Originally Posted by
GOLDEN
I think you guys are making the argument for equality. Women make less money and have less work seniority. And they are saddled with unpaid domestic labor. All of that information and more is acknowledged in this thread. These are problems.
Speaking from my own experience, I am simply expected to do far, far, far more than half of childcare and housework, and the men in my life blind themselves to the amount of work I do. It's not even real to them; they hardly notice it. When asked to do more, they will do one or two small things. I realize not every man is like this; I also realize that a lot of men who think they are not like this . . . actually are.
Right now I'm working in a job where I am indeed paid less than several men for equivalent work (I know what they're paid because my boss did a screenshare with me and happened to have an Excel doc open with everyone's salaries listed on it). Most of the work we do is exactly the same. But they have different job titles than I do, so if you were to measure our wages, we wouldn't be compared one-for-one because we are categorized differently even though we have such similar jobs. I'm not even earning 77 cents per their dollars, it's actually way, way less than that. And this is not the first time I've experienced this in a workplace where I'm employed.
Such as the big research company where I was the second woman they hired (the first was the girlfriend of a programmer) into a corps of between 50 and 100 researchers. Where every single person with any kind of managerial role was a man because when it was in startup they hired only men. Were they better? No. They had seniority, and it was built into the system. Or the job I took in a friend's restaurant, doing accounting work, in college. The man who had been there a couple of years longer and who had no direct oversight regarding my work, and largely did the same work as I did, was called a manager, and I wasn't, and he was paid twice what I was. (Again, because I worked in accounting it was perhaps inevitable that at some point I stumbled upon information regarding his pay rate.) And again, because our job titles differed and the work did not, we would not have been compared tit-for-tat in a study of wages.
Soon after seeing the pay difference, I lost my interest in doing that job. I also am losing interest in my present job, because it's a disheartening situation to see that I'm literally valued lower than other people doing the same work.
And I never took time off from working per se, in order to raise my kids. I have worked all this time, but even *having* kids means that unlike some people I work with, I get taken for someone who has split interests. Doesn't matter that I put in more than 40 hours a week. If at 5:30 everyone without kids is still grinding away on some project, and I need to go pick up my kid, then I am the one who appears less dedicated to the cause. And I can't help having noticed that when, for example, my ex-husband (rarely) said he needed to do something regarding my son rather than work, he was treated like a hero for it.
And in case you read this as an angry rant, which is pretty much how people hegemonically disenfranchised get read when they describe the effects of hegemony to the people it benefits, I'm actually just sad and fatigued as I write this. I don't really care about the 77 cents/dollar figure, it doesn't even begin to describe the scope of the issues involved.