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Why Do Men Earn More Than Women

Gerry T

As the title suggests, you can guess where this is going. I've just watched a netflix 44min documentary by Karren Brady, the title of which is the same as the thread title. While there were valid points being made, in my opinion, what did grate on me, was the lack of balance. Karrens main point was there is still a gender pay gap but then she started to touch on how senior positions were being dominated by men. I see these as two different things.

First to gender pay gap, I was under the impression in most western countries this has been done away with. I'm sure someone will be along to point to CHina and how men doing the same job earn more, there's no arguing that, so best to look at developed western democratic countries. Is this a thing today ? it was a problem only 20 years ago but I would have though that this was now sorted.

The second point wrt men getting promoted over women, I don't doubt this does happen, but is this not also a rare occurrence ? most employers I know want the best person for the job and they couldn't care if that person was male/female/black/white/blind/deaf etc... they want the best candidate or am I being naive ? I work in an engineering field, most management are men, you do see the odd woman but it's rare. But then in college there were 90 to 95% male students, I see this as the main reason in that industry that men hold senior positions. For every managers role there are 100 men that would want it, their might only be 5 women at most.

I fully support equal pay for an equal job, but I'm totally against a quota system for middle/top management in the industry I work in. I'd be interested to get people's opinions on their experiences, how does it pan out in employment sectors that are dominated by Women ?

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miamee

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121071186#Comment_121071186

This is not true, I think most women these days are willing to pay their way equally whether that be taking turns to pay or splitting bills. I don't think participants in First Dates is a true or useful representation of societal norms.

Markus Antonius

Can someone please point me to a job in which two people can do "equal work"

Royale with Cheese

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/0905/1403385-graduate-earnings/

"Our findings showed clear differences between male and female graduates in career priorities, with male students prioritising financial compensation more than their female counterparts," said Steve Ward, UK and Ireland Business Director, Universum.

"Despite the rising cost of living, female graduates expect to earn 11% less than male students. Clearly, more work needs to be undertaken by employers to address this issue and achieve greater pay parity"

I mean this just doesn't make any sense to me? You've just stated your research has found female graduates are less interested in financial compensation than men, they then end up going into jobs with lower starting salaries, and somehow this is a problem that needs to be fixed by employers?

I work in IT. It's a decent paying career for many people in Ireland, huge employer of graduates, and it's predominantly male. So are the undergraduate courses for it though, start there if you want to fix the "problem" instead of expecting independent businesses to just raise their salaries to match your gender quota.

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121071186#Comment_121071186

Utter hypocrisy and stupidity if women select men on the basis of financial resources then complain about the gender pay gap.

I've had this discussion with a female work colleague who was moaning after there was some feminist rubbish in the media about how women were working for free for part of the year. First of all, we worked in the public service where pay scales are transparent. Secondly, this same woman had the usual female hypergamous tendencies - when I had previously asked her what she looked for in a man, answer was "plenty of money and a big car". She was fuming when I quoted this back to her after her complaints about the gender pay gap.

miamee

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121071145#Comment_121071145

Well it is a problem. Even if the woman has no intention of staying home to raise her children, she is still the one who has to go through pregnancy, go to hospital appointments during the pregnancy and take maternity leave when the baby arrives. Some companies will take all of this into account when evaluating people for promotions or payrises or bonuses but it's not as if her male partner (or anyone else) could have done it for her so it is unfair from that perspective. Prospective father - no issues. Prospective mother - oh she'll be off having babies, she's had one she'll be having another soon enough, etc. I think most companies have moved on from this kind of thinking but not all.

If you take a career break of a few years to do something other than work in your career then it is to be expected that you will have fallen behind in that career (depending on what it is, some will move faster than others) and will be less experienced now than people of a similar age who did not take that time out. This can be true of stay at home mams or dads but the majority are still stay at home mammies.

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121071358#Comment_121071358

They have 'moved on' from that kind of thinking because legislation and cultural pressure forces them to, often against the interests of the business.

