Letters to the Editor
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Right ON!
Personally, I don't care about softballs or what you didn't do or proving the exact percentage of the inexcusable wage gap, Ms. Traister.
I'm just glad this interview is out on the front page where people can see it.
Thanks!
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And how much after ten years?
Twelve percent.
Moreover, that small gap doesn't take into consideration the income lost for making the decision to take time off to raise children, a decision made much less frequently by men, or the fact that jobs historically held by women tend to pull in less money than jobs historically held by men. The study's point was that even looking at things from an allegedly value-neutral viewpoint (comparing men and women who have made the same choices), women still make less than men.
The reason that the gender-based deficit is closer to 5% (the difference for education) rather than 14% (the difference for math) is that more women go into education than math (although this gap is and has been closing). Needless to say, education, at least below the college level, historically was a career for women, while math was for men. Careers that women entered received less pay partly because women took those jobs. Those jobs became less valued and employers could, for lack of a better phrase, get away with paying women less. These factors worked together to suppress women's wages.
When women entered into fields dominated by men it was ideologically acceptable to pay them less because to do otherwise would threaten the man's ability to support his family. Irrational, but that went the thinking. Of course, this also happened when the "other" entering into the field was Asian or Irish or black or what-have-you.
While the gap has shrunk, the historical legacy of paying "woman's work" less than "men's work", as well as simply paying women less than men, still exists. While it seems inconceivable that somehow what you gleaned from the article is that women have very little to complain about, from reading your other letters you clearly have some kind of ax to grind regarding women or feminism or both.
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About that wage gap...
Read the Reuters article (emphasis mine):
Even as the study accounted for such factors as the number of hours worked, occupations or parenthood, the gap persisted, researchers said.
"If a woman and a man make the same choices, will they receive the same pay?" the study asked. "The answer is no.
"These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force," it said.
Specifically, about one-quarter of the pay gap is attributable to gender -- 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation, it said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2029109620070423?feedType=RSS
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I think it's entirely reasonable for women (and men) to be upset with the 5% and 12% gap
What I don't think is reasonable is the way that Jessica, others at feministing, her blogfriends at feministe, and pandagon all backed up by Broadsheet keep on insisting that the number is 23%. And they go on from there insisting that anyone that wants to discuss teh number as being anything less than 23% is a misogynist. (Or they do like you and insult people, and insist there is some axe to grind.)
Science is good. Dialogue is good. Stopping discussion is evil. Dehumanizing other humans is evil.
So they move from the bogus 23% number to claims that the gap is because men hate women. And that women are systematically being given 23% less in every field. Even though that is against the law, and if it were anything like that, there would be massive law suits. Which there ain't.
And then they move onto the other bogus statistics. False allegations of rape are non-existent. Or so small as to be meaningless. And when people point out studies that show the numbers are from 8% - 20% - 30% - 40% or even as high as 45 - 60%, they pull the same crap. To even discuss this is misogynistic. You hate women. There is no such thing as false allegations. On Pandagon, one blogger recently said that what the Duke students went through was less harmful than what women have to face in terms of online harassment everyday.
And then they move on to domestic violence. Only women are battered. When pointed to credible studies that show that women cause 30% of domestic violence, they trot out again with the you're a misogynist wife beater. Even the founder of the first women's shelter, Erin Pizzey now disassociates herself from the women's movement because exactly of this. She says she knows women cause violence, because they were violent in her shelters.
And then they move on to custody cases. They trot out a study (you can check pandagon tonight) that claims (I can't find the study online) that abusive men are the men most prone to fight for custody. Assuming that is true, they still draw the wrong conclusion that anyone that fights for custody must be an abusive man. And they trot out bogus claims that men that fight for custody usually win full custody.
And they use all of the above methods of denying discussion, denying the science to keep going business as usual in blaming men, and white men in particular for all of their problems.
And they justify all of this with an untestable hypothesis: Patriarchy Theory. They provide no well defined definition of what the Patriarchy is (and they do not mean it in the same way that anthropologists do), and they provide no means of testing for it, no predictions of what it will do, and no way to falsify it. This is bogus, junk, cult science.
It is a way of avoiding their responsibility.
Jessica recognizes this. She understands that young women are hate the label of "feminist." That's because young women have grown up in homes with good fathers and bad fathers and have had good boyfriends and bad boyfriends and have had good brothers and bad brothers and frankly, to use some nasty language, they have all had friends that they recognize behave like irresponsible bitches. They realize it's not all the man's fault.
And they've listened to their grandparents and their parents and they can't figure out what the hell a 5% wage gap has to do with their grandmothers and mothers that couldn't even get jobs as engineers and scientists and lawyers and doctors. And they say, we've come a long way, baby, so you can take your website and label of feminist and jam it.
And that is why it is completely reasonable to think about how we get rid of that final 5% and 12%, but why it is unreasonable to keep spewing the same old nonsense they have been for years now.
As I said, science is good. Dialogue is good. Stopping discussion is basically evil. And dehumanizing other humans is evil.