"Women just choose lower paying jobs!"

On the gender wage gap, patriarchy and the unwavering confidence of teenage boys

Well, Actually is an ongoing reader-supported newsletter series debunking the mythconceptions and outright lies told by those invested in upholding patriarchy. For the price of a monthly glass of wine, I’ll supply weekly facts, figures and funnies to break down all the patriarchal myths and nonsense you need to help you stay calm at the next family dinner! You can find the introduction post here.

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Priceless.

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There’s no such thing as a wage gap! the teenage boy cries. He’s smirking as if he can’t believe your stupidity, shoulders spread out to maximum capacity in order to bear the weight of responsibility in having to explain to an adult woman yet again why such claims are ridiculous. Doesn’t she know anything? I mean, if women are so much cheaper to employ, why don’t they have all the jobs?! He says as much to her, his words dripping with disdain, and it’s less a question than an accusation.

At 15, the boy isn’t an economist, nor has he ever read any books or articles written by economists, least of all those to do with pay inequity between genders. He’s never heard of the government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) website let alone scrolled through its section on data and statistics, where he would almost instantly be met by the revelation that Australia’s current gender wage gap sits at 21.7%. He’s never had a job, not even a part time one, because his parents think school is too important - which is ironic when you think about it, given his unwavering commitment to the avoidance of thought. Besides, jobs are for poor people.

His inexperience in the field of labour industries, economic research or life in general won’t dissuade him from feeling entirely within his rights to declare the expert standing before him WRONG! while high fiving the similarly uninformed, overgrown boy children sneering in symphony. She may be decades older than him, the author of numerous books detailing the impact of gender inequality and - crucially - a woman with personal experience of the matter, but these details are irrelevant. She cannot possibly be better informed than he is, because he’s watched a number of videos on YouTube made by men (and sometimes women) who are also not economists but who do hate women and who instruct him in the ways of misogyny week after week. Also, his friends agree with him as does every person who knows anything about anything (except for economics, labour exploitation, women, or life.)

Five or ten years from now, that boy - or one of an endless number of facsimiles of him - will appear in a pub or at a dinner party or in the corridor or work or that place on the internet where facts have gone to die, and he’ll make the exact same argument with the exact same level of entirely unearned confidence. Having heard the call to arms that’s invariably laid down by even the vaguest mention of “money” and “women” in the same sentence, he’ll materialise out of thin air to remind everyone present that feminism is a joke and women just choose lower paying jobs.

Case closed!

Take ‘em away, judge.

If feminism is an international airport, arguments about the wage gap are kind of like one of the security checkpoints you’re forced to go through in order to make it to your gate. Unavoidable and predictable in their tedium, the one thing that unites them all is that they never seem to get an upgrade. Your most annoying encounters with them will have you unpacking your laptop AND your aerosols, only to be forced back through the screening machine to remove your boots.

But while you may never be able to escape the scourge of the Wage Gap Whiners, you can at least prepare yourself for the boneheaded arguments they make to try to discredit its existence. Remember, as with all of our Well, Actually rebuttals, we don’t want to expend an abundance of energy on any of these fights. Misogynists will never admit that you’re right and they’ll never back down from their commitment to ignorance. They’re not motivated by facts or reason, only the desire to ‘win’ by agitating you to the point of emotional sufferance and frustration. And this ‘win’ comes the moment you give in to temper or heightened feeling. That’s the gas that fuels them, so it’s imperative you try to keep an even keel and simply bat away their bollocks as if it were a fly - annoying, sure, but unable to harm you.

Generally speaking, misogynists like this tend to run through a list of soundbites and call that a watertight thesis. So we’re going to run through the most common, and disprove them.

Let’s begin!

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1. There’s no such thing as a wage gap!

I realise this is the broad premise of this post, but as the circuitous route through misogynist economic logic always begins with refuting the gender wage gap outright this is where we have to start.

Regardless of how the gender wage gap is determined or what it’s referring to, the simple fact is that yes, both statistically and economically, it does indeed exist. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency both show a gender pay gap favouring full-time working men over full-time working women in Australia.

As of the time of this post (May 31, 2024), that gap sits at 12 per cent.

From the WGEA website:

Australia’s national gender pay gap is 12 per cent.