Senior managers - including cynical female senior managers, who are primarily interested in their own advancement - will try to dodge hiring such women if they can get away with it and of course keep it 100% deniable.

Call that hard-hearted, sociopathic or unfair or whatever but the business logic is pretty straightforward.

BrianD3

When i worked in the public service, female workers being "off" at the same time was a constant source of frustration. The result was, we were regularly left with a skeleton staff and provided a rubbish service to the public. This would happen, without fail, around every bank holiday weekend, Easter, Halloween, Patrick's day. Christmas, mid terms and for the entire summer to an extent. The local creche is closed because of holidays or an outbreak of norovirus? Ah, we have a skeleton staff - again. It wasn't about whether people had families or not as men who had children managed to come to work.

When I worked in the private sector, it wasn't much better although at least some managers (female managers were better at this than male) were able to say NO to requests for leave. Whereas in the public sector, managers had given up trying and anyway there were no consequences for them if a poor service was provided

Now I see it from the other side, I had to give up work to become a carer and am dependent on healthcare workers, including GPs, PHNs and HCAs. Most of them female. It is chaos. They are constantly off or sick.

I gave up my job yet women think they can marry a bigshot man who works 60 hours a week, work themselves (while complaining about the gender pay gap) raise children and live in a Muck Mansion. They can't. If they could manage to overcome their hypergamous instincts to marry high earners, their husbands might actually be able to assist with child rearing duties.

Honey50000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121071186#Comment_121071186

Thats why you should go for a drink or whatever guys fault if they are jumping in to expensive dates on the first time meeting

miamee

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121071623#Comment_121071623

The local creche is closed because of holidays or an outbreak of norovirus? Ah, we have a skeleton staff - again. It wasn't about whether people had families or not as men who had children managed to come to work.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

This is both the funniest and dumbest thing I have read on this thread so far. How tf do you think the men 'managed to come to work' when they have children in these circumstances?

The women you are complaining about took the time off allowing their other halves go to work.

teresa-villas

Most companies want to make as much profit as possible, leads to the question:

"Why do companies over pay men, when they could get women much cheaper to do the same thing?"

by the laws of economics if both units were the same (men and women) companies would fill with women over time.

Unless the market thinks the units are different of course.

Gerry T

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121070870#Comment_121070870

There's talk of "same jobs" having different pay for genders, but I have yet to see someone show this. You do see a difference in the gender split in more senior roles., but in those same companies you also have a similar split in junior positions. This programme was making out it was epidemic.

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121072431#Comment_121072431

Well done for stating the blindingly obvious. The only dumb thing here is your lack of understanding of what the thread is about. Women earn less than men because of women's own choices, priorities and instincts. They do not want men who will take time off work to look after sick children as that is not regarded as a male role. They also don't want stay at home dads. This feeds directly into the gender pay gap. It also means that if your workplace is female dominated, you are going to have major issues with staff all wanting to be off at the same time (generally when the free childminding service i.e. schools are closed)

"More than one-quarter of women surveyed (26%) said they fundamentally refuse to support a spouse's decision to be a stay-at-home parent. So even though the men in this survey are just as open to sacrificing their careers as women, women are more than three times as likely not to support the same decision for men."

https://medium.com/a-parent-is-born/survey-says-women-are-less-likely-to-support-stay-at-home-dads-48c5f15eb018#:~:text=More%20than%20one%2Dquarter%20of,the%20same%20decision%20for%20men.

Women could reduce the gender pay gap and share more of the child rearing duties with men by having children with men who work in family friendly roles. Problem is these are generally low paid and regarded as unmasculine so women won't do it. Instead they will, as I stated earlier, have children with bigshot and workhorse men on big salaries. Then, stoked up by feminist rubbish in the media will complain about gender pay gaps.

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121072186#Comment_121072186

Why cant the woman pay for first date though?

Honey50000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121072828#Comment_121072828

Why dont you ask them why are you asking me I am not a woman

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121072886#Comment_121072886

You can still have an opinion.

