The Wage Gap and the Death Gap
When I was growing up in the 1970s, feminists complained of a wage gap between men and women. The fulltime woman worker’s wage was said to be 51 cents to the fulltime man worker’s dollar.
In not too many years, the operative figure became 59 cents. A few years later it went up again and then again and now it is 77 cents.
In other words, the amount of money a woman working fulltime can expect to make relative to what a man working fulltime makes has been steadily rising for the past decades.
What accounts for the rise? Discrimination against women in pay and promotions has dramatically decreased due to more vigorous enforcement of laws banning such discrimination. (Some say we are now discriminating against men in some areas but that’s a subject for another essay.) “Help Wanted” newspaper ads were classified into “male” and “female” up until the 1970s but the Supreme Court ruled such practices unconstitutional, leading to more women entering high-paying jobs that were previously male-dominated.
In the decades since the 1970s, more women have received higher educations and more have worked for uninterrupted years of their lives. Indeed, when the wages of women and men who have the same education, work the same jobs (not “comparable” jobs), and have worked the same amount of time are compared, the wage gap often comes close to vanishing – or even reverses.
Part of the reason a wage gap persists are that the sexes continue to work different amounts of times and at different jobs.
Women are still more likely than men to take time off from the labor market for fulltime homemaking. Inevitably, a worker who is out of the labor market for years will not, on average, make as much as one who has been in it without interruption.
Another reason for the wage gap is that men take the physical-strength intensive jobs. These jobs pay highly in large part because they are dangerous. This brings us to another on-the-job gender gap but one less well publicized than the wage gap.
Men are heavily represented in those jobs with high injury and fatal accident rates. Men are the majority of coal miners, garbage collectors, lumberjacks (there aren’t many lumberjills!), firefighters, and workers in other physically hazardous areas. Coal miners suffer a double whammy as they not only work in an environment that is accident-prone but are exposed to the dreaded “black lung” as a result of their work.
Why don’t women take these jobs? It might be that women place a greater premium on personal safety as opposed to high pay than men do because men are still expected to shoulder the greatest share of family support. Perhaps even more relevantly, these jobs require more upper-body physical strength than is possessed by the vast majority of women.
People who take great physical risks on their jobs should be compensated for those risks. To the extent that the wage gap reflects women’s lesser participation in the labor market and men’s greater chance of injuries and deaths on the job, it is not an injustice but a difference based on fairness.
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Stumble It!
June 16th, 2007 at 10:22 am
If I were a coal minor it’s more likely I would “allow” my son – not encourage – to work there than my daughter. Why? Well, I am not sure why. I have been pushing for gender fairness for decades but I still have that need to protect my daughter more than my son. I love both equally. I see that same tendency for others but it goes beyond familes. Society really does care more about the health and safety of women. (Read P.C. M.D. by Sally Satel.) Yet we allow feminist to teach that society and men in particular care less about women than about men. We don’t even protest when gender experts AKA feminists teach such propaganda but we don’t even ask the school board to make sure that other views are taught to our children.
What is often missed isn’t just the differences in pay because of women’s – options – read Farrell “Why Men Earn More” but we never count as lost wages over a life time those men who died young in war, or the work place. We never count the men with total or substantial disabilities who lose years of higher wages … consider the guys coming back from war with 100% disabilities and $2,600 a month. Their wages might be higher than the average women bu what is their life like, compared to the average women.
Thanks Denise for writing about these things.
SDd
June 16th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Hi steven deluca:
When my son asked me about joining the military, I discouraged him and he took my advice. I retired from the military after 20 years and didn’t want him following in my footsteps.
I gave him other ideas and he took them. He has worked his way up to now being a sales manager at a local car dealership and makes more money than I ever did. In fact, it’s not even close. I’m presently planning a way to leapfrog him, in spades. Can’t allow this situation to continue.
This garbage about joining the military or becoming a government bureaucrat to “serve your country” is nothing but government propaganda. I taught him that anything he does that is legal and supportive of the needs and wants of other people is serving his country.
I think that we should require that women shoulder 50% of the responsibility for doing the more dangerous and less than comfy jobs, or be restricted from getting a job at all. As soon as 50% of all the lower-paying, lower-responsibility comfy jobs are taken, the comfy job spigot gets totally turned off to women.
June 16th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Thanks Denise for restating so succinctly what has been argued by many for the last 20 years. Diogenes has found an honest woman.
June 16th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
denise; i am sending this to all my liberal friends. of course, as it comes from mensnewsdaily.com, most won’t even open it. gotta try though.
thanks so much
June 16th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
As compulsive as feminists and mostly women are in spreading these lies, same with “1 in 4 wimmin will be raped” ( another feminist blatant lie), the wage gap is non-existant, just as the previous blatant male-hate statement concerning rape has been proven to be.
They are created to ensure that the war against men continues under false pretences….
Another bit of feminist induced hysteria…
Boring.
June 17th, 2007 at 2:30 am
To Steven DeLuca, S Baker and Donnieboy57: You are very much welcome! I hope you’ll read — and enjoy! — many of my other writings.