...Originally Posted by Account
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"A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope."
........ G. ........... K. ............... C ........ H ........ E ...... S ........ T ...... E ........ R ........ T ........ O ........ N ........
"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along
by every wind of teaching, looks like the only
attitude acceptable to today's standards." - Pope Benedict the XVI, "The Dictatorship of Relativism"
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i don't know. the main thing that concerns me is that families are raising kids with both parents frequently unavailable. i think that's a terrible way to do things. my objection i guess is actually mostly towards the work world and corporations which i think are basically turning the human population into slaves and it's fucking over our future generations. it should be possible for one of two parents to spend way more time with the kids so they can be raised properly. it should also be possible for parents to switch off on this, which is to say it doesn't have to be the role of the father or mother primarily... but just that one of them is able to invest enough time to it at all times. i love how we all spend our days pushing paper and on other pointless work activities, bored out of our minds, many working way over 40 hours a week even... all for what? while our personal and spiritual selves are neglected, and our kids are especially neglected. so i want "equal opportunity" but i don't care who is working what job or who prefers what role and when. i just want gender out of the equation. if we really did have an equal society we would probably end up with some patterns that might reflect trends of biological sex differences, which is fine.
anyway i don't know how to fix this shit.
i'm going to have to disagree strongly regarding the civil rights act btw. that's kind of the bedrock that really made injustice on account of race (among other things) unacceptable. of course, it did not end racism. it's going to take more than that. but to me it stands in defense of citizens, saying that yes everyone is a citizen and we are all entitled to the same rights. and frankly a society that segregates based on race is not one in which i feel particularly safe. racism is disturbing, dangerous and deadly.
I didn't say that the economy should be tough, I said that having children should be tough. Fortunately for society, most people that would make horrible parents cannot afford to raise kids, so they don't do it. If suddenly a law was put into affect that made it so that single moms could had more income, this would actually cause more problems then it would help. This would make it far more accessible for single moms to have children. When I was a tax-preparer it was fairly obvious that the majority of those that had children shouldn't have had children. Yet there was an irony to it, the tax laws actually made it beneficial for them to have children, so they had them anyways. You should go to a tax preparer office, it is like child lottery occurring, as they all really badly want to sort out how they are going to use the children to get as much money as they possibly can....sometimes up to 7-9k$. It isn't just an argument on population control, it is an argument on internal population capacity... meaning our standard of living isn't high enough to warrant an increased birth rate. If you want to see how bad a society can get, increase the population growth of the US by another 15%. If childcare improvements can be made so that women don't spend as much down time(education, overall standard of living, etc), then the incomes of married childbearers would increase, as it should increase as this means our overall population capacity has increased. This isn't something you can artificially stimulate into working out for you.
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*randomwarelinkremoved
i beg to differ. from my personal observations, society is full of people who really shouldn't have had kids.
that was sarcasm
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*randomwarelinkremoved
i don't know - some of the attitudes displayed in this thread are just so disheartening that i have little desire to keep posting in it. i've barely started my career, nor do i plan to have children for years yet, but i already worry about having to deal with these attitudes from men who think it's perfectly fair to pay me less because of my sex and ability to have children. i'm ambitious, but i also want to have a family one day. but as i long as i work in the US, i'm always going to be bugged by the thought that i'm probably getting paid less than my male coworkers - and for what? if i stay here, it's likely i will eventually come around to the point where i'll have to decide whether to make sacrifices to my career, in order to balance family life at home. because you know, the profit-motive interests of business owners and companies are obviously much more important considerations than ensuring fair compensation of their female workers - especially mothers. how silly of me, i guess i should be thanking the forces of the marketplace for discouraging me from having children, apparently(!) i should probably just move to another country to work, seriously...
from my perspective, the status quo in America will be difficult to change without a real change in overall societal attitudes, including general expectations of both women and men. there are some government policies that could help push things in the right direction, however:
- affordable, publicly-funded child care for working parents
- mandatory paid maternal/paternal leave for all new parents, for a reasonable time period
- better enforcement of current labor laws, e.g. harsher penalties for companies who illegally implement "pay secrecy" rules for their employees
however, America is quite conservative, within the Western world at least. my perception is that Americans overall value the rights of businesses more than the rights of workers - "unions" and "socialism" are practically dirty words here, and people still cling to fantasy notions like "the market always knows best!" so given the current political climate, i don't currently have much faith that this will change soon.
