One of the most cherished beliefs of feminists is that women get paid less than men for doing the exact same job and that’s because the whole world hates women and thinks they’re stupid and worthless. It’s called the “wage gap”.
The very first clue that the wage gap is complete and utter bullshit lies in the logic of capitalism itself. If any given industry could pay women less than men for doing the exact same job, THEY WOULD ONLY HIRE WOMEN! Think about this way: if you were in the business of making packing tape, and you could buy the exact same adhesive for 10% less from supplier A than supplier B, which supplier would you buy from?
In arguing for a wage gap, feminists are in effect saying that businesses are choosing to pay more for labor because…. why? It makes no sense. I suppose you could attempt an argument that business hates women so much it is willing to forgo profit for the simple pleasures of misogyny, but that is even more pathetic. Business doesn’t care about ideological bullshit.
Profit or die.
It’s that simple.
Why do men make more money than women, even in the same occupational categories?
They work longer hours
They get more advanced training
They are more likely to specialize
Nursing is a great example. A traditionally feminine occupation, the super highly specialized, technically complex and very well remunerated positions are going to men. Ergo, male nurses make more than female ones. Not because SEXISM but because TRAINING, SKILL AND HOURS WORKED.
Men work more paid hours than women – full stop – end of fucking story. For all OECD countries collectively, men work 309 216 hours per year, while women are putting in 243 311 hours per year. In just the G7, men are pulling 184 733 hours while women clock in at 155 285.
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS
Even doing the exact same job at the exact same rate of pay, men will earn more than women simply because they work more. There are lots of reasons women don’t work as many hours as men, but whatever spin you want to put on it, the simple fact that women work fewer hours at paid labor than men remains.
There is no wage gap.
Jon Gunnarson gives it a more thorough treatment here, if you are interested.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/what-pay-gap/
Women also tend to work at cushy, indoor, pansy-assed occupations that require little in the way of effort or physical exertion. Those nasty, dirty, outdoor, dangerous jobs? Yeah, they tend to be filled by men. Who get paid to take on the dirty work.
The Ten Most Dangerous Jobs in 2013:
10. Taxi drivers (85.6% men)
9. Electrical power line installers (99.6% men)
8. Truck drivers (95.4% men)
7. Farmers (76.5% men)
6. Structural/Iron and Steel workers (97.3% men)
5. Roofers (99% men)
4. Recycling collectors (92.1% men)
3. Aircraft pilots (94.8% men)
2. Logging workers (76.5% men)
1. Fishing (76.5% men)
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0616.pdf
Note: This 2010 census report lumps fishing, farming and logging all into one category. Even so, it is overwhelmingly men who work in these occupations.
And just for shits and giggles, what do women do?
71% of all waitstaff are women
89% of all maids and housekeepers are women
91% of all hairdressers and cosmetologists are women
92% of all billing and posting clerks are women
90% of all bookkeeping and accounting clerks are women
90% of all time keeping and payroll clerks are women
92% of all receptionists are women
96% of all secretaries are women
97% of all preschool teachers are women
98% of all dental hygienists are women
So basically women serve food, clean up, keep organized, look after small children and tell everyone to remember to floss! Yay! Good job ladies. I’m so glad we spent our GDP on educating women to do shit they would be doing anyways. Except for their own families.
Does any of this come as a surprise to anyone at all? Men work longer, harder and in more dangerous occupations than women do, and for this they are rewarded, as they should be. And it turns out that the same conditions apply even in childhood! Boys get the crappy, yucky, dirty jobs and girls get the soft, cushy, easy jobs and guess who gets a bigger allowance?
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/15/even_little_kids_have_a_wage_gap/
Boys have to take out the garbage (Ew! Gross!), mow the lawn and shovel the driveway. Girls fold the laundry and unload the dishwasher. I have a super awesome dishwasher with a turbo setting so that little blade thingy that sprays water will spin like mad, but I have yet to experience any injury from unloading the dishwasher. It’s so safe, I let the baby help!
The little blade thingy that spins and cuts the grass underneath the lawnmower is a little more efficient at removing wayward limbs.
