this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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The idea that men make more than women for similar jobs with similar experience is a myth that needs to die.
The idea was based on flawed data from the get-go, but it has persisted because it is an easy way to rile up the troops.
Whoo boy.
I used to work in the financial industry, specifically in a program geared toward women (trying to make financial services more approachable and inclusive). Much of their published "educational" material is about the harsh financial realities of being a woman, and the writers keep repeating this falsehood ... as if the phrase "controlled pay gap" is profanity.
Don't get me wrong, we should still be mindful of bias. We should acknowledge the pressure on women to take career breaks as caretakers (and, on the flip side, the pressure on men to be primary wage earners). And it's perfectly valid to question whether pink collar work is undervalued and underpaid because these are traditionally female occupations.
But the women I worked with (most of them VPs in finance) simply preferred to believe that they were underpaid because of their gender. No matter what dollar figure you offered, no matter the industry/company/job role/etc., they would firmly believe that having a penis = 20% pay bump.
Like ... that's not how averages work ??
We live in a time when everyone wants to be a victim.
I think anger feels more safe than sadness or fear, and not just for men. If you make an injustice narrative to elements of your life, you get to paint the surrounding moments with anger. It removes some of the sadness and fear from the hours of your day.
Also anger’s a directing-forward emotion. Anger motivates a person toward a thing, whereas fear motivates away. And sadness demotivates.
Anger is literally some people’s fuel for the day, because their desire isn’t strong enough to motivate them forward.
In order to have desire moving one forward, one needs a clear picture of what they want. But our world is so complex and fast-changing, that pictures of desired future states are hard to form.
As the world gets more complex, replacing the goal with an enemy allows one to keep moving forward without having to keep re-evaluating the goal.
With an enemy the goal is simple: warfare makes sense to us.
With something that would create stent desire, the goal is complex: good health and being of a certain role in the community and etc etc.
If people make simple desire goals, it can work. But they’re less profound so less powerful. “I want to have a red truck”. A person can work toward that but soon you have the truck and oh gee that’s nice but it’s not very fulfilling.
Having an enemy is simple, but hard. Which is perfect, because it lets you keep your eye on the same ball for a long time and build up momentum chasing it.