It's a fairly well-known fact that American women, on average, earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. There are many professions in which women make significantly less; for example, women in finance make only 55 to 62 cents on the dollar -- the largest disparity of any profession. And according to census data, the service industry is the only industry in which women earn more than men, on average.
On Meet the Press yesterday, GOP strategist and Romney surrogate Alex Castellanos attempted to make the argument that women don't actually make less than men, it's just that women take jobs that pay less, that women work less, and that women demand "benefits" like flexibility from their jobs. According to Castellanos and the GOP, men are just willing to work harder, longer, for more years, see their families less, and do more dangerous and grueling work than women. In modern America, this has been true. Women default to caregiving, and they are financially punished for doing so.
It seems to me the GOP's new talking points boil down to "women are wimps." If women were just more willing to work like men, they could magically make more money.
In an exchange Rachel Maddow cited the 77 cent statistic, when Castellanos interjected that women don't actually make less than men. "Do women make less than men for doing the same work" Maddow challenged him."Actually no," he responded. "For example. Men work an average of 44 hours a week. Women work 41 hours a week. Men go into professions like engineering, science and math that earn more. Women want more flexibility."
Alex is an intelligent and kind man. I honestly can't understand why he would take on an issue that is just... crazy. Feel free to deny a pay gap and admit that yes, men work more hours than women, women are more likely to leave the workforce to care for others, thus resulting in less pay, and women are more likely to "flex" in order to care for family and home. Is the GOP saying that's right and proper and how it should be? Women should expect to earn less because they default to parenting over work? Is this the party line? Because I know a lot of pretty ambitious Republican women who would disagree.
Supporting working women is not a political issue. Fellow GOP pundit Ross Douthat has repeatedly called for public policy solutions for working parents, including "generous family leave."
It's easy to say that women "choose" lower-paying jobs, that they "choose" to take more time off from work to have children, that they "choose" to work fewer hours or not at all. It's easy to put on blinders and ignore the parts of our system, from our family structures, to entrenched gender roles, to historical discrimination, that contribute to the wage gap. It's much easier to write off pay disparities as women simply "choosing" not to make more money. If the problem is created by the people who claim to suffer from it, no one ever has to take responsibility for the problem or worry about how to fix it.
It is a sad but true fact that in so many American households, men aren't faced with the same questions of work and family life management as women. Though most families are headed by parents who both work, the burden of childcare still falls to women.
The GOP can attempt to explain away the wage gap all it wants, but it still exists and is a hard reality for most working women. But if we're going to argue about wage gap, let's at least have an honest discussion about why women sometimes make career "choices" that put them at an economic disadvantage.
@kaitlyndowling contributed to this piece
Follow Morra Aarons-Mele on Twitter: www.twitter.com/morraam
Otherwise, what are you advocating? Should women working fewer hours than men earn more per hour such that both take home the same amount? If that's your view, why should part-time works earn more per hour than full-time works?
http://jec.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=9118a9ef-0771-4777-9c1f-8232fe70a45c
Two entries of note on approx pages 80-81 are important. When the data is actually done apples to apples and oranges to oranges, the supposed 77% ratio drops to a mere ~3%.
"The starting salaries for women college graduates were $1,443 less than they were for
men in the same fields." On the assumption that the starting salary is ~50k, this would be a 3% difference.
Additionally:
"In a forthcoming study of college professors in one specific college of a large public
university, researchers controlled for years experience, mobility, teaching and research
productivity, and department and found that even in the identical job in the same
institution women made three percent less than men."
I'm lib through and through and am a big Rachel fan (it was seeing her debate with Castellanos that made me curious on this subject and the data supporting each of their facts) but I think the left isn't being entirely honest throwing around this scary sounding 77% number.
I doubt that if women were actually payed $.77 to the dollar, anyone would choose to hire a man over a woman.
I'm not sure how you go from that to saying "women "choose" lower-paying jobs" (and repeat it several times). Nobody chooses lower pay, but some women (and men) choose jobs that don't pay as well in exchange for flexible schedules.
So, the author responds to something Castellanos didn't say, but ignores facts that contradict her position (e.g. 44 hours vs. 41 per week).
From Wikipedia: A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man") ...
Good job, Morra. That's one scarecrow that won't be getting up again.
"You apparently can't read. She explained this in full. How about this? How about all women stop having children so that they can work as much as men and earn as much as men, and this way, women will stop complaining about the pay gap? Get the picture?"
Like the person she was responding to, you simply didn't get the point of the article. They didn't choose to be the ones who make the babies, so it's a more complex social issue than you make it out to be.
The cronies in this corrupt system are men, by and large, who aren't about to give up power and wealth to women, unions or any other group without a battle. They are the masters of the military industrial complex who KILL for profit,hunting the world for resources and poor natives to exploit in their mines and sweatshops. What makes you think that they will have mercy on you or your kind?
You, like most Americans, are not facing the reality of the failure of our economic system which has produced a class of leaders with no other ethic than to win at whatever cost. Capitalism as practiced in this country is an abject failure and the people will continue to suffer until we can admit it and find alternatives that promote economic cooperation rather than competition.
The problem with this is how does a woman find out she is being paid less? Hijack the books? What do you propose?
Discrimination occurs when one person is paid less than another person PER HOUR for equivalent work---not less in total. Otherwise, under your logic, a person who works 1 one hour per week should take home the same amount in total as another person who works 40 hours per week.
This is not complicated.
He is NOT a kind man.
He is right about one thing though.
We ARE wimps. We're always the last in the queue, putting everyone else before ourselves and never asking for what we want or need as a gender. And conservative men the whole world over have thanked us for our efforts with contempt, suffering and sometimes even outright violence.
The question is will we CONTINUE to be wimps?
And the answer for American women is at the polls in November.
Republicans would never DREAM of treating ANY male interest groups with this level of disregard. It's time to stop letting them get away with it.
Since then, much has changed. Not that women actually get paid the same for the same work. No, what has changed is that bosses no longer justify this discrepancy by saying, "Well, men need to get paid more." They pull something else out their butts.