As of November 2023, the full-time adult average weekly ordinary time earnings across all industries and occupations was $1982.80 for men and $1744.80 for women.

For every dollar on average men earned, women earned 88 cents. That's $238 less than men each week.

Over the course of a year, this difference adds up to $12,376.

Further, Australian legislation passed in 2023 meant that this year the WGEA began issuing the first public releases of pay gaps across almost 5000 private organisations. What this information revealed was that “the total remuneration gender pay gap for Australia is now 19%.”

The following chart shows that of Australia’s top 20 publicly listed companies on the ASX, all but one have a gender wage gap that favours men, with 11 of those companies with a pay gap of more than 20 per cent.

Now, these are averages. If were to break this down further along other intersectional measures of discrimination - race, disability, education levels - we would see wider gaps. Just as with my posts about the myth of the golden era of marriage and the ‘homemaker’ narrative, we have to be careful not to homogenise women’s experiences.

From this post on Missing Perspectives (please read the whole post):

“Continuous research conducted from 2018 and presently by diversity research and consultancy firm MindTribes, shows that the ethnic gender pay gap in Australian organisations can be around 33-36%. Women from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds spend up to eight years longer in middle management roles compared to women from Anglo and European backgrounds. They are often underemployed or experience higher rates of workplace bullying and harassment linked to their gender, race and ethnicity.”

Adding to the demonstrable gap in weekly take home earnings is the disparity in superannuation (for American readers, I believe the equivalent to what we call “super” is your 401k.) In Australia, women retire with an average of 42% less superannuation (and one third of women retire with no super at all), a key contributor to the fact Australia’s fastest growing group of homeless people are women over 65.

So yes, the gender wage gap is very much a “real thing” and we have years worth of data that demonstrates this.

2. Yeah, but it’s ILLEGAL to pay men more!!!

Correct. In Australia, legislation to enforce equal pay has been in place since 1969 although initially it was only defined as equal pay between men and women doing exactly the same work. From the National Museum website:

“In 1972 Australian unions and the newly elected Whitlam government lobbied the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (ACAC) to reevaluate their earlier decision granting equal pay to women only in those instances where they did exactly the same work as men.”

The Whitlam government was successful in expanding the parameters of ‘equal pay’ to mean work of equal value - that is to say, work considered to be equal in contribution to a workplace or industry, even if it wasn’t necessarily identical in performance.

Despite this legislation, whether this is what actually happens is a matter for debate. Although the Whitlam government’s definition technically improves the prospects of women’s financial remuneration, the matter of what constitutes ‘value’ is so easily manipulated by structural power systems.

But even with the legislative reality of “equal pay”, the gender wage gap still persists. Because the gap itself is not about equal pay for equal work, but how the discrimination that exists for women in the workplace leads to a disparity in finances. And this disparity is more pronounced in the private sector than in the public, where wage negotiation is conducted behind closed doors and therefore more easily hidden. Data from 2017 shared on the WGEA website shows that even though women represent over 50 per cent of students undertaking higher education AND form the majority of those who complete their studies, men are still privileged by higher median starting salaries post graduation than women.

One of the findings the WGEA gleans from this is that the financial disadvantage inflicted on female graduates extends to making their financial investment in their education less profitable - and considering men of the ruling class have been trying all manner of methods to prevent or dissuade women from pursuing higher education for centuries, that doesn’t suprise me one little bit.

What do we know about median starting salaries for people with undergraduate qualifications seeking FULL TIME work in Australia? Well, data from 2018 shows us that the industry with the highest starting salary gap is dentistry, with female graduates starting on a median annual salary of $78,000 compared with male graduates on a whopping $102,000.

That’s an annual difference of $24,000 - and that’s for graduates with no experience, both working full time.

Take a look yourself.

What I find interesting about this data in particular is that the starting salary gap between men and women persists even in the so-called “feminised” care industries of health services and support, creative arts, social work, communications, teacher education and nursing. This will be relevant in point 4.

But wait, there’s more! The starting salary gap also persists between genders for full time employees with post graduate qualifications.

No matter which way you slice it, and despite legislation supposedly making this kind of thing illegal, women in “professional” industries are financially disadvantaged compared to men straight out of the gate.

