Gender Wage Gap

Creating engineer's drafts is not a job you can do with children around.

Sources are a PITA demand on Pinterest, you know. Links being blocked and all. Especially on controversial pins, the moderators delete comments like crazy. Google is free, you know. But, since I've already done the Googling and I happened to have the time and energy, here's an article by an independent beancounter firm comparing actual and adjusted men/women wage gaps for the employees of the companies that use their services: j.mp/WageGapAnalysis . It shows that when setting people with equivalent jobs and equivalent time working at that job next to each other, a 2% gap in income still remains between the two major genders, decreased from 19% total average. It also goes on to explain and even attempts to quantify the impact of factors such as the glass escalator on job placement.

In opposition, here's an study analyzing money earned at supposedly blind-hired jobs in an online marketplace, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0229383, which may be claiming that 10% of the gap is not due to sexism. I find several faults with this study's claim, because of factors such as the one mentioned in the study itself, where single mothers tend to accept any work because they're desperate for money to feed their children and likely have low or no UI to fall back on due to previous low wages, and other factors such as the general disruption of children in a primary caretaker's life which I discuss below. It's obvious that the sexism of our modern practice of "childcare is a woman's role" still affects this 10% gap; and there could be other cognitive oversights - although I'm sure some can't even be measured, such as the effect of gaslighting on resumes, which causes women to represent themselves less favorably with the same experience. 

Therefore, after skimming the methodology of both studies, I believe that even though the data is private, the first study has done better at identifying and analyzing the impact of social and workplace barriers to equal income for women - but regardless of the percent, both articles demonstrate that sexism has a major impact on the wage gap.

As a sidenote, probably my least favorite thing today was reading an article claiming that there's proof that the wage gap isn't sexist because women choose to work less hours; and they quoted research showing that men with children tended to work overtime and women with children tended to leave early - and that's certainly proof that the people who wrote that article do not believe that childcare should be equally split between the genders. I don't even have children myself but I do know that ensuring their basic needs are met requires hours of work a week, between shopping, cooking, and housekeeping - and what about transportation or school involvement? I'm actually paid $13 an hour for the most basic legal requirements of caretaking right now, as a "personal care aide", and doing those things for one *adult* will give me 15 hours of backbreaking work a week on average. Children also need emotional labor, or they grow up and turn into sociopaths, and they're not going to be getting what they need from an overstuffed classroom or an empty house, no matter how much food is in the fridge. The sexism exists because the assumption that childcare is a woman's job *prevents* women from having equal access to the workplace. Consider the frustration of a single dad looking for a changing table at a store, how his access to the space assigned to a different gender is limited by his responsibility to his child. Our society is designed around gender roles, and people who deviate from them face struggles that their peers do not - and one of those struggles is a pay gap - whether it's 2%, or 10%, or 19%, or even more.

Don't get me started on the wage gap for disability, though. That one's even worse. And the intersectional wage gap? OOF. How many disabled women do you know who work? How many of those disabled, working women are WOC?