Normally I don't tag team people on blog topics, but this one was too good to resist:
I think I'm in trouble over at Snoop's place, or at least with Mrs. Snoop*, who after I asked "If women were really doing exactly the same work as men and getting paid significantly less, who would hire a man?" informed me that:Uh let me answer that for you - another man. I don't care what you think on this one Bill, I truly believe that most women are paid % less then men for the same work. The reason some people still don't therefore hire women instead of men is b/c there are still employers (mostly in the private sector) who do not like/trust a woman for the job. That is, in part, because we (the younger women) can get pregnant. And that is a huge loss to employers, in terms of time and benefits. But I have seen study after study that shows that women's salaries, for the same jobs, are almost always below men's. There has to be some reason for that... Unless you think ALL the studies are skewed?
Why did I emphasize the phrase for the same jobs? It's because the idea of the "same job" only applies to lowest common denominator jobs like your average minimum wage jobs or ones that require no heavy lifting like being a receptionist in a corporate office. Any job that requires even a most amount of real intelligence, education and experience is going to be wildly variable in how competent people are for similar tasks.
Work experience matters. Knowledge matters. In many fields that require people to continuously build on those, such as engineering, law and medicine, there is a real wage premium for keeping up and advancing. Many women just flat out don't get this. They actually think that a woman who has been out of the workforce, and hasn't worked as an engineer for ten years while she was raising her kids, should get a salary even in the same tax bracket as a male engineer who worked all ten of those years and really built up his expertise.
The very notion that people can be regimented into neat little boxes for matching up salaries to fight discrimination is laughable because no one is identical, and companies pay based on the value that they perceive in an individual worker. If you have two people fitting similar job reqs, but one of them knows more or shows a stronger aptitude in the interview, the company will perceive them as more valuable than the other one.
Lastly, it doesn't help things for women that if they decide to get pregnant and leave the workforce that the company has to fill that slot and replace the domain experience lost. In many fields this loss is real and it costs the company money longer than many women like to admit. It costs money to replace the worker. It costs money to get them up to speed on the basic requirements of the job. It costs money to get them productive to the point that they can get the momentum back up to what it used to be.
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Stop trying to argue using facts!!
No one but a radical feminist believes an employer purposely pays women less than men for the same work. Usually it's an issue of seniority, which in turn is influenced by issues of marriage and childbearing. An employer who has a highly reliable and productive female employee will do everything he can to retain her services, including paying her what she's worth.
Another thing that holds women back is that they don't negotiate job offers as well as men do in many cases because they will generally take whatever they are offered if they think it's reasonable.
I disagree with all of you. Women are not only NOT underpaid per performance when compared with men, they are usually overpaid. Because of a demand to have women in certain positions, and yet given women's wants for flexible hours, breaks in experience gained in continuous work for births and rearing duties, higher medical costs, more frequent disabilities, and other issues and expenses, companies (given those issues) overpay women. As well, most of the hiring is done through human resources, that last traditional bastion of man-think. *laughs*
If women were as valuable as men and cheaper, we (men) would become househusbands. Business does not care, it does not negotiate, it grabs for the lowest functional bid and runs, unless it finds cheaper somewhere along the way. And yet, if we removed two or three words from the laws (mis)governing hiring practices, in five years half of the women who work in non-traditionally female fields would be gone, in ten years, ninety percent of them would be gone. They are an expense, difficult, and problem makers, and regardless how good this or that woman is, the aggregate and in combination with male counterparts, women are a net loss to companies compared to men, especially compared to men only employee groups.
I could be wrong, but I am not. So long as liberalism is in control, which it is, they will never lose their "right" to work. Of course, this right weakens the family, therefore, in theory (and practice) it also reduces population. It's a less severe (than genocide) form of population control. But often, it looks like women are just continuing their education, sort of. They go to work like they went to class. It is what they know, many honestly do not even know how to be women, run a house, shop, cook, or any of that.
I didn't want to get into your first point because it would be too controversial with a lot of people. I have seen that happen before, like at one place I know of, a 27 year old woman was promoted to a position of senior management because she has an advanced degree in electrical engineering and is a woman. She's not a prodigy who led a very successful team in the past, or something like that that would have made the decision rational. This sort of stuff does happen, and generally it would never happen with men barring nepotism or some sort of cronyism.