Which leads us to:

3. But if women are cheaper, why don’t they have all the jobs then DUM-DUM?

This is a popular argument from the wage gap deniers. As we’ve established, the gender wage gap doesn’t refer to the cost of like-for-like work but a range of factors that account for an overall gap in finances and long term financial independence.

BUT - and this is an important but - in the private sector, where wages are negotiated behind closed doors, we’ve seen that there IS still a clear gap between starting and ongoing salaries between men and women.

So why on earth would a company spend MORE money than they had to, if they could just employ women for less?

There are two answers to this question, and they’re both essential for any kind of rebuttal you want to mount against Captain Twatface.

The first is that women DO have “all the jobs” when it comes to work that is considered feminised and therefore undervalued.

For example, women are much more likely to be domestic cleaners, accounting for 78 per cent of the workforce in Australia. That number jumps to 88 per cent when confined to domestic housekeepers. (Median weekly salaries for these jumps are not available, because they’re often privately negotiated.)

Women also account for 97 per cent of childcare workers. No median salary was listed for this, but considering childcare centre MANAGERS (91 per cent of whom are women) are on a median annual salary of $1412, we can assume the median salary for the almost completely female workforce of child carers is much lower.

Women also make up the majority of early education workers (96 per cent) with a median annual salary of $1660. Primary school teachers (84 per cent female) earn a median salary of $2000, while secondary school teachers (60 per cent female) earn a median salary of $2166. And while women still make up the majority of school principals (64 per cent), the huge disparity between this figure and, say, the number of women who work as early education or primary school teachers indicates a general male lack of interest in those fields.

Women make up a majority of registered nurses with a median salary of $2156, but are in the minority of GPs (48 per cent), emergency medicine ‘specialists’ (46 per cent) and even fewer specialist physicians (33 per cent).

Women too make up almost the entirety of the midwifery profession (99 per cent) with a median salary of $2387 but account for over a third fewer obstetricians and gynaecologists (65 per cent).

Where surgery is concerned, women are in the minority:

Cardiothoracic surgeons: 11 per cent

Neurosurgeons: 18 per cent

Orthopaedic surgeons: 10 per cent

Paediatric surgeons: 37 per cent

Plastic and reconstructive surgeons: 25 per cent

General surgeons: 27 per cent

Vascular surgeons: 19 per cent

This is despite the fact research shows that patients have better outcomes with female surgeons. The Canadian and Swedish joint study showed that patients are 25 per cent more likely to die in the year following their surgery if their surgeon was male.

More here:

“According to a recent study, performance of female surgeons was better in early post-operative outcomes. There was lesser 30-day mortality, lesser complications and length of stay at hospital in patients treated by female surgeons.13 It was also seen that in communication skills, medical knowledge, technical skills, clinical judgement and professionalism, women had shown equal competence.”

Despite the clear advantage to patients offered by female surgeons, male surgeons continue to be more likely to receive referrals. See here:

“Male surgeons accounted for 77.5% of all surgeons but received 87.1% of referrals from male physicians and 79.3% of referrals from female physicians. Female surgeons less commonly received procedural referrals than male surgeons (25.4% vs 33.0%, P < .001).”

And this demonstrates the existence not just of performance bias, but also value. Because in answering the (asinine) rhetorical question of “wHy DoN’t WoMeN hAvE aLL tHe JoBs”, we also have to consider how we assign value in capitalist society. Women have ‘all’ the domestic cleaning jobs and child care jobs because society in general thinks this work is pointless, easy and unimpressive - therefore it can and should be done by women, and women especially of lower class brackets.

Conversely, work that (patriarchal, classist, capitalist, white supremacist) society considers important and essential is deemed worthy of investing in. Sometimes this is practical (for example, if you needed a heart transplant your primary concern probably wouldn’t be shopping for the cheapest surgeon you could find) but mostly it’s a reflection of the skewed values we prioritise.

White collar industries looking to “attract the best” offer “competitive salaries” because they believe you have to spend money to make money. The default position of most powerful institutions is that ‘merit’ is something white men automatically have and everyone else needs to prove. Patriarchy has also neatly arranged things so that women and other marginalised groups have fewer options than this demographic of the ‘meritorious’, and fewer options makes us believe we have less room for negotiation. The ‘she’ll be grateful just to be picked’ attitude is fully in play, which means that money these organisations save on paying women’s salaries can be spent on attracting and securing the men they think will enhance the reputation of their business.

