House of Eratosthenes

Imagine going to McDonald’s and hearing that, because you’re a white male, you pay full price for a Big Mac. Meanwhile, the girl behind you pays three-quarters of the total amount for the same thing.

NOW (National Organization for Women) @ SDSU brought that reality to San Diego State yesterday at the Aztec Center by holding a pay equity bake sale. The prices for cookies reflected the difference of pay between genders and races.

“It’s just to raise awareness,” NOW @ SDSU Co-President Amanda Whitehead said. “A lot of people don’t realize that white women make 75 percent of every dollar a white man makes or Hispanic women make 50 percent. It’s pretty ridiculous. When they actually have to buy the cookies, it puts it into perspective.”

White men, of whom NOW @ SDSU says make the most money of any demographic, were charged a dollar for the same cookie a Hispanic woman would pay 50 cents for. The group broke down the prices for white, Hispanic, black and Asian men and women, using pay scale statistics from NOW and www.payequity.org.

“It’s a more unique way of showing the differences without just showing the statistics all the time,” NOW @ SDSU Co-President Ashley Frazier said.

Jeanne Sahad of CNN Money, on why the statistic measurements and the ensuing crankiness don’t really work with reality:

Unequal doesn’t always mean unfair. Much depends on the reasons for disparity. And, Hartmann notes, “parsing out (the reasons for the gap) is difficult to do.”

Factors may include: more women choose lower-paying professions than men; they move in and out of the workforce more frequently; and they work fewer paid hours on average.

Why that’s the case may have to do in part with the fact that women are still society’s primary caregivers, that some higher-paying professions require either too much time away from home or are still less hospitable to women than they should be.
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But maybe there can never be absolute parity because often there are many non-discriminatory variables that cause a differential in pay. What determines someone’s pay isn’t just a title and job description, but also performance, tenure and market forces — e.g., what it takes to get a desirable job candidate to accept a position.

And then there are situations in which a company may do well by a female employee but still be vulnerable to charges of discrimination and reverse discrimination.

In an article, Warren Farrell, author of “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — and What Women Can Do About It,” tells of a company that promoted good women employees faster than men. But consequently the women moving into the higher positions often were paid less than men in the same position because the men had greater tenure at the company.

Bill Maher’s comments on women feeling abused and mistreated by our society…take what you like, leave the rest.

Maher is so sad. His central thesis is not only, as they say, “politically incorrect” but it makes good sense as well. He simply inspects what we’ve been culturally discouraged from inspecting, and he finds, lo and behold, truth. Women are upset at not being treated fairly, they make noise, after a third of a century our society values everything according to the female mindset — women still think they’re being treated unfairly. It’s a great point. But being a whack-a-doodle, he has to tun over some more rocks until he can find something to blame on George W. Bush. It’s like a rule with him. By the time he’s six minutes in, he’s envisioning Clinton’s impeachment trial and the 2000 election as the watershed events — the eye of this hurricane, if you will.

I suppose people could say I’m selectively choosing when to agree with Maher and when not to, based on whether his commentary comports with my prejudices. There would be a kernel of truth in that, but also a kernel of insanity; the first step on the way to it, in fact. Remember — subjective and objective. Maher’s slippage from “political incorrectness for sake of truth,” into “political incorrectness for sake of lunacy,” does not rest on my opinion.

It is measurable.

Bill Clinton stayed in office. Because of the female vote. And mostly because of that, the feminist movement on January 20, 2001, was a shadow of it’s former self on January 20, 1993. And furthermore…struggle as I might to recall year-2000 campaign commercials for George Bush following the theme he’s described, I’m coming up empty. I don’t think they occurred. These are historical events open to no interpretation at all, or very little. And they gut the last two minutes of Maher’s rant like a big sharp Gerber knife gutting a fish.

Other than that, great rant.

The most successful lie arrives bundled in with a kernel of truth. That’s what makes ungrateful women so dangerous and toxic in our society. We do discriminate against women. Everybody does. It’s unavoidable — they aren’t men.

And the truth is, nobody wants it to stop. Women who say they want discrimination to stop, only want to bring an end to discrimination that doesn’t benefit women. All the other stuff, they want to keep in place forever.

And now that the Clinton impeachment thing is behind us, society at large simply isn’t willing to tolerate that. The pay “discrimination” is actually a perfect example of this. It is linked to the role women still enjoy in our society, as primary caregiver of our children. Once it’s recognized that the best way to equalize the pay scales across the gender barrier, is to remove women from that cultural role, to tear down that status symbol — will that be a popular effort? Nobody in their right mind is going to think so.

So what we really have going on here, is an effort to make sure women are more important than men in the office, in the sitcom, and in the real-life home. That’s wildly unrealistic, but on top of that if it starts to succeed, a lot of ladies are going to feel even more overworked than they do right now.

And then you’ll see even more stuff like this:

Last year, a team of researchers added a novel twist to something known as a time-use survey. Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, the researchers also asked how people felt during each activity. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed?

Not surprisingly, men and women often gave similar answers about what they liked to do (hanging out with friends) and didn’t like (paying bills). But there are also a number of activities that produce very different reactions from the two sexes, and one of these activities stands out: Men apparently enjoy being with their parents, while women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.

Alan Krueger – a Princeton economist working with four psychologists on the time-use research team – figures that there is a simple explanation for the difference. For a woman, time with her parents often resembles work, whether it’s helping them pay bills or plan a family gathering. “For men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad,” said Krueger, who, when not crunching data, happens to enjoy watching the New York Giants with his father. This intriguing – if unsettling – finding is part of a larger story: there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.

Are women being victimized? Hell yes they are. Their interests are being represented to society-at-large, by a small coterie of loud angry self-appointed spokespersons, people who can’t ever be made happy.

Thing I Know #52. When angry people make demands, the ensuing fulfillment never seems to bring a stop to their anger.

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Men Pay MoreSaturday, November 10th, 2007

Men Pay More
Saturday, November 10th, 2007