I heard about a lot of companies who hire women specifically so they can pay them less.
That make me wonder, in a perfect world where there is no pay gap, what would be the effect on woman employment rate.
Would companies hire equal percentage of workers from both genders or would something else happen?
Speaking from the purely meritocratic view that capitalists take, I’d hazard that if the wages were similar then men would still get better employment because they’re less likely to take time off for menstruation.
I suppose that’s only really a benefit if you’re employing salaried workers though, so if you’re hourly they might actually be more likely to hire women because then individually they’d each get fewer hours. Depending on legislation, that might interfere with their requirements to pay benefits or something. We often see that businesses prefer to employ four employees at 10-hours per week as opposed to one employee at 40-hours because individually the part-timers are less expensive.
There’s always going to be some way to be exploited.
My wife and I have this conversation from time to time that women should get an extra week off every month to deal with their period. She has a pretty rough go when she’s menstruating, and I totally get it. She’s not even a particularly exceptional case and she has a nasty period. So many people have it even worse off, I don’t understand how they keep showing up for work.
I’m anti-discrimination and believe in equality, so honestly I think everyone should get an extra week off. Men and post-menopausal women should be equally entitled to worker benefits.
Some people think that’s pretty radical. “How are we supposed to get anything done if we have to pay for people who aren’t here a quarter of the time?” Well, the average CEO’s compensation package would probably pay for each of their workers to take a week off each month. And they’re usually not even in the office even a quarter of the time.
Something tells me that if we strove to be more equitable, they could afford it.
I work in a setting where everybody gets the same wage based on their job level and experience. I assume that out office staff has parity between the genders.
The blue collar part of the company is 99% men.
I think you’re underestimating how deep the pay gap goes.
“women’s work” jobs are so consistently paid less that mere career choice is a huge part of the pay gap.
I have never once seen a pay scale that has seperate grades for women. The “women make less” statistic is weighted by women taking time off to raise children, that they are more likely to be primary caregivers and less able to do overtime and so on. (Which yes does figure into the problem)
That isnt to say that in jobs where staff can negotiate their own salary or recieve offers there IS DEFINITELY a problem with women recieving lower offers. Also being offered less chances for advancement, etc. But there isnt a company that would ever have the balls to deliberately put a lower pay scale for women on paper these days.
Women of color do get paid way less, even compared to white women
Yup. That’s kind of the rub. It’s not a pay gap on paper anywhere in the sense of pay scales, it’s a bunch of societal biases that lead to overwhelmingly common “emergent” systemic behavior that skews women towards the lower end of the pay bands they coexist with men in while also often denying them promotions into higher positions and pay bands that are more frequently given to equal or lesser skilled men.
Very few of the individual cogs in the system are intentionally aiming for this outcome, but it’s the combination of a shit ton of biases built up over generations about women and how they are expected to behave that all smashes together into the shitty end result of pay discrepancy along gender lines.
Jobs that typically women do also pay much less. Regardless of if the women in question take any time off to raise children. Or if the individual employee happens to be a man.
Teachers for example. But also human services workers and similar jobs. And this doesn’t get into hiring biases for high paying jobs, like management positions in any field, which tends strongly to break for men.
The idea that women take time off from work to raise babies, and therefore they get paid less, isn’t the issue, in other words. Women don’t take 25% more time off then men. And not all women are having babies. But we’re affected by the gender pay gap all the same.
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Orthodox economic thought suggests that in the labor market, whenever wages increase without anything changing in the underlying supply and demand, employment would fall… I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never been big on religion so I suggest taking that with a grain of salt.
Regardless of your conclusions and what you make of the orthodox argument, it is important to consider the total cost and aggregate risk of a company of hiring a woman vs a man or other genders. If, for example, regulation establishes that women have the right to a different amount of postnatal days off than men, that would be risks that companies would take into account at the moment of deciding who to hire.
regulation establishes that women have the right to a different amount of postnatal days off than men
Don’t a number of European countries (Germany, France, etc.) Require the same number of parental leave days between sexes?
That’s why I started with “if”. It’s not the case here in Chile.
Different roles would still attract different genders because of factors like fewer women in Tech and Engg, unconscious biases, etc
