Second, people act like having a child or dropping out of the workforce is a bad thing–as in, it *should* hurt your salary/be a legit reason you are paid less because you took some time off. As a woman, having no children is considered being a good employee in this country–why? Why not allow women (where practical) to telecommute or work part time w/out mass penalties for having the audacity to spawn? Why is sitting at a desk 40 hours a week make you a more valuable employee than someone who works smart not long or hard? Someone who’s not in the office as much can provide things like more perspective and better ideas (see also: highly paid consultants).

Finally, while women and men are more similar than they are different. In general women aren’t like men when it comes to negotiation. In general, women don’t have that entitled “How can I make the most money possible?” attitude. This has pluses and minuses in life but in negotiation it is not an advantageous attitude. Learning how to ask for more is matter of practice.

I’m a female w/out kids and I make more money than most people I know. I’m thankful for that. Part of the reason for that is that I work in a male-dominated field (most of those pay well), I was trained early on and many times to negotiate, and probably a whole other host of reasons (I have 2 brothers and a ass-kicking mom). I cringe thinking that someone thinks I should be paid less because I might decide to have kids one day. Screw that!

And by the way, I have read that men lose more work time to alcoholism (anybody know a workaholic man who isn’t also a heavy drinker? I don’t!) than women do to pregnancy. And doesn’t anyone think it’s unfair that women are punished for continuing the species?

As for waiting until you’re in your 40s to have kids, yeah that works great if you’re a guy, not so much if you’re a woman. Your fertility drops DRASTICALLY after 35 and is pretty much non-existent after 40, despite the media’s fascination with older mothers. And please show me the teenager who wants a 60-year-old mother, anyhow, it’s RIDICULOUS for women in their 40s to have babies, even if they’re lucky enough to be able to.

The whole “career arc” is based on being male. Staying fertile till you’re 90 and with a wife who holds down the whole rest of your life (including, most often, relationships with the man’s family of origin) so you can devote yourself to that supreme god, MONEY.

And yeah, the system also makes whores of women because frankly, whoring (also known as marraige) is always and forever the best-paid job you can get without a dick.

During a lunch with 5 of my female friends, the only male in attendance, one of my friend’s husband, claimed that women didn’t have to prove themselves in the workplace any more than men did. The six of us turned to him as one unit and basically told him very nicely how wrong he was. Every one of us, and we were all college educated professionals making over $50K at the time had the exact same experience in the workplace and not just from our male colleagues; older, more experienced female colleagues were more likely to assume that men were more capable than we were. My friend’s husband was shocked but I think it opened his eyes.

A short time later a friend and colleague told me that a recruiter had contacted him about a position that he wasn’t interested in but that he thought I would be. He told me the salary range the recruiter quoted him and, before I called the head-hunter, I told my friend that as soon as the recruiter found out I was a woman, I would be offered less than him. He basically told me I was dead wrong. What do you think happened? The recruiter quoted me a starting hourly wage (since I was a consultant) that was more than $10 less per hour than my male colleague with less experience both in years in the field and in knowledge/skill level.

Explain it to me if you can. You won’t convince me and you won’t convince any other woman who has experienced it.

Note to the female readers; use this knowledge to empower yourself, the next time that someone offers you a salary, ask yourself if it’s fair, ask yourself if you’re worth more, and then ask for it. the worst they can say is no but you won’t get anything if you don’t try.

I read on MSNBC that “Women make only 80 percent of the salaries their male peers do one year after college”. At first glance, this is shocking. But if this gap is due to discrimination, and not differences in skill, risk, usefulness of chosen majors, or any other non-discriminatory factor, there is actually a wonderful opportunity here. A startup that chooses to hire only women could save 20% on its employment costs compared to its competitors. Since wages usually make up the largest proportion of a firm’s expenses, this savings would be truly incredible.

Consider a firm with revenues of $160,000 per year, wage costs of $80,000 per year, and other costs of $50,000 per year. Given these numbers, the firm’s yearly return on investment is 23% = 30,000/130,000. Now suppose the firm cut its wage costs by 20%, to $64,000 per year, by hiring only women, all else remaining equal. Yearly ROI is now 40% = 46,000/114,000, almost double what it was before!

Even if only 10% of the wage difference is due to discrimination, starting a firm that hires only women would result in a yearly increase in ROI of 1.5%, which is, to put it mildly, a big deal in the business world. My numbers may make this opportunity look a little better than it is (try it with your own numbers), but the basic idea should be the same no matter what: a 20% or other significant savings on wages would allow any company to easily outcompete its bigoted rivals.

So I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is. If you really think women are being discriminated against in the workforce, show the closed-minded companies their mistake by ruthlessly crushing them with this business plan.

