Equal Pay Day & the Elusive “Pay Gap”
Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 12:49 pm
[Largely plagiarized from an article by Carrie Lukas in today’s WSJ] Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, a “feminist” “holiday” that pays implicit homage to the eminently questionable “Pay Gap” between men and women in the American workplace. As we all know, it is an article of faith among so-called, “feminists,” that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work.
Well...
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men – about a nine percent difference.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable working conditions, regular hours, less overnight travel, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility (e.g., education, banking, health care, insurance, and government employment). Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade the prospect of higher pay for other desirable job characteristics. Large numbers of women with school-age children (or elderly, infirm parents) require a position that is amenable to frequent short term absences without advance notice, and abnormally high use of personal and “sick” days. (But of course, no employer may consider this when hiring, for example, a single mother with three school-age children).
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). [Dare I point out that there not many women wearing the white suits doing cleanup work at Daiichi these days?] At the professional level, men do not shy away from positions that involve extensive or even long-term assignments away from home, or may regularly require 50+ hours per week at the office. They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can at least potentially earn more in both the short and the long term.
“Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts.”
The article also gives statistics showing that men have been hit harder by the Great Recession, as they are more predominant in construction, transportation, and manufacturing, where the effects have been most acute. In the White Collar environment, layoffs invariably strike men under 40 years of age hardest. Layoffs of women – particularly if they are on an individual basis – must be extensively justified, while men are both legally and in fact, “employees at will,” as they are not members of any “protected class.”
In Medicine and Law, the numbers of women professionals are surging, with most medical and law schools currently having at least as many women as men. Furthermore, women outnumber men on most college campuses and in most college graduating classes.
This wrong-headed “feminist” campaign to claim victimhood where none exists does nothing to improve women’s status in the workplace or in the overall society. The bogus class-action suit against WalMart seeks to profit lawyers and undeserving women by punishing an economic dynamo that has provided millions of valuable, desirable jobs to women with school age children – women who are looking for nothing more than a paycheck and flexible work hours – by falsely claiming that they were vying for management positions in the WalMart stores. Really. Married women with children desiring to get into the grind (50 hrs/wk minimum) of retail management with WalMart.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…
DGS49 – Now more than ever, the provider of his household’s “second income.”
Well...
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men – about a nine percent difference.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable working conditions, regular hours, less overnight travel, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility (e.g., education, banking, health care, insurance, and government employment). Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade the prospect of higher pay for other desirable job characteristics. Large numbers of women with school-age children (or elderly, infirm parents) require a position that is amenable to frequent short term absences without advance notice, and abnormally high use of personal and “sick” days. (But of course, no employer may consider this when hiring, for example, a single mother with three school-age children).
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). [Dare I point out that there not many women wearing the white suits doing cleanup work at Daiichi these days?] At the professional level, men do not shy away from positions that involve extensive or even long-term assignments away from home, or may regularly require 50+ hours per week at the office. They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can at least potentially earn more in both the short and the long term.
“Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts.”
The article also gives statistics showing that men have been hit harder by the Great Recession, as they are more predominant in construction, transportation, and manufacturing, where the effects have been most acute. In the White Collar environment, layoffs invariably strike men under 40 years of age hardest. Layoffs of women – particularly if they are on an individual basis – must be extensively justified, while men are both legally and in fact, “employees at will,” as they are not members of any “protected class.”
In Medicine and Law, the numbers of women professionals are surging, with most medical and law schools currently having at least as many women as men. Furthermore, women outnumber men on most college campuses and in most college graduating classes.
This wrong-headed “feminist” campaign to claim victimhood where none exists does nothing to improve women’s status in the workplace or in the overall society. The bogus class-action suit against WalMart seeks to profit lawyers and undeserving women by punishing an economic dynamo that has provided millions of valuable, desirable jobs to women with school age children – women who are looking for nothing more than a paycheck and flexible work hours – by falsely claiming that they were vying for management positions in the WalMart stores. Really. Married women with children desiring to get into the grind (50 hrs/wk minimum) of retail management with WalMart.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…
DGS49 – Now more than ever, the provider of his household’s “second income.”