Last edited by glam; 07-20-2015 at 11:12 PM.
Nope, America is just like Europe... 19th century Europe.
I don't believe women should be paid less for the same work. I think that when that happens it is rather unjust. You don't have a 23 cent pay gap though just because businesses are sexist, they do it because it is practical. It sucks, but that is the truth of it. The policies you recommend would not help. They don't get to the fundamental issue. The only thing that would change the amount that married child caring women are paid is if the way that child care is handled would change, and the only way that is going to happen is if we make significant strides in that via education, the male becoming more involved in childcare, standard of living increases, etc. You've misinterpreted my point as saying that the pay gap should exist, whereas I'm saying that the pay gap exists because of a more fundamental problem.. a problem with the fundamentals of the economy. There is a reason that women can't leave their homes, work less hours.... it is because the stand of living... our internal economic capacity is lacking. Businesses pay for practical solutions to accommodate their businesses. 23 cents is a giant gap, I think most people underestimate just how large that is in terms of the overall populace. If you think that 23 cent gap is solely due to sex discrimination, you really have a shitty outlook on humanity in general. I do think there is probably some legitimate discrimination in the labor force, but it's probably more like 4-7 cents per dollar. Also I think you also assume in your data that men are literally payed 23 cents more per dollar for the same amount of work, and that is not how the data is calculated. Men work more hours, if you work more hours... you get paid more. It isn't like the businesses are like "Oh I'm going to pay the woman 77 cents for every dollar the man earns." That is a misinterpretation of the statistics.i don't know - some of the attitudes displayed in this thread are just so disheartening that i have little desire to keep posting in it. i've barely started my career, nor do i plan to have children for years yet, but i already worry about having to deal with these attitudes from men who think it's perfectly fair to pay me less because of my sex and ability to have children. i'm ambitious, but i also want to have a family one day. but as i long as i work in the US, i'm always going to be bugged by the thought that i'm probably getting paid less than my male coworkers - and for what? if i stay here, it's likely i will eventually come around to the point where i'll have to decide whether to make sacrifices to my career, in order to balance family life at home. because you know, the profit-motive interests of business owners and companies are obviously much more important considerations than ensuring fair compensation of their female workers - especially mothers. how silly of me, i guess i should be thanking the forces of the marketplace for discouraging me from having children, apparently
from my perspective, the status quo in America will be difficult to change without a real change in overall societal attitudes, including general expectations of both women and men. there are some government policies that could help push things in the right direction, however:
- affordable, publicly-funded child care for working parents
- mandatory paid maternal/paternal leave for all new parents, for a reasonable time period
- better enforcement of current labor laws, e.g. harsher penalties for companies who illegally implement "pay secrecy" rules for their employees
however, America is quite conservative, within the Western world at least. my perception is that Americans overall value the rights of businesses more than the rights of workers - "unions" and "socialism" are practically dirty words here, and people still cling to fantasy notions like "the market always knows best!" so given the current political climate, i don't currently have much faith that this will change soon.
Truthfully, socialism is less of a dirty word these days in the US than Capitalism. I'd go as far to argue that there are things that China does that are more conducive to free trade and free enterprise than things that are done in American markets. The US doesn't produce anything, it is very shitty when it comes to valuing it precious resources. Whereas countries like China hoard gold, silver, or any precious resource they can get their hands on. Resources and production are wealth, not some GDP number that is easily manipulated. American hasn't really practiced capitalism for a very very long time, probably since the mid to late 1800s. The US has a propensity to inflate bubbles, which is the only reason in my opinion that the market is doing well right now. It is fairly easy for it to appear strides are being made in the market when you have as much liquidity being pumped into it via 0% interest rates as we do currently have. They can't raise the interest rates without causing a recession, and they are going to keep stalling rate hike and probably implement another round of QE. The policies that socialism support actually make it much harder on women than it does ease their issues. America doesn't believe in free markets, it believes in populism. The masses are pretty much mind controlled by business interests that support news networks like CNN or Fox News. Even the "conservatives" are highly Keynesian big business thinkers. They state that the unemployment rate is 5.5%, and they flash it on the news daily as if to prove that some progress as being made. It is such a cooked number. The only thing that number represents is how many people have left the labor market. As a matter of fact, the labor participation rate as of now is the LOWEST it has been since the 1970s sitting at 62.3%. They try to cover this up by saying that it is the baby boomers that are leaving the workforce, but it such a scam. The old people are the ones with jobs, while college graduates struggle for work. The labor force participation for college graduates is atrocious.
