Do Women Really Earn Less Money for Doing the Same Job?

June 12, 2009

I have now read the book What Is Your Self-Worth? A Woman's Guide to Validation, by Cheryl Saban -- the one I refer to in a previous blog ("Women, Self-Worth, and the Modern Generation") when the author was on Larry King.

In a nutshell, Saban's message is this: Women are still victims of a patriarchal society, a world where everything is devised by men and is therefore inherently unfair to women. Some of her comments include:

Here in the U.S., a woman's worth and validity are routinely questioned or challenged in both subtle and unsubtle ways.

Systemic resistance to women gaining equal status is true not only in developing countries but in the United States, where we should know better.

Here in the United States, women continue to grapple with financial equity and pay for work supplied.

This last point -- re the disparity in pay between women and men -- she makes several times throughout the book. I can tell you right now that any woman who tries to convince women that they are paid less for the same job simply because they're female is not to be trusted. Everything else the person says should fall on deaf ears because no intelligent person can honestly believe this unless she doesn't do the research or is so blinded by ideology and emotion she can't think straight.

Women, on the whole, do not make the same amount of money as men because they do not follow the same career trajectory: They do not enter the workforce full-time at age 22 and stay there until they're 65 years old. Women sequence their lives: move in and out of the workforce to accomodate caring for children and elderly parents -- mainly children. Motherhood, in other words, is the reason for the pay disparity. The minority of women who do follow the same trajectory as men -- and have the same qualifications and work the same number of hours doing the same job -- absolutely receive the same pay. Saban panders to women who go along with whatever people tell them because they're too busy to find out whether the information they're receiving is accurate.

Saban may provide a great service to underprivilged women or women in other countries. But to suggest that middle or upper-middle class American women are in any way comparable to women in third-world countries is laughable.

Women like Saban may get a full-hour of airtime on Larry King to churn out their message of victimhood, but regular folks between New York and CA are too smart to fall for it.

Source: Opposing Views