It varies greatly depending on where you live. In rural, conservative areas women tend to make a lot less. On the other hand, some northeast and west coast cities have higher average salaries for women than men.
How come women are more likely to become Walmart workers than doctors compared to men? Here are some contributing factors:
Girls are taught to see doctors as men
Girls receive less pressure to excel in science
Girls are taught to be more squeamish while boys are permitted to make messes
Maintaining a professional career is harder without maternity leave
Employers may view the prospect of having to pay maternity leave as a business risk
Women may avoid academia due to a fear of not being taken seriously
Girls are discouraged from occupying positions of authority
Women may fear not being taken seriously by patients
Girls are often told not to worry about their careers and to focus on marriage instead
Sexism: A 2019 review notes that previous research has found that girls play outside less than boys. Some studies have found that caregivers treat girls differently from boys when it comes to managing risk, encouraging boys to deal with problems by themselves more often. This may mean girls feel less confident playing outside without supervision. Caregivers can also restrict girls from playing outside due to fears of assault.
The first national survey of play in preschool-aged children in Britain has found that from the age of two-years-old, girls are playing outside in nature less than boys.
Children need to play in the mud and get messy. It's good for them. But girls are being discouraged from playing outside. And being able, psychologically, to deal with mess is an important life skill needed for lots of jobs. Including being a doctor. It's better to learn these skills earlier rather than later.
This. It's a wilfully deceptive statistical misinterpretation implying that a woman working alongside a man in the same job is magically making 20-something percent less. If businesses could get away with saving 20-30% on their biggest ongoing expense (payroll) for employees in one half of the population, they would only ever hire people from that half.
When controlled for field, role, seniority, region, etc., the disparity is within a margin of error.
It looks like the figure is similar in the US: plateaued at 83% a few years ago, currently at 82.
Incidentally, I’m not used to seeing “West-“ specified and was curious enough to read up. Didn’t realize there were still major social differences in the East. Thank you!
There are very strong lingering effects which mean women, on average, are paid less.
It's especially hard on women in various countries where they're now expected to both have a successful career and be the primary child caregiver. Which is as ridiculous as it sounds.
However, one example of advocacy from a cafe in my city of Melbourne Australia a number of years ago really rubbed me the wrong way: when a cafe decided to charge like 25% more to men (inverse of 80%). I was a close to minimum wage worker at the time (in Australia, before the cost of living skyrocket, so I wasn't starving), and it annoyed me because if I went in, I would be asked to pay more because I was a man, never mind the fact I would likely be earning far less than many women going in there.
The wage gap is 100% real, and things should definitely be done to make all genders pay more equitable. But hell, the class divide is orders of magnitude worse, and we ought not forget it.
Sounds like it’s similar to here. I would have thought we narrowed the gap by now but apparently not. The child caregiver trends are definitely behind along with a host of other gender norms.
Lol that pricing scheme sounds great, easily a sketch comedy premise from Portlandia, BackBerner, SNL, etc
Ah I see, like grocers requiring that employees solicit donations at every checkout to reduce global food insecurity (and the grocer’s tax burden), it’s only technically optional.
Women still have to bear children, and pregnancy takes a heavy toll on the body, which often results in several fewer years in the workforce, on average.
Unless that changes — or we start paying mothers with less experience more money — there will always be a gap.
Edit: because liberals/tankies like to ignore reality as much as fascists when the truth is inconvenient.
Wow. That's about the dumbest thing I've read. You have contributed nothing to the discussion, and made us all measurably stupider in the process. Well done.
Great work. With strong arguments like that you're sure to discredit fascism and advance feminism! You are as asset to the conservative PsyOps machine, comrade!
His primary argument was all about lifetime earning potential. That is not what salary refers to. So, his argument doesn't actually apply to the allegation. Therefore, it is specious.
I can't see where his argument was about lifetime earning potential. Seems to be just simply women with children make less money, which seems reasonable.
I also don't see anywhere he even implied that salary and lifetime earning potential were the same thing. And salary would be reflected in lifetime earning potential.
What is your position? I'm not even certain what the point of your disagreement is.
Your links, especially the WEF link, support the correlation, but explicitly describe a confounding variable as being household work (especially childcare). And that's consistent with the observation that the motherhood penalty has a different magnitude for different countries and different industries. All that suggests that a combination of household division of labor, parental leave policies (either employer policies or government regulations), and workplace accommodations generally can make a big difference.
None of this is inevitable or immutable. We can learn from the countries and the industries where the motherhood penalty is lower, or doesn't last as long.
I agree, but the fact remains that as long as only women can bear children, women (statistically) will always take more time off than men — in a sane world several months per child at an absolute minimum to limit physical and mental stress to the mother/child — thus the statistics will always reflect a pay gap when compared to males, and if the goal is reducing the pay gap to zero this is impossible (esp under capitalism, for the foreseeable future). Even if men took identical time off they'd still have a much lower physical stress.
Australia's maternity leave and social benefits are in the upper percentiles of the developed world, and the ATO/Treasury figures I shared are in spite of those benefits. There is simply no way to give mothers back time to recoup lost work xp, and that would be a horrifically poor goal anyway.
My argument isn't that women don't deserve equal pay for equal work (incl xp, in whichever jobs that legitimately matters). It's that there will always be a gap as long as there are inherent biological differences which naturally result in career variances between genders, and the only thing that should matter is whether that difference is fair and non-discriminatory. Most of the real stats I've seen over the last decade (as in, produced by demographers and statisticians; not rage bait for clicks) don't show a significant pay gap in the developed world, when the natural biological variance is accounted for. If you've seen anything that indicates otherwise, go ahead and share it.