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AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I don't see the pay gap (as distinct from a wage gap) as a problem. If women work less hours, take more holidays, take time off to raise kids, and in turn get less promotions, then it's the woman's choice to do that.

Yup, it is their fault for choosing to propagate the species. If women want to be taken seriously like men, they should stop having kids. Genetics be damned! /s

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I If a person work less hours, take more holidays, take time off to raise kids, and in turn get less promotions, then it's the person's choice to do that.

Fixed it for you. If anyone has a problem with that, feel free to point it out.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

Yup, it is their fault for choosing to propagate the species. If women want to be taken seriously like men, they should stop having kids. Genetics be damned!

I've highlighted the important word there. Women are people with their own agency. Women are responsible for their own choices. That includes the choice to get pregnant, the choice to carry the child to term and the choice to raise the child.

It's exactly the same for a man. If a man has sex- by choice- and the woman falls pregnant he is responsible for that choice. And that responsibility will inevitably be a financial hit to him. His choice will have very real costs. I assume we're all ok with a male wearing such costs, since they chose to have sex?

 Orlanth wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-20294633

Birmingham City Council liable for £757m equal pay claims
12 November 2012

Birmingham City Council has revealed it will have to pay at least £757m to settle equal pay claims brought by mainly women who missed out on bonuses.

Last month 174 people who worked in traditionally-female roles won a ruling at the Supreme Court over the pay.

The £757m includes claims by that group and hundreds of other city council workers.

What recourse does a man has who didnt get the bonus?
Likely none, the employer can claim reward based on merit.

...

The article says that several men were included in the lawsuit because they did not get the bonus, when working in the same jobs as the women. The judgement was that the council would have to pay them the bonus alongside the women members of the suit.

The reason the council failed in the case is that it was clear that the bonuses were not based on merit, they were based on whether you were working in a traditional male (e.g. rubbish collection) or female (e.g. office cleaner) type of job.


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AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I don't see the pay gap (as distinct from a wage gap) as a problem. If women work less hours, take more holidays, take time off to raise kids, and in turn get less promotions, then it's the woman's choice to do that.
...

It's a problem for the reason already mentioned of child-bearing and -rearing duties.

The thread started with the election of a woman to governor of Tokyo, and diverted into this pay gap tangent because it was observed that Japan has a population decline problem thanks to women not wanting to give birth because they are treated as second class citizens in this kind of matter.

It's also a problem because of poverty in retirement for women who lack the life-long earning potential of men due to time taken off from careers for child-bearing and -rearing duties.

Thirdly, this issue of career gaps does not address the separate but related issue of lower pay for equal work.

The kind of jobs more easily available to women taking career breaks or wanting to work part time owing to child-bearing and -rearing duties are often the sort of "women's work" like part-time shop assistant or cleaner, which tend to be low paid and often as shown by the Birmingham case, are lower paid than equal or equivalent male jobs.

Edit: woops

Why is it that the bootstrap argument always, without fail, shows up in order to let people ignore structural issues?

What is this bootstrap argument you speak of?

My argument was simply that people are responsible for their choices, whatever those choices might be.

I don't think we should assume someone saying "people make choices and they are responsible for them" is necessarily saying that there are no mitigating social factors influencing those choices. Ultimately, we do expect people to own their own actions, and this is distinct from recognizing that someone's actions can be heavily influenced by outside factors.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I don't see the pay gap (as distinct from a wage gap) as a problem. If women work less hours, take more holidays, take time off to raise kids, and in turn get less promotions, then it's the woman's choice to do that.

Yup, it is their fault for choosing to propagate the species. If women want to be taken seriously like men, they should stop having kids. Genetics be damned! /s

Well the question is, do we want to pay people for rearing their own kids? I mean, there's maternity leave in many countries and specific jobs and for compassion sake I agree with maternity leave for the period of time near the end of a pregnancy and immediately after. But should that extend further than a period that is medically justified? I don't really think so and if you're out of the workforce for a couple of years or take lots of time off work then for obvious reasons you aren't going to get as for in the professional world

I don't think it's a good idea to try and force companies to pay and promote people equally if they don't both contribute the same amount of time, effort and expertise. At a government level we could decide that being a mother is worth $X to the community and tax everyone enough to distribute the wealth around, but you're not going to convince too many people raising your own kids should pay as well as being the head of blah blah in whatever professional field.

