I’ll give Sofia, the antifeminist bloggress behind the blog Sofiastry, credit for one thing: unlike a lot of Men’s Rightsers, she doesn’t deny that there is a wage gap between men and women. She just thinks that it’s justified – that women should be paid less.
Why? Well, I admit I don’t quite understand her explanation, which has something to do with women getting worse grades in school, working less, and, well, whatever the hell she’s trying to say here:
women who are likely seen in executive and higher-earning positions are estrogenically flawed in their lack of sufficient desire to prioritize family life. Its the equivalent of a man who has no creative, intellectual or ambitious drive — all hallmarks of testosterone.
Oh, and because, like Barbie, women think that math class is tough:
can it not simply be reduced to the fact that the average man has more of of an aptitude for finance and numbers than the average woman?
No, I’m pretty sure it can’t.
In a followup post, Sofia raised a critical issue that she somehow had overlooked in her earlier analysis: women are a bunch of blubbering crybabies.
I couldn’t count on one hand the number of times a female co-worker cried on the job (myself included), but I couldn’t name a single male (homosexuals excluded & even then…). Women are more emotional, more likely to take days off for such reasons (or no reason) and quantifiably put in less hours on the job. Depending on the field, I’d also wager that women are less likely to revolutionize an industry or make the same amount of exceptional contributions men do.
Seriously, gal. Don’t be a bunch of Lady-Boehners. Stop all of your sobbing! (Oh, oh oh.)
qwert, this is blatantly false. BLS statistics control for experience, as do others. One study specifically of academia found that it was at 7%; pretty good, but still a gender bias, and along with construction is one of the most gender-equal fields.
And you know, Ig otta say as a feminist? The wage gap is quite frankly the least of my worries. The Promotion and Hiring gaps, as well as the difference in who gets to work full vs. part time, is FAR more important to the distribution of wealth in the USA, if much less sexy to discuss.than the wage gap. And those hiring and promotion gaps are specifically controlled for by experience; women still are less likely to be hired and promoted (So are non-white people in the USA)
GYOW: ur doin it wrong. <{:D
@ Rutee
“qwert, this is blatantly false.” – I disagree, and am confident that you can’t conclusively prove otherwise.
Thanks, I’m doing pretty good GMOW! I’m not here to start a fight, It just irks me when I hear people talking about the “wage gap”. I know that all the evidence says that women earn less than men on average and I don’t dispute it: it’s just that it can be no more proven that this is based upon discrimination whether through promotion or hiring or firing, than it could be proven that men with white hair earning more than men with black hair are doing so because of discrimination. One thing that these statistics and studies do not include is personal choice, i.e. I choose to work this job or for this many hours because it’s my choice to do so.
Apologies if this is not the discussion at hand, I haven’t read all the comments here.
The GYOW is to hengist.
If you specifically mean that it the wage gap is not due to INTENTIONAL discrimination, then I am inclined to agree, I just don’t give two fucks. If you do a racist thing, I don’t care if you mean to do a racist thing. What matters is that you have done a thing that makes it harder for a particular racial minority to get ahead, in a small way. Intent is meaningless to me, in the face of this.
And yes, this applies to the wage, hiring, and promotion gaps by gender too. That people are probably not intentionally being misogynist does not mean they aren’t substantively being so. It’s just not important, since this isn’t really the blame center.
@ Rutee
I don’t think it’s about intent though, it’s not INTENTIONAL discrimination or any other form of discrimination. Either men earn more than women, women earn more than men or they both earn the same. Whatever circumstances dictate this, one of these must be true. I think that it’s far too complex a set of variables to simply focus on gender and say that this is the reason “women” are paid less than “men”. To even begin to try and classify a man as one of the “men” and a woman as one of the “women” would be utterly ridiculous.
Yes, if you only ever had individuals on hand, that would be an absurd proposition. You would have to study large populations, preferably controlling by field, and most ideally, by experience….
Good God, man, be less solipsistic. It sounds too simple, except it’s what you’re left with when, even after you control for other factors, you’re left with a gap between the genders. Even if the only evidence we had was a clear wage gap within professions, given that the hiring, promotion, and FT/PT gaps are substantiated on their own grounds, can you really pretend that it’s groundless to say that the gap in wages, by gender might be due to discrimination?
