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And when it comes to Social Security benefits, female recipients get on average $341 a month less than men because of lower total payroll tax contributions, an under-recognized consequence of the gender wage gap.
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Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
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Girls, here's the truth about the Ban Bossy campaign: It's being spearheaded by a privileged group of elite feminists who have a very vested interest in stoking victim politics and exacerbating the gender divide. They actually encourage dependency and groupthink while paying lip service to empowerment and self-determination. They traffic in bogus wage disparity statistics, whitewashing the fact that what's actually left of that dwindling pay gap is due to the deliberate, voluntary choices women in the workforce make.
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Michelle Malkin
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And women, it turns out, pay a steep economic price for being mothers: according to Shelley Correll, a Stanford sociologist who looks at gender inequities in the labor force, the wage gap between mothers and childless women who are otherwise equally qualified is now greater than the wage gap between women and men generally.
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Jennifer Senior (All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood)
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At first glance, the stewardess appears to have been a reflection of conservative postwar gender roles—an impeccable airborne incarnation of the mythical homemaker of the 1950s who would happily abandon work to settle down with Mr. Right. A high-flying expert at applying lipstick, warming baby bottles, and mixing a martini, the stewardess was popularly imagined as the quintessential wife to be. Dubbed the “typical American girl,” this masterful charmer—known for pampering her mostly male passengers while maintaining perfect poise (and straight stocking seams) thirty thousand feet above sea level—became an esteemed national heroine for her womanly perfection.
But while the the stewardess appears to have been an airborne Donna Reed, a closer look reveals that she was also popularly represented as a sophisticated, independent, ambitious career woman employed on the cutting edge of technology. This iconic woman in the workforce was in a unique position to bring acceptance and respect to working women by bridging the gap between the postwar domestic ideal and wage work for women. As both the apotheosis of feminine charm and American careerism, the stewardess deftly straddled the domestic ideal and a career that took her far from home. Ultimately, she became a crucial figure in paving the way for feminism in America.
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Victoria Vantoch (The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon)
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Beyond the obvious demands - an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap - feminism must be class-conscious, and aware of the limiting culture of the gender binary. It needs to recognise that disabled people aren't inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed.
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
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Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most
important attribute for survival; the physically stronger person was more likely to lead.
And men in general are physically stronger. (There are of course many exceptions.)
Today, we live in a vastly diʃerent world. The person more qualiɹed to lead is not the
physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more
creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as
likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our
ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
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Yes, the United States and many other countries still have a gender wage gap. Yes, women still do most of the childcare. And yes, the upper reaches of power are still dominated by men. But given the sheer velocity of the economic and other forces at work, those circumstances are much more likely the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration.
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Hanna Rosin (The End of Men: And the Rise of Women)
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A 2016 study conducted by researchers at Cornell University determined that job type is one of the single greatest contributors to an enduring gender wage gap. The more "feminized" a job, the less people will pay for someone to do it.
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Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
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In a married couple’s joint tax return, the couple must ‘stack’ their wages. The higher earner (given the gender pay gap this is usually the man) is designated the ‘primary earner’, and their income occupies the lower tax bracket. The lower earner (usually the woman) becomes the ‘secondary earner’, and their income occupies the higher tax bracket. To return to our couple earning $60,000 and $20,000, the person earning $20,000 will be taxed on that income as if it is the final $20,000 of an $80,000 salary, rather than all she earns. That is, she will pay a much higher rate of tax on that income than if she filed independently of her higher-earning husband.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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helps reinforce the gender-wage gap, as working mothers are rarely able to put in that kind of time in an office.)