In a multicenter study of pediatric lawn-mower injuries (push or riding gas-powered machines), we reviewed 144 children at an average age of injury of 7.0 years; 77% were boys. Amputations occurred in 67 children; 63 were unilateral and four bilateral; the most common level was the toes (63%). Blood transfusions were given to 35 children.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9150027
You shouldn’t pay boys more than girls when they run the risk of amputation?
Fuck you, Soraya.
In fact, I think I’m gonna pay my son NOT to mow the lawn. I don’t want him to get used to the idea that his life is worth less than my girls. Because that is essentially what Soraya is saying. NOT that girls should be given the shit work. Oh, no. That will never do.
The bad news is that gender inequities in lifetime wages and time allocation have roots in how we reward children for work they do at home. Childhood scripts continue to lay the groundwork for making domestic work less valued, for prioritizing men’s careers over women’s, for a persistent workforce sex segregation, and for an enduring wage gap. All because of who dries the dishes and takes out the trash.
Nope. Girls should be paid the same as boys no matter what the chores, so we can go on teaching boys that their lives are essentially disposable, their bodies are tools we can all use and that bullshit jobs like folding towels are equally worthwhile.
You know what happens if you don’t cut the grass? Your house is overtaken by weeds and eventually the natural landscape will take over and engulf your house, break the foundations and make it impossible for you to inhabit it. The World Without Us lays it all out. It’s a fascinating book!
http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html
You know what happens if you don’t fold the towels?
Not one fucking thing!
Trust me.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
U R breathtakingness sauteed in awesomesauce.
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Sitting here in Kenya rolling on the floor laughing. Love it, dad, I want some back pay for cleaning the gutters as my sister got the same for doing dishes. Damn, damn, damn
Ron R
Just and Expat American
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People pay their children for doing basic household chores? Jesus H Christ what will they think of next.
My Father paid us for doing our chores in food on the table, clothes on our backs and a roof over our heads and I would bet growing up on a dairy farm I did a lot more chores than 99% of kids.
As to the wage gap, it has been debunked so many times it’s almost like beating a dead horse. I remember working for a road paving company in my early 20’s. 130+ degrees laying asphalt on remote highways in British Columbia. Living away from home for months at a time. Somehow I don’t think the secretary who sits on her has filed and answering phones in an airconditioned office and sleeping in her own bed should be making the same money.
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Want to see a real life example of “The World Without Us”? Search for panoramic landscapes from “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone” on Google Images. Photos taken form a spectrum from creepy to hauntingly beautiful.
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I owned a taxi for five years. I was very careful and had little trouble, I had friends, however, who were robbed, stabbed and murdered.
My father was a general contractor and I did roofing a few times. The hell with that. I’ll drive a taxi.
When I was 13 (yeah, 13) I was helping my father build a house. I heard something rustling on the roof and I jumped back. A 12-foot 2×8 came crashing down. Had I not jumped back it would have landed on my 13-year-old skull and possibly killed me.
I also buried a guy’s fingertip that got cut off and have lost track of the number of Band-Aids I have put on fingers cut by power saws and other implements.
I have no sympathy for women whining about their highly-paid jobs.
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Geez, JB, you really don’t get it do you? Men shouldn’t be working those long hours, they should be at home picking up their share of the housework so women can work the long hours! Business must conform to feminist ideals to facilitate women’s equal access to the higher echelons of the workforce. Women should be given appointments to corporate boards where they are under-represented! Government must provide childcare–free or low-cost, natch–to equalize the economic playing field for women!
Get with the program, lady!
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Hrm, this brings up thoughts about modern parenting tools. Why couldn’t I create a web-app that’s linked to my bank account or accounting software that creates accounts for each kid (that they have spending authority on so they can buy things online), that auto-deposits for each chore completed.
I can imagine this would work splendidly. In fact, after a year, you can get real data on how often chores were done, and how much money paid out per chore. In this way, you can adjust the pay rate depending on how often specific chores get done. If, as a parent, you always find the trash not being taken out? Raise your payout rate! If, as a parent, you find people fighting over doing the dishes? Lower the pay rate!
The only problem is the daily tally, that itself is kind of a chore. But if you have the time to keep track of what was done each day, you can essentially run your house like a free market.
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The very first clue that the wage gap is complete and utter bullshit lies in the logic of capitalism itself. If any given industry could pay women less than men for doing the exact same job, THEY WOULD ONLY HIRE WOMEN!
