Comments on Darcy Burner Knows the Way to My Heart
All it takes is a vagina to know the way to your heart.
Obama has not been as outspoken about equal pay as his former Senate colleague
Uh, former?!
ECB...I'm on board with you on this one. I agree with all of your points...
Except this...
Why must you continue to cast doubts on the Democratic Nominee for President? As you noted, he supports the legislation. So, why not champion that? You know full-well that after a bruising primary battle, he needs the support of women. So, why the extra jab?
Sour grapes? Or is there something of merit in the distinction that you think needed to be told?
And what about parental leave? Mandatory paid vacation?
like the fact that a man made more in his previous job.
such a pile of bullshit, so now my past work experience is flushed down the toilet and I have to earn less, because someone who decided to take 5 years off ( for kids, buying shoes, saving the world who cares) can feel equal? FUCK YOU and your communist idiocracy
@3
He has a penis.
It's cute the way you say those are all the factors.
What are consequences for this legislation in regards to hiring practices?
Only Americans would put up with gender-based wage differences - the rest of the world has been changing this for decades, and you're still talking about it.
Talking won't work.
Action will work.
Didn't the supreme court make stuff like this near impossible to enforce recently by saying that you only have some narrow window in which you can actually contest discriminatory wage differentials?
"Currently, women working full-time and year-round earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by me"
People still believe this urban legend? It's been disproven several times. Hell, Marilyn vos Savant debunked it nicely years ago -- and she's a woman!
Whoops. "Earned by men," not "earned by me." Then again, Oprah outearns me. Hmmm...
The person I would have had to file a complaint about (had the laws been navigable) who made more than me for doing the same job in my last position was another woman. It's not always men v. women in this bullshit. It should be about fair pay for doing the same motherfucking job regardless of anything.
Oh, and "can feel equal" totally made my day. Thanks for acknowledging the hierarchy of gender.
It's my understanding that ECB earns exactly 77% of what her male colleagues earn. Ergo, this is not a myth.
#1?
Erica has a vagina? The whole time I thought it was a dried up cave of lost hope.
Do female whores make as much as male whores?
@10,
They used a loophole in the existing legislation, which is why Congress is trying to pass new legislation.
Everyone should know by now that the 77% number so beloved of ECB and her ilk is not controlled for profession, education, or experience. When one controlls for qualifying factors like these, the number rises to 95%-100%, depending on the study.
You might believe that legislation like this is still justified to deal with that last 0%-5%. But McCain is indisputably correct that education and experience are what women need to close the overwhelming majority of this gap.
@17: Where is this study?
i read somewhere on the ever-reliable and always factually accurate internet that "studies have shown" men are more likely than women to negotiate their starting salary, and over time this has a huge impact on one's salary. i doubt this accounts for the full 20-cent disparity, but any study that doesn't include this factor is probably not getting the full picture.
ECB: "Even controlling for ALL factors that influence earnings—including marital status, race, number and age of children, and total amount of time (hours, tenure, and total years of work) spent in the workforce, women still earn only 80 percent of men’s income."
@17: "When one controlls for qualifying factors like these, the number rises to 95%-100%, depending on the study."
Obviously, someone is wrong, but neither provides a source. Links, please!
@17: More women than men have degrees. Perhaps accounting for principles of compatibility hiring would be more warranted.
According to my read of this proposed act, if you have a 25-year old man with an electrical engineering degree and a 25-year old woman with a history degree, it would be discrimination if a company hired them both (for different jobs) and paid him more. Is that correct?
I want to compliment Erica for this post. I often (half) joke that I don't want ECB to become an Obama advocate because her brand of rhetoric is actually counter-productive, but this post is a good example of how she can make a contribution. When you see ECB in full propaganda mode ("Tim Eyman is stupid!") she mostly becomes herself a convenient piñata for the opposition.
But here, she is not pretending to be an Obama partisan, but rather making an argument she actually believes in and saying that while she wants more from Obama, McCain is worse. Anyone could see that much of what she wrote to help the Clinton campaign was the result of turning a blind eye to all the things about Hillary that offend Erica's values, and those cracks in her arguments showed.
All I'm saying is that when you speak from the heart instead of treating your readers like rubes you're trying to manipulate, your arguments are inherently better and stronger.
Ditto what elenchos @ 23 said, for all the same reasons. This is a good post, Erica.
People who subscribe to the points that Erica raised (which includes me) will be raising money, staffing phone banks, banging doors, and doing everything else necessary to help Darcy win this election.
The David Wrights of the world are on the wrong side of the discussion, and on the wrong side of history. They are foot soldiers in the army of corporate absolutism. We can and must beat them at the polls this November.
This is politics at its worse, a case where you take a complicated issue, throw out some very general statistics that throw very little light on the subject, don't attempt to understand the root causes, and then legislate the problem away (and call anyone who wants to look deeper into the issue a sexist).
Please define "foot soldiers in the army of corporate absolutism," because that phrase makes no sense to me.
i love the mentality of john mccain. "women should get more education!" oh wait, more women graduate college than men? and are still being paid less? hmmm
@ 5 it's NOT THAT YOU HAVE TO EARN LESS. it's that woman have a right to earn the same as what you do. how is that you earning less? in what universe do you live where the laws of mathematics do not apply to you? your income does not change.
bridget, what are women educated in? That is an important distinction.
