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The Economist Debates: Women

Jill

The debate issue over at the Economist right now is “This house believes that women in the developed world have never had it so good.” Which… ok. May be true. But I’m with Terry O’Neill, who opposes the whole premise of the motion:

The “you’ve never had it so good” canard has long been used as a smokescreen by those who would avoid or deny society’s most intractable problems. For women, it is tantamount to being told to sit down and shut up. We will not. The motion is insulting, and I reject it.

She continues:

It is not good that the wage gap between women and men has narrowed by less than half a penny per year since 1963. It definitely is not good that because of gender pay discrimination women in the United States are at higher risk of poverty than men, especially in retirement. Denial of equal pay for comparable work is a form of oppression of half the population that underlies lower productivity, higher poverty rates, more old age poverty, more ill health and family instability.

Women in the United States do make up half the workforce, but that hardly makes us equal. Since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, women have closed the wage gap by a mere 18 cents. Today, women’s median annual paychecks reflect only 77 cents for each dollar paid to men, with African American women paid 68 cents and Latinas just 58 cents (in nearly every arena, women of colour are short-changed at startlingly high rates).

Recently The WAGE Project concluded that full-time working women lose a startling amount of wages over the course of their lifetimes: an average $700,000 for high-school graduates; $1.2m for college graduates and $2m for professional graduates. I ask all of your female readers to pause a moment to reflect on this statistic. What might you do with $700,000? Pay off your mortgage? Send your kids to college debt-free?

Yes, many women in the Western world — especially middle and upper-class women — experience privileges and opportunities that were unthinkable a few generations ago. And we certainly have our feminist foremothers to thank for a lot of them.

But too often, “Look how far you’ve come!” is shorthand for “…so be grateful and stop complaining.” Men are never told to be grateful for what they have and how far they’ve come, or lectured on how other men over there have it so much worse and so why are they agitating for greater benefits? Head over there and join the debate.

26 thoughts on The Economist Debates: Women

  2. Rhetorically, the motion is brilliant. Ethically, it is disgraceful.

    Making such a claim at all, underscores both the absence of equality and a desire to keep it that way.

  3. I am currently doing a thesis relating to the gendered wage gap in Canada and have found some interesting information that I would be interested to find out if it holds true in other countries as well.

    In Canada, wage equality peaked in the mid 1990s at 72% and has since fallen to about 71%, showing that when left alone, this problem will not just get better (an argument that I have heard a lot recently… that we have come so far that now it will just go away on it’s own).

    Although I am aware that many people would consider me lucky to live in a time and place that allows ( and in my case, forces) me to participate in the workforce, I agree that there should be much more to this debate. Hopefully, it doesn’t all fall back to the personal choices argument, that we chose to have children and are knowingly sacrificing our salaries for families… that one really bothers me.

  4. It’s disgusting actually. I have these discussion where I feel as some women are actually men dressed up in women’s clothing. The idea that “certain” kinds of women had to work, just doesn’t seem to resonate with many feminists, or women generally.

    Yes, thanks to women’s lib many women are able to do more than before, but the poor women who had to pick up after these women are still doing just that.

    I know as a working women I am being short-changed. I would have guess the wage loss to be less, but nonetheless I am not surprised. Sad.

  6. Regarding the wage gap, does anybody know if the 77 cents per male dollar figure is specific to white women, or is that averaged out across multiple races?

  7. Uhg, that was painful to read, and under the Oxford rules, I’d have to side with Donkin, not because his arguments or case is that strong, O’Neill is that bad.

    She’s espousing the tenants of third wave humanism which gains her points with marginalized groups, in total disregard to the publication’s key audience – very privileged people, predominantly old white men, who will not share power unless it benefits them in some way.

    The topic is the status of women, not the status of the denizens of failed states, or the marginalize groups in the developed world.

    She screwed up again by conceding to Donkin’s point that women choose to drop out of the work force in order to take care of their families, just as Laurel feared. What was O’Neill thinking????

    True, a longitudinal survey of three Harvard Business School graduating classes showed only 38% of graduating women ending up in full-time careers. A Harvard Business Review study shows that of those in full-time careers, nearly eight in ten women reported taking drastic steps to care for their families, with four out of ten deliberately seeking work with fewer responsibilities and lower compensation in order to continue unpaid care-giving work, and another four in ten reporting voluntarily leaving work at some point in their careers (most often to care for their families).

    A real feminist response to such a situation would be to let the family burn. If it’s sooo important(i.e. possesses real value), the men will pick up the slack right? 😀 😀 😀

    That’s why powerful old white men rule the world, they are masters of deflecting/avoiding things that don’t have an upside (for them).

  8. Jill, it is disingenuous at best to pretend that women receive only 77 cents for every dollar that men receive as a result of sex discrimination. At worst, women receive between 93% and 95% of the pay that men receive, and even that remaining gap is speculative. Factors other than gender account for more than 100% of the remaining gap, but mix dependent and independent variables due to insufficiently large data collections that would allow such variables to be properly disentangled.

