You Go, Woman!

Sometimes the female feminists really impress me with what they say about how ingrained we are in sexism as a society. At the wonderful Pandagon blog, Amanda Marcotte writes:

In the world of anti-feminist literature that denies that sexism exists, few tropes are more irritating then the people who try to disprove sexism causes the pay gap between men and women by referring instead to “other” causes for the pay gap that are caused by….sexism. Now I’m not talking about honest disagreement about which flavor of sexism is most responsible and how to attack that, but the people who are trying to wave their hands and pretend that it’s not a problem that women make so much less than men on average. (Even though the ramifications are more far-reaching than that basic injustice, ranging from the fact that women have less bargaining power, less retirement money and less ability to walk out of abusive marriages, even though they are far more likely to be abused.) The latest article that attempts to distract from the sexism underlying the pay gap by pointing to the sexism that causes it is by Steve Chapman, writing for Reason. Lest you think I’m kidding that he’s going to deny outright that sexism causes the sexism that causes the pay gap, here’s his thesis:

And the effort got new fuel from a report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation, which says women are paid less starting with their first jobs out of college, and that the deficit only grows with time. Pay discrimination, says AAUW, is still “a serious problem for women in the work force.”

In reality, that’s not clear at all. What we know from an array of evidence, including this report, is that most if not all of the discrepancy can be traced to factors other than sexism.

Emphasis mine, because I’m not sure that the factors he lists are “other than sexism” at all.

I couldn't have said it better if I said it myself. Any claim that there is no pay gap is contradicted by this chart I found online which shows it only getting worse:
It's time for us new progressives to have some new ideas about how to address the gender wage gap. There seem to be two basic policy options:

• Pay Men Less
• Pay Women More

Some men, it should go without saying, are actually paid too little too. I'm thinking of the schoolteachers in public schools where there's not as much of a sex pay gap because of the democratic pressure in the government that doesn't exist in the marketplace. (The free market, after all, is a jungle where instead of invisible helping hands what we really have is glass ceilings -- invisible, yes, but not in a helping-hand way.)

Also, a lot of people get paid not enough, which is why minimum wage is so important to raise their wages. So maybe lowering wages for men is a bad idea, though a tax on rich men espeically might help to pay public women employees more (and men too, if they deserve it!)

So I think the better policy option is to pay women more, not pay men less. Maybe what we need is the government to handle more of the economy, like it does with public schools, that way it can treat men and women equally the way they were meant to be treated.

Another option is to make a law to make corporations not pay men and women differently. That way, we could once again save capitalism from itself, like the first Progressive Era did and also like FDR's New Deal.

These are serious questions and need require serious thinking. The first step though is to admit there's a sexist problem, but the corporate media probably won't let this story come out because they are also run by men (and I bet they're run by men who get paid more than women would for doing just as good (or bad) of a job, depending on your perspective.)