Reminds me of the study that showed that the difference in negotiated wages for the same position across genders is about 7%. Coincidentally, if you compare the wage gap between men and women across the same job (rather than just doing a straight "average wage"), the gap goes from something like the 23% that it's usually stated to be to around... 7%.
Though don't be misled; the 23% does reflect that women are also employed in jobs that pay less than the jobs that men are generally employed in, though that's a whole other beast to tackle. So you have a gap within the same career that's explained through wage negotiating, and a gap without the same career (to clarify, using a particularly odd definition of "without" here; think the phrase "within and without" to get an idea of what it is) that's explained by the gender ratio across professions skewing towards men in higher-paying career paths (unsure on the statistics of this one here).
I don't know why I thought to bring this up, but eh. There's the nuance for the usual statistic of the "wage gap", and to no surprise, it's not as clear-cut as you'd expect.
Yeah, i wrote about some confounding factors before. For example, maternity leave. It costs money to provide leave (even unpaid leave costs companies money). Since it's almost always mothers who take leave for children, then it's the companies that hire more women that are hit with the costs. These costs come off the bottom line, reduce profitability, and those costs are born by
everyone in the company. And of course, this disproportionately affects other women, whether or not they even want kids.
This is why I think laws that compare paychecks from male and female employees of the
same company (Equal pay act 1963) haven't actually uncovered widespread discrimination. If a woman
will do the same job for 20% less than a man, why would you hire any men? You just set a single wage that attracts
enough people to fill your jobs and be done with it. That's just business sense. The really big disparities are between
different companies due to multiple economic pressures, and different social norms.
And that's not something you can just legislate away. The core problem is that companies with mainly male employees don't pay their fair share for childcare, that's born by the mother's companies. And the unbalanced costs feed into wage differentials. Yet our response is actually to launch intrusive investigations of the companies hiring women to see that they're paying "fair wages". Which is just piling even more costs onto companies for hiring women.
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Topic: Gender/sexuality etc. - What Even Is A Gender Anyway (Read 142206 times)