“Fixing” gender pay gap short-term only creates greater injustice

I’ve told this story before, but it is worth repeating. I lived in California for a few years, and when first arrived I needed to make some money. The quickest available route seemed to be signing up with a temp agency. I was soon off to my first assignment at some business that contracted to put together promotional material for some product. When I arrived there were about two dozen other people for the same purpose. There wasn’t much to the job, just taking one piece of paper or brochure from one stack and placing it in order inside a folder.  I figured that the job would last a week or two, long enough to make enough to keep from starving. At the end of the day, the supervisor called us all together, and started counting heads. I sensed something foul; he was only counting the white females present, and when he had counted the last one, he announced that there wasn’t enough work for the rest of us, and so we were not to come back the next day. 

I don’t know if I was the only one who noticed that something was “amiss,” but I was the only one who confronted the supervisor about the selection “process” while the rest of us were sitting in his office waiting for him to sign our time cards. I told him that the rest of us needed work to; I was also thinking that he had just selected his “harem,” but did not say so out loud. A couple people looked at me as if I had just committed a breach of temp worker etiquette; one or two others’ mouths were agape out of apparent “shock.” I couldn’t believe people could be so cowed as to fear to speak up for themselves in the face of plainly discriminatory treatment. The supervisor just looked at me with a shit-eating grin. I learned a lesson there; the only temp jobs I would agree to do were those involving industrial labor, the kind that required a different set of “qualifications.”

I bring this up again because it highlights a certain reality concerning employment in our society, and that trying to determine what is “just” and “unjust” is often a matter of one’s perspective. From this episode we can conjecture several things. For one thing, in certain settings white women benefit from preferential treatment, which in part explains why as a demographic they have by far the lowest unemployment rates.

Another conjecture is that because the job was in the lower wage bracket, its effect on average wages would be negative if applied to gender; if just one of the males who was not retained obtained a higher wage position and everyone else remained unemployed, the effect of that one male would be somewhat skewed positively, but only because the unemployed persons were not counted in a “wage equality” report.

This is just one example of how the much hyped income gap between men and women—women earn 77 percent of what men do—doesn’t tell the complete story. Women have some “catching up” to do in terms of seniority now that they’ve entered the work force in greater numbers in the last few decades, but that influx of workers in the once one-breadwinner social order means that middle and lower-class income has been “split” to accommodate more workers for less “work.” When I see mostly white “yuppies” going out for a noon-time jog to work off the office fat, I can see where some of that pay fund shouldn’t be spent on.

Women are certainly over-represented in many lower-wage positions, particularly service, clerical and retail jobs. It’s not that that they are capable of doing such work, but they are the beneficiaries of certain “positive” stereotypes. It should also be obvious that the wider the net, the more likely the jobs that women displace men (as well as minorities) to the greater extent are on the bottom half of the wage scale, and this effects the income gap negatively. On the other hand, the majority of CEOs are men, thus further skewing the statistics. Other “jobs” that men can’t help but impact “negatively” on wage equality is professional sports. There are no female football  or baseball players making $20 million a year salaries; in the professional basketball, a male player may also “earn” a $20 million salary, but for female players, $500,000 in total team salary is typical. It’s a matter of the marketplace; to try to change it to make it more “fair” cannot be taken as anything other than one of incredulity.

One study suggests that if all factors are equal, women today make 95 percent of what men make; while not completely negligible, it does suggest that once there is a complete shift in how the demographics of the work force is structured, the politics of the issue will be revealed, and we can then do the more pertinent study on the matter of how race is a more determining factor in wage inequality. 

Something tells me, however, that the income disparity will never be “fixed” unless women in many occupations are vastly overpaid, or men vastly underpaid—particularly if (white) women continue to displace men in the workplace at current rate. Why? Because if women displace men at the lower-end of income scale, then that leaves the men who are left making a higher average level pay—but not necessarily “better-off” as a whole. Another factor  is that today, women are overwhelming represented in such job classifications as public relations and fundraising managers, human resources managers, teachers and education administrators, medical and health services managers, social and community services, and of course, cashiers. Ditto in sales, office  and administrative support.

But in engineering and the “hard” sciences the presence of women is so small it is virtually unmeasurable as a percentage. In order to force wage “equality,” we are told that one must rank jobs in terms of “comparable.” But to draw “comparisons” between jobs and what their “worth” in compensation has little relation to reality, and in fact requires that one inject concepts like “injustice” and “unfairness” into the equation.

But this is an age where gender advocates demand  instant gratification, or are draconian in their demands for “justice.” What if employers were given, say, two years to create an “equal” pay scenario? What would that require? Arbitrarily raise the pay of women in low and mid-level jobs, regardless of years in service and relative responsibilities? Or raise their pay, and lower that of male employees, regardless of seniority and relative responsibilities? Fire or lay-off enough men (particularly those in the in the higher wage categories), to bring down their average wage, or hire women in their place, even at the cost of unforeseen consequences? 

I actually experienced a work environment where someone tried to shoe-horn an “equal” work environment. Most people envision a warehouse as a male-dominated environment, and for good reason. But I once worked in a sports apparel warehouse that had a female with the made-up title of  “chief operating officer,” even though the company never employed as many as 50 people at any time. The COO and the warehouse manager at the time I was hired were always at odds on how to run the warehouse and who to hire. The warehouse manager was from North Carolina, but he was a decent, unprejudiced man who had an appreciation for people who actually worked, regardless of race or ethnicity. The COO, however, was someone who had a personal agenda. I know she clashed with manager over me because she didn’t believe that someone of my “ethnicity”—despite my having a college degree which she didn’t have—had the capacity to work the shipping desk, and she proved this belief every year I was there by making sure I was one of the lowest paid employees in the warehouse despite have greater responsibility than a picker. 

But that was nothing compared to what happened to other people in her effort to enforce gender “equality.” When we needed temp help during the busy season to load and off-load 60-foot shipping containers—which during the summer were like blast furnaces in a steel mill—the COO made the calls to temp agencies, and most of the people who showed were women who were not physically or temperamentally suited for spending eight hours a day in the containers off-loading 1,000 50-pound boxes or loading per hour. Thus the full-time male employers—all with their own responsibilities and generally older—were pulled off their jobs in order to exhaust themselves in the containers working as quickly as possible so not to fall behind in their own work. This often required us to work an hour or more of overtime, which most of us welcomed and the manager knew would anger the COO who micromanaged every dime spent in the warehouse.

Nevertheless there was much grumbling about not having more male temps brought in to do the work, and if there was, in was some high school kid who was a friend, son or nephew of someone “upstairs”—who often “worked” like he was. The effect of this “equality” was the following: In the last two years I worked there, two male employees suffered strokes, one of whom went blind in one eye and the other was forced to “retire” for “safety” reasons. Another had a heart attack, and I never saw him again. Still another developed what appeared to be Parkinson’s Disease, and the  rapidity of its  onslaught seemed to me to be highly suspicious. I recall more than once being forced to stop and take a “breather”; my head seemed in a daze, and although I was barely breathing, my pulse was running so fast that the separate beats almost seemed to flat line. Fortunately for me, by that time the manager had been forced to “quit” and the COO hired a new “manager” who was nothing more than an overpaid façade, and I actually felt relieved when myself and a few other long-time employees were laid-off permanently.