#Gender pay gap

[mindblowingscience]

For nearly two decades, the negotiation skills of working women have frequently been blamed for the gender pay gap. New research by Vanderbilt Professor Jessica A. Kennedy finds the gender difference in tendency to negotiate has now reversed, and the widespread narrative that women don't ask is outdated. While other measures are necessary to completely close the gender pay gap, the study also discusses how people who believe and adhere to the notion that "women don't ask" hinder progress. "Our research shows that women are willing to do their part to close the gender pay gap. Unfortunately, negotiating well isn't enough to close the gender pay gap. It's not the source of the problem," says Kennedy.

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[justinspoliticalcorner]

Craig Harrington at MMFA:

The economic policy provisions outlined by Project 2025 — the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration — are overwhelmingly catered toward benefiting wealthier Americans and corporate interests at the expense of average workers and taxpayers. Project 2025 prioritizes redoubling Republican efforts to expand “trickle-down” tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation across the economy. The authors of the effort’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise, recommend putting key government agencies responsible for oversight of large sectors of the economy under direct right-wing political control and empowering those agencies to prioritize right-wing agendas in dealing with everything from consumer protections to organized labor activity. [...]

Project 2025 would chill labor unions' abilities to engage in political activity. Project 2025 suggests that the National Labor Relations Board change its enforcement priorities regarding what it describes as unions using “members' resources on left-wing culture-war issues.” The authors encourage allowing employees to accuse union leadership of violating their “duty of fair representation” by having “political conflicts of interest” if the union engages in political activity that the employee disagrees with. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; National Labor Relations Board, accessed 7/8/24]

Project 2025 would make it easier for employers to classify workers as “independent contractors.” The authors recommended reinstating policies governing the classification of independent contractors that the NLRB implemented during the Trump administration. Those Trump-era NLRB regulations were amended in 2023, expanding workplace and labor organizing protections to previously exempt American workers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; The National Law Review, 6/19/23; National Labor Relations Board, 6/13/23]

Project 2025 would reduce base overtime pay for workers. The authors recommend changing overtime protections to remove nonwage compensatory and other workplace benefits from calculations of their “regular” pay rate, which forms the basis for overtime formulations. If that change is enacted, every worker currently given overtime protections could be subject to a slight reduction in the value of their overtime pay, which the authors claim will encourage employers to provide nonwage benefits but would effectively just amount to a pay cut. The authors also propose other changes to the way overtime is calculated and enforced, which could result in reduced compensation for workers. Overtime protections have long been a focus of right-wing media campaigns to reduce protections afforded to American workers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023, Media Matters, 7/9/24]

Project 2025 proposes capping and phasing out visa programs for migrant workers. Project 2025’s authors propose capping and eventually eliminating the H-2A and H-2B temporary work visa programs, which are available for seasonal agricultural and nonagricultural workers, respectively. Even the Project 2025 authors admit that these proposals could threaten many businesses that rely on migrant workers and could result in higher prices for consumers. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

Project 2025 recommends institutionalizing the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of the Sabbath. Under the guise of creating a “communal day of rest,” Project 2025 includes a policy proposal amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require paying workers who currently receive overtime protections “time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath,” which it said “would default to Sunday.” Ostensibly a policy that increases wages, the proposal is specifically meant to disincentivize employers from providing services on Sundays as an explicitly religious overture. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

[...]

International Trade

Project 2025 contains a lengthy debate between diametrically opposed perspectives on international trade and commerce.Over the course of 31 pages, disgraced former Trump adviser and current federal inmate Peter Navarro outlines various proposals to fundamentally transform American international commercial and domestic industrial policy in opposition to China, primarily by using tariffs. He dedicates well over a dozen pages to obsessing over America’s trade deficit with China, even though Trump’s trade war with China was a failure and as he focused on China, the overall U.S. trade deficit exploded. Much of the rest of Navarro’s section is economic saber-rattling against “Communist China’s economic aggression and quest for world domination.”In response, Kent Lassman of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute promotes a return to free trade orthodoxy that was previously pursued by the Republican Party but has fallen out of favor during the Trump era.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda would be a boon for the wealthy and a disaster for the working class folk.