Model X Will Save Us!
*randomwarelinkremoved
sorry, can you clarify what you mean by that in this context?
It was a sarcastic joke about how the USA is just as advanced / enlightened as other Western countries (namely, Europe) on the issue of labor rights, but only if you compared the USA with 19th century versions of those countries, a time when Europe had really shitty labor rights.
ok yes i see... i was overthinking, i thought you were making an obscure reference to something that i had no idea about, lol
The European pay gap is actually worse than the US. The only countries that has any sort of obvious increase in pay gap wages over the US is Norway (Ireland is lower too, but I mean it is kind of unfair to count it because of the birth rate)@ 79%(US @ 77%)of what men make with the majority of the countries falling below the US.
Last edited by Hitta; 07-21-2015 at 03:11 AM.
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*randomwarelinkremoved
Not according to these stats from the European Commission. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statist...gap_statistics
The financial sector is pretty bad, but the gap, in most cases, is less than the USA's 23%. Public sector did better than private sector. I'm not really qualified to gauge the accuracy of these statistics vis. a vis. others from different sources, though, and I suspect neither is anyone else debating this shit on the Internet.
Gender pay gap by age:
By business sector:
Public vs. private spheres:
...
But I was really talking about labor rights in general.
The way that that data is calculated is different than the 77 cent number that is calculated for the US. This is done by hourly pay, which is much different than gross wages which the 77 cent number is based on. You factor out the number of hours that someone works and that 77 cent number would go up. Also a few of them countries have substantially lower gap because of the birth rate as there is more available full time employees.Not according to these stats from the European Commission. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statist...gap_statistics
The financial sector is pretty bad, but the gap, in most cases, is less than the USA's 23%. Public sector did better than private sector. I'm not really qualified to gauge the accuracy of these statistics vis. a vis. others from different sources, though, and I suspect neither is anyone else debating this shit on the Internet.
Gender pay gap by age:
By business sector:
Public vs. private spheres:
...
But I was really talking about labor rights in general.
Women's hourly rate is about 84% of what Men make in the US.
Model X Will Save Us!
*randomwarelinkremoved
Here is an official OECD chart which puts the US' full time gap (~18%) as higher than a number of western / northern European countries, including Germany, France, UK, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Belgium, etc. New Zealand tops the list.
http://www.oecd.org/gender/data/genderwagegap.htm
But to be honest with you, I'm not really qualified to sift through all these statistics, so I'mma stop talking about them. I'm an engineer, I don't have the nuanced economics training to look for flaws or loopholes. That, and I can't rule out the possibility that you can find slightly contradictory statistics elsewhere, mainly because this shit doesn't have the same scientific rigor as physics. As such, don't think I'm accusing you of fabricating anything.
Last edited by xerx; 07-21-2015 at 05:11 AM.
Has nothing to do with Socialism Darwinism as much as when you throw artificial stimulation in certain areas, there are always repercussions. If you are a fruit vendor and you are like "I can boost sells by picking all of my fruit", so you pick all of the fruit and for a while all the sells go up as you have a larger supply. Then all of your fruit goes bad and the vendor no longer has anything to sell and struggles to survive. So the fruit vendor learns from this, or some other fruit vendor comes about that does this better. This is the market, it adapts. The government doesn't adapt, it is like doing surgery with a hammer instead of a scalpel, it can never learn from its mistakes because it only has a limited amount of tools at its disposal. Government is highly un-adaptive. The government will keep picking the fruit over and over again. Then it'll plant more fruit to make up for the difference, and keep having the same inefficiencies that become more and more extreme as time goes on. This is a bubble, and bubbles eventually pop.