Well, feminism really isn’t all that big on capitalism in the first place. The hard-core RadFems are pretty explicit about their Marxist roots because they fairly explicitly equate capitalism with patriarchy. In their minds, there is really no difference. Hence their desire to bring it down and do away with the “money” system. (What they plan to replace it with they’re a little vague on, though I suspect it involves berries, brightly-colored seashells, and grass huts.)
Even the more mainstream feminists who tout the “wage gap” lie and call for better pay for women don’t grasp a fundamental truth of business that it makes more sense to lower the pay of men to achieve parity than it is to raise the pay of women. When The call for women to be given seats on corporate boards to achieve gender parity also reveals a core tenet of feminism: women should be given more pay, boardroom seats, and free daycare because… Well, I’m not sure why, but I suspect PATRIARCHY! (Shut up, it just is.) Women should be given things just because they are women.
Solipsism is no way to run an economy…
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I had a conversation with my husband about this the other night. I didn’t think it was fair that the admins at his job made more than those actually out doing the hard work. He doesn’t really agree or disagree though…he kind of looks at it as it’s just the way it is. =\ yeah, wage gap my ass…
My husband is a paramedic and is currently in nursing school. (He’s on his way to being a trauma nurse). He’s extremely hard working and I respect and greatly appreciate what he does to provide for our family.
His paramedic job was not entirely enough to support us (so he ended up working a weekend part-time job as well. Two jobs AND school started to become very overwhelming for him so he eventually asked me to return back to work. I was very conflicted about this. At the time- our son was only 4 and our daughter was only 3 months old. A lot of evaluation with into this before our final decision was made.
I feel terribly guilty it. =(
The fact that a secretary working for the same company is making more than my paramedic husband goes to prove otherwise.
I can’t wait until he finishes nursing school.
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This reminds me of being a kid. My parents weren’t the allowance types so my brothers and I earned our own money. And yes, my brother made more money mowing lawns than I did babysitting- as he should have.
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Reblogged this on aneroidocean and commented:
This topic comes up from time to time with people, and JudgyBitch tackles the topic pretty effectively with logic AND references. There is no appreciable wage gap in most cases.
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This is a takedown for the ages. Well done.
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Hey JB, thought you might enjoy this one
In a nut shell, prison shouldn’t inconvenience women or separate them from their child because vagina I guess….
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This would make a fantastic short play.
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I propose “a day without men”. All men take a day off all at once. Just to see what happens.
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“Not because SEXISM but because TRAINING”
Let’s use an actual, real language here. If I want to read shitty writing, I’ll go to a feminist website:
http://brownfemipower.tumblr.com/
Other than that, great post.
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What is this… “allowance” you speak of? 😛 I only got paid when I got a job at a bakery over the Summer! Haha great takedown.
Cheers.
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It’s supposed to play into the whole, “Women file more harassment charges because SEXISM.”
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Actually, I’d rather see a ‘week without men’. A single day would make little difference, we’d just have to do ten times as much work when we get back. A week, however, would be far far more enlightening. within three days, the supermarkets would be empty of food, which wouldn’t matter because all power and water would have shut down the first day, and there would be no way to cook food, even if people could (no ‘guys’ to grill). in four days, all the existing refrigerated food would be spoiled. Within five days there would be wholesale raiding of canned supplies, and within a week there would be cannibalism and the beginnings of plague as rotting bodies started to fester.
within 1 month of all the men disappearing 90% of america would be dead.
If all the women disappeared, within 1 month 10% of america would be dead. reason? suicide.
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Actually, the point was to be an ironic reflection of the feminist dialogue. she misused ‘sexism’ deliberately to call attention to the humorous dichotomy between the real meaning of the word and the feminist interpretation.
Kind of like saying “I was carrying a gun, dressed in black, with a ski mask over my head, and they wouldn’t let me in the theater because RACISM!”
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yes, I made a lot more money than the girls of my acquaintance… But that’s because I mosed nearly 30 lawns a week, and it’s hard to get more than 3 babysitting gigs a week.
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*mowed
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Oh, I also painted houses, washed cars, painted house numbers on curbs, replaced mailboxes, cleaned gutters, trimmed shrubs, raked leaves, changed oil, tilled gardens, painted fences, edged and weeded, help clean out and paint garages, made dump runs, scraped sidewalks, poured concrete, and swept nearly everything in my neighborhood for spare cash. I also wrote code and did commissioned artwork for my ‘furry’ friends on the side.
