I heard about a lot of companies who hire women specifically so they can pay them less.
That make me wonder, in a perfect world where there is no pay gap, what would be the effect on woman employment rate.
Would companies hire equal percentage of workers from both genders or would something else happen?
I have never once seen a pay scale that has seperate grades for women. The “women make less” statistic is weighted by women taking time off to raise children, that they are more likely to be primary caregivers and less able to do overtime and so on. (Which yes does figure into the problem)
That isnt to say that in jobs where staff can negotiate their own salary or recieve offers there IS DEFINITELY a problem with women recieving lower offers. Also being offered less chances for advancement, etc. But there isnt a company that would ever have the balls to deliberately put a lower pay scale for women on paper these days.
Women of color do get paid way less, even compared to white women
Yup. That’s kind of the rub. It’s not a pay gap on paper anywhere in the sense of pay scales, it’s a bunch of societal biases that lead to overwhelmingly common “emergent” systemic behavior that skews women towards the lower end of the pay bands they coexist with men in while also often denying them promotions into higher positions and pay bands that are more frequently given to equal or lesser skilled men.
Very few of the individual cogs in the system are intentionally aiming for this outcome, but it’s the combination of a shit ton of biases built up over generations about women and how they are expected to behave that all smashes together into the shitty end result of pay discrepancy along gender lines.
Jobs that typically women do also pay much less. Regardless of if the women in question take any time off to raise children. Or if the individual employee happens to be a man.
Teachers for example. But also human services workers and similar jobs. And this doesn’t get into hiring biases for high paying jobs, like management positions in any field, which tends strongly to break for men.
The idea that women take time off from work to raise babies, and therefore they get paid less, isn’t the issue, in other words. Women don’t take 25% more time off then men. And not all women are having babies. But we’re affected by the gender pay gap all the same.