#unequal pay

Teach young girls to code, build, calculate, and bank. The only thing is—as we saw with the programmers and the secretaries—an industry often diminishes in status when more women enter it. The problem isn’t that the men have snatched all the high-paid jobs: The problem is that certain jobs are high paid because they are filled by men.

The nineteenth-century hosiery industry, for example, employed both female and male workers. The women, however, would be put to work sewing up the toes of the stockings, which was the technically more complex task. They also turned out to be rather good at it, and because they turned out to be rather good at it, their employer started to view the ability to sew up a toe as a “naturally feminine attribute.” And if something was a “naturally feminine attribute,” then it needn’t be valued economically as a formal “skill”. Which meant the women could be paid less. This was all very practical. For the factory owners, at least. This way of reasoning put women in an impossible position. If an individual female worker was bad at something, it was proof that womankind as a whole should be paid less. Just look—these womenfolk can’t do the job like a man! But now, simultaneously, the exact opposite was being argued: If a female worker was good at something, it was proof that women should be paid less. Whatever her aptitude for the task, it was taken as proof of why she should earn less money. The trick was always to define anything a woman excelled at as a “naturally feminine attribute”. She simply couldn’t help but have a biological knack for closing the toes of silk stockings, programming computers, or looking after the elderly. This mode of thinking persists to this day.

Gender Bias in Workplace II – Blog Post #381 by Asrar Qureshi