See Also:

MMFA: Project 2025’s dystopian approach to taxes

[justinssportscorner]

Gideon Taaffe and Charis Hoard at MMFA:

Instead of celebrating the rising influence of women’s basketball, right-wing media seized on the highly anticipated draft to attack the WNBA and dismiss the low wages of some of basketball’s biggest stars.  After a historic women’s NCAA tournament, the Women’s National Basketball Association draft drew substantial media attention both praising the rising influence of the league and criticizing the low wages of the league’s stars. Right-wing media chose to denigrate the sport and its players rather than engage with critiques of how women athletes are treated.

With the WNBA's popularity surging due to several college megastars such as Caitlin Clark being drafted, right-wing media launched unhinged sexist attacks against the league (and women's sports in general). These same people attacking the WNBA and women's sports launch attacks against trans women participating in women's sports under the purported guise of "saving women's sports."

[mouth-almighty]

This Twitter bot is amazing.

Edit: oh and...

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Elite, mostly male, thinkers remained convinced that men should be paid more than women, and the government passed the 1834 new Poor Law on that assumption:

It is clearly a waste of strength, a superfluous extravagance, (an economic blunder) to employ a powerful and costly machine to do work which can be as well done by a feebler and a cheaper one. Women and girls are less costly operatives than men . . . what they can do with equal efficiency it is therefore wasteful and foolish, economically considered, to set a man to do. By employing the cheaper labour, the article is supplied to the public at a smaller cost and therefore the demand for the article is increased.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[isawthismeme]

[moonlovesskunks]

Some people will try to tell you that for every dollar men make, women only make 82 cents.

This is actually not true in the slightest!

For every dollar a cisgender, white-passing man makes, a cisgender, white-passing women makes only 82 cents.

Everyone else is paid less.

[indizombie]

One 28-year-old woman, who worked in HR, said she'd seen people who were forced to leave their jobs or who were passed over for promotions after taking maternity leave, which had been enough to convince her never to have a baby. Both men and women are entitled to a year's leave during the first eight years of their child's life. But in 2022, only 7% of new fathers used some of their leave, compared to 70% of new mothers. Korean women are the most highly educated of those in OECD countries, and yet the country has the worst gender pay gap and a higher-than-average proportion of women out of work compared to men. Researchers say this proves they are being presented with a trade-off - have a career or have a family. Increasingly, they are choosing a career.

Jean Mackenzie, ‘Why South Korean women aren't having babies’, BBC

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The Tin Men: But this is a great example of how giving equal rights to men, benefits women.

The "pay gap" is not experienced by women versus men, it's mothers versus fathers. Mothers are not paid the same as fathers, because mothers are at home, and fathers are at work. And fathers often don't want to be at work, they want to be at home, and mothers often want to be at work.

So the graph is insane. It's salary over time. And it's men and women coming up, as the same, and suddenly the mum comes down, the father keeps going, and it's because they've had a child. And when you've had a child, the father takes two weeks off, but goes back to work; keeps getting promoted, keeps earning more money, and the mother stops working, and may never return to work. And if she does, it's often part time, and she's not paid the same as a father.

And she shouldn't be, because she's working part time, and he's gone back to work. So the best way of closing the pay gap, is giving equal parental leave to fathers.

Host: Just if it was me, I would just say, give it to the family, let them split it however they like.

The Tin Men: Well, yeah, but I also... it's such a difficult conversation, because I'm constantly making asterisks here and there. I agree. There should be a shared amount of time, and then it's "use it or lose it." So he has to use it.

But I also want to add another asterisk, and be like: childbirth is a traumatic experience for women, and she needs to have additional medical leave to recover from that. So both parents get six months, she gets and additional one month, or whatever it should be, seven months for her, six months to him, non-transferable, "use it or lose it."

==

It's remarkable how often the mythological "pay gap" is pushed by people who are self-described "anti-capitalists," yet don't think they sound like abject contradictory morons.

Ask your retired father or grandfather whether he wishes he'd worked more and earned more money, or worked less and spent more time with his family.

[maybejuel]

SABA was on the Danish youth national team but couldn't continue with football because women's football doesn't pay enough to live on as your only income

[vividdreamer]

"just get a job" i am going to eat your liver for dinner actually!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Morgan Jerkins at Mother Jones:

Last year, despite minding other people’s business online, I didn’t know what a “trad wife” was. Now it seems like every time I log in to Instagram or TikTok, there is another video of a beautiful woman cleaning her home or making an extraordinarily long and needlessly difficult meal. These trad wives, short for traditional wives, are women who post online content showing themselves adhering to patriarchal gender roles while keeping house and raising children—and making it look easy.

