Comments

1
NPR had another piece on this issue today:
...[A]n assistant professor of management at the University of Texas devised an experiment... she had men and women negotiate a starting salary for themselves. Then she had them negotiate on behalf of someone else.

When the women negotiated for themselves, they asked for an average of $7,000 less than the men. But when they negotiated on behalf of a friend, they asked for just as much money as the men...
2
Why today? Because people tend to be distracted by income tax and getting lawns ready so they figure nothing will get done if it's now.

Duh.
3
the more women there are in a job category, the lower everyone in the job category gets paid

Female naturopaths outnumber males by 3 to 1. Male MDs outnumber females by 2 to 1. By your reasoning, naturopaths should be paid as much as MDs because PATRIARCHY! Give me a break.

Everyone is for fairness and against discrimination. If women are being unfairly compensated relative to men for the same work, that's not cool.

But if women choose to enter lower paying fields at a higher rate than men, that's their choice. And if you think that's wrong, perhaps you should take the issue up with all the women who pass up med school to pursue a less valuable (and much less stressful) degree in nutrition or homeopathy.
4
"the more women there are in a job category, the lower everyone in the job category gets paid"--I highly doubt the causal relationship implied here is true. I.e., I would be very surprised if more women in a job category causes that job category to be lower-paid.

Instead, I bet it's something more like this: highly-paid jobs require scarce skills like computer programming. Low-paying jobs do not. Fewer women than men have the technical skills for the highly-paid jobs, so women concentrate in the low-paying jobs.

So low pay does not cause concentration of women, nor does concentration of women cause low pay. Instead, both are caused by outside factors, e.g. higher demand, and hence higher pay, for technical skills, paucity of women with those skills, etc.

Really, Ms. Minard, when feminists float poorly-thought-through talking points like this it only hurts your own credibility.

Please wait...

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