It is entirely illogical to argue that cheap is always the goal. Saving money is very often the goal for people and institutions who value money for themselves, but this doesn’t mean they’ll never spend it. The money is shuffled around to be spent on things they decide have value - it’s not cost cutting, it’s redistribution of wealth.

A simpler example that might help explain it better to Captain Twatface: if people were always swayed by what’s ‘cheaper’, why is brand recognition and commensurate pricing so powerful? Why do people buy Nike shoes when they can get unbranded ones for a third of the price?

Finally, there’s this illustrative example. Nike is the world’s leading shoe brand with a current financial revenue of $55 billion and increasing. Nike outsources its production to factories operating in the global south, because “cheap” (read: exploitative) labour costs helps maximise the company’s profits. Given the majority of garment workers in the global south are drastically underpaid women, we could indeed say that women DO ‘have all the jobs’ when it comes to sustaining Nike’s existence.

And yet, it’s how Nike chooses to spend its money that reflects its perception of what makes a “worthy investment”.

Spoiler: it isn’t on the products themselves, but on the people they think will add value to their brand recognition and therefore increase their profits.

According to Clean Clothes:

“Much of these brands’ sportswear is produced in Indonesia where 80% of garment workers are women and earn between 82 and 200 euro per month. Their wages often do not even cover basic needs, and is much less than would enable them and their families to have decent lives, which according to calculations by Asia Floor Wage would amount to 363 euro. Some of these do not even receive their legal minimum wages. Unions and civil society are therefore calling on adidas and Nike to ensure living wages throughout their supply chain. If Nike and adidas would have kept their sponsor contracts at the 2012 levels instead of increasing them to unprecedented levels, they would have saved enough money  to cover living wages for the workers in their main production countries China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia. Instead, these brands decided to spend their money on football players rather than the workers stitching their shirts and shoes.”

By the way, in February 2024 Nike announced the need to lay off a number of employees. The cuts, they explained, were necessary to “save money” because consumers were spending less on “non essentials”.

In 2023, the CEO of Nike, John Donahue, was paid $32.8 million.

4. Okay, well if the wage gap DOES exist, it’s just because women choose lower paying jobs!

As convincing as it sounds that an entire demographic of people would just CHOOSE “lower paying jobs”, this one is also wrong.

The problem isn’t that women are attracted to low paying industries (and please, that makes zero logical sense.) It’s that women’s value is considered to be less worthy of investment, and therefore more easily exploited. And the work itself is not the issue, but the women doing it: historically speaking, the more feminised an industry becomes, the lower its perceived financial value drops to.

Don’t believe me? A university study of American industry between 1950 and 2000 found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.

In fact, when women began to dominate as biologists, the pay dropped by 18 points!

Additionally, the combination of historic framing of women as ‘natural caregivers’ combined with the community need for care work to be provided has ensured this essential industry has become female dominated. Simply put, care work needs to be derided and seen as women’s responsibility, because acknowledging that the provision of this care is integral to humanity’s well being (and therefore crucial to ensure capitalism’s success) delivers too much power and financial freedom to the women relied on to provide it. We need nurses, but we will never pay them like we do doctors - because as Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich note in Witches, Midwives and Nurses, the difference between what’s considered a “profession” and what’s considered a “trade” lies in which one serves the ruling class.

And the final nail in the coffin of this ludicrous argument? As demonstrated up in point 3, when men just out of university ‘choose’ to work in the supposedly ‘lower paying jobs’ like nursing, social work, creative arts, teacher education, health services and communications, their starting salaries are automatically higher than the women who make up the majority of those labour forces.

Again, it’s not that women “choose lower paying jobs”. It’s that society chooses to value women’s work less.

