Happy Equal Pay Day: My Paycheck Makes Me Blue

Yes, in a red state, I still manage to be blue. Especially when payday comes along. I am a scientist, working in a male-dominated field. I wonder why, in these modern times, is my paycheck significantly less than others who entered the same field? It's not performance...I have several patents and national awards, yet make about 35% less than others in the same field. I am not imagining this, it is real.

Today is Equal Pay Day, which is explained in the paragraphs below from NOW. One can try and legislate "paycheck fairness" and a closer balance may be able to be obtained, but I'm not holding my breath. It seems those at the top of the power tower are the ones that respect women and their contributions the least. Case in point is the attitude by those who reach the top, ala Tiger Woods and Eliot Spitzer. Are we expecting our male-dominated government to save us? Again...not holding my breath.

From NOW:

Equal Pay Day Background

Equal Pay Day -- observed this year on April 20 -- is a symbolic date when women's earnings into a second year finally catch up to the salary made by men in the previous year. In recent decades the gap has narrowed only because men's wages have stagnated, and progress is moving at the glacial pace of a fraction of a cent per year. The disparity between women's and men's pay is a huge barrier to women's equality that costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars in our lifetimes. The wage gap undermines women's struggle for independence by compromising their financial security. Equal pay for equal or substantially similar work is more important than ever now that many women are the prime breadwinners during this recession, which has seen many more men lose their jobs. Sex-based wage discrimination is undoubtedly a factor in the high mortgage foreclosure rate, which continues unabated.

Pay Gap Always Present - Several recent reports document that from the moment they graduate from college women are penalized with a lower salary compared with identical male counterparts -- for instance, an average of $4,600 less for female MBA grads. An oft-cited reason for the pay gap is that women take time out of the paid workforce to care for children and thus lose out on promotions and pay increases. The Catalyst study, however, showed that the salary difference existed even for women with no children. Center for American Progress economist Heather Boushey testified at a recent congressional hearing that the pay gap grows over time. One reason is that women are less likely than men to negotiate for a high salary, and the cumulative effect over a working career is great.

Huge Lifetime Losses - A small hopeful change in 2009 was an increase to 80.2 of the earnings ratio for the median weekly earnings for female full-time workers compared to male median weekly earnings, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. However, a more important statistic relates to women's annual earnings. In her median annual earnings, a woman working full time made 77.1 percent (this amount has declined slightly in recent years) of the pay made by a man working the same hours, in 2008. The figure is lower for women of color and is a prime reason for the perpetuation of economic vulnerability of these groups.

African-American women, for instance, are paid 67.9 percent of men's wages, and Latinas take home 58 percent of what men are paid. Experts estimate that the gender wage gap costs women between $700,000 to $2 million in lifetime earnings; lifetime losses range higher for women in top professional categories. The gender-based pay gap creates serious economic insecurity for women and their families and is a major factor of old age poverty for women.

PFA Addresses Wrongs - Among the remedies found in the Paycheck Fairness Act is a provision that allows wronged women to collect compensatory and punitive damages -- a standard practice in discrimination cases based on race or ethnicity that is still unavailable to women. The new act will also prohibit employers from retaliating against their staff for sharing salary information with each other; this will allow an employee to freely determine if she is experiencing wage discrimination and take appropriate action. This provision alone might have spared Lilly Ledbetter the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars and the need to take her case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Employers Must Prove Reasons - The act limits acceptable justifications for an affirmative defense, which is "factors other than sex" used by employers to explain lower wages of their female workers. Currently, employers can claim a broad range of reasons, such as women's "weaker" salary negotiations skills, to rationalize paying women less. The Paycheck Fairness Act will require employers to show that the pay gap is truly caused by factors other than sex-stereotyping and relates directly to job performance. The act also establishes a grant program that would train women on how to gain better jobs and encourage them to break out of low-paying job categories. Finally, the Paycheck Fairness Act improves guidelines on the collection and publication of wage discrimination information and research.