@ Rutee
The gap between the genders is not in doubt, it’s the reasoning behind this gap. And the reasoning behind this gap is far, far more complex than simply saying that women are being discriminated against. I’m not even saying that the discrimination doesn’t exist, I’m saying, that from a scientific perspective, it’s wholly impossible to prove that it is does exist, and if it did, that it would be the main cause for the effect.
“except it’s what you’re left with when, even after you control for other factors, you’re left with a gap between the genders”
Why do you assume that the gender of the subjects is the thread that binds them together? Why not their race or religion etc etc etc?
What does intent matter? It’s completly irrelevant to the question.
Usually when you detect a strong statistical correlation between gender and a low wage and you’ve corrected for other factors, you tend to think gender might have something to do with it…
WAIT!!! I had my own personal internet stalker! Now he’s going his own way. And I never got to meet him in person. How can I go on now?
I’ll be all alone without someone cross referencing my manboobz/pandagon/pharyngula/dailykos/myspace/livejournal/facebook accounts to trace me down through my crazy racist nephew!
I haz a sad. 🙁
@ BlackBloc
You are right, intent doesn’t matter, as I said…
“it’s not INTENTIONAL discrimination or any other form of discrimination.”
Intentional or unintentional it’s, in my view, not discrimination either way.
Are you stupid? Science isn’t about proving things true. It’s about failing to disprove something repeatedly. You don’t disprove a hypothesis with empty conjecture; you disprove it with studies. As it happens, for race that’s been attempted; women still do worse. For class that’s been attempted; women still do worse. Ad nauseum. If within these categories women do worse, and women do worse in the general population, and if in other similar fields we *can* control specifically for gender and have found it to have a strong factor, than the most concise explanation that fits the evidence is that there is also discrimination on gender grounds themselves in pay, absent data which demonstrates this to not be the case.
Not sure if trolling or just stupid. You’re asking why I’m looking at gender as the factor when, after controlling for experience, hours worked, and profession, there’s a gap in gender? Because that is itself strong evidence that *GENDER IS A STRONG FACTOR* you nitwit. There’s evidence that race is a factor as well, but women within a minority almost always, if not always, do worse than men within that minority.
@ BlackBloc
“Usually when you detect a strong statistical correlation between gender and a low wage and you’ve corrected for other factors, you tend to think gender might have something to do with it…”
And do these studies mentioned provide and detail a breakdown of race and religion for each gender? Or are these studies conducted with the intention of discovering if discrimination exists based solely on gender?
Qwert, you’re playing the “Invent a confound” game. That’s not how it works. Just because you can speculate on a confound doesn’t demonstrate the confound is meaningful. You do’nt actually understand how science works if you think the name of the game is to prove something true. Confirmation ist rivial; failure to disconfirm after repeated attempts is substantially more interesting.
@ Rutee
You are confusing cause and effect. The effect being that women earn less than men, the cause being that women are being discriminated against based on their gender. The effect can be demonstrably proven, the cause cannot. That is my point. It is useless even to point at studies, there are no studies that factor in all of the significant variables. It can’t be proven one way or the other.
Incidentally, ways to substantiate your confound may have been a factor:
Checking demographic data to show that, more or less, there are substantially fewer white women than there are white men (And conversely that there are more non-white women, proportionally, than there are non-white men, and that this is true to a statistically significant degree).
Checking to make sure religion has a strong economic effect to begin with, that there is substantial discrimination based *solely on religion* (Good luck with that, because it’s mostly against ethnic minorities; white people who practice are just weird, in general), then demonstrate that again, religions that make less money have substantially more of the total population of women. Etc.
Absent data like this, there’s no reason to take your confound as remotely accurate until you demonstrate its accuracy yourself with a specific study
Petulant Qwert is Petulant. “If I say the confound matters, it does, and I don’t have to demonstrate my case”. You don’t understand how science works if you think science proves things true. It fails to prove them false; the difference is *CRITICAL*.
I don’t get to say “Climate Change studies are on hold and useless; their predictive power is nil, until they prove Cheetos aren’t the real source of AGW” unless I have a serious evidence that Cheetos are themselves a factor in AGW. There’s no reason to think that religion is a factor at all, and there’s precious little reason to think that *race* can account for the gender gap. You find the confound, you substantiate it, I’ll put the hypothesis on hold. Til then, you’re just a puling child who refuses to cede that you’re wrong.