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Anonymous
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Systems of supremacy and domination ultimately imperil even those who, in many crucial respects, benefit from them. Racism, while it elevates whiteness, is weaponized to erode the welfare and wages that would enable white people to lead healthier, less precarious lives. Misogyny hurts men economically and emotionally, as gendered pay gaps suppress overall wages and through the trap of destructive and often violent standards of masculinity. Transphobia impacts everyone by imposing state-sponsored gender norms and curtailing freedom and self-expression. Ableism, by devaluing and dehumanizing the disabled, dissuades people from demanding the social services and public assistance they need as they cope with illness or aging. The inequality and pursuit of endless growth that drive climate change endanger the homes, infrastructure, and supply chains on which the wealthy and working class both rely—not to mention the complex ecosystems in which we are all embedded.
Solidarity, in other words, is not selfless. Siding with others is the only way to rescue ourselves from the catastrophes that will otherwise engulf us.
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Astra Taylor (Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea)
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Their conclusion: while gender discrimination may be a minor contributor to the male-female wage differential, it is desire—or the lack thereof—that accounts for most of the wage gap. The economists identified three main factors: Women have slightly lower GPAs than men and, perhaps more important, they take fewer finance courses. All else being equal, there is a strong correlation between a finance background and career earnings. Over the first fifteen years of their careers, women work fewer hours than men, 52 per week versus 58. Over fifteen years, that six-hour difference adds up to six months’ less experience. Women take more career interruptions than men. After ten years in the workforce, only 10 percent of male MBAs went for six months or more without working, compared with 40 percent of female MBAs.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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The mess we are living in is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few. Beyond the obvious demands - an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap - feminism must be class-conscious, and needs to recognise that disabled people aren't inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that services all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race race is completely deconstructed.
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
“
The mess we are living in is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few. Beyond the obvious demands - an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap - feminism must be class-conscious, and needs to recognise that disabled people aren't inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race race is completely deconstructed.
”
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
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What I want to tease out and focus on are the ways that misogyny, femmephobia, and transmisogyny come together to royally screw over femme people of many genders; how misogyny, femmephobia, and transmisogyny are part of global systems of gender that extract a hell of a lot of labor and energy from femme and feminized people, from parenting and caretaking being considered “free labor” to sexist assumptions of femme perma-availability being made in queer and trans communities. Also, the gendered wage gap is real. Cis and trans women really do get paid less than cis men, and women and femmes who are racialized, disabled, imprisoned and institutionalized, trans, rural and poor/working class get paid extra bad.
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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice)
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Transferring childcare from a mainly unpaid feminised and invisible form of labour to the formal paid workplace is a virtuous circle: an increase of 300,000 more women with children under five working full-time would raise an estimated additional £1.5 billion in tax.84 The WBG estimates that the increased tax revenue (together with the reduced spending on social security benefits) would recoup between 95% and 89% of the annual childcare investment.85 This is likely to be a conservative estimate, because it’s based on current wages – and like properly paid paternity leave, publicly funded childcare has also been shown to lower the gender pay gap. In Denmark where all children are entitled to a full-time childcare place from the age of twenty-six weeks to six years, the gender wage gap in 2012 was around 7%, and had been falling for years. In the US, where childcare is not publicly provided until age five in most places, the pay gap in 2012 was almost double this and has stalled.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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The coordinated market economies of continental Europe and Japan unintentionally hurt women when they protected labor from layoffs, because women cannot compete with men in committing credibly to human capital accumulation over long careers. Although female political representation tends to be higher in these countries than in the district-based systems of liberal market economies, gender-friendly policies have not yet made much of a dent in many outcomes of concern to women, such as female employment, the gender wage gap, male share of household work, and the ability to have children without negative career effects.
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Torben Iversen (Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies))
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But it is nonetheless disturbing to find mothers actively engaged in sabotaging one another, blind to their common ground. Think about it: women against poor mothers on welfare; women against rich Zoe Baird. Women against their husbands' first wives; mothers embroiled in endless mommy wars. Working mothers aren't "doing their job" at home, while mothers at home don't have a "real" job. The net effect of all of this belittling is to obscure the larger reality that mothers as a group are performing an enormous amount of essential unpaid labor.
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Ann Crittenden (The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued)