Why do some women think there is a wage gap?

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cyberdad
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03 Dec 2021, 7:43 pm

hurtloam wrote:
[ but the strike is partly about demanding equal pay for women and ethnic minorities. Part of the issue is the amount of contract work researchers need to do, rather than having stable permanent contracts.


I can't speak for the UK but in Australia its impossible for a female or minority to be employed under a casual fixed term or permanent contract at a university or government (or NGO) position on a different salary level for the same position level. Regardless of whether it's a professional, research or teaching position.



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03 Dec 2021, 7:59 pm

hurtloam wrote:
It's supposed to be based on your experience. As you get more experience in the role you are given more money.

No one wants a job with no growth potential. It's nice to feel appreciated.

Having the range also stops people job hopping. If they are stuck on £21,000 with no increase in sight they will leave for a job that pays more. Of you pay them more, they will stay.


In the private sector where wage cases are permitted to be negotiated within a company when there is a downturn in the economy and unemployment is high (demand for jobs outstrips supply).

I'll give two examples where a male might attract a higher salary based on the position. The first pertains to security. A male security guard or bouncer or bodyguard might be preferred to a female because men are bigger and more intimidating and/or stronger. The security company may not openly advertise a different pay scale but it might be something they negotiate on a one-on one basis.

A second example is a corporate job in sales, marketing or advertising (a sector I have experience). This sector has a lot of younger female staff who perform as good as males. Except there are two issues. The first is burnout. It's well known in this sector (and it also applies to other high pressure jobs such as law, politics and the military). Younger females are more likely to burn out, get sick or move jobs than men when they are under constant high pressure. This is not necessarily biological but more sociological where women tend to face more hurdles both in the workplace and in society in general so the combined burdens impacts on female burnout more than males. I have certainly seen this in sales.

Another reason is more pragmatic. Young females are more likely to take maternity leave. This is a major hit to a company who have to not only pay the female staff but then pay for somebody to cover the maternity leave position. Companies factor this in to the salaries (I am not saying it's ethical but it comes down to risk management).



hurtloam
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04 Dec 2021, 2:04 am

cyberdad wrote:
hurtloam wrote:
[ but the strike is partly about demanding equal pay for women and ethnic minorities. Part of the issue is the amount of contract work researchers need to do, rather than having stable permanent contracts.


I can't speak for the UK but in Australia its impossible for a female or minority to be employed under a casual fixed term or permanent contract at a university or government (or NGO) position on a different salary level for the same position level. Regardless of whether it's a professional, research or teaching position.


Legally it should be here too. I'll need to do some more digging to find out what's going on.



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04 Dec 2021, 7:35 am

There is a wage gap but it's not because women get paid less for the same work.

I noticed women have a tendancy to do fewer hours in jobs that are not as skilled or high paying.



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04 Dec 2021, 10:26 am

Fnord wrote:
The woman earns 70% of what the man earns because she has worked only 70% of the hours that the man has worked.

Again, there is no "Wage-Gap Policy"; but the way that wage scales are negotiated, a wage-gap occurs when one person works more hours than another person for the same number of years.


Unfortunately, that's not all there is to it. Yes, that is part of it, but there's more. In some cases, women still get paid less even when they have the same job, same education and same amount of work hours. And that is the biggest problem. As for the reasons, the researchers apparently saw two main ones: one was that the bosses are paying women less because they think that them being women automatically makes them less capable, and the other was that men dare to ask for, or even demand, for a higher salary than women, so that's what they get. When there's a gap from the beginning, it won't close even if men and women all get same raises at the same time from same jobs. As for why this is the case, it is likely to be cultural: women are raised in a way that demands more compromises and politeness from them than men, so they don't dare to stand up for themselves the same way.