When the government continually pumps liquidity into the market, this creates a vast amount of inefficiencies. The markets respond positively to this because the liquidity gets distributed amongst shareholders. It is unsustainable though, eventually the government either quits pumping the liquidity into the markets and the interest rates rise, which causes a giant market collapse, or you keep pumping liquidity into the markets and you murder the dollar. I'm actually betting on the latter. Populations don't like to hear from their politicians that a collapse must take place to reorganize the market. So instead politicians keep printing money and pretending as if everything is getting better.
Last edited by Hitta; 07-21-2015 at 05:11 PM.
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*randomwarelinkremoved
That was a typo. I know what social darwinism is, quite frankly I've probably studied more on evolutionary biology and psychology than you have, so get off your high horse.
The tangent I'm speaking of is quite important to my points. The wage gap exists for a reason, there is a reason that A) Females with children have less hours than men have and B) Females with children earn less money overall than men. Then you inspect the numbers and you learn that even women with children that work normal hours earn around the same that women without children do(about 96% of what males make). So the question is "Why do females with children work less than men?" And then you start dissecting the numbers even more and you come to realize that the amount of hours that males work after the family has a child increases.
Now I'm no employer, but I scoff at the idea that employers are sitting behind their desks and are like "Oh you are a father.... because of this we are going to give you more hours. This is our gift to you". That scenario is laughable and quite frankly ridiculous. Instead what happens is the male tries to increase his work output to hold together the family due to the female reducing her hours or leaving the labor force to take care of the child. It is not the employer's fault that women reduce their hours. You can scream at the system all you want, but you'd be completely full of shit. There probably is a discriminatory wage gape... but it is not 23%. More like 4-6 cents.
The point I'm trying to make about childbirth is that when you have a child, you are going to have cutbacks in your productive output regardless of whether it is the husband or the wife taking the hit. As a family, if this is somehow causing unbearable strain, you probably shouldn't have had the child as you can't support it properly. The giant 23% wage gap exists, not as a discriminatory component in how women are treated, but as a production roadblock to having kids. If you decreased the workhours of the male, and increased the hours of the female, you'd probably still have a very relate-able total income for the family. Truthfully it would probably be a bit less because to have the highest income per hour in a job, you have to have seniority and respect within the enterprise in which you are employed.
If there was some sort of counter to the fact that women are paid less(say you had some sort of credit that was given to women that allowed their income to soar), you'd end up having males leaving the work force gradually to take care of the children instead of the women. If the extra money was apart of liquidity injections you'd gradually have prices go up which would cause an increased diminishing of the middle class. Maybe 20-30 year we'll have a movement calling for the end of the wage gap, but instead of this time from women... we'd have men calling for it. And by that same logic, I'll state that the wage gap exists for a reason.
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Most "unpaid domestic work" is entirely voluntary. My personal spaces are usually messy, unvacuumed. I don't really care. I don't have children, but I know people with children that live on either end of the spectrum: so called "white trash" that live in dumps and uptight WASPy types that are known to vacuum whenever their Christmas trees drop a few pine needles. Just as I'm sure there are people that always cook delicately prepared meals and those that eat junk everyday. It's a lifestyle choice. I don't really see why anyone should be compensated for what they do on their own time.
Of course, some level of childcare is legally required, and if you live in certain areas a degree of property care may be required by homeowner's associations, apartment owners, etc. But with the former, I think the current world's population is a testament to the margin of error allowed in raising children, and with the latter, again, where you choose to live is a choice.
unfortunately, biology has deemed that women will have huge gaps in employment if they choose motherhood. just as biology has deemed men relatively inconsequential in conception, and thus possessing of much free time & fairly expendable.
until we are all born from communal, petri dish grown wombs, I don't really see a structural fix for this. our sex is one aspect of our biology which restricts us, just as our solid bones and lack of wings prevent us from flying, or our lack of gills prevent us from breathing underwater.
PROTIP: Women can buy men's razors.
If the plastic guards prove less than sufficient for shaving delicate areas on a women's body, then, volia! you now know why it costs more (i've used a woman's razor a couple of times before in a pinch, and I remember it proving a less close shave/less likely to nick you)
Last edited by Whoobie77; 07-22-2015 at 04:01 AM.
So, in summary, a wage gap exists.
People use this wage gap as evidence for sex discrimination.
But, this wage gap exists mainly due to factors UNRELATED to sex discrimination.
