Yes, I'm aware it's predictable shit, but really?!
www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/31/gender-pay-feminism-working-class
So, essentially, ,most women who worked for 12 years before the Equal Pay Act in 1970 are hugely worse paid over their careers than men, and than the tiny number of women who graduated with degrees in 1958.
This, apparently, is all feminism's fault, cos you know everyone really tried hard to exploit the vast majority of women. The nice patriarchial system just employed them on shit wages and made it perfectly ok to pay them less than men ... that hardly compares to the evil of feminism whereby some small number of women (the hussies!) made it and got paid substantially more than most women. Let's search out that tiny minority and burn them, right?
Honestly.
This article is one level up from the sort of idiocy where people believe the moon landings were faked. Except I expect it isn't idiocy really, it's someone deliberately taking a pop at feminism, isn't it? 
Feminism: Sex and gender discussions
Guardian article about feminism 'failing' had me spitting feathers.
LRDtheFeministDragon · 01/04/2013 11:47
Ah, ok ... I could have sworn it didn't actually say that when I read it this morning. 
I'm not nit-picking, just could have sworn.
Even so, I would imagine the numbers are still fairly small. My mum would be in the late 70s generation, and it is still a very small number of women (or men for that matter) who went to university. And by the late 70s, it certainly wasn't the case that working-class people didn't go, either, so in some ways it's a worse argument by then.
I agree about the differences between low and high earners.
Not that it's terribly relevant to this thread, but the last-but-one Oxbridge college to go mixed (a women's college at Oxford went mixed a couple of years back) only admitted women in 1987, and students carried coffins through the halls as a protest when they were let in. 
I started out saying that this article was idiotic because such a small proportion of women went to university and they were being blamed for feminism failing. Now I'm thinking I doubt it was terribly different for those women anyway!
Both of my parents were from the generation where if you stayed on past 16 you would think of yourself as having stopped being 'working class'. Whereas I think now it is more something to be proud of, for my dad it was something not to admit to. I suppose maybe that is how they came to that peculiar use of working class in that article, but I still think it's rubbish.
I can't find the original survey because I am shit at googling, but maybe someone else can. 
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Mmm. The report is kinda saying the opposite of what the journalism about it (not just in the Guardian) says.
Gotta admit I am amused it was funded by L'Oreal. With their sparkling track record for lack of sexism. To be fair, I doubt this is their kind of sexism, though.
The way the study puts it is this: 'Controlling for education, social class, geography and whether or not and at what age respondents had children, our analysis of full-time workers shows that women born in 1958 were, at the age of 41?42, expected to earn almost 35 per cent less than men born in the same year. This figure fell to 29 per cent for women born in 1970, asked at age 38?39. ...
A man born in 1958 was likely to earn 14 per cent more for holding a degree (asked at age 41?42), while a man born in 1970 was likely to earn 17 per cent more for holding a degree (at age 38?39) (see annex 1, table A1.5). A woman born in 1958 was likely to earn nearly 34 per cent for holding a degree. This declined slightly for women born in 1970, who could expect to earn 32 per cent more than women without a degree (table A1.5). This shows that a degree benefits a woman more than it benefits a man, although the gap has closed. ...
Although a woman enjoys a higher premium for a degree, she still earns much less than her male counterparts. Holding everything else equal, a woman without a degree born in 1958 was expected to earn about 52 per cent of the amount a man withouta degree earns, based on weekly wages, while a woman with a degree was expected to earn about 71 per cent of a male graduate?s wage (table A1.5). Among the 1970 cohort, women without a degree could expect to earn 59 per cent of a (non-graduate) man?s wages, while a female graduate could expect to earn 75 per cent of man?s wage'
And, crucially given what we're saying on this thread: 'This analysis is based on full-time workers, but the pay gap between full-time and part- time workers is much larger (over 36 per cent, compared to 10?15 per cent for full-time workers) and has hardly fallen at all over the last 30 years.'
'Between 1971 and 1993, a massive 93 per cent of the total increase in women?s employment was in part-time work, and the proportion of women working part- time increased from one-third in 1971 to almost half (46 per cent) by 1993 ... The proportion of women in part-time work has since fallen to 39 per cent, but this is still the third-highest rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Deveopment (OECD), behind only the Netherlands and Switzerland.
While part-time work in other northern European countries has been used as a tool to retain workers and promote a healthy family life ... In a survey of 22 workplaces across England, Grant et al (ibid) found that the main motivation for employers in taking on part-time workers was to keep wage costs down and deploy staff flexibly.
They also make this a interesting point (in view of that claim that feminism is to blame for dual-income households/high mortgages): 'the shift from an industrial to a service economy was also associated with a decline in the employment and earning prospects of men, particularly those with lower levels of education. For some families, therefore, dual-earning came to reflect a financial necessity, not simply changes in attitudes and aspirations among women. In many parts of the country, relatively well-paid jobs in manufacturing have been replaced by low-paid, low-skilled jobs in the private service sector, carried out largely by women on a part-time basis.'
The report is actually very up-front about the patriarchy being the reason for women and especially working-class women struggling:
'The average time men spend on housework and particularly childcare has risen since the 1970s, but this has occurred mostly among men with higher levels of education. In recent years, moreover, the time women spend on childcare has also increased. ... Despite some improvements in family policy
in recent years, the combination of a relatively long period of maternity leave, meagre paternity leave, and a lack of affordable childcare for children under the age of three tacitly supports a male breadwinner model.'
I hope it's ok to make such a long post of quotations, they're just the ones I found really interesting in light of the Guardian article, and I've only read part of it so far.
Thanks again for the link.
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