Gerry T

It seems to me to be a dangerous direction for society.For example if we want to have an equal amount of men and women at a senior level in an industry, logically we would need an equal amount in that workforce. To get that we would need equal amounts of both sexes in college. How is that going to work, do we reserve 50% of engineering, IT spaces for females and the same in marketing Psychology for males. Because if the end result is equality in roles the only real way to get there, without discrimination is to control the input.

Honey50000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121072900#Comment_121072900

I really cant be bothered to have a opinion no one forces men to pay if they dont want to pay then dont

Strumms

one of the buzz terms over the last 20 years is ‘ equality ‘ ….

life though simply isn’t equal…. In many situations woman have it better than men, in others such as pay it tends to be the other way around.

i worked in a job where two females were hired into our department onto the top of the grade with NO experience…. The rest of us went from midpoint to the top yet these two parachuted in….at the top.

one certainly was value after a short while... the other was capable but spent more time outside lighting up fags, making tea and gossiping, causing drama and organising her social life on the phone….

But was getting paid more then some more experienced staff..

[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121072926#Comment_121072926

It really starts out at primary & second level & what career roles girls & boys could possibly see themselves in. You can be what you see. I’m 62, a child of the 60s who went to an all girls school up to Inter Cert, then gladly changed to a mixed school. Leaving Cert subjects were very limited in availability compared to now, there was no such thing as computer science & engineering type subjects available to either boys or girls. I went to a private school where science was taught abysmally, so badly that there were a lot of complaints from parents of girls who were otherwise high achievers. It reflected in the girls’ careers, if that’s a measure of anything.

I was born a “tomboy”, naturally interested in the workings and construction of things, and my only interest in dolls was to take them apart at the limbs and see how they were made. Back in my childhood I was constantly being told how good at art I was, to me that was incidental, part of my observational & deduction powers. Got first place in art school, turned it down, walked out of a science degree, walked out of a psychology degree, right little unfocused so and so I was. Nowadays I might have been more focussed in a different direction as careers were very paperwork based then. I loved the advent of digitalisation and find computer programming leisure time fun.

I learned to fly as a hobby, but eyesight & health etc would have made it an unsuitable career for me. I am crazy about aircraft, and I think I might have liked a simple low-paid career flying pax on Islanders to and from islands, eg Aran, Scotland. I’m not a high flying type, literally and metaphorically 😁

bringinghomethebeercan

A complicated matter no doubt, but I'd like to weight in on what I have read about, heard from people over the years. I'm a guy BTW.

I do think that in modern Western work cultures the men v women wage gap doesn't really exist in the purest form ie higher salary for the guy, lower salary for the girl assuming same role, experience and qualifications.

However you do have diversity hires, so to speak, where women and minorities will be hired and or promoted far quicker than the average man or even average woman. I've seen this happen with colleagues who had no problem with it really, apart from being paraded around in the newsletter and such. This may skew the true figure of true pay gaps as it may see a woman get a high paying job that may not have been the best candidate.

I have a friend that works in HR/ Recruitment and he says men typically ask for more money both at the initial call/ interview and at the contracting stage.

While a role might be identical, the experience and qualifications that the person brings may be worth a different salary. I recall my cousin telling me that her colleague once approached HR after she found out her male colleague was getting paid 25k more than her. They only matched her salary after she threatened media attention. So maybe there is shady inequality going on in the background to save the company a few quid, but companies are only doing something about it when it affects their image.

Toxic masculinity (if that's the right term). As a guy, we're told/ taught from a very young age either from family, tv, movies, societal standards etc etc. that we've to be the breadwinners, the lawyers, doctors, business owners you name it. Even in this day and age, its madness. Maybe and hopefully it's better now with the younger generation. Naturally we (sweeping generalisation) tend to train for and aim for high paying careers. And due those that don't achieve that are considered failures. Edit: for the record, I'm not in a high paying job and am okay with it.