And THEN I came home and did the same stuff for my mom 😛 of course, I got nothing but constant bitching about my messy room.
On the plus side, I was the only guy I know that bought his own car and computer, paid cash, WITHOUT his parent’s help, before he was old enough to have a learner’s permit 🙂 good thing too, without my income, my mom would have lost the house when her husband died of cancer.
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I worked with a pay equity consultant for a while. I found it frustrating. The goal was never to match up the salary of a female firefighter to a male firefighter. No, instead the goal was to find an occupation that is typically held by a male and compare it to one typically held by a female. The comparisons were rather weak. It mainly focused on years of education.
There are some fields definitely more difficult than others. You highlighted danger on the job as a major one. Another one is that not all fields are at the same level of difficulty. For instance, my undergrad was in business. However, I would not believe that a four year business degree is just as difficult as a four year engineering degree. The degree in engineering is far more difficult.
The additional interesting item is that if the typical female position pays more, that the males were not compensation. In addition, if you had a male who worked a typical female position (let’s say reception), if the females received a pay increase due to pay equity, he would not.
In my years of work, I have never seen someone say “let’s hire a man, because I prefer to work with men.” Might have happened in the past, but not today. Pay is based on many different factors. If you are dissatisfied with yours, then move to a field where you will get paid more. However, that usually does not happen, because most people do not like those jobs that pay more. Which is exactly why they pay more.
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“Pay is based on many different factors. If you are dissatisfied with yours, then move to a field where you will get paid more. However, that usually does not happen, because most people do not like those jobs that pay more. Which is exactly why they pay more.”
Exactly this.
Well. And the fact that the evil capitalist patriarchy has made life so very tough that feminists can make a decent living from being professionally outraged on the internet (after completing gender studies degrees, where the necessity to compete with men is removed entirely). I don’t see many of them moving any time soon.
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I have one objection to this article. Unless you teach your son that his value is in some respect linked to his ability to sacrifice his life in favor of women and children, then he won’t fit in with society very well. If he is seen to be overly concerned for his own safety, he will be seen as weak and rejected. Our value in society is largely a factor of our ability to do those actions more likely to get us killed. As a boy, he will need to play dangerous games and do dangerous chores. Through this sort of risk training he will gain the confidence needed to be valued by society.
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I apologize. That was uncalled for.
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You can’t even have an article in Wired about the best writers/thinkers without the feminist chorus screaming “SEXISTS! WHERE ARE THE WYMMYN?!”
Jezebel has a nice inflammatory spin on it:
http://jezebel.com/wired-magazine-doesnt-think-women-have-brains-1150033824
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By the way there are plenty of women on those compiled lists (I guess Jezebel never actually read it), and it’s a fantastic list of links to interesting blogs. But it’s characteristic of the noisy harpy chorus that drowns out everything with frenzied hysterical cries of sexism even when it’s unwarranted.
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The only thing missing is an open labor market. Just invite other kids into your house to be your children, and have them compete. 🙂
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“Mujeres… cuanto me atraen
Y que poco me gustan!”
“Women… how much I feel atractted to them
And how much I dislike them!”
Luis Alberto de Cuenca (Spanish poet)
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90% of prostitutes are female.
And they earn a lot of money in the “high standing” zone.
Female pornstars are way better paid ( probably ten times more) than male pornstars;
I do not why women complain so much.
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I do not KNOW why women complain so much.
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Men do all the cold, nasty, dangerous, and physically difficult work for a reason – we’re better suited for it. We damn well should be doing it, if you look at it logically. Most men can work in harsh environments, and under difficult conditions, far more efficiently than women can.
And we will do it, too. That’s another huge difference – women don’t WANT to do these jobs. Not just that they can’t do it as well, they just aren’t showing up and getting in line in the first place. Bitch about it all you want, ladies, but until you are willing put on your carpentry bags and show up at 6 am on my jobsite in Sandpoint, Idaho, outside and in February, you aren’t going to have the same opportunities as men. This is a self-imposed limit that YOU are choosing to place on yourselves. The reason that I don’t have any women on my crews is not due to the fact that I won’t hire a woman. It is due to the fact that in 12 years of doing this, I’ve only ever had one woman apply to work on one of my projects. She was an apprentice equipment operator and was a very solid worker (yup, I hired her. And by golly, I paid her the same wage that I paid the men who I had on board in her position. Amazing). She eventually, after 9 months of doing the job, found work elsewhere because she decided she didn’t want to work outside in the heat anymore.