We could try on focusing fathers to take more interest in the kids so mothers can work, but IMO that's a choice for the individual family to make, not something we should be mandating or creating artificial incentives that advantages women over men to achieve.

 Kojiro wrote:
What is this bootstrap argument you speak of?

My argument was simply that people are responsible for their choices, whatever those choices might be.

Which, in turn, implies that all they'd have to do to solve the problem would be to choose differently, which simply is not true. It's shifting the responsibility to the individual to fix a structural problem. As an example, if you're stuck in a room and the only way out is to chop off your own leg, would it be fair to blame you for later getting tetanus from having chopped your leg off? It was your "choice" after all".

I guess what I'm saying is that pointing out people's responsibility for their own acttions is entirely pointless when the "choice" is constrained by factors that are out of the individual's hands.

 LordofHats wrote:
I don't think we should assume someone saying "people make choices and they are responsible for them" is necessarily saying that there are no mitigating social factors influencing those choices. Ultimately, we do expect people to own their own actions, and this is distinct from recognizing that someone's actions can be heavily influenced by outside factors.

What mitigating factors would you say arise in the specific case of having and raising a child in the first world?

 Kojiro wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I don't think we should assume someone saying "people make choices and they are responsible for them" is necessarily saying that there are no mitigating social factors influencing those choices. Ultimately, we do expect people to own their own actions, and this is distinct from recognizing that someone's actions can be heavily influenced by outside factors.

What mitigating factors would you say arise in the specific case of having and raising a child in the first world?

Societal pressure, poor sex-ed, unplanned pregnancy, etc. etc. etc.

 Kojiro wrote:

What mitigating factors would you say arise in the specific case of having and raising a child in the first world?

And that's of course ignoring that acting like the biological function of pregnancy is an inherent choice is kind of silly. Lots of women get pregnant without trying. Contraception isn't 100% effective 100% of the time (EDIT: And yes, Sex-Ed in this country does suck balls). Abortions have become harder to obtain in recent years, what with state legislators in many states doing a very effective job of legislating providers out of business (I believer there was a recent SCOTUS case about this that came down on the side of "the state's can't do that", anyone know for sure?), and of course the factor that women are expected to bear the bulk of child rearing. It's not like woman choose to make pregancy physically intense. That's just biological imperative, and that doesn't even begin to account for the long noticed trend of married women being paid less than single women, and that women with no children fall into the same wage gap as women with children as far as I know. So actually, what does having children really have to do with any of this in actuality except that it is expected of women regardless of their own interests? It doesn't explain why women, despite now generally being more educated than men and make up a larger percentage of college graduates, are less likely to be employed than men. It doesn't explain why they generally work worse jobs. The entire life of a woman and any problems she might encounter cannot be boiled down in the "they can have children" box.

 LordofHats wrote:
I don't think we should assume someone saying "people make choices and they are responsible for them" is necessarily saying that there are no mitigating social factors influencing those choices. Ultimately, we do expect people to own their own actions, and this is distinct from recognizing that someone's actions can be heavily influenced by outside factors.

Of course there are mitigating social factors influencing choices. IMO there's mitigating biological factors that influence those choices too, but I'll probably be executed by feminists for saying that I think there's always going to be more women who want to take time away from work for the sake of their families than men and so there's always going to be a pay gap. And don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for guys who take care of their kids full time to allow mothers to work, but I think that's always going to be an anomaly for biological reasons. Unless you go all communist and decide to pay everyone the same regardless of whether they're a manager in a professional field or a parent raising their kid.

But men and women do mostly have equality in opportunity in western societies (barring some biologically influenced ones). I don't think equality of outcome SHOULD be a goal.

IMO we should be teaching young girls that the world is theirs, THEY have the power to decide. That's why my emphasis is on parents, don't perpetuate this idea that your kids are oppressed based on their gender, perpetuate the idea that your kids can do anything they want to do regardless of gender but if you want outcomes you have to put in the work because that's the reality. Teach them sometimes the world opens up to you, sometimes it doesn't and you have to work and fight and if you do you might get lucky. Teach them that sometimes people will say discouraging things and you need to learn to deal with it and keep going.

What I think we should NOT be doing is reverse sexism where you have to tell a young guy, sorry, I know you got good marks in maths and science, but we aren't giving you a scholarship because that young gal who got worse marks than you needs it so we can fill our gender quota for this year.