This relates to a point made by a poster earlier in the thread, that men might just so happen to be in higher paid jobs. I know a good mix of people in higher paid jobs... on salaries that I'd probably never be on. I can probably say with confidence that most of them got the job based on merit rather than their gender.

Having babies is never really considered or mentioned in these surveys or debates. But the reality is time away from work equals to less experience and promotions during that time. The same could be said for anyone going on extended leave of some sort, not just women having babies.

There is the tired and old argument of but what about binmen and people working in mines and oil rigs etc etc. I think this falls into the fact that while we strive for equality in many ways, we have to accept that men and women are different and some are better suited/attracted to some things.

In summary, I don't think companies are going to leave themselves open for a discrimination case. I do think that there is positive discrimination at play here, however that's very hard to prove. (Albeit my old company's HR (mostly women btw) did openly declare and publicise internally they were lowering technical standards to attract more women into the job. This seemed a little demeaning and patronising to future women employees). But ultimately there's too many variables factors in determining a pay gap that I'd actually say it impossible. Experience, qualifications, people skills, soft skills, how to sell yourself,confidence, connections, negotiationskills and a bunch of other stuff influence pay that it'll be impossible to get a like for like comparison.

nachouser

Ah sure, I was warning people about this sort of thing back in 1922 when we gave the little dearies voting equality.

El Gato De Negocios

The average, unskilled, no more than leaving cert educated woman could probably never get much more than a minimum wage job, shop assistant etc.

The average, unskilled, no more than leaving cert educated man can earn very decent money labouring on building sites, fishermen, truck driving and various other jobs that require physical exertions that women either cannot or will not do.

pgj2015

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121072186#Comment_121072186

Yes but on first dates they kind of have to go to a Restaurant.

Now that I think about it, anytime I was ever asked out by a woman it was for drinks or a coffee, they never said for a meal, they are way ahead of us.😂 If I ever get asked out for dinner by a woman I will let her pay for both dinners as she asked, whoever asks the other out should pay.

Honey50000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121074060#Comment_121074060

Why do they have to go to a restaurant exactly?

pgj2015

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121074095#Comment_121074095

That is just the way the tv show works.

[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121071623#Comment_121071623

This has to be some of the greatest load of out-of-date and out-of-touch misogynistic rubbish I've ever heard.

And for Boards, that is truly saying something.

Honey50000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121074261#Comment_121074261

How do you know its not true he said he saw this while working in these places.

[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121074456#Comment_121074456

Oh I'm sure it appears to be true - if you're a misogynist who thinks all women are gold diggers.

Honey50000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121074497#Comment_121074497

Where did he say all women are golddiggers maybe I cant read

BrianD3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121074456#Comment_121074456

It is 100% true and it's hardly outlandish to say that female dominated workplaces with apathetic management are going to have problems with large numbers of staff taking leave every time the schools are off. Obviously I'm not going to post leave rosters from my jobs to prove a point on the internet. For the other stuff I posted about such as female hypergamy, sick leave and attitudes to stay at home dads, there is ample evidence online from various studies to back up what I've said. All of this affects the gender pay gap.

For hypergamy:

"A study done by the University of Minnesota in 2017 found that females generally prefer dominant males as mates.[6] Research conducted throughout the world strongly supports the position that women prefer marriage with partners who are culturally successful or have high potential to become culturally successful. The most extensive of these studies included 10,000 people in 37 cultures across six continents and five islands. Women rated "good financial prospect" higher than men did in all cultures. In 29 samples, the "ambition and industriousness" of a prospective mate were more important for women than for men. Meta-analysis of research published from 1965 to 1986 revealed the same sex difference (Feingold, 1992). Across studies, 3 out of 4 women rated socioeconomic status as more important in a prospective marriage partner than did the average man"

"Additional studies of mate selection in dozens of countries around the world have found men and women report prioritizing different traits when it comes to choosing a mate, with both groups favoring attractive partners in general, but men tending to prefer women who are young while women tend to prefer men who are rich, well-educated, and ambitious"