There are, of course, cases of sex-related discrimination in the work place, but, in the majority of cases this is simply not true.
Therefore, women making 77 cents for every dollar a man makes is misleading, and a terrible argument for discrimination.
No! Didn't anyone read GOLDEN's post #19?? Did you see how in BOTH cases she made FAR LESS than 77% for the SAME work? What are the odds of that? In both cases, she HAPPENED to see salaries, but often, people work side by side and NEVER KNOW. I think its not an unusual situation - I doubt she just stumbled onto these totally unique job situations, and that every other company is scrupulous to be fair and equal with salaries, vs. paying less whenever they can get away with it. Both of her jobs would NOT show on the stats as being unequal pay, because her job got a different name! For the same work! That fact is backed up in the stats GLAM shared. And that whole Mom-penalty/Dad-bonus is a reality. It really is a problem. My guess is that if the company can pay less, they WILL. My opinion is that times really have not changed - the "changes" we see are superficial.
Perhaps one way to avoid this is to work in the public sector where pay has to be published, and positions are clearly delineated. I don't know.
"A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope."
........ G. ........... K. ............... C ........ H ........ E ...... S ........ T ...... E ........ R ........ T ........ O ........ N ........
"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along
by every wind of teaching, looks like the only
attitude acceptable to today's standards." - Pope Benedict the XVI, "The Dictatorship of Relativism"
.
.
.
There is no dad bonus, it is a dumb concept. Employers are not like "HEY YOU ARE A DAD, I'M GOING TO GIVE YOU A RAISE BECAUSE I HAVE THIS EXTRA MONEY TO SPEND... WOOOHOOO!!!". As I have stated repeatedly through the thread, the statistics don't back up what you are saying when they are broken down. When women give birth to children, they tend to drop out of the labor force or reduce their hours. This in turn lowers women's salaries. Men as a result increase their hours of employment because they have to provide support for their families.
Fact 1: Single childless women in comparable job make around 96% of what men do.
Fact 2 : Married women with children in comparable job who work equal hours to average males earn around 94% of what men do.
When you put these two things together, there is only one conclusion to be had. While there is probably some discrimination in the work force... it is incredibly overstated. There are actually several fields, especially in engineering in which women actually make more than men. These fields include systems programmer, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. This whole "we must bridge the wage gap" movement shit that is occurring is just a method for politicians to secure votes. You've been duped. I'm all for wage equality, but this shit is just misplaced.
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*randomwarelinkremoved
Well I'll give you that, but, there is a bias - that is the response. Maybe/maybe not it pans out into more/less money.
Well, I am not so sure. Statistics are often presented to make the opposite conclusion of truth. That's why a story like Golden's really says more to me. I am not as confident as you that I have all this figured out, but I do know her story says something about the reality that can't just be ignored.
Yes, that sounds reasonable. Except one thing that is different these days is constant turnover in employees, vs. the old way of company loyalty, staying in one place a long time. Not every job one takes is valuable experience to apply directly to the next - it can often be useless in a new position. A woman who takes time off may need a few weeks to get back on track if she has been out of it, but I do not see how in a few months time the average woman would not be at the same level (or better, if she's inherently better) than her male colleagues who did not take time off... I am just not feeling convinced that taking time off is a true damaging blow to a career (but certainly its a perceived one).
Perhaps. I have a friend (LII) who was extremely successful/accomplished in the corporate world (she consults now); she is older so she started I'm not sure how far back... but I am going to ask her opinion when I write her next (I also want to ask her if she knows about that "Games" book I mentioned here and what she thinks of it). She had a mentor (male) to whom she credits her rise in the business world, who mentored her closely when she first started out in business (she had studied for science in college). Also, she had no children. So, no time off for that...
Well the reason why I questioned that is because of Golden's story.
So, in your opinion, what Golden described is the "exception to the rule"? She stumbled into something highly unusual, twice?
Well, it sounds that way, but, I am not convinced. Things aren't always what they seem.
"A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope."
........ G. ........... K. ............... C ........ H ........ E ...... S ........ T ...... E ........ R ........ T ........ O ........ N ........
"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along
by every wind of teaching, looks like the only
attitude acceptable to today's standards." - Pope Benedict the XVI, "The Dictatorship of Relativism"
.
.
.
