The gender pay gap lie
This is a controversial topic because everyone knows girls get paid less, right? i have found this clip from 1981 that already explains why the gap is a myth. And since then, we have had many more studies to dig deeper and deeper into it. First of all, let me say that salary is part of the reason to chose a job, but certainly not the only reason. Work/Life balance, stress, commute, colleagues, etc. also play a major factor in it. And if you prefer a relaxed low effort workplace, you will earn less than someone in a high stress work place. But like with many feminist points the gender wage gap crumbles pretty fast if you dare to look at it a little bit. The first interesting question is: why do companies hire male employees? Big companies are usually very ruthless and efficient at eliminating costs. So why waste money and hire a man for a job a woman can do for less?
But of course, this is a rhetoric question and just shows that there has to be something wrong with that "gap". The problem is correlation and causation, meaning girls get paid less on average, but are they get paid less because they are girls or because of other factors. Take for example the question: do brunettes get paid more than blondes or vice versa? Suddenly it sounds pretty ridiculous to ask that.
Personality traits factor in a lot when negotiating for a raise. There are for example the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Your personality hugely impacts your interaction with other people, especially in negotiations. For example, an introvert with high agreeableness would not negotiate as forceful as an extravert with low agreeableness. We know that girls and Men have a difference here, certain traits are more common in each gender.
So there are studies to show that having certain personality traits do directly factor in your salary. Conscientious (organized) people do earn more money than agreeable people, on average. Of course, there are other factors as well. For example, girls do outperform men in their early 20s in wages (how many feminists do you know that protest this injustice?). So it is hard to argue that the wage gap is an inherent bias. Also when looking at how wages develop over time, you can see they are nonlinear. That means early successes in getting a bigger raise scale insanely well at higher ages. Small advantages you gain at the start of your career can propel you way higher later on. Coincidentally the wage gap rises with age.
There is, of course, the biological fact that girls get pregnant as well. This possibility of having kids does come with a cost, but usually at older ages when the girl missed a few years of work for her maternal leave. There is a significant wage drop on average when a girl gets her first child. Which of course makes sense because usually, the focus of a girl shifts from being career focused to focus more on her family. While at the same time fathers earn more money because they feel an increased drive to support their family financially (ie compensating the wage drop his wife experienced).
Longer hours at work aslo get nonlinear pay raises. So if someone is willing to spend overtime at work, this usually affects the salary very nicely. Girls with kids basically never do that, they generally lose a certain drive they might have had at work and put this effort more into their kids. Girls who don't get kids don't get these wage drops and they keep on par with men because they do have similar personality traits to men.
So if we look closely at why girls get paid less, we learn that there are many factors but gender is not really one of them. There are different factors at play and probably a few more i didn't mention. But when looking at the pay gap, people often forget one of the most paramount rules of statistics: correlation does not imply causation. So while girls do get paid less on average, this does not mean it is caused by them being girls. And since hardly any feminist would ever look this deep into this topic and rather keep parroting things that fit their narrative, i have to consider feminism to be harmful.
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