Hello everybody!
Please read Playing All the Roles: Gender and the Work-Family Balancing Act for Monday. This text discusses the challenges in women’s lives as they balance work and family commitments. For Monday’s class, I’ll be discussing Gender/Sexed Wage Disparity from Chapter 9. Please think about the following line: “Workplaces are never just about doing work because they are populated with people doing gender. Evidence that gender/sex matter at work can be found in pay statistics” (pg. 186).
As you read, I’d like you to consider the following question:
- What is your ideal definition of a workplace?
- A recent report by the U.S General Accounting Office (2010) found that “female managers earned 81 cents for every dollar earned by male managers in 2007,” (pg. 187).
How you feel about women only earning less than men?
- How can this issue be solved or how can we make a difference to create a change in this inequality?
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Hello all!
As a refresher, I presented last Monday on the topic of Gendered/Sexed Wage Disparity. I asked you all to think about the following quote from the textbook, “Workplaces are never just about doing work because they are populated with people doing gender. Evidence that gender/sex matter at work can be found in pay statistics” (pg. 186). We then looked at the gender pay gap chart which showed that for a lifetime of work, the estimated lost income resulting from the gender pay gap for a full-time working women could buy two houses, afford more than seven four-year college degrees at a public university, buy 14 new cars, feed a family of four for almost 37 years. The extreme gap is large enough to make an impact on the lives of the women who are at disadvantage. Due to this wage gap, women who are working full time are able to afford less education, housing, transportation, food, and health care for themselves and their families than their male counterparts. As a result, female-headed households are more likely to be in poverty and less likely to have health insurance. In the reading titled Playing All the Roles: Gender and the Work-Family Balancing Act, authors Milkie and Peltola analyzes the expectation society hold for women to report more tradeoffs than men in their job due to family responsibilities.
We also discussed the two research about the relationship between wage gap and communication. The first research mentioned in the textbook was conducted by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, who stated that the wage gap is primarily due to women’s reluctance to initiate and directly negotiate their initial salary offer. In their research they concluded that communication may overall influence whether one receives a job offer since “assertive women are more likely to be hired” (pg 188). We discussed the Two-Culture Approach from Chapter 3 of masculine style of report talk and feminine style of rapport talk. Additionally, the second study by researchers Bowles, Babcock and Lai found that evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations regarding pay. When researchers explored why women and men might be more or less willing to negotiate for pay, they found that women women recognized that they face greater social costs for negotiating than men. The experiment concluded that the negative judgement of evaluators was 5.5 times greater for women regardless of whether their request was simple or assertive. Therefore, they choose not to negotiate because they perceive they will be penalized. These studies make very clear that the only solution to this issue is for the social environment of work to change rather than expecting women to negotiate their pay.
Discussion Questions
Feel free to answer any of the following question:
- According to the research by the IWPR, if the wage gap continues to grow at the same slow pace, it will take another 43 years or until 2059 for women to finally reach pay parity. Do you agree with this statement? How can we work to achieve this goal of equal pay sooner?
- If you’re comfortable sharing, discuss a time when you experienced being at an advantage or disadvantage of wage disparity at work. How did that make you feel?
- Pick a country and look at their gender wage gap. How are they managing their wage distribution differently from the United States? (Positively or negatively)
Hi! I was not in the class for some reasons but I really enjoyed reading your post! Every contents here is very interesting.
ReplyDelete1. I partially agree with that. In many countries, the number of employees of males is always higher than females'. Even though more and more women advanced to the society and the society is more open to women recently, the people who have high status in the organizations are mostly men, and moreover, those people usually have beliefs that men have more power and capacity to work. Therefore, it is not too much to say that men have privilege in companies. In order to get equal pay, I think we need time to figure it out and make all people understand the problems.
2. I have done the internship at the newspaper company in Manhattan during the summer. The newspaper is written in Japanese, so ninety percent of employees are Japanese. I worked at the sales department, so that I had to see a lot of our clients. Not many women have a status to make decisions, so almost all of them I met during the internship were men. However, because I am still young and woman, and I praised them a lot, some of our clients, who were famous for not saying yes to our requests, easily accepted our requests. Hence sometimes women can do better job than men. My boss, who is a thirty years old woman, said that she thought the same as me when she was young, whereas her income was always less than other sales men even though they did less work than her. They started working at the same time, but they easily got higher status and she always felt unfairness, she said.