Another problem is that fields that have a lot more women tend to have lower pays. Some say that it's because it's less useful and not productive, but jobs like being a nurse are absolutely necessary, so saying that it's no productive is false. Without nurses, no job would be as productive as it is since all the sick or injured workers would take longer to recover. Someone on this forum once said that nurses aren't low paid, and while that might be true in the USA (don't know if it is or not), it certainly isn't true here.
Same with child care workers. It's said not to be productive, but the truth is that if they all did a walk out, the productivity of the society would crash because many working people would have to stay home to look after their kids... again, this is the case here, I don't know if they're well paid in USA. Plus, they're educating the next generation, so paying childcare workers well would be an investment in the society's and the country's future.

One reason why those fields remain low paid is that the nurses and such just can't all do a walk out at once because it could very likely hurt and even kill people. That's not a problem in most fields, but in health care, it is, so those people are stuck.



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04 Dec 2021, 2:50 pm

↑ Agreed.

It is also fair to point out the concept of "the same work" has been used to support some weak arguments.

Personal Experience: Back in the 1980s, when personal computers started flooding the working environment, programmers were much in demand and could command higher wages than the average office worker.  Leaders of a local office-workers' union decided that their secretaries and clerks should be paid the same wages because (they reasoned) entering numbers into a spreadsheet (remember Lotus 1-2-3?) was the same as writing programs.  This case ended up in court, where it was demonstrated that programming and data-entry were two entirely different functions -- programming was likened to pregnancy and delivery while data-entry was likened to feeding and teaching.  The ruling came down against the union, and the distinction is still being argued today.



cyberdad
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04 Dec 2021, 6:27 pm

Nades wrote:
There is a wage gap but it's not because women get paid less for the same work.

I noticed women have a tendancy to do fewer hours in jobs that are not as skilled or high paying.


So this is post-children. Women return to the workforce on a casual/part-time basis. This is why many businesses are reluctant to employ young married girls because of a) paid parental and b) accommodating the woman returning to the workforce on a part-time basis while finding somebody to cover the rest of the position.

When there is a economic downturn the sectors that employ a predominantly female workforce are the first to shed staff.



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26 Dec 2021, 9:15 pm

Wage gap? It's more of a salary gap.


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26 Dec 2021, 9:16 pm

RetroGamer87 wrote:
Wage gap? It's more of a salary gap.


What is the difference between "wage" and "salary"?



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26 Dec 2021, 9:21 pm

MRAs will say the salary gap doesn't really exist because it's just men getting paid more for working harder.

The same MRAs will complain that women getting better grades is evidence of of bias in educational institutions.

How do they know women aren't getting grades from working harder? So if it favours men MRAs will say it's from "working harder" but it favours women MRAs will say it's gender bias. What a double standard.


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27 Dec 2021, 5:31 am

QFT wrote:
RetroGamer87 wrote:
Wage gap? It's more of a salary gap.


What is the difference between "wage" and "salary"?


A wage is paid per hour, a salary is paid per year. Salaries tend to be more negotiable while wages tend to be more standardised. One wage for one job type. Because salaries are more variable for the same type of job, there more wiggle room for a disparity between the sexes to form.


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kraftiekortie
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27 Dec 2021, 6:01 am

Wages tend to be paid to employees subject to the overtime laws. Salaries tend to be paid to people not subject to the overtime laws.

I happen to be paid a yearly salary, and am subject to the overtime laws. I get paid time-and-a-half for working over 40 hours in a week. I’m a clerk, which is a non-exempt position.

Professionals tend to be paid salaries, and are rarely subject to the overtime laws. The employer can technically make them work over 40 hours per week without increased salary,
.



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27 Dec 2021, 10:34 am

RetroGamer87 wrote:
The same MRAs will complain that women getting better grades is evidence of of bias in educational institutions.


Actually I can answer this one. As a graduate student I been grading some math courses. Now, lets say a student writes something that is really messy and unreadable, yet gets the right answer. What am I supposed to think? Did that student actually know what they were doing, or did they just write something random and then at the very end copy the answer? So its hard to give them a good grade. Or conversely lets say a student was writing everything neatly yet got a wrong answer. I don't want to take off too many points because they clearly worked hard (for one thing) plus it seems like they knew what they were doing and it was just a slopy mistake. So I am biased in favor of neat students (of either gender) and against messy students (of either gender). Yes it is sort of a bias since sometimes I ran into the situations when neat students don't know what they are doing while messy students do. But thats not the kind of bias I would be sorry for: messy students don't care so why should I care.

Now here is the gender part. If I remember neat students, I remember both male and female examples of such. But if I remember messy students, they seem to be exclusively males. So if I am "biased against the messy students" and they are almost always males, it might look like a "bias against men", but it isn't. In order to prove that it isn't, all I have to do is to point out some neat students that are also males whom I keep favoring in my grading. But the fact that all the messy ones are men, thats what makes it "look like" a bias -- although nobody ever confronted me in it, I just noticed it in myself. And no I am not sorry: messy students don't have anybody to blame but themselves. And by the way if a female student was equally messy, I would punish her just as much. The only thing is that it never happens. Why does it never happen? Well, ask the students, don't ask me.

By the way, racial bias might be very much the same thing. If black students are more likely to be messy than white ones, they might be led to believe that they are experiencing racial bias, but they don't. I had some neat black students (particularly black females, but yes black males too) and they didn't experience any negative bias in my grading. But its also true that its more common for blacks to be messy than for whites, and when that happened thats where my grading "looked like" as if it was biased against blacks although it wasn't. Again though nobody confronted me with that. Its just something I noticed in myself. So I can easily see how people who "are" confronted in one of those things aren't actually biased.



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28 Dec 2021, 2:04 am

It seems I'm once again late to a discussion where I have no intention of reading pages of replies, but my view on the matter is, there both is and isn't a wage gap, because it's not so cut and dry. No, I don't believe the vast majority of employers are paying men and women differently for the same work, and if they are that should be reported.

However, there are other factors to consider, and they may not actually be cases of blatant sexism. Of course, there's also the general, statistical wage gap, and the case-by-case wage gap by position. One can be influenced by things like which gender is more likely to occupy positions that pay more. Even comparing the wages of people who do "the same work", isn't as simple either. The employer could be a factor, and maybe one gender is more likely to work for one that pays more. Maybe a certain position is more likely to be occupied by one gender, so the sample size is something to be considered.

Heck, I couldn't tell you what the peer reviewed, scholarly studies say on the subject. Also, the term "average" should be banned from all statistical discussion, because this is one of many cases where it's uncertain if the mean, median or mode is being discussed, let alone whether all studies cited on the matter focus on the same one. In most cases it can probably be assumed that the mean or mode is being presented (though all three can be used to draw a particular conclusion). Even so though, there's a big difference between the two. To be clear, I have no doubt that a statistical wage gap exists in some capacity, but it's important to have accurate data to synthesize a suitable solution.



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29 Dec 2021, 11:14 pm

It exists.

Wages/salaries advertised aren't always what's agreed to.

Sometimes there's a range advertised, say $50-60k. Often women will be offered close to the low end of the range while men will be offered more, even if the women are equally or more so qualified. Professional women tend to also get skipped over for significant raises or promotions into positions of decision making power. That's reality. Wage gaps are real - and the stats are compiled by people who would know; like tax agencies. They know peoples' demographic information and declared incomes. It's not difficult for them to analyze the data and realize wage parity is still a long ways off.


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29 Dec 2021, 11:53 pm

In the Red Pill movie, they complain men being killed on the job at a much higher rate them women. Again, this could be because men choose more dangerous jobs then women. Why is it that when women are paid less MRAs say "it's because they chose jobs that pay less" but when men survive less it's somehow evidence of mass misandry.

I think the "Red Pill" name, for both the movie and the movement is pretty funny considering the Matrix is basically a trans allegory (stuffy conformist men telling Neo to conform to their ideals, taking the pill and seeing he real world, being attaced by identical clones, getting dead-named). MRAs tend to be pretty transphobic so I wonder if they'll stopped saying they've been red pilled.


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