Pay gap?

[mydogishot]

If I decide to identify as male, does my pay go up?
I know we are all "paid the same" but you get more for having a penis.

Likewise, does pay cut happen other way around?

I'm wishing it was that easy

This is an interesting one.

Men get paid more because they act differently, and because we reward stereotypically 'male' behaviours. (Although in actual fact, the split comes from having children, and women without children on average out-earn men). So identifying as a man won't increase your pay, but if you behave like one (and look like one?), that might.

On the flip side, I can totally believe that a man stating he identified as a woman would have a negative impact on his earnings, even if he didn't transition, but even more so if he did.

Phillip Bunce.

No for the same reason that there's a man sat next to me who gets paid the same and a man sat near me who is paid less.
It's based on averages rather than individuals.
The law says that you cannot pay a man more for doing the same job, so you wouldn't get more by identifying as one.

If you work longer hours and marry somebody willing to take on a larger slice of domestic/childcare than you to enable that, then yes you likely will.

Men get paid more because they act differently, and because we reward stereotypically 'male' behaviours. (Although in actual fact, the split comes from having children, and women without children on average out-earn men). So identifying as a man won't increase your pay, but if you behave like one (and look like one?), that might.

Unfortunately, behaving like a man won’t help. Quite the opposite. Where men acting assertively are seen as leadership material, women behaving the same way are seen as ‘bossy’ , shrill and ‘bitchy.’

If everyone just chooses their own 'gender' and nobody has a sex any more, then it will be impossible to tell whether men (male people) are paid more than women (female people), since they will all just be 'people'. Just as now there are no statistics to say whether tall people are paid more than short people, or whether carnivores are paid more than vegetarians.

If there is a pay penalty (on average) for being a male transwoman, then I would say that is discrimination for being trans as opposed to being women.

Pay discrimination against women is down to many factors, eg women being discouraged from entering well-paid roles, less likely to be given those roles when they do apply, even when they have the experience, and that they need to take maternity leave to have children, then (because of how society and work is structured, childcare, etc) they often are backed into a corner where they have to reduce hours.

Those things don't tend to apply to transwomen in the same way they apply to women, so the discrimination isn't because they are women.

Not least to mention that many transwomen transition in middle age when they are already well established in their (often male-dominated and well paid) careers.

Legally there should be pay equality (although that didn't stop my company having to retroactively give senior women some hefty pay rises when the data was about to published) so declaring yourself male shouldn't impact that.

The other aspect of the pay gap is that women get stuck in lower paying roles due to a combination of attitudes on promoting women from hiring managers, women being expected to pick up larger proportion of household/caring duties than their partners restricting their working availability, and the impact of lack of flexibility in the workplace linked to the former. I don't imagine that declaring myself male is going to deal with any of those either.

In fact, the only 2 things I can think of that could possibly have a financial impact by legally changing sex would be that women used to have cheaper insurance, and used to retire earlier. The first one upset men so we can't have cheaper insurance any more, and the governments have already screwed over the WASPI women by hoisting the pension age up without giving them time to adjust. However look to other countries where there are still these benefits for declaring yourself female and voila - stories of men declaring themselves female.

@Fallingirl I've heard about that research, but haven't been able to find it - could you link me to it?

It sounds like one of those things that's incredibly hard to measure, because so much of how we react to people is in the small unconscious details. Saying the same words / making the same requests doesn't mean the actions are actually the same.

@dinkydonky I think the research mentioned here, was the one I was thinking of.

www.aauw.org/2016/03/18/masculinity-isnt-leadership/

I’ve worked on the gender pay gap, specifically calculating the size of the gender pay gap.
Self-id, as its predominantly men id’ing as women, has a risk of eradicating the gender pay gap (and therefore would remove the justification for all the policies which aim to decrease it, such as child-care policies, attempts to increase female participation in STEM etc.) as one of the primary causes of the gender pay gap is high earning men. While I don’t expect a sea change of high earning men self iding as female nationally. I think creatively used self-id could get some companies out of having to report a too high pay gap.