Friday, April 16, 2010

The Wage Gap

Can an IT professional of the female persuasion please field this one?



With such intellectual dishonesty, the people at Newsweak wonder why their subscriptions are tanking.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Last I checked single women in IT make more than men do, not less.

Anonymous said...

There are women in the IT field?

Martian Bachelor said...

Capitalist is gender neutral.
Inventor is gender neutral.
President is gender neutral.
Billionaire is gender neutral.

Has-Been-But-Still-Wannabee Princess is *not*!

Anonymous said...

Oh my god. The meme that JUST. WILL. NOT. DIE. the richly deserved death it should get.

It's like wind and solar power, no matter how many times power engineers and economists demonstrate what a disaster it is, it seems to go on zombie-like.

Now cap-n-trade fraud is coming to the senate.

Stop the stupidity. Please.

Chemist said...

Higher GPA in college but lower pay. OK I'll bite. Are we talking about a 4.0 GPA in Women's Studies/Art History vs a 3.0 in Mechanical Engineering?

Captain Capitalism said...

Chemist, you hit it on the head.

1 out of every 5 engineering students is female.

A 4.0 GPA in "sociology" is the equivalent of a 1.2 in nuclear physics.

I tired of the intellectual dishonesty.

ijuhtfws said...

Chemist and Martian nailed it.

I'm tired of liberal arts and child development majors complaining about their lower pay. Take the hard stuff in school and then once you get the job try showing up for work everyday instead of taking a bunch of "mental health days".

Great blog by the way Captain. I salute you!

PeppermintPanda said...

I’m sorry Captain, I believe you’re making the same mistake that the feminists are making in assuming that the value of an education has anything to do with how difficult it is to achieve; and there realistically is no value in comparing GPA to income in any way.

In the private sector the factors that determine how well someone is paid are the value of the skills they provide (generally measured by the revenue they produce or the costs they prevent), how common their skill-set is, and how high of demand there is for this skill-set. While it might be dramatically more difficult to receive a social science degree than to become a plumber, and a women’s study major might have achieved far greater grades than a plumber in trade school, the demand for plumbers is growing, the number of people with the skill-set is shrinking, and a plumber’s work is far more valuable meaning that a plumber will earn far more than a women’s study graduate can.

While you’ll never see a discussion from an activist group, the real problem is that women continue to choose fields of study that have no real career path associated with them; and in many cases they’re still making decisions based off of the assumption that a man will come by and support them. If from the time a girl was 6 years old the idea that they couldn’t count on anyone except for themselves to produce the lifestyle they desire maybe we would have fewer English and Women’s studies majors.

pathfinderlight said...

Women make less than men, but for very different work. I was almost hired on by a company specifically because I was willing to travel and train to do paper work that the women the company had already employed would not travel for.

In general, Men are more willing to travel, work at night, work demanding physical jobs, etc. What women are complaining about now is that they want nice cushy indoor desk jobs shuffling paperwork from 9-5 AND to be paid as much as the men who work the graveyard shift.

Sylia said...

I am a woman.

I work in IT.

I actually do have an Engineering degree.

I don't make less than a similarly qualified male.

The so-called 'wage-gap' is a straw man argument. What these people are doing is trying to create absolute equivalences with no regard to differences in effort, hazard or stress level. I recall an exercise in government where they were working on wage parity, so they started doing things like comparing a typist (female dominated classification) with a draftsman (male dominated classification). Nevermind that the level of education and effort required to perform drafting tasks is much greater than that of reading someone's notes and transcribing them, they managed to get such bogus comparisions taken into account in this exercise.

I weep for my gender. If I didn't like being a woman so much, I swear some days I'd opt out.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Silvia (and am in the same "boat"). In Corporate America, your salary is largely determined by a chart on which they look up your education level and experience. Sex is no where to be found.

Mrs. Bob said...

I am a civil engineer. As far as I know I make the right amount of money for my experience not more or less than a comparable man.

However I have a SIL who got her degree in some piece of fluff and is upset that she can't find a job and has decided that grad school is the answer. Unfortunately she has "great grades" but can't get a high enough score on the GRE to get into grad school.

I feel so bad (sarcasm intended).