biology, and you can't trump that without some gene editing ... but either way, you cannot get the feds to legistlate this component away, assuming it's even driving wages (which, I think, is what most women assume when they infer why women make less than men ... even though it may be among the smallest factors of a very small gap). But if parenthood makes women want to nurture instead of career climb while making men want to double down to provide for their families, then there will be a gap that you can only eliminate by paying a women more than she is worth.
#4b: Don't have kids, and discourage your women friends from having kids
If this bit pisses you off, I think the assumption is that it's society's job to help people make and raise kids ... in that sense, I believe you are oppressing me, as well as the planet, and you can go knob yourself. "Let's work out this food/air deal. Then go back to your rutting." (Bill Hicks). I don't think there should be any incentives for having children, not just because I don't want to pay (even more than I do already) for your screaming brood that will be sitting next to me on my next flight, but because babies will keep coming no matter what you do, and at a rate that will ultimately over-tax our resources (and has on many fronts already). Subsidizing that behavior, even thought it is culturally expected -- just like equal pay for equal work is expected -- may in the long term not be in our best interest. There, I have now offered up an opinion (without supporting data) which you can get legitimately pissed at me for.
Even if you are single and childless, and employers are doing a surprisingly good job of not imposing a penalty on maternity, don't be surprised if some fields or companies are amortizing the costs of all maternities over the female population, given that they can't ask your maternity plans. Not telling your friends to choose between careeer and family is potentially hurting your income. They're proabably also hurting your chances of promotion:
Concerns that women will ... spend more time away from the office ... can create a labor market where it’s difficult for women to achieve to the most advanced and highly paid positions.
Really, if you want people to be paid an equal proportion of their value to a company after costs, which seems like a reasonable goal, stop cranking out kids. Unless you want companies to be able to determine (and enforce) whether you plan to have kids, baby-making females are actively lowering wages for childless females, so in some respect, women are their own problem here. If you believe women you should get compensated just as much for producing less and costing more, then I think what you want is an unlevel playing field, which is exactly what you were complaining about before I started typing.
Critically, don't agitate for increased costs to companies to cover baby making. That just reduces the value of a woman to the company. If you want family leave, it's going to have to come from the government (a given in most industrialized countries). Either method seems unfair to the childless ("But I don't want an unfair advantage ... I just want my fair advantage"), but by externalizing corporate costs to the taxpayer, you remove much of the math from the equation of what each gender costs a company (in about the same way energy companies don't have to factor in the costs of superfund sites because frackers get exempted from the clean water act and taxpayers will ultimately foot that bill).
If you must have a kid, and you want to minimize the wage damage, crank the kid out and get back into the field, Pearl-Buck-style, and make your hubby raise the kid. First, marry a guy who lacks career ambitions and can somehow wet-nurse a baby. Aside from minimal maternity leave (and maybe some sick days during pregnancy), the question in this case should become "why do women raise children?" rather than "why do women make less?" If you have a good answer for the former, then you should probably not be asking the latter.
#4c: Work like a man
Individually, you (as a woman) need to become one of those people who will do anything to make a buck, which might require adjusting your moral compass (data-free assertion: men are more likely to be scammers, hucksters, ponzi-schemers, and shorcut-takers, possibly -- but not necessarily -- driven by the darwinian status afforded high-wage-earners). Make your husband stay at home with the kids or sick parent, make him leave work to deal with the kid that missed the bus or needs a ride to sports practice, or to be the one that has to relieve the nanny or pick the kid up at daycare where they're charging $2/minute overtime, etc. This makes the most sense if you are the primary bread-winner, so trading job satisfaction for income becomes doubly important, and it wouldn't hurt to marry someone down the pay scale.
Even once your hubbie is the stay-at-home, you still need to sacrifice family for career if you want to offset the males who get paid to do the same. The male employee who leaves at 5pm several times a month to watch his kid play sports is not going above middle-management; it's just currently less common than the woman who has to leave to deal with all kid issues.
Get an MBA or PhD, then don't have a baby. Stick it out no matter how much you hate it:
So the highest-paid lawyers, for example, are mostly the men who’ve stuck it out at the most grueling and prestigious law firms that pay the most amount of money. The women have fallen off that elite track.