5. Yeah, well men do all the dangerous jobs and that’s why they deserve more money!

Men are certainly exploited by capitalism in ways that puts their bodies at risk, but as I covered in the first of the Well, Actually series, this isn’t out of any kind of moral imperative. This is because this is how capitalism works - by exploiting the labour of the working class to bolster the coffers of the aristocracy. The world’s billionaires do not by any stretch of the imagination engage in “dangerous work”, so the idea that financial privilege is somehow tied to risk is absurd. Nor does this pretence of “danger” account for the proven disparity in wages between men and women in the “white collar” working world. Dentistry, for example, has one of industry’s highest gender wage gaps - and this begins the moment graduates begin receiving job offers. Ditto architecture.

And who gets to define what danger means? Women dominate in care based industries like healthcare, education and social work (at least until it comes to management roles!) but these jobs are certainly not easy or without risk. In fact, a 2015 American study showed nurses were at a higher risk of workplace injuries than those working in the construction and mining industries, not least of which was caused by the physical impacts of the job. And while this is less a problem for Australia and other countries with sensible gun laws, being a teacher in America is certainly not “safe” - if your job has people in the community demanding you be armed to ‘take down a shooter’, you can hardly be accused of cruising through. Looking further down the class system, how safe is it to be a woman working in a factory? And across the board of all industries, how safe is it to be exposed to sexual harassment in the workplace - especially if you have to risk losing your weekly pay check if you report it?

The question of “easy versus hard” is less important than “essential versus non essential”. Covid-19 demonstrated exactly which of the globe’s jobs are most important, and it’s certainly not any of those fields fiercely defended by wage gap deniers. It’s the teachers, the healthcare workers, the social workers, the domestic workers - in short, the jobs most likely to be performed by women, but dismissed as easy and therefore unimportant to the world’s well-being.

6. Sure, but if you want equality then why aren’t women willing to work in mining or construction? RIDDLE ME THAT, FEMINIST!

Firstly, most men are also not working in mining and construction and yet seem to want to use this argument to a) bolster their ridiculous sense of alpha masculinity and b) ignore the disparity of the economic outlook for men and women. Darrell, you’re in the public service. You’re not diffusing landmines.

Secondly - and again, because it bears repeating - the notion that hard work is automatically rewarded financially is nonsense. Care industries are hard and dangerous, often requiring arduous shift work and the negotiation of potentially hostile clients, but because they’re dominated by women they’re underpaid. More to the point, the vast majority of the world’s economy is dependent on the exploitation of workers in the global south, whose extremely low incomes are indicative of how dangerous and undervalued their work is and not the opposite. As Arundhati Roy argues, the hardest working person in the world picks rice for a living. But they certainly aren’t being paid the salary of the CEO of SunRice.

The workers employed in Amazon factories are among the lowest paid in America in one of the most dangerous workplaces, expected to work 12 hour shifts without bathroom breaks. In 2019, a worker had a fatal heart attack on the factory floor and was ignored. They were one of 6 Amazon workers who died that year as a result of workplace lack of safety. 

But Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is the richest man in the world. Based on the metric of high pay = harder and more dangerous, you’re saying Bezos’ job is more demanding than that of the people whose exploitation is required to service his bank balance.

And what constitutes danger for women is different again. A Sydney University study of more than 2000 women workers aged between 16 and 40 showed 26% of those doing hyper masculine jobs were currently experiencing sexual harassment, double that of women outside these fields. The risk of sexual harassment increases exponentially for women working in fields where fewer than 15% of workers are women.

Men as a group make it almost impossible for women to safely work in industries that are already high risk, but then uses this non-representation as “evidence” that women just want to live on easy street. Convenient!

7. Well, women have BABIES and therefore CHOOSE to take time out of the workforce which accounts for the gap!!

It’s true that a lot of working women have children - but so do men. They just happen to have women around to do all that work for them. And while having children negatively impacts a woman’s career progression, becoming a father helps men in the workplace. Michelle Budig, a University of Massachusetts sociology professor, researched the parenthood pay gap for 15 years and found on average men’s earnings increased by more than 6 % after having children while women’s dropped by 4% for each child they had. 

Women are told we have to have children for our emotional well being and happiness, and then ritually punished for it the moment we agree. So can we really say this is choice, when it might just be expectation?

Further, the idea that women are somehow “not working” when engaged in domestic tasks is absolute bollocks. A 2016 UN report found that girls worldwide spend 40% more time on household chores and domestic labour, equating to 160 million more hours a day.