Bridget -
The point is that if a man with 10 years of experience in a career gets paid the same as a woman with 5 years (who took off five years in the middle to raise a family or for that matter, took of five years to travel the world), yes, you are devaluing his work experience.
Also, bridget, unless we now live in a world of unlimited resources and I didn't get the memo, that money comes from somewhere (possibly my salary).
When I was a working as a consultant, it sucked to find out what my coworkers were making. Some way more, some way less. There was a lot of factors involved, but gender wasn't one of them. As a matter of fact, education and experience wasn't ALWAYS a factor either. It usually boiled down to how you (or your agency) negotiated, and when-and-WHY you were hired.
This is only my experience in my tiny little world. It's not hard for me to believe there's poverty-level jobs looking for anyone who will take the least amount of money, and be most reliable, whoever that turns out to be.
Recipe for "Instant Hostility from Sloggers":
1. Make feminist statement
2. Wait three nanoseconds
For extra misogyny, include favorable comment about Hillary Clinton.
@29,
This act does not demand that. Work experience can still be factored in when determining an employee's salary. I mean seriously; where the fuck are you getting that?
@33 -
I'm responding to Bridget, who doesn't understand that paying someone with with 5 years experience the same as another person with 10 years is in face devaluing their work experience. I don't know what the bill does or doesn't say, I was responding to a specific point on here.
If I ran a business, and could cut my payroll by 20% simply by replacing all my male employees with female ones to do exactly the same job, as this implies, this would allow me to undercut my competitors' prices and give me a huge advantage in the market. How come nobody does that, then?
In fields where the education and experience gap has closed, the salary gap has too. Young women lawyers earn more on average than young men doing exactly the same job (young women lawyers are considerably more highly-sought out of law school too). Women working in day care earn peanuts in comparison -- but so do men.
There are fields where women are excluded for a variety of reasons which have nothing to do with fitness, particularly the trades (carpenter, plumber, etc.)
There is also a biological block in some jobs: you are generally speaking not going to be considered an upper-management candidate if there is the slightest chance you might have a baby. This isn't about childcare, it's about the rigors of pregnancy and the factor of attention. In order to be a CEO you have to give 100% of your attention to your job, and mothers-to-be won't ever do that.
@35
No way are you being genuine with that last paragraph Fnarf. You're such a troll.
There's something to be said for the fact that no two people TRULY do the same job.
The issue of pay inequality between the sexes is still worthy of investigation, but I haven't seen an argument that itemizing the data in a way that's compelling.
As for Fnarf's example - there's a similar old-school way of thinking that still exists in the professional world and keeps unmarried men from advancing past a certain level.
I am being genuine. CEOs are not allowed to have family lives, and they're certainly not allowed to become pregnant. Don't agree? Name one. Powerful women are either childless or had their babies a long time ago. My boss has had two babies on the job and it has definitely hurt her ability to concentrate fully, and she's not a CEO.
F @ 20: Your citation request is perfectly reasonable.
At http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/334/15/960 you will find a real, academic study of physician pay which finds a 0% gap. ("after adjustment for differences in specialty, practice setting, and other characteristics, no earnings difference was evident")
At http://www.aauw.org/About/newsroom/pressreleases/042307_PayGap.cfm, you will find a study by a women's pay interest group that finds a 6% gap. ("after controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors known to affect earnings, the research indicates that one-quarter of the pay gap remains" -- 1/4 of a 23% gap is a 6% gap)
The only "study" I'm aware of that claimed a 20% differential after "controls" controlled for educational atainment and work experience, but not for profession. In other words, it saw it as an injustice that a Ph.D. art historian with 10 years experience selling baskets at street markets didn't make as much as Ph.D. chemical engineer with 10 years experience building industrial scale reaction systems.
I don't understand: if the market punishes companies that discriminate against women or minorities irrationally, then that means discrimination could never have existed for very long. It means the 6% pay gap David Wright identifies in @39 is impossible. Companies live and die by differences in payroll costs of far less than 6%. If real discrimination exists -- or ever existed -- then that means something else is broken, doesn't it?
"Tragedy of the comments" my ass. This is one of the more intelligent discussions on the topic I've read in long time.
Study that math and science, girls!
If you go and look at the PDF FAQ on the Paycheck Fairness Act that ECB linked to, you'll see the list of factors controled for to reach her 80% figure: "marital status, race, number and age of children, and income, as well as work patterns such as years of work, hours worked, and job tenure". Notice that occupation is not on the list.
Reading that document also makes it very clear that the proposed legislation is designed as the thin end of the wedge of comparable worth, i.e. government control of wage scales across professions. It "directs the Department of Labor to develop guidelines to enable employers voluntarily to compare wages paid for different jobs to determine whether their pay scales accurately reflect the requirements of the jobs." While the bill makes these guidelines voluntary, the clear hope is that they would eventually carry sufficient weight that departure from them would constitute prima facae evidence of gender descrimination.
The Fair Pay act, another bill touted in the document, goes so far as to "equalize wage disparities between jobs that are segregated on the basis of sex, race, or national origin, but require equivalent skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions". That is, it really implements comparable worth.
There will always be foolish people with a grudge who want to use command-and-control economic policy to address their grievences. But I would hope that ECB and others like her would have the decency to be upfront about what they are trying to achieve, and the real meaning of the statistics they are touting.
Comments Closed
Comments are closed on this post.