FWIW, I support more women in engineering. My workplace is a total sausagefest.
I think being "disheartened" is a bit on the excessive side.
If the guy over in the next cubicle costs the company more money than you do, does that necessarily mean you have the net economic disadvantage, f.i. in terms of job security? And as a woman, are you as dependent on formal income from commercial activity as he is? AFAICT, most young women still have a source of income option that most men don't have: The traditional one, marriage. Or just the generous gentleman friends and admirers: even in this day and age, it seems to me that in personal relationships money flows easier and for both sexes more naturally from male wallets into female purses than vice versa.
Also, as a woman you'll statistically live about 7 years longer that the guy over in the next cubicle. How much monetary value does that advantage translate into? And the guy is paying for your social support during those extra 7 years, which he'll never see. You and he are both paying for your 7 extra years, which only you will enjoy.
There are lots of arguments like this that can be put forth to show that framing the issue of man's versus woman's wages as a simple "who gets paid most" kind of question is better for demagoguery than for reasoned discussion.
Edited to add: When referring above to "generous gentleman friends and admirers", I certainly do NOT refer to untoward people who attempt to obtain illicit and/or immoral "services".
Last edited by ragnar; 07-27-2015 at 05:50 PM. Reason: avoid possible misunderstanding.
Greetings, ragnar
ILI knowledge-seeker
I find the idea that men should be seen as a source of income in a woman's life a very sad degeneration of what love is.
In addition, I certainly haven't experienced it in my life.
I look good, particularly when younger. I am kind. I love. I am smart. I am spiritual. I am skilled at many things. I have a lot of gifts a lot of men would be honored sharing with me. It was me who supported my husband for years, because that was natural for us. And yet, I got fired from my job when they had to cut people as "we can't fire the other guy even if you are better than him at what you are doing, as he has a wife and kids to support, and it would be too harsh for him, but you have a husband, so it's not so bad for you". His wife worked. My husband didn't. We have kids, too.... Old ideas like the one you show here are still valid in society, and those ideas threw my family into trouble for a bit, until I found new ways to create income. Old ideas don't see individuals, just groups of "women" and "men". Ideas of women and men. Not truth. Not what is. I got fired because a job wasn't seen as so important for me, being beautiful and a woman, in their opinion. My husband ended up shaming himself for not being a good man because of these ideas. I could have ended up feeling like somebody who shouldn't have a need for self-realization. It is just sad. The idea that I have to use men as income providers, instead of loving a man freely, without strings, so he can move as he wants based on his path in life, is opposing the idea of real love to me. I don't seek a partner for economic security, but for true love, freedom. And I wouldn't want it any other way. I possibly won't live longer than that man you talk of either, as I lived a stressful life due to supporting others and in addition having to face hardship due to people - generally (old(fashioned)) men - assuming my gender gives me advantages, and thus allowing themselves to use me (yes, men have used me for economic purposes) - or - as above - assume I have things already, magically, as if hard days are not really hard for women. But : I have loved. I'd take love over money again and again, no matter how hard it is or how sad it is that people still think like you do, and I am happy with my choices. But it isn't always easy. I believe your ideas are of a dying paradigm. I am grateful for that, too.
As for the rest of this thread and other discussions on this forum about genders, sure, you all talk some truth. Mostly partial. Often limited.
Last edited by Ananke; 07-27-2015 at 12:35 PM. Reason: Spelling
Yes. Add in that it generally costs women more to hold that job. (Expectations for hair, makeup, clothes which are more expensive than men's clothes, shoes, and other beauty related requirements, etc.)
Yes, women have the economic option of selling their bodies for men's sexual pleasure.And as a woman, are you as dependent on formal income from commercial activity as he is? AFAICT, most young women still have a source of income option that most men don't have: The traditional one, marriage. Or just the generous gentleman friends and admirers: even in this day and age, it seems to me that in personal relationships money flows easier and for both sexes more naturally from male wallets into female purses than vice versa.
If married without an income then she places her life under his control and becomes dependent on his interest and good will towards her. As she ages, he'll likely start losing interest in her aging body and drop her for a younger woman. By this time her age, children in tow, and 'usedness' makes it significantly harder to 'attract a man's patronage'. And without her youthful looks to help, and with kids in tow, it's also now harder for her to get and keep a stable job.