[...] I wanted nothing to do with her or any self-identifying trad wife in my own small piece of digital real estate, but their immense popularity (and algorithmic dexterity) had allowed them to trespass, and I find myself unable to turn away. Chances are, neither can you. But while it might be easy to write off the trad wives as a silly meme or a guilty pleasure, they should not be taken lightly. Given the misogynistic messaging and white-centric ideals some of these influencers peddle, they are indicative of larger forces at play—henchwomen in an ongoing effort to functionally erase modern women from the public sphere.

To fully understand the rise of the trad wife phenomenon, it helps to look at its origins. In some ways, trad wives resemble the mommy bloggers of the mid-aughts to early 2010s. Back then, momfluencers like Dooce’s Heather Armstrong and Catherine Connors of Her Bad Mother commanded massive audiences through confessional posts about breast pumps and postpartum depression. As writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton pointed out in a 2020 New York Times piece, mommy branding was different back then: These bloggers were messy; they did not hold back in revealing all of the stickiness and ugliness in their matrescence. But then the vibe shifted. In 2016 and 2017, when Seyward Darby was doing research for her 2020 book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, she noticed an ominous subculture gaining prominence, one in which women were performing this highly curated image of wife- and motherhood. “It was aggressively anti-feminist, anti-diversity; some of it was proudly pro-white,” Darby says. Trump’s rise helped give these women a larger megaphone.

Of course, many influencers bragging about being stay-at-home moms are not white supremacists, but, as Darby points out, “it is a slippery slope—and sometimes there’s no slope at all—between ‘I’m just a nice woman who wants to be a wife and mom’ and having a very white nationalist agenda. Whether they realize it or not, those are the waters they are swimming in.” Watching trad wife content can pull viewers into territory they didn’t expect. “What’s scary is that there is a subtext in all these videos,” Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz tells me. For example, a trad wife might advocate for “natural living” or homeschooling, and then veer into anti–birth control rhetoric or religious indoctrination. “When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of ­extremism.”

Not all trad wives have direct links to the far right. But what unites them is a romanticized vision of domesticity, or, as Darby calls it, “June Cleaver 1950s cosplaying.” As self-proclaimed trad wife Estee Williams, who rejects any associations with white supremacy, declared in a 2022 TikTok video, “We believe our purpose is to be homemakers.” It’s not simply about looking pretty. Their aestheticizing of housework is a throwback to the mid-20th century, when women weren’t even allowed to get a credit card or a loan. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal were responsible for promoting a certain kind of wife as a way to reestablish social order after World War II, when many women had entered the labor force. As Ann Oakley puts it in her 1974 book, Housewife, “a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient ­homemaker­…Women’s expected role in society is to strive after perfection in all three roles.” Most trad wife content is marked with this desire for perfection.

[...]

So why are many millennial and Gen Z women an eager part of the trad wife audience? Here’s my theory: We’ve given up. The popularity of the trad wife content is demonstrative of a psychological resignation. In the past several years, we’ve experienced a pandemic, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the end of the Girlboss­­ Era. The rise of the trad wives marks what Samhita Mukhopadhyay, author of the 2024 book The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, believes is “a response to the failures of a neoliberal workplace feminism” stretching from the 1960s to the present day—one that focuses on individuality. “What women fought for was an entry into the workplace,”­ Mukhopadhyay explains, but “being a mother in the workplace was almost untenable.” Even after decades of supposed progress, she points out, “we’re still not paid equally, and most women still don’t have resources commensurate with how hard they work and how they contribute to their families.” According to a 2023 report from the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress, women were 5 to 8 times more likely than men to work part time or not at all because of caregiving responsibilities. Maya Kosoff, a content strategist and writer who admits to me that she has become obsessed with trad wives herself, says their popularity is “a reaction to perceived systemic failures” that seem like they “can be easily solved by turning to the simpler life of homesteading.”

And look, escapism isn’t anything new. When life gets harder, it’s only natural that one would daydream about a different time. But fantasies are dangerous when the stakes are so high for American women right now. We have only started to feel the effects of the Dobbs decision. “We have not seen how bad it’s going to get as women are pushed out of public life over the coming years,” journalist and MeToo activist Moira Donegan tells me. “Our main educational institutions, our workplaces, our elected officials are going to start to look more male.” Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom similarly argues that attacks on reproductive rights represent an erosion of women’s place in a democracy. “Women only get to be full citizens if they have control over when and how they have babies,” she says. “When that changes, your citizenship becomes vulnerable, so you attach yourself to a citizen: men. I think this reclaiming of being the traditional wife is here so long as there’s a threat.”

