In who is worse off in wage disparities, it depends on who controls the message

This past Friday another batch of statistics was released in which yet again we are battered with the women victimization syndrome. I didn’t bother reading the story that appeared on the front page of Saturday’s Seattle Times concerning the gender wage gap, since it isn’t supposed to change, ever.  Here we have myths “debunking” other “myths,” and no one is much interested in the reality on the ground.

For example, you can’t simply compare age groups and draw a “conclusion” from that. One “study” from the radical women’s advocacy group American Association of University Women—perpetrator of a host of outrageously fraudulent “studies” like the one-in-three college women are raped—“debunks” the claim that overall wage differences are in large part due to lower-wage service occupations that are top-heavy with female employees. But reality tells us that if a retail store employs 100 low-wage workers of whom 90 percent are women, and an engineering firm in which 9 of 10 high-wage employees are men, and you only use the average wage by gender without taking into consideration the number employed within those occupations, of course the wage of the men counted is going to be higher; that doesn’t mean, however, that there is wage inequality here—unless, of course, you think that everyone should be paid the same wage. However, I suspect that even female engineers expect to make more money than a store clerk—male or female.

Women’s advocates like to say that they are “discriminated” against in the job market, but that is another fallacy. In many job descriptions, women—especially white women—are the “preferred” hire, and not just in office environments. I’ve told this story before, but I’ll repeat it: I was working for a temp agency in Sacramento when I was sent to a firm involved in putting together mailers, nothing too difficult. But at the end of the day, the supervisor gathered us together and proceeded to count out certain people, and told the rest of us we would not be needed henceforth. This wasn’t a “random” drawing or based on merit; it was every white female who was picked out. The rest of—males and minority females—were, to put it bluntly, the victims of blatant discrimination. I recall angrily telling the supervisor that the rest of us needed the work too; my audacity seemed to shock the rest of my fellow unemployed.

Another reality is that white female advocates in and out of the media control how this issue is presented. They call themselves “victims,” but this really about power and personal cupidity. Since they are so self-serving, naturally they are blinded to the role race plays in this. A few years ago in response to an email, a black female journalist employed by one of the local newspapers confessed to me that she recalled attending a women’s conference in which she and the only other black woman present in a sea of white females were asked if they considered “sexism” a greater detriment on their lives than racism; considering the circumstances, it was an easy call to make. She noted the “shock” in the room when she stated that racism was the greater factor.

White female advocates simply refuse to recognize that their “whiteness” is more important than their gender in this country. There is no doubt that they use minority women so that they can avoid the issue of how racism helps themselves. I’m sure those white women at that conference probably think that if anyone should be “replaced” in a job by a minority it should be a male, not one of their number; if that was the case, I’m certain that at least privately—or at the ballot box, as was the case in the anti-affirmative action I-200, or in Supreme Court cases in which a white female student was the “victim”—they’d think about their racial “privilege” a bit more.

What makes this mendacity all the more difficult to take is the fact that the wage gap between races is far more significant—especially considering the fact that a close look at workforce statistics indicate that as much as 40 percent of all black males are not employed—either unemployed, “dropped out,” or in jail. They have certainly been hurt in many job sectors by the influx of women in the job market, especially white women whose unemployment rates are only a quarter that of black males.

In fact, despite the high percentage of black male athletes making millions of dollars, this only makes the overall wage picture even more bleak for the rest. Women make 77 percent of what men make overall. But since black and Hispanic women make even less than that, obviously there is a little funny business going on in the “interpretation” of the statistics. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, not the invented stats from the advocates, black males make just 74.5 percent of what white men make—not much of an improvement over the 69 percent in 1970. Hispanic men make even less—65.9 percent, compared to 58.7 percent in 1970.

White women, however, have improved dramatically—from 59 percent in 1970 to over 80 percent now. Black and Hispanic women are obviously worse off compared to white males—69 and 60 percent respectively; however, their levels of pay have also jumped far more radically than their male counterparts, to the point where minority male and female wages are quite close. It also should be pointed out again that white females have far lower unemployment rates than minority women, and their total numbers in the workforce have an out-of-proportion impact on the average “gender” wage.

Why is so much more attention put on gender wage gaps than the far more significant gaps between racial groups?  As I mentioned before, it is about who controls the information and how it is delivered. Obviously, white females have far more power in this regard than they pretend.