Feminism won the important battles in western cultures, women to have equal rights and equal opportunity if they want to take it. I feel sorry for the girls and women in nations where that isn't true.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Feminism won the important battles in western cultures, women to have equal rights and equal opportunity if they want to take it. I feel sorry for the girls and women in nations where that isn't true.

That's blatantly not true, though. Society still expects women to behave in one way and men in another based on gender constructs.

 LordofHats wrote:
and that women with no children fall into the same wage gap as women with children as far as I know.

[citation needed]

are less likely to be employed than men.

[citation needed]

I think a better way of putting it would be that Feminism won the easy and obvious battles (easy is a relative thing...) in western culture. These days Feminism tackles with much more complicated issues, and itself. Issues like how society expects and views the sexes, the way it indoctrinates gender roles, and the difficult task of defining exactly what equality looks like. And come on. It's not like Feminism is the only movement debating that last one. The bulk of modern Western politics could probably be boiled down to the question "what does equality look like?" We can all probably throw out a few sentences describing it, we'll quickly find out that making it a reality is a lot harder and we probably won't come up with the same sentences.

It's not an easy question.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Feminism won the important battles in western cultures, women to have equal rights and equal opportunity if they want to take it. I feel sorry for the girls and women in nations where that isn't true.

That's blatantly not true, though. Society still expects women to behave in one way and men in another based on gender constructs.

But no one imposes that a woman has to behave one way and men another. Once no one is imposing it, don't be surprised when people stop caring. It's up to parents to instil values that a young lass can do whatever she wants and send the young lass to a good school, then once that young lass grows up it's her choice if she wants to wants to have a balanced lifestyle or a workaholic lifestyle.

Here

And here

And here's a bonus one on how women get passed over for promotions!

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Societal pressure, poor sex-ed, unplanned pregnancy, etc. etc. etc.

And do these factors defray the responsibility of a would be father?

 LordofHats wrote:
Here

That article says nothing of significance regarding the points I asked for citation. Unless you only read the click-baiting title, it talks about how women who are pregnant or have young kids are more likely to be in contingent positions and a couple of anecdotes about pregnant women and one anecdote about how a woman was told by a male colleague would move past her if she had a baby.

And here

The first study there is pretty weak.

The 2nd one just is a little bit more interesting, though still too abstract to actually be a valid citation for your statements. I couldn't actually find the original article to evaluate their methodology.

And here's a bonus one on how women get passed over for promotions!

That just talks about how 1 in 7-ish women feel they were passed over because of their gender.... forgive me if I don't trust how people "feel" about why they might have been passed over for a raise or a promotion.

There was a link within that link which is a bit more interesting, though I question their methodology and don't really have the time right now to investigate it further.

 Kojiro wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Societal pressure, poor sex-ed, unplanned pregnancy, etc. etc. etc.

And do these factors defray the responsibility of a would be father?

How many companies offer paternity leave these days?

@AllSeeingSkink Can you tell me what amount of time is medically justified?

It should be the same amount that offer maternity leave.

Aka all of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's still some discrimination probably mostly from older managers who grew up probably in the 60's and maybe, hopefully when they all die out/retire that will be a thing of the past.

But I still think the vast majority of the pay gap (and lets be consistent with our wording here, pay gap = the paycheque you take home at the end of the week regardless of the work you do, wage gap = how much you get paid per hour for the same work) comes down to individual choices rather than institutional gender discrimination, which is illegal (and I'm not saying just because it's illegal that it can't happen, I just don't think it's as common as people might think it is).

And why are those choices being made?

 Dreadwinter wrote:
[@AllSeeingSkink Can you tell me what amount of time is medically justified?

No idea, I'm not a doctor, or at least not a medical one. The time it takes for one's body to recover. It's not necessarily going to be the same for each person and so it either has to be evaluated individually or simply be generous and take the upper limit. I know one of my sister's had an especially hard time bringing her little one in to the world and couldn't do much for quite a while afterwards.

But when I brought that up I was talking specifically about how long a company should be expected to pay and/or hold a position for someone who isn't actually present for work and is not contributing to the company on compassionate grounds.

I don't think companies should be responsible in the long term if a parent simply wants to put their child ahead of their job.


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 MrDwhitey wrote:
It should be the same amount that offer maternity leave.

Aka all of them.

