Equal Pay Day has come and gone. Now that we know that Sen. Elizabeth Warren pays her female staffers far less than she pays her
male staffers, we can all move on to the next outrage.
Some feminists, appalled about the 8% differential between
male and female pay, have trotted out yet another mindless idea:
true equality will only be achieved when it’s half-and-half, 50/50 at all
levels of the corporate hierarchy. These great thinkers should have added that this would require that all housework and childrearing also be split 50/50.
Heather Wilhelm has the story:
For
true empowerment to exist, women must be literally equal to men, in everything,
all the time. In a new profile in New
York magazine, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, described as “a
bit of a gender essentialist,” insists that Congress should ideally be split
50/50 along gender lines. Sandberg, meanwhile, feels similarly: “We know how
important achieving equality is for all of us. A world where women ran half of
our companies and countries and men ran half of our homes would be a better
world.”
Ah, yes. Kirsten Gillibrand, a waste of a senate seat. Name
me one thing that KG has accomplished in the senate… except perhaps complaining
that we did not have enough trangender soldiers.
The problem with the calculation, a problem that arises when
you care more about ideas than about people, is simply that most women do not want to become like Sheryl Sandberg. They simply do not want her life. Do
they have a choice? According to feminism, they do not.
Feminism does not allow women to choose their own life path
or plan. They are free to choose abortion, but on other important life
decisions they ought not to be free to choose.
Wilhelm continues, speaking for her own choices:
… I
don’t want to run a company or a country. It sounds exhausting! Nor do I want
to become a highly paid senior director of engineering, no matter how many
times prominent feminists tell me I should. Many women — especially those with
children, or who want to have children — feel the same way.
Of course, no law says that women have to live their lives
the way that feminists dictate. And yet, the hectoring, the shaming, the pubic
derision has produced a generation of women who dare not marry and have
children when young and who dare not have modest career ambitions. The result:
manufactured misery.
Wilhelm concludes:
And
yet, strangely, many of today’s leading feminists seem quite fond of hectoring
women into taking high-paying, high-pressure jobs whether they want to or not,
promoting a weird vision of a corporate corner suite as heaven on earth.
Studies have shown women’s happiness levels plummeting since the 1970s, the
last time they were measured to be higher than those of men. Could it be
because we’re getting a lot of really dodgy life advice?
Yes, it could.
Stuart: Now that we know that Sen. Elizabeth Warren pays her female staffers far less than she pays her male staffers, we can all move on to the next outrage.
ReplyDeleteI see the claim here, and happily await her office's reply. I also looked for reference, and a Senator's salary is $156k.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/elizabeth-warrens-female-staffers-made-71-less-male-staffers-earnings-2016/
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Among employees employed the entire year, only one woman, Warren's director of scheduling, earned a six-figure salary, at $100,624.88.
Five men—Warren's director of oversight and investigations ($156,000), legislative director ($149,458), deputy chief of staff ($119,375), Massachusetts state director ($152,310), and deputy state director ($113,750)—earned more than Warren's highest paid woman staffer in 2016.
...
Warren's office did not respond to inquiries regarding the disparity.
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For myself, it's easy to be skeptical of claims like $0.79 for women for $1 for men, while saying "equal work for equal pay" in the same breath as if the two statements were at all related.
And now-a-days we know more women finish 4 years of college than men, and more women get masters degrees than men. So if education was about women "leaning in" seem to be very earnest there.
And meanwhile I'm yet wondering if employers should always pay more for hirees with more degrees, especially if the degree has nothing to do with their work.
One of my engineering friends went back to college in his 30s and got a PhD in an aerospace department, while as a far as I know, his studies don't help him at all in his job doing civil and mining consulting. I never had the heart to ask him if he thought he deserved a higher salary for a "vanity doctorate", yet when he's introduced to clients, they'll introduce him as Dr. X so the company does take advantage of his irrelevant status.
Perhaps the higher education boom will come crashing down as soon as employers learn they don't have to pay more for advanced degrees, and then women will feel doubly scammed, losing work experience time, gaining student debt, and but finding their CV status hasn't risen automatically for their troubles.
On the other hand, come to think of it, I just say a video recently with Trump babbling about people's PhDs, supposedly proof that they're "smart people" so maybe degree status will never go out of style?
We all want short cuts to prudence, and advanced degrees would seem to be hard to resist.
We MUST have female roustabouts on oil platforms and in the oil patches, and down in the mines digging coal. We must? Then why aren't those feminists doing that already?
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