Relying on the generous gentleman friends and admirers, relying on the flow of money from male wallets to her purse (for shelter, food, utilities, transportation, etc etc) is far from economic security in the same ways as above. It's also not generosity if the money comes with expectations and demands for sexual activities.
It's more likely that no man is paying for her last 7 years as he more likely dropped her for a younger more sexually attractive girl. And most of her 77 cents is going towards seeing to the welfare of her children PLUS the beauty related requirements of her job(s). Chances are that she lacks the 33 cents to set aside into savings for her own final years.Also, as a woman you'll statistically live about 7 years longer that the guy over in the next cubicle. How much monetary value does that advantage translate into? And the guy is paying for your social support during those extra 7 years, which he'll never see. You and he are both paying for your 7 extra years, which only you will enjoy.
It's difficult to live 7 years longer without access to economic resources to pay for fundamental needs.
Women are also more likely to be raped, beaten, and even killed by their husbands, boyfriends, or other 'generous' men in their lives. How much monetary and life expectancy advantage does that translate into?
I agree that it's not a simple "who gets paid the most" kind of issue, but it's also not something to swept under the rug for being a messy discussion.There are lots of arguments like this that can be put forth to show that framing the issue of man's versus woman's wages as a simple "who gets paid most" kind of question is better for demagoguery than for reasoned discussion.
I don't think saying one is 'disheartened' is excessive. I think it was a fair and generous way of describing it.
Edited to add: i initially misunderstood what demagoguery meant. I've since looked up its meaning. However I still stand by what I wrote.
Last edited by anndelise; 07-27-2015 at 02:33 PM.
IEE 649 sx/sp cp
That all sounds so depressing.I don't think it matches my life experience though. In my early 20s I supported most of my live in boyfriends and some supported me, Usually it was the musicians I ended up supporting. I didn't resent it because they did everything else for me. Cleaned the house, cooked, shopped... I made way more money than they were capable of making at the time and it worked for us, for awhile. Some were younger (I was with an 18 year old when I was 21) than me and some my age and some way older. We literally partied away a small fortune, which was mine, but that is another story. I liked being in control of my money even if I wasn't spending it wisely.
Then I got into a longterm relationship with someone my age, who had a trust fund, and we pretty much split everything down the middle and maintained separate accounts, at first, but he made me quit my job. I kind of resented that when he would complain about money and money ended up being one of the reasons we split. He was kind of a stingy person from the start and kept a spreadsheet on who paid for what. It was stressful and made me feel useless and that I could never give enough in that relationship.
You could say I traded him in for a much younger model but it wasn't about my exes age or looks. We really had drifted apart. I told him I wanted to be in a relationship with someone else and all of a sudden money was no longer an issue and he said he would never mention it again and I would never have to work again. It was not the money. I chose to go live with the younger guy (much younger) who supported me for three years. I had my own money but he would not let me spend a dime of it. I ended up leaving him for a guy I ended up supporting for awhile. Then that guy started supporting me when he got a job. So my experiences have run in cycles like that.
It all sounds like a convoluted mess without the details but the main factor in all of this was never the money. I have my own. I have made some investments in my future thanks to my stepdad's advice. The deciding factor for me was and still is the love I feel for someone. I simply can't relate to most of the posts in this thread except for Anankes.
Edit: I am just going to attribute all this, in my case, to being social last with little awareness of these kinds of issues. This is an area I have not researched and probably never will. :/
Last edited by Aylen; 07-27-2015 at 06:36 PM.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
While I was raising my daughter, I inevitably met a lot of other mothers (single and married) who'd tell me their stories.
I also have personal experiences of being the one supporting my bfs, as well as being supported by bfs.
And I've plenty of experiences with the expectations of 'generous' admirers.
Enough to know that relying on marriage and/or the generosity of admirers is NOT a viable economic option for women throughout their lives. It's good only as long as she meets certain criteria. And when she no longer meets those criteria, she most definitely is as dependent on formal income from commercial activity as a man is. But since she likely didn't gain commercial activity experiences while she was economically dependent, then she's now in a much worse position than she ever was.
Edited to add: if she has children she is raising herself, then she is even more dependent on steady formal income from commercial activity than a man is.
IEE 649 sx/sp cp
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