gothhabiba:

chamomileyes:

stuffmomnevertoldyou:

It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.

That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.

A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.

The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.

one thing that irks me about discourse surrounding this is that its scope is almost always too narrow. like “women sometimes voluntarily choose lower-paying occupations because they are drawn to work that happens to pay less, like caregiving or nonprofit jobs, or because they want less demanding jobs because they have more family responsibilities outside of work.” but doesn’t saying that these jobs just “happen” to pay less kind of undercut the main point here? besides which the fact that women have more family responsibilities outside of work is part of the problem. the same thing goes for “pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.” or “Some explanations for the pay gap cut both ways. One intriguing issue is the gender difference in noncognitive skills. Men are often said to be more competitive and self-confident than women, and according to this logic, they might be more inclined to pursue highly competitive jobs.” this is just so clearly circular that I don’t even know where to start with it–even disregarding the fact that women are penalised for confidence in the workplace, which it’s lazy not to mention

a lot of people seem to have a lot of difficulty not using the part of the problem to explain away another part of the problem when it comes to patriarchy, in part because a lot of these ideas are just so deeply ingrained that seeing how they’re 1. connected 2. created and 3. preventable requires a lot of imagination.