The Lily Ledbetter Act was a needed clarification in the Title VII employment discrimination law. Now, we must follow through on the momentum and take the next most important step by securing passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act.

The Misguided, Embarrassing War Against Feminism Rages On

By MOLLY KNEFEL

[via Broadsheet] There’s something that makes me really uncomfortable about people who get nervous and defensive about feminism. It’s embarrassing in its unwarrantedness, the same way its embarrassing when people are violently homophobic. To disagree is one thing, but to wage a war against something as tolerant as feminism with such vehemence just screams insecurity. The same way that people who wage wars against homosexuals are often insecure about their own sexuality.

That’s how I felt when I learned about the group of intellectuals (?) who came together to finally fight back against the faceless, all-powerful monster known as feminism– which, I guess, was getting too big for its lady-britches and needed to be taken down a peg. As described in an article in Inside HigherEd, these “scholars of boys and men” decided to fight back by creating a discipline called Male Studies. Tracy Clark-Flory provides an excellent explanation of men’s studies, which already exists, which is I guess too pansy and feminism-loving for the “scholars of boys and men.” So they created male studies, with the explicit purpose of excluding existing feminist and gender theory. Feminism, as described by ManBoy scholar Lionel Tiger (roar!), is:

“a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.”

I am so tired of people’s willful misunderstanding of feminism as a war against men. I’ve written about this before, and Chloe Angyal has a wonderful piece in the Guardian that talks about the systematic misrepresentation of feminist ideals and the resulting reluctance of young women to identify as an f-word. And while, thankfully, gender equality has improved over the years, to call the feminist movement “highly successful” is a misrepresentation, given the powerful stigma against it that still remains strong. And to call it a “denigration of maleness” is just willfully and demonstrably false.

In addition to seeing women’s studies as an “institutionalization of misandry,” the Motherboy scholars also believe that the whole power thing long associated with maleness and masculinity isn’t fair.

“today’s discourse on individual men is not a discourse of power — men do not feel powerful in today’s society.”

Fair enough. But how is it logical to then, in turn, attack a movement whose aim is to empower all individuals, regardless of gender, race, class, sexuality, or ability? Again, there seems to be a lot of willful misunderstanding here:

Primary and secondary schools, as well as higher education, have been so heavily influenced by feminism, Tiger said, “that the academic lives of males are systematically discriminated against.”

I don’t know what primary and secondary schools these Boyz II Men went to, but I wish I had known about them when I was a child. I cannot recall hearing the word “feminism” used in a non-derogatory way ONCE until I went to college. And again, I can’t emphasize this enough: feminism is not about disempowering males. To talk about the changing roles and representations of maleness in society is an important discussion to have. But these BoyMan scholars are so obviously threatened by women that they feel the need to create their own discipline, rather than to operate in the tolerant, already existant institution of men’s studies, just because those men’s studies pussies don’t exist in an exclusive dichotomy against women’s studies.

The final paragraph of the Inside HigherEd article is hilarious:

Edward Stevens, chair of the On Step Institute for Mental Health Research, said he wants to see male studies search for ways to improve male academic performance. “What are the ethical concerns of devoting 90 percent of resources to one gender?” he asked (though without explaining exactly what he meant). “What are the unintended consequences of the failure of our academic institutions to consider the 21st century needs of males?” (emphasis added)

I’m not even going to go into an explanation of how, historically, the “needs of males” have been the default needs of everyone, and that much of education is already male studies due to the, you know, historic and institutionalized marginalization of women. I don’t want to be a ball buster or anything.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, all this talk about the “scholars of boys and men” has left me with a powerful urge to watch the Arrested Development episode “Motherboy XXX,” or listen to some Boys II Men songs, or maybe that Beyonce song “If I were a boy.” And if I were a boy, I hope I would be happy to have women’s studies and men’s studies and a tolerant, interdisciplinary system of talking about gender and difference, without feeling the need to wave my dick around and make my own No-Girls-Allowed club.