There’s this event that is starting to get traction in Europe (I don’t know in the rest of the world), that on November 4th, at 9:10 am, women work for free for the rest of the year due to wage disparities between men and women.
Clarification: women are not refusing pay, the event is that they (as well as men) are highlighting the fact that after that date, they are essentially working for free.
Truthfully I’m not sure what to think of this or say about it. I mean, the purpose of noting this event is to bring awareness to wage disparities and inequality. But I can’t help but feel it lacks revolutionary character. All wage labour is labour done for free, it is not unique to wage disparity among other lines.
What are your thoughts? How do we repackage this into a revolutionary outlook?
So do women actually make less money than their male counterparts in the same job?
I’ve had this explained to me that the whole gender wage gap could be explained by maths, as there are less women working, so the average salary of a woman is therefore lower on paper but not in reality or something like that.
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about this but the way I remember it makes no sense at all right now. Can anyone elaborate on this, maybe?
Women make less money. They are often hired for less, they get raises less often, they are unable to negotiate as high salaries, they often are expected to do extra labour unpaid (reproductive labour around the workplace, like cleaning, making coffee, looking after others etc), they are more often hired temporary or part-time versus full-time.
They often have to take more leave (especially for care-giving), on top of the large amounts of unpaid reproductive labour they are expected to do outside of work.
This is compounded for women with further marginalisations. Black women in America, for instance, make 58% less than white men, so when discussing the gender pay gap in America it ends up averaging out to 82%, because white women make almost as much as white men, but Black women make much less than white men.
I like how whenever I ask a question, you’re often quick to reply. In my headcanon you get a notification whenever I ask a question. ‘Babe, please watch the soup for a second. It says right here that DankZedong has a question again so I have to come in’
This explanation makes more sense. You got any theory or vids or something you recommend about this?
Little alarm goes off whenever someone needs to know about intersectional feminism, it’s like my bat-signal.
The Marxist examination of the gender pay gap is a building on the Conflict Theory (first put forth by Marx himself), which has a lot of writing on it, though you may want to look specifically into writers from your general locale to get a more firm grasp of what you specifically can do to help address it.
The always-classic Wages Against Housework by Silvia Federici is a good introduction into the Marxist feminist struggle of unpaid reproductive labour (which isn’t usually what radlibs are talking about when approaching the gender pay gap, but which is a more robust understanding of the expropriation of feminised labour).
I think an understanding of women’s place in the wage labour economy is essential to tackling the multi-faceted layers of the gender pay gap, so of course the very intro-level reading is Engels’ Origin of the Family.
Judith Orr (who wrote Sexism and the System) also has a pretty good essay on bridging feminism and Marxism that touches on the gender pay gap, though it’s over a decade old now so the statistics aren’t going to be up to date. I’ll see if I can find it.
Edit: I found it; https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/2010/isj2-127/orr.html