To get my hair off with this paygap denier

[Jackfruitburger]

"I think men are more driven (in general) to get high paying jobs, whereas women tend to either do what they like doing (I.e making cakes and selling them, or run breeding and boarding kennels) or do something of service (teacher). I really do think it's innate."

Also her

"But I also don't see it as a problem that needs to be fixed - it's just the way we are and the way it is. Men and women are different."

I don't even have the words to argue back.

Also, certainly going back a few years, there was a definite cost to going into non-traditional occupations as a woman. IIRC (I wrote a dissertation on this at uni, but it was a long time ago!) women who went into 'non-traditional' occupations through youth training schemes tended to find it harder to get work on completing the schemes than men with the same qualifications & experience, and ended up with lower paying jobs, plus often having to deal with hostile attitudes etc at work/in training. Hopefully things have changed, but back then it was definitely the rational choice in many ways if going in at the lower end of the occupational scale to take a stereotypically female job.

Similarly (anecdote / personal experience not research here tbf) going into a graduate job out of uni in a traditionally male occupation you definitely needed to be extremely confident and bulletproof - I was in a company with 3 women compared to 30 plus men, and was the only one who didn't tend to get given lower grade work compared to similar level men (possibly because I had no mortgage/kids at the time, didn't give a shit if they fired me, and told anyone who tried to patronise me to fuck off )

Sadiqs anecdote suggests that the females had the problem. She and the men fought for what they wanted and got it. The 2 other women didnt and got shit on. People have to fight for stuff. Youre not gonna win by being weak and passive

It's such a weird coincidence that all the jobs/roles that are innate for women are less well paid (on average) and less prestigious than those that are innate for men. Also it's weird how some jobs/roles are innate for women in some societies but not in others. Wonder how that works.

This.

There are structural barriers to women achieving pay equality that go well beyond individual choices. Biology has always been used against women, as if it were destiny, to make women do the same amount of work for less.

Hence any argument that centres on biology is inherently suspect and designed to preserve the status quo.

She's right to some extent, but there are plenty of other factors at play beside individual women's choices:

i) pay falls when a sector becomes dominated by women. This has been documented with teaching - used to be mostly male teachers, well paid, respected etc. The profession became more female-dominated, and pay fell.

www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html

ii) The reverse holds true, with sectors increasing in male representation as they gain prestige, e.g. computer programming.

www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/what-programmings-past-reveals-about-todays-gender-pay-gap/498797/

iii) The very real discrimination women face in advancing their careers, e.g. 40% of hiring managers wouldn't hire a woman of childbearing age. Men don't have that sort of barrier to pay increases.

www.theguardian.com/money/2014/aug/12/managers-avoid-hiring-younger-women-maternity-leave

you just say that the gender pay gap is comparing men and women doing the same jobs. The question of why women progress less in chosen careers is different, as is the question of why women choose lower paying jobs (if they do, if the stats bear that out).

I remember school careers guidance.

I told them that I wanted to become a doctor, so I wanted to do these GCSEs, then these A levels, and could I have some advice on what sort of activities to do to make my application look better. They tried to stop me doing 3 sciences, asked me if I'd considered nursing or childcare, then sent me on (compulsory) work experience shelf stacking.

I really hope school careers advice is better these days!

"She and the men fought for what they wanted and got it. "

No - the men didn't have to fight - no-one asked them to make coffee / pick up bits of typing etc.

@Sadik absolutely this! When my female friend is on AL, all her male colleagues have to buy Starbucks. She sees it as a nice thing to do for them, they see it as servitude and weakness.

Well, men and women are different. It's just a fact of life whether you like it or not. I wanted to be an artist, never an engineer.

I was going to say ask her why she thinks traditional women’s roles are paid so much less than traditional male roles, but I can see a lot of people have already pointed this out! I can’t be wasting time with women who are this hard of critical thinking skills though, so maybe just avoid her...

Noone asked the men to make coffee because the men would have told them to shove their coffee. Why didnt the women?

"I wanted to be an artist, never an engineer."
But lots of men want to be artists! And plenty of teenage girls I know are interested in becoming engineers / are off to uni to study engineering.

"Noone asked the men to make coffee because the men would have told them to shove their coffee. Why didnt the women?"
I suspect because they had been socialised by their families to be polite & compliant. Also because they had kids/mortgages/needed their paycheck. I could easily take the risk of pushing back because I was always willing to walk.

Exactly what Lannie said.

Noone asked the men to make coffee because the men would have told them to shove their coffee. Why didnt the women?

If men felt it was below them to be asked to make coffee, why would they be so disrespectful as to ask a woman to do it? Women are not responsible for shitty male behaviour.

The trouble is, it was never really 'shitty male behaviour' - it was always very nice, very friendly, very 'I'm really sorry but X (secretary) is not around, could you just (do the typing/make coffee for the meeting) etc'

It takes a fair bit of bolshiness to say 'look, would you ask [insert name of male colleague here] to do that? And if not why are you asking me?'

And fair play, when I said that sort of thing, the (older male, not bad just thoughtless) bosses would be absolutely understanding.

But then those who wouldn't speak up & said yes found their time was taken up with those sort of jobs, and they weren't doing the stuff that got noticed & got you moving up.

It all goes back to us being the little girls with the tea sets who get told we're a good girl for being helpful whilst brother who bashes all the other kids with a dinosaur is left to get on with it.

They asked the women because 2 of them would do it

I bet they stopped asking sadik..

And thats 2 less people to worry about next time a promotion becomes available

Getting better jobs and better pay is a competition and nice people will usually lose

It takes a fair bit of bolshiness to say 'look, would you ask [insert name of male colleague here] to do that? And if not why are you asking me?'

This is true, in my old job in HR, I was once asked to set up a meeting room for a department whose only female member of staff was on holiday. God forbid the manager asked any on the men in his department, no, instead he came to HR and asked me to do it.

I said no.

He put in a complaint about me.

Teaching and medicine were both jobs that were thought to be too difficult for women to do. Even when women were allowed to study medicine, medical schools had quotas for female students for years so even though girls had better A level results only 20% of students were allowed to be female. Now the majority of doctors are female.

I'm a scientist, a biologist. My work has gone from being predominantly male to about 50:50 in the 20 years I've been here. When I started there were very few female managers, now there are (2) women on the board and women throughout the management structure. Biology is a hard science that was seen as too abstract for women historically, now there are more female graduates than men. What does your friend think has happened in the last 20 years? Has biology become more caring? Or have women had more opportunity and it has become easier to make the choice to keep working after children?

But why did women successfully colonise biology and less so physics?

DieAntword - there are a lot of social barriers to women accessing the 'harder' sciences. One of my colleagues was told she couldn't do pure maths at college (by the college!!) and should choose something different.

See also all the people who claim that women are rubbish at maths / "don't worry your pretty little head about it" etc.

Lots more reasons here: www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/math-women/506417/

e.g. 'Brilliance effect' - where success in the subject is seen as being innate, rather than through hard work. And women are less often seen as being 'brilliant'

e.g. women being socialised to assume that not understanding something is their failure, rather than realising that no-one else understands it either.

Ooh, I know! Women are innately less good at physics than men, that'll be why. And biology is much easier, and to do with people rather than things so women are more interested in it, innately.

"colonise" is an interesting choice of word....

At my mixed sixth form, Maths, Physics and Chemistry were taught separately. But not biology (or indeed any non-science subjects). I wonder why that was?