Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Why bother employing men at all?

and also studies prove that women are less pushy when it comes to payrises, and I agree about what you say

It's also a matter of hiring practices (men are more likely to get hired for certain jobs than women)
Maybe... I mean we have sex equality laws and so the disparity in hiring has been attacked (granted: not perfectly, but the situation is markedly better today than it was even 20 years ago. Despite that there is still this difference in pay across the spectrum. The argument is about pay disparity, not employment rights. That one has already been won.

promotion prospects (with men being more likely to get promoted than women) and other similar factors. Women are more likley to end up looking after kids than men, too, which cuts their earning power dramatically.

If a woman thought she was being paid less than a man to do her job, just give her her lawsuit settlement now and she can retire. Quite right. I concur.... but women do take more time off work for childbearing. So even where they are doing the "same" job as men the men often have more seniority.

Apparently the biggest difference in income is between married women and everyone else. Women who never married have long held their own economically. So why is this? Discrimination? No. Women often avoid taking jobs demanding long hours and/or extensive travel, as these make personal childcare all but impossible.

That usually means interruptions in careers or different choices of careers beforehand, because some occupations weather interruptions better than others. Sheer dogmatic repetition has pounded into our minds the notion that all groups have similar capabilities, when in fact they do not and nor do they necessarily even have the same interest in developing such capabilities. One can argue that potential is the same, but developed capabilities depend on a lot more including interest and circumstances.

Why care about the real reasons if it means you can sue and put the burden of proof on your employer? Once a lawsuit is under way, the pressure is on the accused employer to settle, rather than risk bad publicity that could hurt profits. And, once they settle, that is taken as proof of guilt, no matter what anybody says.

The point I am making is that extrapolating from those specific injustices to a wider reliance on bare statistics comparing rates of pay and then using that to set up and Equal Pay Commission is brainless.

In many cases ladies CHOOSE the lower paid options for other reasons, and that is why we don't have an all-lady workforce as suggested in my first post.