Debunking the so-called gender wage-gap by example

Submitted by mens_issues on Sat, 2014-03-15 18:04

It's ironic that the so-called gender wage gap is greatest in wealthier places like Beverly Hills and much less in poor places such as Indian reservations.

Women earn $.64 on the dollar compared to men in Beverly Hills. For the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, it's $.90. So men earning more than women says nothing of how the money is spent or who benefits from it.

An even more extreme case is Buffalo County, SD, which has the lowest per capita income in the U.S. Women there earn $1.05 to the dollar compared to men. This county is made up mostly the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, and is largely a matriarchy. Many houses lack kitchens and indoor plumbing.

In contrast, Rancho Santa Fe is a wealthy enclave in San Diego County. Women there earn $.58 to the dollar for men. Rancho Santa Fe has the second highest per capita income in the U.S. and the typical house costs over $2 million. The women living there can hardly be described as suffering from the so-called wage gap.

So, high gender wage gap here vs. women earning more here.

Where are women better off? And where are they more likely to be a victim of violence? Where are children - or men for that matter - better off?

Of course, these examples are anecdotes from the extremes of wealth and poverty in the United States and correlation doesn't imply causation, but it is likely related to something else. In these cases, the wealthy enclaves are an example of the success of free markets and property rights, while the impoverished Indian reservations an example of historic injustice compounded by a lack of property rights. A more comprehensive study would result in a graph of locations in the United States comparing the "gender wage gap" to per capita income. There would likely be a lot of scatter in such a graph, but it would be interesting to see what the overall correlation is, and the causes of the correlation would probably be complex and nuanced. But it would likely refute the feminist assertion that women are oppressed by the so-called wage gap that they keep touting.

Steve Van Valkenburg

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Comments

It's been happening for years. Men subsidize women's lifestyles and pay for what they want, with or without much of anything in return. This may well be the greatest con job ever done on any group of people, and is the one that says women are owed the support and patronage of men *by default*, regardless of what men get in return; it's even better than the "divine right" con job propagated by medieval monarchs!

In places where men cannot or will not subsidize women's lifestyles, there is abject poverty. In places where they will, there is at last a decent standard of living, all this relative to resources and technology available.

To this day, even in so-called "progressive agenda" countries, this still happens. If men actually stopped categorically doing this, two things would happen: 1) men would keep a lot more of their own earnings and 2) women would be forced to finance their own desired lifestyles, and to do whatever that takes.

I am not merely talking about getting out of the classic "men pay for dates" thing, though that has to be changed so that it is presumed categorically to be 50-50. I am instead referring to men-don't-subsidize-women, period. If a woman wants to live in a $2 million house, she coughs up $1 million herself and does not expect her husband to pay for the house all the while having an "equal claim of right" to the equity in it when she decides to dump him for someone else. She has to pay half the monthly payment on the mortgage, period. Same for all other expenses. If she isn't married or cohabiting, she shouldn't ask nor expect a boyfriend (and no more sugar-daddies!) to help her pay for the place or anything else. Her lifestyle should be supported by *her*. That ought to be the default assumption both men and women have.

Because this persists however and because feminists are seemingly fine with it, women do in fact get a pass on achieving actual parity with men in terms of pursuing the higher-paying jobs. If a woman can reasonably assume she will get subsidized in life by a man, her motivation to strive for a better position or go into a higher-paying field (*ahem* STEM, *ahem*) is diminished. Why, after all, bother? You can get a guy to pay the difference between your pay as a *__something_that_doesn't_pay much__* and the fact that you like to wear Prada and have a taste for lace curtains -- pricey ones, too. And as for college loans, why not major in "eco-feminism" or sociology; you probably think you can get a man to pay them for you, too, and you might be right. So don't worry much about having a degree that'll actually get you a decent job after graduation.

Until feminism/women realize that the "golden side" of double-standards when it comes to financial patronage is actually discouraging them from striving for a far more solid kind of economic equality than they are currently shooting for, this issue won't go away. Another one of my damned analogies: It's comfortable riding a bike with training wheels. It feels a lot safer than riding one without. But if you take off those training wheels, you find that despite the greater risk and chance of injury, the bike is a lot more fun to ride and you have a lot more say about where you go on it. That's worth the risk, and it comes with a lot of satisfaction. And in this case, the training wheels will be thankful for the break!

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-03-15 21:25

"In places where men cannot or will not subsidize women's lifestyles, there is abject poverty. In places where they will, there is at last a decent standard of living, all this relative to resources and technology available."

That sums it up quite nicely.

As for this essay topic, it was cobbled together from a series of tweets on Twitter at Male Positive Media https://twitter.com/MalePositive as I researched the gender wage-gap online at Wikipedia in relation to very wealthy and very poor places in the United States.

Here's another!

I just realized that women in Cherry Hills Village in Colorado earn less than half of what men do. Therefore, they must be even more underpaid than women elsewhere in the United States regarding their earnings (compared with men). These poor women suffer from a huge wage gap and are horribly oppressed! (This is something I came up with myself, though a feminist could come to the same conclusion).

Now, some information regarding Cherry Hills Village (where I got this information):

Quote

From Wikipedia: The median income for a household in the city was $190,805, and the median income for a family was $200,001. Males had a median income of $100,000+ versus $49,891 for females. The per-capita income for the city was $99,996. About 1.7% of families and 2.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.5% of those under age 18 and 1.5% of those age 65 or over.

Women in Cherry Hills Village earn less than half of what men do there.

Note: Cherry Hills Village is the most affluent suburb of Denver, located just to the south of the city, with many homes worth well over $1 million! There's something funky about feminist math and reasoning!

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Submitted by mens_issues on Sat, 2014-03-15 22:06

I wont repeat everything I have already disputed in the past, but I really think some MRA's are ignoring biology, will have a perpetual never ending struggle if the goal is "equality" or 50/50, and are being short sighted for seeing only feminist as guilty of double standards. "men have been subsidizing women's choices for years" Yep, that about sums it,Matt, I will go even further and say men have been paying for women since the beginning of time and it wont ever end as long as biology stays the same. What men get in return is sexual companionship and children.

As far as wage gap, I think people are generally paid what they are worth and the so called wage gap is a result of personal decisions. However, those decisions are ususally guided by a woman's biological disposition.

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Submitted by Kris on Sun, 2014-03-16 00:27

"What men get in return is sexual companionship and children"

Yes, Kris, and I suppose women will keep selling "sexual companionship" to men and having kids (ones they can take away, too -- since men's children really aren't theirs, given the way courts treat fathers).

You've reduced in your reply the functional role women have in the lives of men: "sexual companionship" and baby-production.

I can't imagine how anyone could have ever accused you of being a feminist.

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Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2014-03-16 01:18

If you can acknowledge that men have a higher sex drive compared to women, and have a narrower sense of what an attractive mate looks like (females aged 18 to 30 and of certain body type) and can acknowledge that biology puts a disproportion amount of the reproduction responsibility onto women, then you should be able to conclude why men paying for women will never end.

And if you were to ask a successful single man 30 to 40ish who is looking to start a family, what he wants in a female mate, the ability and expectation for her to contribute 50% of living expenses is not likely going to be anywhere near his top requirements, and probably not common in the age demographic that he wants in a woman and probably would not be compatible with her biological clock and all. So yeah, as you say (paraphrasing me), the only thing he really wants her for is sex and baby production.....don't make it sound like it's such a bad thing ;)

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Submitted by Kris on Sun, 2014-03-16 03:49