Mother Jones does a solid report on the explosion of tradwife culture in the wake of the Dobbs decision, in which abortion bans serve as a tool to drive women out of the workforce.

Tradwife influencers romanticize the 1950s aesthetic, and most of them tend to have far-right political views (especially on gender roles).

Read the full story at Mother Jones.

[justinssportscorner]

Li Zhou at Vox:

Caitlin Clark, a college basketball phenom and the top pick at Monday’s WNBA draft, will make a staggeringly low salary in her rookie year compared to her NBA counterpart. Despite her record-breaking performance in the NCAA and the energy that she’s generated for the sport, Clark’s base salary will be $76,535 as a rookie. In the NBA, meanwhile, the first draft pick is expected to make roughly $10.5 million in base salary their first year.

Players like Clark, who was picked by the Indiana Fever Monday night after multiple blockbuster seasons as a point guard for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, and former Louisiana State University forward Angel Reese, who was signed by the Chicago Sky, have helped women’s college basketball achieve a landmark year. For the first time ever, the women’s final March Madness game, which drew as many as 24 million viewers, surpassed the viewership of the men’s final. “It’s been catapulted this year to a whole new level,” says University of Michigan sports management professor Ketra Armstrong. “People are tuning in to the WNBA draft that never had before.” The fresh attention for the WNBA draft, however, is also spotlighting the problems the league has had with pay equity. For years, the WNBA’s salaries have lagged the NBA’s by a massive margin. That’s due in part to the leagues’ differences in revenue and season lengths. But other factors, like differences in collective bargaining agreements and revenue-sharing, also play a big role. [...]

The pay-gap problem is bigger than any one player

Despite her record-breaking performance in the NCAA and the energy that she’s generated for the sport, Clark will earn less than 1 percent of what her male counterpart will make in her first year. She will be able to supplement her salary through endorsement and marketing deals, but even with those, her estimated earnings will be lower than the base salary of a first-round NBA pick. Clark isn’t alone. WNBA star Brittney Griner — who spent months jailed in Russia — spoke about the reason she played abroad in the offseason, and noted that a big part of it was to supplement her income: “I’ll say this ... the whole reason a lot of us go over is the pay gap,” she said at a press conference in April 2023. In 2023, a WNBA player made a $113,295 base salary on average, while an NBA player made an average base salary of $9.7 million. The NBA’s much larger revenue is part of the reason for this discrepancy: It takes in an estimated $10 billion annually, compared to the WNBA, which has been projected to bring in roughly $200 million. Its season is also about twice the length of the WNBA’s, including 82 games compared to 40 games. Those factors alone, however, don’t tell the full story.

It's a grotesque insult that WNBA stars (and potential stars) such as Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Brittney Griner are appallingly underpaid compared to their male counterparts in the NBA.

The large gender pay gap between WNBA and NBA players is why WNBA players choose to play in overseas leagues during that league's offseason to supplement their income.

[postmariannizm]

Fuck, I love american wokeness in corporations

Homo sovieticus is leaving my body.

I'm at a seminar about gender pay gap and new UE directives that will come soon and I'm having an absolute blast.

[duncantf]

i'm sorry but the gender pay gap is the most absurd thing to ever exist in human society. why does it exist. work is work. what the Fuck

[whats-in-a-sentence]

A parliamentary committee set up to explore the wage gap in 1840 heard from a handloom weaver from Stockport:

Joseph Sherwin . . . usually earned 6s 6d a week, and his wife 3s by winding bobbins for two other looms. However, he failed to subtract from his wage, and add to hers, the value of her winding services for his loom. Mrs Sherwin received for winding 3d out of every 1s earned by each of the two weavers who hired her services; each of these weavers, then, earned only 9d for every 1s worth of cloth. Since she could wind for three looms (her husband's plus two others), Mrs Sherwin could earn the same amount as these two weavers (9d = 3 x 3d). Joseph Sherwin admitted 'I must pay three-pence out of every shilling, if I had no wife.'

His true wage, then, was only 4s 10d, and his wife's true wage was 4s 7½d. What by his statement appeared to be a wage ratio of 0.46 (3s / 6s 6d) turns out to be, in truth, almost equal wages. If the wage data that we have overstate male earnings and understate female earnings, then there may be no wage gap to explain.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory