Fighting for pay equity by signing the Paycheck Fairness Act into law. It is an outrage that women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.
This Paycheck Fairness Act will likely shift things dramatically, such that women now earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns instead of 78 cents. I'd actually argue that the benefit is minimal, and overall focusing on it does more harm than good because it misdirects efforts from dealing with the real reasons for the pay gap. But, I want to see it passed so that the dialogue can move past that issue and focus on the actually reason the pay gap exists.
My reasoning for this is that
1) when asked for "smoking gun" evidence of pay discrimination, I constantly see them pull out things like they blindfolded music listeners and had male and female violinists play auditions, and the women won the auditions more often when the blindfolds were on. While all good and well, if you want to prove pay discrimination wouldn't you actually cite examples of "
Man A getting paid more than Woman B for the exact same job" rather than some bizarro world social experiment that involve blindfolded people? It's basically like arguing with a troll who keeps bringing out tangential topics rather than providing proof of their main assertion.
2) the 78 cents in the dollar statistic doesn't take into account weeks worked (which narrows the game to around 82%) or hours worked (which narrows the gap to 86%). Nor do these stats take into account a number of discernable factors that influence pay (mainly, choice of profession and number of years in the workforce, because women tend to take big chunks out when they have kids, and women tend to choose careers which give them the
option of taking time off for kids, whereas men just go for the highest pay even if they're locked into 80 hour weeks for the next two decades. And no, we can't part time/flexi-time every profession. That's like saying you want to train for the olympics part time. Sure you can try and be a part time civil engineer, but you're competing with other people who aren't doing that. You can see, if you try and part-time any
competitive profession, you're going to be left in the dust, just like slacking off at athletic training). All those known factors take women's equivalent pay to around 96 cents in the dollar compared to men in the same circumstances.
3) the remaining 4% is the "unexplained" pay gap. Not
necessarily direct discrimination from employers, but it's in there. Let's say half of that is direct discrimination, and that the Paycheck Fairness Act cuts discrimination in half. You're looking at a half of a half of 4%, or a 1% improvement in women's pay vs men's pay because of a Paycheck Fairness Act. And I suspect I'm being too generous to the Paycheck Fairness Act here, and the actual changed won't even be measurable. The basic logic here is that - businesses don't want to pay more than the absolute minimum wage they can get away with since they're not a charity. If women are willing to do a job for less money than men (on average) then you set your pay rate to attract just enough workers to fill the role, and they will skew towards women. Men will self-exclude themselves from that role, and there is no good reason to pay more to attract them.
Now, I'm not saying a Paycheck Fairness Act is bad in itself, but what the whole "78 cents in the dollar" argument, while in a good cause, is doing is sending a false message that direct employer discrimination explains more than the tiniest portion of the pay gap. This creates a false target, and legislation to deal with a false target is of course a waste of time - actually it's worse than a waste of time because it mis-directed liberal / feminist group's energies from addressing the real issues.
Child Care and
paid Paternity Leave are things that would make a much larger dent in the disparity between men and women's pay, because
children explain at least 80% of the pay gap. Maternity leave wouldn't help because that doesn't free women from the carer burden.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1584580 times)