Women often have only themselves to blame for the gender pay gap, because they are not as tough as men when negotiating their salary. Feminists don’t like to hear this. In an essay on finews.first, Judith Sevinç Basad wonders why they are so surprised about it.
This article is published on finews.first, a forum for authors specialized in economic and financial topics.
«Women earn 21 percent less than men,» is the key finding of the gender pay gap. It conjures the picture of a group of sexist department heads who curtail the hourly salaries of women out of sheer ill will, barring their way to the top jobs.
And while it is true that many industries still are beset by hostility towards women, the picture isn’t entirely accurate. Women tend to work in industries where the pay averages are lower, such as care and the retail business. And they also are overrepresented in the arts studies, where job prospects are worse, while men tend to choose technical studies with higher entry-level wages.
«The image of the sexist macho-boss is wrong»
And frequently it is women who take on the care duties, which pushes them into the part-time trap, preventing them from getting better-paid executive positions.
If you discount all these factors from the 21 percent, the adjusted pay gap dwindles to 6 percent. But here too the image of the sexist macho-boss is wrong, according to a recent study by British careers portal «Milkround».
Female graduates underestimate the value of their work many times over. A third of the women who participated in the survey would accept an underpaid job, while only 18 percent of male graduates would be prepared to work for a low salary.
«If you accept this feminist view, such assertions are highly sexist»
The International University of Bad Honnef (IUBH) found a similar trend to be true: women adjudge their strengths to be much lower than their colleagues and line managers. This could be the reason for why women hold back during salary talks or in applications for management positions, says Kurt Jeschke, the deputy head of IUBH.
If you accept the feminist view, such assertions are highly sexist. Margarete Stokowski maintains in «Spiegel Online» that women are pushed into unattractive professions by verbal-patriarchal structures.
«It is typical how women are denied a free will»
DIW President Marcel Fratzscher also paints the picture of women as helpless victims: women don’t get to choose their bad salary, he wrote in an essay for «Zeit Online», they simply get them. And what's more, they also are structurally disadvantaged because the state provides too little in terms of childcare.
It is typical how vehemently women are denied free will. The feminists fuel the stereotype that they actually want to overcome: the woman as a passive being, too weak to resist the patriarchal structures, to demand more pay or simply tell their partners to take on more care duties in a bid to avoid relying on the state.
Why is feminism so unfeministic? The reason lies in its obscure concept of identity, which paints the woman not as an independent individual but a homogeneous mass.
«A trend in society is being extrapolated to an individual»
If there are women in society who behave not as emancipated persons of their own volition, feminists turn a trend into a characteristic of every woman. But they are mistaken: it doesn’t mean that ALL women per se or per nature are weak only because some women allow themselves to be exploited in a low-wage industry.
An Australian café named «Handsome Her» in Melbourne makes plain where this logic can lead: male customers have to pay 18 percent more, in accordance with the country's gender pay gap, regardless if the client is a CEO of a mega-corporation with a top salary or earns a pittance as a freelance journalist.
Here too a trend in society is being extrapolated to an individual. And men don’t only disappear as people in the great mass but are also forced upon a stereotype of male more-earner and provider.
«Women have been allowed to work without the written consent of their husbands only since the end of the 1970s»
The whole uproar about the gender pay gap seems even more absurd if one looks at the numbers of the past years. The adjusted gender pay gap fell from 8 to 6 percent since 2006. And the share of women on the boards of companies in the Dax increased from 0.5 to 13.4 percent.
These achievements are huge, given that women only have been allowed to work without the written consent of their husbands since the end of the 1970s.
It won’t be long before women will have taken the seats on the boards and executive committees. Century-old cliches and prejudices can’t be removed from one day to the next, and the chauvinists in executive positions aren’t going to give up their positions of power voluntarily. It simply is a tough fight.
Judith Sevinç Basad did her studies in philosophy, German philology, new German literature and political science in Stuttgart and Berlin. She has written for various German and Swiss newspapers on the issues of feminism, islam and antisemitism. In 2018, she worked for the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque in Berlin-Moabit, which, founded by Seyran Ateş practices a gender-neutral islam. In 2019, she did a stint at «Neue Zuercher Zeitung» and currently she works as a freelance author in Berlin. The text was first published in «Salonkolumnisten».
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