Wage Gap Equal Pay Quotes

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.

A more modern literature formalizes the notion that political equality equals economic equality. This literature builds from the well-established finding that political parties have a tendency to coalesce around the median, or representative, voter in their policy platforms. Because the distribution of pre-tax and transfer income is inevitably unequal throughout the world, this puts class conflict waged between the rich and poor at the center of political life. That means that under democracy there will be redistribution between social classes: the rich will pay higher taxes than the poor and the poor will receive transfers that will narrow the gap between them and the rich (Meltzer and Richard 1981).

We must therefore distinguish the necessary feminist demand for “equal pay for equal work” from the equally important need to keep some parts of our social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace. We must not convert all gift labors into market work lest we wake one day to see that universal market in which all our actions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price. There is a place for volunteer labor, for mutual aid, for in-house work, for healings that require sympathetic contact or a cohesive support group, for strengthening the bonds of kinship, for intellectual community, for creative idleness, for the slow maturation of talent, for the creation and preservation and dissemination of culture, and so on. To quit the confines of our current system of gender means not to introduce market value into these labors but to recognize that they are not “female” but human tasks. And to break the system that oppresses women, we need not convert all gift labor to cash work; we need, rather, to admit women to the “male,” money-making jobs while at the same time including supposedly “female” tasks and forms of exchange in our sense of possible masculinity.