    Please see the CONSAD Research Corporation’s full statistical analysis here. (It’s a pdf you can download.)

    It’s true that on a raw level women as a group make less money than men. It’s also true that on a raw level men are injured on the job far more frequently than women, tend to work longer hours than women, and get killed on the job at a rate eight times that of women. It’s irresponsible to pull out one piece of raw data and pretend it represents an accurate summary of a very complex picture.

  9. I think there is an inclination for us all to want to see proof that at least progress has been made to some degree. Those, of course, who oppose it will see progress as having gone quite far enough. But the key for us as feminists and as activists is to spell out our goals directly for our opponents, not that we don’t do this already but to underscore direct examples beyond more abstract concepts. Patriarchy is difficult to explain in concrete terms, but I think we need to find a way to make that we which deserve and are striving for as plain as we can.

  10. Ballgame, and that couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that jobs which are traditionally reserved for women tend to pay much less than jobs traditionally reserved for men, could it? Professors of science and engineering make a whole hell of a lot more than professors of say, art history, for example. Humm…

  11. Okay, ballgame, let’s play.

    From the report: “A greater percentage of women than man tend to work part-time. Part-time work tends to pay less than full-time work.”

    Let’s think about some reasons for that. Women have to take care of the kids at a disproportionate rate to men. If the household is a two-income household, and there are children involved, the women have to stay home half the time because they have boobies and vaginas.

    “A great percentage of women than men tend to leave the labor force for child birth, child care and elder care.” Many women want to leave the workforce for a degree of (unpaid maternity leave) time in order to have children. But the present business model is set up to reward only continued official employment and to penalize any lapses in employment due to things like having children. The discrepancy is compounded by the fact that our system makes no efforts to help with child care, so overwhelmingly, the burden falls to women. And, since women have boobies and vaginas, they are the natural caregivers for the elderly, too.

    “Women, especially working mothers, tend to value ‘family friendly’ workplace policies more than men. Some of the wage gap is explained by industry and occupation…” Because such environments are valued less than the cut-throat, traditionally male working environment because of (say it with me) systemic inequalities in the traits we (in this patriarchal society of ours) value.

    Oh, and you say men have more dangerous jobs? Really? Well, that may be true of jobs the system deems “real” but what about women on the street? What about women in certain sectors (and not all, I should emphasize) of the sex industry who are almost assured of having violence visited on them during the course of their work? What about those women? Oh wait, I forgot, they don’t count. Okay.

  12. And what percentage of science and engineering graduates are female, Andrea? And what is the relative demand and supply for professors in each field? I’d wager that, if being a professor in both fields paid the same, you’d end up with many more folks trying to become art history professors than engineering professors because most people would find it more inherently enjoyable spending their days ‘consuming’ and discussing art than analyzing shearing forces and talking about ways to measure metal fatigue. As a result, you just don’t have to pay someone as much to induce them to immerse themselves in art history as you do to be a wizard at engineering.

  13. “What about women in certain sectors (and not all, I should emphasize) of the sex industry who are almost assured of having violence visited on them during the course of their work? What about those women? Oh wait, I forgot, they don’t count. Okay.”

    I believe they were counted, although I can’t find the study I’m thinking of. It wasn’t based on just worker’s comp. The study I’m thinking of explicitly excluded military injuries, however (which skew highly male). One industry that surprised me with higher female injury rates was healthcare.

    I know that “but there’s a STUDY!!!!” without showing the study isn’t really a powerful argument, and I’m not disagreeing with anything else you said in that post, but I don’t think one dangerous job (or set of dangerous jobs) that is traditionally female really does much to tear apart the argument. Also, it’s very possible that my study only applies to Canada and not the US.

    SPEAKING OF WHICH, I’m surprised women’s wages compared to men’s seems so much lower in Canada, though it’s possible they use different criteria because they’re obviously different studies. It’s probably totally unfair bias on my part but I tend to expect Canada to be a little bit ahead of the US on these sort of equality issues.

  14. Let’s also not forget that the jobs where men get physically disproportionately hurt are jobs which employ a very small amount of women, on purpose, where women in that particular field are seen as either too weak to perform the job (or “unqualified”), and are condescended to daily.

    Women aren’t banned from combat in US military law because they’re too precious to be shot, but because they’re not seen as capable of killing/winning/strategizing. Even talking about female privilege, you find misogyny everywhere.

  15. “Women, especially working mothers, tend to value ‘family friendly’ workplace policies more than men. Some of the wage gap is explained by industry and occupation…” Because such environments are valued less than the cut-throat, traditionally male working environment because of (say it with me) systemic inequalities in the traits we (in this patriarchal society of ours) value.

