A BRITISH journalist has taken feminist political theory to its logical next step and called for a “woman discount” on taxes, utility bills and medical insurance. The idea is to compensate women for lower wages.

Joan Smith of The Independent cites a study by a management organization that shows that compensation of women executives continues to lag significantly behind that of men and is unlikely to catch up in the next 100 years. There is so much pervasive discrimination against women, she says, their bills should be reduced.

Smith seems to have missed a telling detail of the report. Young single women are actually paid more than men. In addition salaries of female executives rose faster than that of comparable men last year. As early as 1971, studies have shown that women who remain single throughout their careers earning as much or more than men. Black women earn significantly more than black men. In 2005, college-educated women in their 20’s in New York City earned 117 percent of the wages of men. In Dallas, they earned 120 percent, and presumably that pattern continues. Amidst the numerous laws, regulations and judicial decisions requiring employers and educational institutions to favor women, the notion of a conspiracy against them is patently ludicrous. Shouldn’t the taxes and utility bills of single men be decreased?

Another fact that is often overlooked in discussions of comparable worth is that men pay a much larger share of the expenses of women. A salary is very often not the exclusive property of the wage earner. By the reasoning employed by feminists, the greater financial indebtedness of women to men should be considered unfair.

Only when feminists come up with proposals to equalize the amount of gain men and women receive from the other’s earnings can such measures as Smith’s be taken seriously.

                                          — Comments —

Texanne, who sent the above link, writes:

Smith cites one “unique” study that is hilarious. From the article:

Only a misogynist would suggest that men are universally better than women across the entire field of paid employment, so there has to be another reason why this form of discrimination is so widespread. The obvious one, that employers view men and women differently, was tested in 2008 bythe American academics, sociologist Kristen Schilt and economist Matthew Wiswall, who carried out a unique piece of research on people who had changed sex.

They cited the case of an economics professor, Donald McCloskey, who announced to his colleagues that he was having an operation to become Deidre; McCloskey was jokingly told by his head of department that it would mean a pay cut, but Schilt and Wiswall discovered that’s the actual experience of many male-to-female transgender people. Men who had surgery to become women earned 32 per cent less on average after the change, even after taking into account variables such as educational qualifications; women who became men earned 1.5 per cent more. The academics observed that becoming female often brings with it a loss of authority, harassment and a loss of employment, while becoming male tends to produce an increase in respect and authority. These startling findings challenge traditional explanations for the pay gap, illustrating the “often hidden and subtle processes that produce gender inequality in workplace outcomes.

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