No pay gap my ass

A few weeks ago, on April 8 to be precise, the White House declared Equal Pay Day. The idea was to put a spotlight on the pay discrepancy between women and men in the U.S. The official declaration from the White House used the oft-cited statistic that on average, women make approximately 77 cents for every dollar that men make. Hence, the April 8th date—that’s how long women have to work into the following year to make as much as men did the previous year. (I meant to write about this when it happened, but y’know. I have a full time job and a family. Life and shit.)

This, of course, like everything that president Obama does—eating, breathing, talking—brought out the crazies and naysayers. First off, they declared the President a DIRTY STINKING LIAR for saying that women, on average, make only 77% of what men make, because their data shows that women actually make a whole 81% of what men make! AND ISN’T THAT A WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT AND BETTER? Several pundits on the right twisted themselves into philosophical pretzels to explain that THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE. According to them, not only does the pay gap not exist, but women have all the equality and work flexibility we want! We can work part-time for convenient, easy-to-manage woman-sized salaries and breastfeed in the alley! Isn’t ‘Merica wonderful?

OH HAPPY DAY!

Two pundits in particular, journalist Glenn Kessler and economist Mark Perry, published commentaries that had sexist white dudes (and a few delusional white Republican women) rejoicing. You can read some of their work for yourself here and here. (I would like to point out here that both Kessler and Perry are white dudes over the age of 50, but y’know. I’m pretty sexist and racist for even mentioning that.) 

Mark Perry’s piece in particular is a smoke-and-mirrors piece of bullshit that I honestly do not understand the purpose of, and this is not because I am not an economist. Perry goes to great pains to explain to our delicate ladybrains how it’s really our personal choices that affect our pay and that it has nothing to do with gender whatsoever. Perry’s article bobs and weaves all over place to show exactly how much women are fucked over for pay at exactly which points in our lives. Women who are single, for example, are actually statistically paid almost as much as a man (95.2%-95.8%) and isn’t that Wonderful! It’s when we get hitched and start poppin’ out babies that things go all wrong for us. But since that’s our own fault shoulder shrug then that’s just too darn bad, isn’t it? 

DEAR MARK. LET ME EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF DISCRIMINATION:

• First off buddy, it’s not just women who have babies. Men are part of that equation too. So why is it that when a couple chooses to have children it’s the woman who bears the full pay penalty of that decision? I know what you’re going to say, Mark. But women choose to stay home with their babies after they’re born. Only that’s a total falsehood, because staying home after you have a baby isn’t a choice. Childbirth is a rough deal physically. The body needs time to heal and rest. Moms and dads need time to bond with their newborns. The U.S. is the only first world nation that doesn’t have universal paid leave for new parents. 

• Beyond that, if a couple decides that one of them should stay home with the kids (and I’m talking about after the cessation of breastfeeding if she's decided she needs to stay home to do that, because the workplace isn't exactly accommodating) the reason that women are often the ones who stay home is not because we’re all cuddly and necessarily have fuzzier feelings for our children. It’s because we make less money. And it naturally follows that the partner making a bigger salary is the one who keeps working, especially once a kid enters the equation.

• Finally and most blatantly DUH-worthy: Should women just refuse to have babies so that we can finally achieve full pay equality? Should we just let humanity come to an end? 

Mark’s piece comes with this pretty graph so that you too can figure out where in your womanhood you literally screwed yourself out of your salary.

Both Perry and Kessler’s pieces gleefully point out that much of the pay gap between women and men is based on raw hours worked. Men work a few more hours a week so it follows that they make more money. 

From Perry’s piece: Because men work more hours on average than women, some of the raw wage gap naturally disappears just by simply controlling for the number of hours worked per week, an important factor not even mentioned by groups like the National Committee on Pay Equity. He says that—but then nothing else on the matter. Not one single mention of why women work fewer hours than men. Glenn Kessler offers one explanation: Since most school teachers are women and most school teachers don’t work summers, that accounts for some of the hours disparity.

Neither man has any sort of insight as to what might make up the rest of that disparity in hours. But stop any woman on the street and she can tell you. Obviously it's because we need extra time to lie on the couch and eat bon bons. NOT. It’s because we’re taking time off to take care of sick kids. Or we’re taking time off to take kids to the doctor. Or we’re going to parent-teacher conferences. Or we’re taking our aging parents—or even our spouses aging parents—to doctors’ appointments.

Y’know. All of those fun “choices” that women have. 

And why is it that those “choices” rest with women? There are three reasons. First off, since it’s likely her male partner who is making more money, it makes sense that his job is more valued in the relationship and needs to be protected, so it falls to the woman to take the time off. Secondly, and it pains me to say this, there are still some Neanderthals out there who think it’s the wife’s job to take time off of work to attend to children’s needs and they simply refuse to do it. This is not the case in our household, but I have friends who have some pretty sad stories to tell about how their husbands won’t take time off work for anything. Finally, there is still this lingering (though changing) idea that caretaking is “women’s work” … So men don’t want to jeopardize their jobs by asking an unsympathetic (and likely male) employer for time off for “girly” shit like watching a sick child or taking Mom to her cardiologist appointment. If women were truly being paid equally, we'd take off less time from work and men would take on more of those responsibilities.

I would also like to point out that neither Kessler nor Perry’s pieces seem to take into account or differentiate between salaried pay and clock-in-clock-out work. They also neglect to take into account all of the extra unpaid work women put in outside the workplace so that their men can do paid work virtually uninterrupted. Predictably, they both cite the fact that women “choose” careers that pay less—but they never even consider the idea that perhaps the problem is that fields traditionally dominated by women are simply not valued as much as “men’s work” is. 

Because why should they worry their big privileged man brains over those kinds of things?

And before you blast me because I'm some "libtard" who won't acknowledge that Obama's White House pays women less than men I say again, "Duh." That's what I'm talking about. And weren't you the one who was just telling me that there's no gender pay gap?