Of course, this means I'll never be elected to public office....

[demiurgent]

I am not, I have it on good authority from ex-girlfriends, a woman. However, it is International Women's Day. A friend of mine quoted this in their (locked) LJ today, and I'm passing it on because it doesn't matter that I'm not a woman, when it comes to saying important things:

Because women's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and...for lots of other reasons we are part of the women's liberation movement.

-- Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, 14 September 1987

And if you're a man, wondering why we don't get an International Men's Day? Well, I don't have international figures, but according to the U.S. Department of Labor, women nationally (in my nation, anyhow) make a median of 77% of what men do for comparable work. That twenty-three cents for every dollar we earn should buy a Hell of a lot more than one day a year, don't you think?

A Hell of a lot more.

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Well, not to defend the shrub, but when it comes to gender statistics, one has to be very careful to avoid confounding variables and indirect effects. Eric quoted "median pay for equivalent work," which is probably as good as we can get, since it screens out the effect of the top 1% and the seniority effect (although, really, the seniority effect shouldn't be as bad as it is, since it's been a generation or so since women started seriously entering the workforce during peacetime).

Here's a few other confounding variables:

- Maternity leave: even when this is paid leave (and if it isn't, there's a bite in the paycheck right there), it's time when you're not working and therefore not doing the things that earn raises. There's a difference between "not penalizing" and "not affecting", after all.

- Equivalent work: This can be really hard to define. And if you include things like "CEO jobs" in the measure, then that pesky top 1% comes into effect if you look at medians for each type of job and then find the mean of the medians.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Maternity leave: even when this is paid leave (and if it isn't, there's a bite in the paycheck right there), it's time when you're not working and therefore not doing the things that earn raises. There's a difference between "not penalizing" and "not affecting", after all.

Typically, this is unpaid. The Family Leave Act guarantees up to 12 weeks *un*paid leave.

Equivalent work: This can be really hard to define. And if you include things like "CEO jobs" in the measure, then that pesky top 1% comes into effect if you look at medians for each type of job and then find the mean of the medians.

Which brings us to the Glass Ceiling portion of our discussion....