    YES. This.

  16. Also if you factor in GIVING BIRTH, the work – and producing the next generation, paid or not, by choice or not, is the most important job out there, hence is “work” – that women do is, as far as injury and death, on average just as dangerous. Factor in elder care and childcare, and across the majority of the planet, farming (mostly done by women in the third world, which is 85% of Earth’s population), the “men are so chivalrous they do the the difficult, dirty or dangerous jobs” argument holds no water whatsoever. The difficult, dirty or dangerous, WELL-PAID, HIGH STATUS jobs (firefighters, sewage workers, cops, soldiers mostly get pensions and salaries) are reserved for men. The DDD jobs that are done for free or at massive personal cost because if you don’t do them, society lines up to make you an outcast and you’ll have an even lower status (eg spinster, old maid, hardnosed bitch, starving widow) – those are still mostly done by women.

  17. ballgame, men far outnumber women in those higher paid jobs/fields because they are encouraged *from the very beginning* to excell in math and science-based courses (we don’t have to have another sing-along bout systemic inequalities do we?). Until this generation, the vast majority of art history professors were also men, until the patriarchy decided that wussy art is woman’s stuff to just sit around and be “consumed” (wow, you really don’t know anything about history or the humanities, do you).

  18. By the way, ballgame, did your argument just center around the idea that men are the ones who take on the challenging fields, while women tend to go for the easy, frivolous ones? Yea, pretty sure it did. That, my friend, is a logic fail.

  19. Andrea, cacophonies, Lizzie: My remarks are specifically targeted to the unsupported notion that women in the U.S. receive “77 cents” for each dollar earned by men due to sex discrimination at the workplace, thus “losing” a “startling” amount of money over their lifetimes. (My comment does not pertain at all to conditions outside of the U.S., where — particularly in developing nations — gender relations are radically different than they are here.)

    You are raising related but nonetheless significantly different issues: namely, that various cultural forces shunt women into certain occupations, or pressure them into making choices that end up costing them money, or that society doesn’t compensate women properly for the “work” of bearing children. Those are ideas worth debating, but none amenable to the misleading decimal point precision implied by “$0.77 is less than $1.00 and that’s not fair.” You would have to weigh the cultural forces impinging on women vs. those impinging on men, the question of relative job and life satisfaction, etc. etc. And an equitable resolution to those questions would probably not lie in simplistic legislation based on the “77 is less than a 100” equation.

    I think those discussions are important and I like participating in them, but in all honesty I’m not sure Jill is particularly enthusiastic about my doing so. (Jill has always treated me respectfully but my last comment took a rather long time to emerge from moderation and I can’t help but wonder if she was Telling Me Something.)

  20. Well I heart Jill.

    And fine, you can split hairs and say that the pay descrepency is not due to discrimination in the work place specifically, but to discrimination in Western culture at large. The fact remains, women are paid less, are valued less and increasingly do more.

  21. “From the report: “A greater percentage of women than man tend to work part-time. Part-time work tends to pay less than full-time work.”

    Let’s think about some reasons for that. Women have to take care of the kids at a disproportionate rate to men. If the household is a two-income household, and there are children involved, the women have to stay home half the time because they have boobies and vaginas.”

    Not to mention the fact that raising children is -work-. Women just don’t get paid for the work that we do raising children.

    “Also if you factor in GIVING BIRTH, the work – and producing the next generation, paid or not, by choice or not, is the most important job out there, hence is “work” – that women do is, as far as injury and death, on average just as dangerous.”

    Thank you.

  22. Ballgame: you’re not really here to debate are you? Shouldn’t you come clean about your hatred of all thing feminist and the hard on you have for Men’s Rights?

    (you know what the deal is when we talk about wages – you’ve been a part of these conversations for what, four or five years now? You know that the hinge point is unequal pay for equal work. But yeah, you conveniently forget *that* whenever you need to.)

  23. To Andrea, cacophonies, Lizzie and all others who believe the pay gap:

    If there were proof that women were paid less for the same work, hours etc etc, why aren’t the companies being prosecuted for sexual discrimination?

    1. Sonja, are you kidding? I hate to be condescending, but do a few minutes of research on how sex discrimination claims actually work.

  25. cacaphonies:

    As someone with experience in the field of rather backbreaking labour and an avid bodybuilder/weightlifter, it IS true that there are some tasks where almost no women would have the physical strength involved to get the job done. I’m sure this doesn’t help employers in those fields warm to the idea of hiring women.

    THAT SAID, if ANY person of any identity can fulfill the needs of that roll I see no reason why they should not. The idea that in modern warfare a woman does not have the strength to hold a firearm and run in heavy gear is ludicrous. Standardized tests seem a fair approach to the issue of women in the military, if any particular woman is as capable as any particular man and is still denied service it seems nothing more than state-sponsored oppression.

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