There is a bit of time where the mother biologically speaking has to be responsible, so I'm happy with paternity leave being slightly shorter than maternity leave, but as I said I'm not a medical doctor so I'm not in a position to evaluate that.

Valid citation? A citation is pretty much valid if you can find even one sentence in a given source to support a claim, which is something you can do even for blatantly false statements. Google search any of those topics and you'll find dozens of articles, all of them with links to numerous studies and other articles discussing them and related issues.

This is the off topic section of a forum on toy soldiers. I'm not writing you a research paper, and I'm not going to do your googling for you (I'd do that somewhere I'd get paid for it), especially since I'm the only poster even in this thread actually posting links (not that I imagine counter links would be hard to find mind you).

I really need to go back to my policy of not playing the citation game.


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AllSeeingSkink wrote:

and lets be consistent with our wording here, pay gap = the paycheque you take home at the end of the week regardless of the work you do, wage gap = how much you get paid per hour for the same work)

Why does it have to be explained how absurd this split hair is? Pay is pay. Most people are either paid wage (hourly) or paid salary (fixed amount based on expectations)*. You're creating a distinction that not only doesn't exist, but calling on others to use consistent wording by calling a type of pay by the wrong vocabulary. Even that distinction doesn't matter as paid wage and paid salary are easily comparable by simply breaking down how many hours a salaried worker worked over an equal period of time as a wage worker. The only kind of pay that isn't easily comparable is pay for contract work simply because contract work is highly variable.

 MrDwhitey wrote:
And why are those choices being made?

Lots of reasons, social and biological.

I just think we should stop whinging about it and start telling girls the biggest obstacle in the way of their professional success is themselves, not their genitals.

It's kind of funny, on the STEM side of the University you see young guys and gals working alongside each other quite happily, it's when you walk over to the arts side of the campus you see people complaining about how there's not enough women in STEM fields... from women who chose not to go in to a STEM field


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 LordofHats wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

and lets be consistent with our wording here, pay gap = the paycheque you take home at the end of the week regardless of the work you do, wage gap = how much you get paid per hour for the same work)

Why does it have to be explained how absurd this split hair is? Pay is pay. Most people are either paid wage (hourly) or paid salary (fixed amount based on expectations)*. You're creating a distinction that not only doesn't exist, but calling on others to use consistent wording by calling a type of pay by the wrong vocabulary. Even that distinction doesn't matter as paid wage and paid salary are easily comparable. The only kind of pay that isn't easily comparable is pay for contract work simply because contract work is highly variable.

It's important because a "wage gap" implies 2 people doing the same work are getting different renumeration for it.

As long as it is understood that what we are talking about encompasses people often working vastly different jobs then call it whatever you want to call it I guess.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 MrDwhitey wrote:
I just think we should stop whinging about it and start telling girls the biggest obstacle in the way of their professional success is themselves, not their genitals.

Which just isn't true when a large segment of society continue to act like donkey-caves towards women.

Further, women ARE working to fix the disparities; hence feminism.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I don't see the pay gap (as distinct from a wage gap) as a problem. If women work less hours, take more holidays, take time off to raise kids, and in turn get less promotions, then it's the woman's choice to do that.

My wife has a degree in Business admin, I studied Product Design. I also studied for various additional certs and diplomas relating to web design and cloud computing/database admin which became far more relevant to my work.
I recently completed a CIPD in L&D.

We both work in (different) offices, are the same grade and get paid the same.
In a weeks time I will be promoted and we will not be paid the same, and in January she will take maternity leave.

All of this is choice, experience and merit at play. No shadowy system is oppressing my wife.

The issue is when people decide to ignore the equality of opportunity that exists and focus of the outcome.
There's also a height gap and a strength gap and a sickness gap that urgently need hashtags.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
]It's important because a "wage gap" implies 2 people doing the same work are getting different renumeration for it.

...

It doesn't imply. It outright states it, and that's exactly what this past page of discussion has been about.

As long as it is understood that what we are talking about encompasses people often working vastly different jobs then call it whatever you want to call it I guess.

Have you never looked at a single study about the wage gap? Most break the data down by some level of field of work or profession. Even the ones about jobs where women make more than men break it down by profession. It's been broken down so many ways. Why am I even bothering with the links? People are probably just going to ignore them anyway... It's not like I didn't link these exact thing a page ago.

I'm not even sure now what you think that split hair is achieving