3. I am from Japan, so I am going to write about Japanese culture. In Japan, the amount of income that females get is very lower than males. As I mentioned before, many male employees who thought old way of thinking just make women work to serve cups of tea and do some other meaningless work, such as copying and cleaning up the rooms. That is why the income of men easily increase but the income of women stay the same. I think people who have high status, such as presidents, need to realize that women can do better job than men for some fields.
The wage gap is such an important question because it evokes the idea, “Equal pay for equal work.” However, how do we measure equality in the workplace? How do we tangibly display equal pay for equal work? Essentially, how do we measure equal work? Possibly through productivity and hours worked, but a wage gap still remains. Perhaps the wage gap inequality that persists is from the ideas of the Two-Culture Approach about masculinity and femininity. The two different rapport styles are believed to allude to different characteristics and skills, which entail someone’s performance. Nevertheless, we should try to uphold the idea of equal pay for equal work and define how to measure equal work justly.
ReplyDeleteI think you’re posing great questions, Tenzin.
1)For your second question I’ve experienced many disadvantages in the workplace. I’ve worked many part time jobs throughout my life and as I’ve gotten older, the sexism worsens. Many male employeers I’ve had were straight up creepy and inappropriate. I’ve also noticed that women, especially in restaurants, are objectified to increase revenue. Waitresses are money-makers because from experience I’ve seen customers objectify their waitress. The customers, who are almost always men, feel entitled to treat her as a sexualized object. In terms of the wage gap, between female waitresses the less “sexy” you are the lower your tip. Sexy entails charm, kindness, general customer service techniques and tolerance for misogyny. Hopefully, women will be more appreciated for their character rather than their appearance.
2)I researched the wage gap in the European Union and the 2014 Tackling the gender pay gap in the European Union study shows interesting results. According to the study, across the EU women earn around 16.4% less than men. While the wage gap in the United States shows women earn 20% of men’s wages, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Generally, the EU shows more positive results than the US. European countries like France, have greater work equality than the US. Women have paid maternity leave and have more paid vacations. They believe vacation is not a privilege but a right. The study shows that France’s wage gap is 14.8%, less than the EU’s average. The highest wage gap inequality was in the Estonia at 30%, the lowest wage gap was in Slovenia at 2.5%.
1) I do agree with this statement because if things proceed to progress the way they have been it will take that amount of time for things to get where they need to be to have a fairer society. I think for the goal of equal pay to occur sooner the issue needs to be brought to light in society. I think there are a lot of people who are unaware of the issue at hand. After educating individuals on the wage gap society can then proceed to exterminate it and push equal pay between men and women.
ReplyDelete2) The wage gap is something that is very important to recognize. As the statistics that you provided show, it is still something that is prevalent in our society today.
When I was first hired at my job I started with no job experience. I was a high school junior at the time I was hired and so was the girl who started with me in orientation. After working with each other we quickly became friends. A few weeks into the job we had a conversation about different places we recently applied to. I was telling her how pleased I was because I got hired at the place I was most interested in. I also told her it was significantly different pay apposed to the other places that I applied to. She agreed and said she started off making $8.75 per hour. I was hired the day after her, by the same hiring manager, and was offered $8.50 per hour. We both were in high school and had no job experience. She was a year younger than me. There was no obvious reason as to why I would be started 0.25 cents less than her. The difference may not seem much, with it being 0.25 cents. It is a lot when the yearly increase is 0.30 cents. The only difference I could see was that she was a girl and I was a boy.
3) I looked up information on Ireland and found that on average across the EU in 2013, women earned 16.4 per cent less than men, but the gender pay gap ranged from 3.2 per cent in Slovenia to 29.9 per cent in Estonia. The EU has a wage gap just as we do in the United States. A quote from the article gives some insight as to why the people believe the wage gap exists. “Just over half of all respondents in Ireland (54 per cent) believed inequalities between men and women were widespread in the country, while the figure across the European Union was 62 per cent.”