The new job she took had a lower wage than the job she had with me.
Let me say that again…
The new job she took had a lower wage than the job she had with me
In 12 years, I’ve had hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of men apply to work for me, and only one woman. This is a self-imposed glass ceiling, ladies.
At my company, the only women that we currently have on the payroll, out of nearly 200 people, are support staff – admins, clerks, and accountants. Again, not because we won’t hire women, but because women are not applying to work here.
So my advice to the women complaining about this is to shut the fuck up. Eventually, all your bitching about men is going to get you exactly what you want – the men are going to just leave you alone – but the consequences of that won’t be what you think they will be, assuming you like food, water, shelter, internet, electricity, roads, cars, and pretty much everything else that you benefit from re: men’s labor.
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Very true. I mean, if women were paid less for the same jobs and same hours that’d be disgraceful, but they don’t, and certainly don’t get the same difficult male tasks. Even with heavy lifting done for free they’ll get a man to do it unless none are around – on my 3 week NY to LA camping holiday 3 years ago, I was the only boy on the tour of 8 people (aside from an Australian bloke with me), and he and I did ALL of the heavy lifting.
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“Men work longer, harder and in more dangerous occupations than women do, and for this they are rewarded, as they should be.”
think about that fact and the fact that the wage gap has shrunk over the decades without any major changes to the gender distribution in those dangerous, dirty, harder jobs. Men are no longer being rewarded as much for putting themselves in such danger and straining their bodies to exhaustion every day, 5 days a week. Feminists have successfully made such jobs not as desirable because of their efforts on the wage gap and now look at the economy, we have hundreds of college and university graduates who are educated in fields like social work and business administration who can’t get work and in Canada they’re importing workers because we don’t have enough people willing to work in the trades(welding, carpentry, plumbing, etc…) meanwhile we have an ever increasing unemployment rate.
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Women to mine NOW!!!!
And if they join the army… to the front!!!
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Re: “A day (week) without men”
I know the dispatcher for the major gasoline supplier here in Fort Lauderdale. He’s a good guy. He’s young (under 30), smart, and works a stressful job (overnight, no less) where he ensures that most of the local gasoline stations receive their deliveries or the precious liquid. I’ve seen the endless stream of gasoline tankers barreling out of Port Everglades where the ship tankers deliver the gasoline. All those drivers are men, by the way.
I asked my dispatcher friend what would happen if the trucks weren’t rolling. His response was chilling:
“Fort Lauderdale would completely run out of gasoline within 24 hours.”
Just after hurricanes, this is exactly what happens here in South Florida. The streets are blocked with debris, the power is out, and essential workers (like my dispatcher friend and those oil tanker drivers) can’t get to work. So, we run out of gasoline. Sometimes that happens with food, too. Hilarity does not ensue. Sometimes, civil unrest does ensue.
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I really need to find someone like you and marry her, like ASAP.
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There’s no one like JB. Not even JB is like JB. Women like that don’t actually exist. This is all just a figment of your imagination…
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You would be surprised
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JB, when I click on that link to the OECD I can’t find the stats you mentioned. Under average annual hours worked per worker it doesn’t break it down by gender. It does show labor force stats by sex and age but those are the number of people working, not hours worked.
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Another thing often neglected is that paying men and women equally for the same job means the man is often underpaid. I’ve never been on a construction site where a woman was able to do the same work as a man. The loads she carried were smaller, she had to take breaks more often and for longer periods, even with fairly simple, straightforward jobs like running a cutoff saw, men were able to do significantly more work, yet were still paid the same. It engendered some grumbling but no real resentment. I can’t imagine, though, a woman lasting in construction if she was both being paid the same as a man to do less while demanding the environment be changed to suit her feelings. She’d be run off, and reasonably so, but not because she was a woman. It would be because she was being an intolerable, entitled arse.
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