But there was one part I found a very interesting insight into how patriarchal policies work:
“This is one of the main differences between the left and the right: We don’t see every issue as being a ‘man’s issue,’ or a ‘woman’s issue.’ It’s not a men-against-women, us-against-them mentality,” said Sue Zoldak, the head of communications for RightNOW Women PAC. “I don’t understand the idea that something is a ‘women’s issue.’ I don’t comprehend that as a statement.”This is an interesting way of casting right wing thinkers as the righteous ones on sex equality. Well, I say "interesting". It's not that interesting because it's exactly what they do with race as well.
The subtitle of The New Jim Crow, which I do recommend, is "Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". The book explains at great length how "colorblind" language is used to justify policies that as a matter of fact disadvantage people of colour, but that never overtly target people based on colour.
The penalties for drug possession don't actually say that black people will be put in prison for longer than white people, but the laws against drug possession have clearly been used as a tool to incarcerate black people.
It's undeniable there there is a difference in the wages people get paid based on their sex. If you were to choose a sex based purely on maximizing salary, you'd choose male. While there are fools who deny it, some of this gap is based on straight up inherent bias - the employer simply offers a person who looks like a woman to them less money than a person who looks like a man. However, there's lots of reason to think that kind of bias is only a fraction of the gap.
This Vox article goes through a bunch of data and puts together a few patterns:
- jobs where certain hours are of higher importance and jobs where working long hours are valued tend to be jobs where the gap is higher
- the gap increases when people are 30 and 40 and then goes down when they are 50 and older
- women are disproportionately doing the work of raising children
You put all that together and it looks an awful lot like women's duties to their families prevent them from achieving the same salary as men in jobs where work hours are very inflexible and/or long. None of this is all that new to anyone who's watched this discussion. It's actually a very common explanation of the wage gap from people who want to downplay it's importance - that the wage gap results from real world differences between how men and women work. If a man gets paid more because he was willing to work longer hours, then that wage gap is justified, they say.
The Vox article doesn't go this way, but instead suggests that something we could do to help close the wage gap is change our attitudes about work. Some jobs have inflexible hours for very legitimate reasons, others have them just because that's how it's always been.
What it stops short of saying is that financially rewarding people for their ability to adhere to inflexible work hours are a discriminatory practice hidden behind a veil of sex-blind language.
We like to think there is a clear ordering of things, a clear way to say what causes what: A person who is male has their wife take on more of the after work childcare duties which means they can stay late which makes their boss think that they are more committed to getting the job done which makes them more likely to get promoted or get a bigger raise, which creates a gender wage gap.
But that way of telling stories is systemically discriminatory. I could tell the story in reverse: It is pointed out that there is a gap between the wages of men and women at a company which causes people who are in charge of determining wages to come up with a rationalization for that gap that doesn't make them look sexist, which causes them to latch onto working longer hours as a reason to promote people and give them higher wages, which causes them to actually promote people based on that criterion despite the fact that everyone knows it's a poor criterion.
I could tell the story starting in the middle of the chain and cascading in both directions. I could tell the story as feedback loops with no clear beginning or end.
We can write stories in lots of ways.
The same goes for the story that women don't negotiate as hard for salary when they start a new job, or that women take maternity leave. We know that paying people more because of their salary negotiations and that paying people less if they took a year off to look after dependents are two ways of doing things that result in women being paid less than men. But we refuse to acknowledge that those two things are themselves sexist policies because they are coated in sex-blind language.
I think one way we can emphasize how sexist these policies are by pointing out that they serve no real world purpose. Rewarding people for working longer hours is likely counterproductive. The Vox article briefly mentions this:
It also means not giving disproportionate rewards to those willing to work the longest, either. Numerous studies find that long hours aren’t always productive. One study published last year found that managers couldn’t tell the difference between those who worked an 80-hour week and those who pretended to.
"The research is clear," the Harvard Business Review declared last summer. "Long hours backfire for people and companies."This isn't a revolutionary idea from last summer, though, it's been standard, accepted theory of business administration since Henry Ford if not longer. People who work longer hours are not more productive.
Similarly, is paying people more because they drove a harder bargain during their interview actually a way to get better employees? It might make sense if you are hiring people to do sales since for sales staff their ability to drive a bargain is a direct asset. For most jobs I think the answer is almost certainly no.
When we have widespread implementation of a policy that seems to sacrifice better outcomes in the name of producing more sexist ones, it's probably pretty easy to think of that policy as sexist. What about a policy we can make sense of, like paying people more if they have worked more years?
Maternity leave seems to connect to the idea of seniority. You pay people who've been there for five years more than you pay people who've been there for one. Therefore you pay someone who has been there for ten years more than someone who has been there for nine - that is, ten but took one of those years off.
But if you think that pay for seniority comes out of the idea that people with more experience are better at their jobs, I think you're applying a contemporary reasoning to a policy that has existed in many places for a long time. It's just as true that pay for seniority is about rewarding people for staying because turnover is hard on companies. For that latter explanation, a year of maternity leave doesn't change the reasoning for why you would pay an employee more. The rationalization we choose for our cultural tradition affects women's equality, and we chose the rationalization that goes against equality.
My arguments that these polices are sexist are, in a way, speculative. What I can say for sure is that discussing any of these polices without acknowledging their contribution to the gender wage gap is definitely sexist. Unequal pay based on gender is a bad thing. If it is the consequence of a policy, that policy had better be at least good enough to outweigh the harm.
Like if a company pays sales staff by commission and is convinced that paying by commission greatly increases the success of the company, they may acknowledge that it can also contribute to a gender wage gap by rewarding working for longer hours but say that it is nonetheless a policy they need to keep. Firefighters don't relax their rules about how much you have to be able to carry even though those result in discrimination based on sex. You can justify a policy as being important enough to overcome it's downside. But choosing not to even evaluate gender-based wage inequality as a bad thing is
explicitly
promoting sexism. It's shouting sexism from the rooftops.Trying to frame policies in a way that is blind to discrimination is directly promoting discrimination. Policies may promote discrimation, they may reduce it, they may have no effect. If you don't care which one of those your policy does, you don't care about discrimination, and that means that you
support
whatever form of discrimination shows up in popular culture.
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