TyphonBlue Monday: “All ‘Ending Violence Against Women’ initiatives assume that the appropriate targets for violence are men.”

Lemme guess… It just so happens that Latina and African American women choose even worse-paying jobs than white women do, and the fact that they get paid 58 and 70 cents per dollar respectively is due to the choices they make.

And yay, I get to throw out this site again! Some excerpts:

Higher levels of education increase women’s earnings, just as they do for men. However, there is no evidence that the gender gap in wages closes at higher levels of education. If anything, the reverse is true: at the very highest levels of education, the gap is at its largest…

Some people think that if women move into male-dominated occupations in larger numbers, the wage gap will close. However, there appears to be a gender-related wage gap in virtually every occupational category.

Women are more likely than men to work part-time. However, most gender wage comparisons leave out part-time workers and focus only on full-time, year-round workers. A close look at the earnings of women and men who work 40 hours or more per week reveals that the wage gap may actually widen as the number of hours worked increases.

Whee!

@Kirby

One thing I notice with a lot of Repubs and Libertarians is that they operate like we live on a planet where discrimination doesn’t exist. Racism, sexism, homophobia…it’s all just one big lie! No coincidence that most of them tend to be white, hetero male or even white, hetero, female. Also yay for another site! *bookmarks*

Two quotes from another article debunking the myth that it’s all due to choice http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/LOP/ResearchPublications/2010-30-e.htm#a9

The workforce continues to be largely segregated into “male” jobs and “female” jobs. For example, men have higher representation rates in manufacturing as well as in construction, transportation, wholesale and trade. Women are predominantly concentrated in retail services, education and health industries and are more likely to work in small firms (fewer than 20 employees).15 Fifty-six percent of women work in two occupational categories: sales and service, and business, finance and administrative.16

According to data from the 2006 Census, “women between the ages of 25 and 54 make up the overwhelming majority of those in the 20 lowest-paid occupations. In 13 of the 20, they account for more than two-thirds of the workers while men are the majority in only three of them.”17 On the other hand, men dominate the 20 highest paid occupations in Canada.

Demographic characteristics include marital status and the presence of children. There continue to be expectations based on gender arising from these demographic characteristics. For example, women continue to take on a larger portion of unpaid household work than men. Statistics Canada conducts a time use survey to measure how Canadians spend their time. The latest data from this survey indicate that, while women and men work the same number of hours for pay each day, women spend almost two hours more per day on unpaid work.9 While this gap is slowly closing as men take on a larger share of unpaid household work, studies have demonstrated that women are more likely than men to make labour force choices that allow them to balance their caregiving responsibilities. Time use surveys indicate:

Although part-time work may be a personal choice and encourage the involvement of women in the workplace, the gap between women and men underlines the fact that they do not use their time in the same way and that the task of looking after dependent family members is largely borne by women.10

Women are much more likely than men to balance their home and work lives by working part-time. In any given month in 2009, there were twice as many women working part-time as men. When asked why they work part-time, men and women provide very different answers. Most significantly, 19% of women work part-time to provide care for children or to take care of other personal or family responsibilities, compared with 2% of men.11

Recent studies show that the more children a woman has, the lower her hourly pay. For men, the opposite tendency applies. Men with children have higher hourly pay than men without children. The wage gap is small or non-existent for never-married men and women.12

So mothers are punished economically for having children while fathers don’t, and they do more unpaid housework, and this is all a “myth”? Give me a break.

Yeah of course.thats why at all the international women’s day events I n have worked at or heard about through work -domestic violence against women and men has been addressed and that is why men are also involved in initiatives to prevent domestic violence.

@Crumb

*sighs* it’s true. I don’t even know why I hold a tiny shred of hope that topics like that can be discussed critically on boobtube.

Funny you should say that, Cassandra, because I actually saw people arguing about Ron Paul in the comments thread of a fucking Talking Heads video a couple of months back. *sigh*