Post 59, part II -- The wage gap game? It's time to draw a line in the sand.

I felt it important to do a follow up to my previous post on the wage gap. While I did cover several important points in regards to the wage gap, I failed to do two crucial things: first, I did not make it clear that the contention with the wage gap from feminists is that its origins are found in sexist discrimination rather than market forces. That is to say that employers willfully pay women less simply for lacking a Y-chromosome. It seems to me a terrible reason to pay women less and has been pointed out that if such a state existed most if not all employers would hire only women simply to save on labour costs.

Second, and this point was only briefly eluded to previously, was how the wage gap is earned. I wish to briefly elaborate on this point.

The wage gap does exist in aggregate. When you break down all the way to hours worked within specializations of already specialized professions, you see the wage gap almost wholly disappear. But not fully. Is this the minor contribution of sexism which persists in our workplaces? No, and far from it. The data is still not perfect, specifically on the points of hours worked. Almost all reviews of data from workplaces consider full-time workers those who work 35 hours per work or more, but does not cap full-time wage review relative to working only 35 hours. To be clear, this means, as I have already states previous, that two people paid the same for the same job could earn different paycheques because one of them worked additional hours.

Those extra hours are one of the major sources of where the wage gap comes in, even when we look at pay differences within professions. Men overwhelmingly work more than women, which is the driver behind the pay differences. In a more macro sense, men take on far more dangerous jobs where they are significantly more compensated. A man felling trees in northern British Columbia is going to make significantly more money than a man working equal hours in an air conditioned call center 20 minutes from his home in Seattle, Washington. Yet, the lumberjack is more likely to die or be injured on the job than the call center clerk.

The fact that men work dangerous jobs far from home for more hours with greatly varied start and finish times is overlooked when we talk about the gender wage gap. When we take it into account, I am left with one conclusion: the wage gap does exist and men have earned it.

If women want to catch up to men, then they can fell trees, learn to do petroleum field work with welding, electrical, or plumbing. Women can go off and pull oil out of the ground or wade into filth to solve water purification problems. Working retail or support roles does not pay as well as field work in mining or long haul trucking. Comfort is sacrificed for pay and men are more willing to accept that. The only barrier to women in this free society is themselves. They can take on the challenges of of dangerous work, die more frequently on the job, and be further from home. Once the whining brigade of wage gap conspiracy theorists accept this, the debate will be over.

Men have earned the wage gap. It is up to women to look at the sacrifices which men take to earn their money and understand that to close or end the gap they must be willing to do the same. Until the time comes when a vast number of women are willing to give up comfort in the name of pay we will continue to see the gender wage gap. Earn your way to solving it.