That collectively accounts for 900 years more worth of unpaid hours, in a single day.

Women are told that the work of mothering and taking care of families is ‘the most important job in the world’ at the same time as we’re told it’s easy and meaningless and worth no money at all because ‘only men do the truly hard jobs’, even though it’s women’s unpaid domestic labour that facilitates all this TIME men have to work. We literally create the next generation of taxpayers and workers to fuel capitalism and its overlords, and the great fucking charade is that we’re told this is our “choice” and therefore it serves no function or purpose for wider society.

And don’t even get me started on the number of men who unthinkingly say, “Well she was going to go back to work but her salary barely covered the childcare!”

Her salary? HER SALARY? A woman’s earning capacity is fundamental to her health and well being. It isn’t the trade off she makes for being ‘allowed’ to go back to work. If you want to be fairer about it (and therefore tackle the gender wage gap, which by now has expanded even further with the introduction of children) the childcare costs should reflect a percentage break down of the parents wages - a 70/30 split say should equate to the higher earner paying slightly more than 2/3rds worth of the childcare costs to allow BOTH parents to return to work.

And actually, if you want to be truly equal about it, the non birthing parent should pay for all of it in its entirety because they didn’t have to grow a human for 9 months and then birth them.

But pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing are just some of the many unappreciated jobs women are expected to do without compensation, and certainly without any respect. Despite the fact these things literally keep the economy going and in particular support men to go out and be the captains of industry they fancy themselves to be, they’re still just conveniently dismissed as being non essential and easy.

In the 1980s, the economist Marilyn Waring discovered that women’s unpaid work, from domestic labour to child reading to caring for the elderly and sick, had historically been excluded from Gross Domestic Product measurements in the UN’s System of National Accounts, having been declared ‘of little or no importance’. She was devastated to discover this, as any female economist would be to realise the profoundly important work of half of the world’s population was considered meaningless to male boffins in suits.

Has it changed? No. Even today, unpaid domestic labour is only measured in a satellite account alongside the GDP rather than considered an essential part within it.

To put this into perspective, the unpaid domestic labour in Australia alone is worth $434 billion annually. Annually, breastfeeding is worth $3billion.

If men actually valued spending more time with their children and began pushing workplaces to provide workplace flexibility, this disparity would more quickly resolve itself. But I guess they don’t care!

Because they have women to do the caring for them.

8. Well, women just need to try harder! They should apply for the high paying jobs!

What an idea! Why didn’t we think of that! 

Except we did, and unconscious bias ruined the party yet again! You can legislate for equal pay and representation all you like, but if you can’t change people’s mindsets you won’t get far. Numerous research studies, including one published in the Harvard Business Review have found that employers are more likely to respond favourably to women applicants when they have a policy of anonymizing resumes ie using initials rather than names that can indicate sex. When indications of candidates’ gender was removed from applications for time on the Hubble Space Telescope, women were selected at a higher rater. 

This is unconscious bias at play, and it’s a symptom of people believing that women are less capable and less prepared to commit to a role, and that their work has inherently less value than men’s. 

These are just some of the factors we must consider when we talk about the gender wage gap, and this is just a very brief summary of it - it’s not just the money, although that’s part of it and it’s not just whether or not women have babies, although that’s absolutely used against us too. It’s the fundamental societal belief that women’s formal work - the kind we contribute in the public realm - is only worth a minor percentage of value to the economy, while our expected work - the labour we perform in the domestic sphere - is worth nothing at all. 

So Captain Twatface still doesn’t ‘believe’ in the wage gap? That’s fine. No one can force him to accept facts that threaten his world view, least of all you. But does he need to be listened to, debated, argued with and appealed to when it’s very obvious he isn’t interested in reading or even attempting to understand a social and cultural system that is both complex and yet extremely simple? 

Absolutely not. Your time is precious and worth so much more than his attempts to exploit it.

And that’s on the wage gap, friends.

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Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to enjoy these posts! I appreciate you. Please remember, you can suggest topics or myths you’d like busted in the comments here!

Next week: The myth of women as biologically wired to nurture. Where did it come from, who does it serve and how can you learn to succinctly rebut it?