It is interesting to note that this business plan might work in reverse in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and a few other cities, according to this NY Times article. In these cities, there has been a gap in women’s favor since 2000.

I would like to humbly submit the following mundane hypothesis: women often focus their energy on things that make them attractive to men and men often focus their energy on things that make them attractive to women. From this vantage point, the choices made by both sexes should reflect the values that each sex seeks in the other. To back this up, I’ll quote “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature”:

“The study was done by David Buss [http://tinyurl.com/2eonxv] of the University of Michigan, who asked a large sample of American students to rank the qualities they most preferred in a mate. He found that men preferred kindness, intelligence, beauty, and youth, while women preferred kindness, intelligence, wealth, and status. He was told that this may be the case in America, but it is not a universal facet of human nature.

“So he repeated the study in thirty-seven different samples from thirty-three countries, asking over one thousand people, and found exactly the same result. Men pay more attention to youth and beauty, women to wealth and status. To which came this answer: Of course women pay more attention
to wealth because men control it. If women controlled wealth, they
would not seek it in their spouses. Buss looked again and found that
American women who make more money than the average American woman pay more attention to the wealth of potential spouses, not less.
High-earning women value the earning capacity of their husbands more,
not less, than low-earning women. Even a survey of fifteen powerful
leaders of the feminist movement revealed that they wanted still more
powerful men.”

To those who have read studies that found something different, I would like to see them (I really mean this). But please don’t say, “I have read of studies that refute this data but can’t produce them”.

If Buss’s study has any bearing on reality, we would expect men to be more aggressive at seeking wealth (asking for raises, seeking high-paying positions) and more likely to be willing to work long hours (in sometimes dangerous conditions) to get it. We would also expect women to expend less effort toward earning money, since men don’t care nearly so much about wealth and status in women.

I know this is unpalatable to some, but please remember that unpalatability has no effect on the truth value of the above arguments. Remember, too, that what is natural isn’t necessarily desirable, and I am not advocating sex differences as such. Rape and murder are also natural (they’re common to every culture in the world, as far as I know, and there are good evolutionary reasons to expect this), yet nobody would advocate them as “good”.

To Cecily’s list, I would add that the entry of women into professions (and, in fact, the normalization of women working for pay after marriage in any group other than the most socially or economically disempowered social subgroups) is another example of social change subverting what people, primarily men, have incorrectly claimed over centuries was a biological predetermination–in this case, that women were biologically unfit for or even biologically capable of such work.

The fact that we are now even having this debate–whether the tendency of working women to take on particular childcare tasks after becoming mothers is a biological function or a social function–is only possible because of gradual social change in the way that people perceive women’s ability and fitness to work for pay across a broad spectrum of labor. A hundred years ago, the premise on which this discussion rests would have been laughable, because “everyone knew” that based on their biology, the fairer sex were simply not capable of the intellectual rigor demanded of lawyers, scientists, or mathematicians. Obviously that argument has died out, but the certainty that women’s interests and abilities are determined by their status as women appears to live on in some quarters.

“Because of (highly speculative and poorly-supported theory x), this is the way things have always been, and the way they always will be.”

To me, these arguments are a signal that the person making them is interested in defending the status quo (in this case, women earning less money and doing more unpaid household/childcare work) over social change.

Massive societal change that seems to go against evolutionary imperatives has been seen over and over again in human history. Whence the popularity of lifelong monogamy and birth control?

I don’t think I backpedaled on the choice debate. Doesn’t matter. The issue has been quite sufficiently covered by others and I stand by my statements.

As for differences between sexes, I’m sure the onus is on you (kmg) to provide data to support your claim that the current social structures resulting in women nurturing babies while men bring food is a social construct instead of natural (genetic). The reason for that is that almost all (all?) societies throughout history have similar structures, and most anthropologists think a matriarchal society is a hypothetical one.

Sara, your point about this not being about absolute or relative figures, and all about opportunities, is perhaps the best way to express how I feel. Thanks for that, I’ll definitely use that in my frequent conversations on the topic.

I disagree that women and men have different base drives–you’re not going to find a lot in support for that statement in well-controlled studies, but let me know if you find something. Yes, there are biological differences, for example breasfeeding, but those go out the window for formula-fed babies or after the child is weaned. And obviously, I agree that social differences exist, but those social differences (including “social topographies”, I like that phrase, thanks) are largely constructed or socialized. They are not, and need not, be static over time. Where they are unfair, ill-founded or (yes, I’ll say it) sexist, they can be and should be challenged. That benefits everyone. And once those underlying factors are controlled for, we should be able to expect statistical proportionality. It doesn’t exist right now, which means that a lot of the underlying factors are still fundamentally out of whack.

As a side note, I’d refrain from trying to identify the “base ideology” of a perfect stranger. It comes off as arrogant. Thanks for being largely civil, though.