| Posted: 15 April 2010 at 7:24am | IP Logged | 10
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"I've never seen a specific example of a man and a woman doing the exact same job, ie working for the same company in the same capacity, with the man being paid more than the woman." Historically, in industrial towns in England at the time of the suffragette movement, the Unions actually demanded that women be paid less than the men for piecework (where you only get paid by the number of products you complete). Some places the rate was as low as half for women. This appears to be the origin of the demand "Equal pay for equal work", and the slogan has survived its original context and may seem confusing in a modern context as the fight is now for a more general and less clearly defined "fair pay". This inequality, where men publicly acknowledged that they resented being paid the same as women, evolved into "parallell occupations", where women were given entry level jobs that were like secretarial jobs or in some way limited in advancement opportunities, whereas men with comparable qualifications were given entry level positions with advancement opportunities that were paid more. Often women were asked to unofficially do "man's work" while being paid for "women's work" and still having limited opportunities. There are many stories of gifted women who, if they were men, would have quickly advanced to an executive position, and instead the best they could hope for was that an incompetent boss would "bring them along" to get their work done for them. Is there still a lot of this type of hidden inequality? I'm not sure. It gets more and more difficult to tell, but there are two options: Things are getting more equal in the Western world or Sexist, patriarchal executives are getting better at disguising it. Certainly in the world as a whole there can be no doubt that there are still double standards as regards rights and salaries of working women? In my country the arguments often center arround "comparable occupations". Using education, stress, importance to society and continued economic prosperity etc. as standards for comparison. When people who go to university for years to become teachers, nurses etc. actually lose money (according to analysis of lifetime net pay - i.e. factoring in the cost of student loans) compared to an unskilled factory worker or someone who went to vocational high school instead, that suggests a broken system. When we end up with financial disincentives for people who want to take lengthy educations and fulfill central roles in society, that's a wooden show in the works of the big machine. If there weren't so many people eager for learning more or less for its own sake, we would be in big trouble.
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