Thankfully, the American Family Association is on the job. The group has issued an “action alert” about Wal-Mart’s sponsorship. They failed to issue an action alert for Wal-Mart destroying towns, paying such low wages that employees have to go on welfare, or not offering health care to employees while the company makes billions in profits. But those things can all be overlooked because there is a greater evil out there: The gays. (And lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders – what ever the fuck that is.)
Certain marketing surveys are often cited to show they [gay and lesbian incomes] are higher. But these are based on samples of affluent readers of magazines which are not representative. More representative studies show that discrimination reduces gay and lesbian incomes below the average.
Certain marketing surveys are often cited to show they [gay and lesbian incomes] are higher. But these are based on samples of affluent readers of magazines which are not representative. More representative studies show that discrimination reduces gay and lesbian incomes below the average.
Those “more representative studies” show that gay and lesbian incomes are below average specifically because of discrimination, or just that they’re below average in general, and it’s assumed that the discrepancy is due to discrimination?
I’m not sure if that’s worse or better than a random internet 'blog. TV Shows have been known to occasionally employ a fact-checker; I don’t know of any 'blogs that do that. :)
On the other hand, the 1993 Yankelovitch representative survey found gay male households had average incomes of $37,400 (compared to $39,400 for heterosexuals) and lesbian households had average incomes of $34,800.
Note that this is for “households,” but if two legally single individuals share a household, each will only report the other’s income if he/she can claim the other as a dependent and get a tax break, because the tax rates for single folks are better than those for married folk. Thus it’s likely that while the married households are reporting average income for both individuals, a homosexual couple living together is more likely to omit the other’s income.
What’s more, that study is really, really old.
Edit: It’s worth adding that, even if e.g. Details magazine is correct, that “greater household income” is not a reason to deny basic human rights or otherwise discriminate against homosexuality. In fact, I’d say that having a higher household income coupled with the higher taxes due to married couples would be a decent financial incentive to allow homosexuals to get married. But I’ve been wrong before.
This one isn’t paved in stone as some women advocacy groups claim. If you look at straight earning of the genders with out any mitigating factors, then yes men make substantially more then women. However, a woman is far more likely to become the primary caretaker of her children then a man is. This means willing to take jobs that pay less but provide more flexibility, or just stop working for extended periods of time. Since pay is often tied experience or years worked, this means women will get paid less on average but not due to discrimination.
I’m not saying there wouldn’t be any salary discrepancy if somebody took this and other mitigating factors, but it would be much smaller.
Oh great, women aren’t discriminated against that much, really, they’re just quite logically economically punished for providing the very basis of the existence of society. That sounds so much better.
And there is also the fact that the more women there is in a field, the lesser valued it becomes.
And I’d say that the expectation on women to act in the way you describe, and more importantly, for men not no do it, leads to a discriminatory practice in itself.
Stop working for extended periods of time? How often does this happen, really? Because the housewife ideal has never been valid for the majority in any country at any time.
Are you saying businesses should just ignore those very real experience gaps? That a woman who say, takes a decade or so off to be a primary caretarker should make as much as someone who spent that same decade or so developing his or her professional skills?
People aren’t paid as a matter of kindness; they are paid for the value they bring, and experience usually correlates with that value.
First of all, define “valid” – I’ve seen good evidence that alternative arrangements were always prevalent, but never seen anything that shows anything other than that for most of the postwar period until fairly recently the “man works, women tends home” model was the most common, particularly among the middle and upper classes.
Second of all, this does happen with quite a bit of frequency. I’ve worked at major law firms and now work in-house at a growing telecom; my wife has worked at a Big 4 Accounting firm and now works at large conglomerate. Between the two of us, we’ve seen plenty of people come and go for various reasons, and a lot of those goings were women who got married, had kids, and decided to hop off the career track (or at least opt for a slower-paced track) so they could raise the kids. I’ve seen the reverse happen exactly once, and that was an unusual deal (the male was a programmer who could work from home, the wife an auditor who had to go to client sites).
And spare me the “society expectation” bullshit. First of all, no individual business should be held to account for the effects of society-wide mores. Second, the women I describe above were all tough-minded, competent professionals who made a well-thought out choice. They didn’t do it because society told them to, they did it because they wanted to.
Even now its rarely expected the man will slow down his career in any way for kids, unlike the woman.
If it’s “an effect of society-wide mores that no individual business should be held to account for,” maybe we should do something society-wide like pay people for having kids out of a general employment tax.
I think it’s not that as much as employer’s extremely strong desires, for whatever reason, to have 100% of people. If you look over the history of industrial employment, they basically want to get all the hours they can out of the smallest employee base possible - strong opposition to limiting the hours of a work week, against time-sharing, against part-time work (with the exception of the benefit-dodging rise of part-time retail work). I really don’t understand why, but it’s there.
Also, note “employers are rational to do that!” doesn’t mean much. Statistically employers would be “rational” in a limited way of reasoning to not hire anyone but white men, as an economist occasional argues to the resulting firestorm - they’re higher risk, why bother? Doesn’t mean we should put up with it. The terms of the market are a beginning, not the end.
Oh, yeah, great idea, I bet there’d be no unintended consequences there. Sheesh.
Oh, bullshit. I’m paid more than the average schmoe because I bring value – because of my education and training, and because of my experience. My boss, the general counsel, makes a lot more than I do because he has the same education and experience, plus an additional fifteen years of relevant work experience. And it shows: I’m good at my job, but he’s better, because he’s seen and done more and thus has a deeper well to draw on as challenges arise.
OK, so let’s take a female accounting graduate who starts with a Big 4 firm. She gets her CPA, works for about three or four years as a staff accountant and then as a senior accountant, then drops out to raise a kid. Fifteen years later, she decides to re-enter the biz.
Should she automatically be brought in as a partner, at a partner’s income? Even though she’s never worked as a supervising senior, manager or supervising manager on an audit? Or should she be brought in at her former level, but at a partner’s salary? Aren’t both of those alternatives insane?
Why is it the accounting firm’s fault that this gal passed on several years worth of relevant job experience? Why should they be expected to rectify that shortfall?
And those years DO mean something. My wife will testify to that – she knows a shit-ton more about auditing today than she did ten years ago, and as a consequence she is a good deal more valuable to an accounting enterprise than someone with only three years on the job.
Right. That’s why everyone’s just as racist as 1953.
What one earth does you response have to do with what I said?
At what point did I say it was, or that they should? Either it’s discrimination and should be that should be handled as such, or it’s biology and should be handled by society in general. It’s not like having kids is a “lifestyle choice,” for chrissakes. If women are just doomed to make less due to the biology of child rearing, which is more or less what you’re saying, then society should cough up offsetting income to compensate. You can’t have it both ways.
Legislation like the 1965 Civil Rights Act is a reflection of changing mores, not the other way around. No one’s mind was ever changed by passing a law.
The part where you disputed my assertion that people are generally paid for the value they bring to the table.
Having children is a lifestyle choice. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – to prevent a woman from living child-free and electing to focus on her career, earning money, and other such things. We live in a society of freely available contraception and abortion on demand. No one has to pop out a kid if they don’t want to.
Electing to have a child is a choice, and like any choice, it carries consequences. Because there are only so many hours in a day, a woman who wants a child may not be able to devote enough time to her professional development to make as much as another woman who has foregone raising a family. That isn’t an inequity that needs rectifying, it’s a logical consequence of choosing how you live your life.
Is it really your position that society should be rectifying inequality in job performance caused by innate biological differences? Because I’d really, really like a starting quarterback job in the NFL, but tragically I am slow, small, and have noodle arms.
“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.”