While you could certainly make the argument that bottom-line-free jobs like caretaking and teaching are at least as important as bottom-line-measurable jobs like pillaging the economy and strip-mining mother earth, there's really no way to quantify the "caring" jobs, and it's easy to say "this piece of equipment, code, process, etc. made us $10M this year, so we're going to pay more money to get more of the best of those kinds of employees." If your measure of your worth and the rewards of your job are in the form of cash, then you should go to industries where your value can be quantified. You can argue that those doors aren't as open to you as women, but there's no data to indicate that, and a lot of CA tech companies are complaining about the absence of qualified female STEM graduates when attempting to balance pay by gender.
Where I went to college, which was NOT in the most liberal state in the union (TX), the only thing we considered unusual about a women in a STEM course was that there were so few of them to unsuccessfully hit on. At least in education, where you are paying for the privilege and choosing your major freely, there are no enforced obstacles to getting a degree with massive lifetime earning potential, and the only obstacle is self-selection: women believing they aren't going to be good at or interested in engineering. That's not a legislate-able problem.
And how do you legislate against this sociological contributor? Probably by becoming the primary (or better, sole) bread winner:
The greater tendency of men to determine the geographic location of the family continues to be a factor even among highly educated couples.
Certainly, if you're still living in a patriarchal state (i.e. KS) full of good-old boys who would conceivably rather tank their business than share their wealth with women and minorities, there are plenty of lovely places you could live in a state of equality. [Note, I'm not saying that discriminatory behavior doesn't exist, but where it does exist, it raises the relative skills of the pool of unemployed females and minorities, and is self-regulating vis-a-vis wages, with some possible asymptotic wage delta reflecting a time-lag in hiring.]
Unionization closes the unadjusted gaps as well, but we’ve already decided as a society that unions and the inequalities they currently address, are passé. If you’re anti-union (because you think union people are paid more than they're worth) but pro-equal-pay, you may have some thinking’ to do.
& Remember: you women have far more retirement years than us men do, so making top-dollar -- assuming you want to be financially independent of your spouse -- should be MORE of a priority for you than us.
#5: Stop spreading the wage gap myth, as it's probably a feedback mechanism
If women are convinced they're going to get paid less, they'll accept lower paying jobs, and they will get paid less (this would explain the low unemployment rate for women in post-recession America). And if you think women choose to raise children because they BELIEVE they make less, and so it makes more economic sense than the guy staying home, and you share that false belief with others, then you are, unfortunately, part of the problem again.
What was the point of all this? Or, be careful what you ask (the government) for.
This may have been a poor example, since it's so easily tinged with assumptions of sexism. [Let me be the first to say that I'd be fine with being a kept man, and would hope whoever was keeping me was making a ton of money.] But understanding data & cause-and-effect are critical skills we lack as a populace. Unless we can build up those muscles, which requires checking our assumptions (and privilege and biases and wishes) at the door, we will suffer antivaxxers, a no-fly list which will fail by design, climate change deniers, Crosscheck and other "massive voter fraud" disenfranchisement efforts, trickle down economics, poor threat assessment and security theater (e.g. take your shoes off while 95% of breach tests fail), torture that's counterproductive, blowback from repeating the same international adventurism, fake news, astroturf-roots movements, scientific suppression, and a president who can get elected on the strength of whatever feels good for him to say and/or for his audience to hear.
We also need to spend our energy where it matters: get mad at the insanity going on in DC and exert yourself learning high-paying job skills ... or get mad at those "awful" women who want to spend time with their children, and are dragging down all females' wages by association ... or make peace with your tradeoffs and fight a fight that doesn't involve fighting reality. Don't ask the government to legislate the unlegislatable, since that will create inequality. If you want equal pay for equal work, you can't start agitating for protected class status when you aren't really being discriminated against. The price of ignoring these kinds of inconvenient explanations is that you'll never solve the problem. So, ultimately, what might be an actual problem on the gender-wage front?
“What is left is a tangle of cultural norms, implicit biases, individual preferences and other, subtler forms of discrimination that are much harder to change or even to measure.”
If there are societal pressures for girls to play with dolls and become mothers, and for guys to play with dump trucks and become engineers, that's what you need to solve for, and what's "worse," you need to make that change yourself, and make the effort to point that out to people in your environment, even at the risk of becoming a pariah. If you have a big-hair girlfriend in Texas, who works in a beauty salon because she dropped out of high school and enjoys the work environment, extolling how cute her 8-year-old daughter looks in her Lil' Nurse halloween outfit (or her 15-year-old in her Sexy Nurse outfit), and you say nothing, you may in fact BE the problem, not sexist big business and an uncaring government (both of which certainly exist, but are not demonstrably the root cause of the problem of unequal wages, if that problem even exists).
Thanks for slogging through this, and please tell me where I got it wrong.
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