@ Rutee
Please, enough with the name calling, it isn’t called for.
I can’t prove that the wage gap is not based on discrimination any more than you can prove that it is, and that’s my point. It can’t be proven to be the case. I don’t think that the wage gap has more or less to do with race or religion, my point is that it can be no more proven these things are more or less a factor than gender is. There’s nothing petulant about that.
@ Rutee
Anyway, it’s been nice talking to you.
’till the next time.
Just took a bunch of comments out of moderation; scroll up to read them.
MRAL, I’m taking you off moderation.
Foolish solipsism deserves mockery.
Your point is that you’re trying to claim science works in ways it doesn’t. We have a mechanism, we have data supporting it, we have nothing disconfirming it, it dovetails with findings in other, similar problems that *can* have those things controlled for, and it the explanatory mechanism can account for all the data. Absent evidence disconfirming it, there is actually no reason to think the gap isn’t discrimination by gender.
Again, Cheetos and AGW. If science had to go on hold until it eliminated every potential confound any idiot could dream up, it’d never get done. But only a confound with potential evidential support is a serious problem absent a study that specifically demonstrates the confound was a factor. I told you how to go about establishing that confound to the degree that I feel it would put the hypothesis on hold. Your response was to clam up and continue to say “Well I can’t DISPROVE it.” Yeah, I know you can’t prove your point; that’s why I extended the challenge to substantiate your claim. If you actually had evidence that it wasn’t the case, you’d have offered it. But you don’t, and we do have evidence substantiating mine. If you can’t even establish your confound is meaningful, then your moronic speculation is pointless.
Also, not particularly going to rush to make sure we defend and protect White People. The majority isn’t hated, dude. This is like pretending “White people can’t dance” is as harmful as “black people are criminals”.
But not by sociological textbooks! And when discussing societal effects, sociologists are the group who’s opinions I care about most.
Well, you’re kind of stuck because unfortunately for you, it’s abundantly clear that you’re trying to claim that misogyny and misandry are actually equivalent problems that cause equivalent harm when they occur. You’re not going to get away with that here, to say the least.
Minor clarification:
I was using his definitions for misogyny and misandry. Basically, he wants us to treat sexism against men and women as equal problems, when one actually disadvantages the majority of its class, and the other doesn’t. In a word, no. It’s idiotic to treat them as actually equal problems. Problem sto both fix, sure, but I gotta be honest, I can’t see sexism against men ever needing the same priority (What with the majority quickly moving to salve perceived injustice against men).
P.S. “I’m not one of *those* Libertarians!” sounds a whole fucking lot like “I’m not one of *those* Christians!” from where I’m sitting.
Actually, I think she’s more saying “he’s not a Libertarian”, the way we do when ppl regard Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann or others as a “feminist”. xD She’s even slamming him down, not ignoring him and arguing with us that NALALT.
This is something I’ve always found hilarious about NWO xD What about him says anti-statist anyways? He says the word “state” a lot but it means as much as “Jew” means to racists… after all he thinks feminists run the state too. xD He seems to actually LOVE the state a lot (as I’ve pointed out in the past). He wants them to solve ALL his problems, he’s anti-abortion, anti-queer people, anti-transition, etc… anti-other-people’s-lives-and-choices basically. Doesn’t sound like he wants a state-less society. I’ve tried to probe him more about how this works but he dodges like woah xD I don’t think even he understands what he believes.
Oh and NWO…. me, Ozy and Summer Snow, have a kwestchun for you! 😀
Hengist: Er, not really. More like “this is pointless and not worth wasting time on.” If you want to treat it as a victory, feel free. I’m sure those guys who spend their days arguing about how Star Wars ships could totally kick Star Trek’s ass also feel like they “won” when a normal person walks away.
Ooooh. I’m hurt. You compared me to a Science fiction fan and said I wasn’t normal.
I’m not “claiming a victory”. I’m saying you picked a fight, and when you weren’t winning you said, “hey, I quit,” while saying it was over a point of intellectual dispute, and pretending that we aren’t willing to argue in good faith.