I grew up with a close sister, and the two of us would often spend as much time braiding each other’s hair as we would yanking it out of each other’s heads amidst sibling fights. Sometimes, to be especially annoying, we would play what I refer to as the blame-game.
It’s that ever-frustrating bullying tactic where one forces the other to slap themselves across the face while tauntingly singing, “Why are you hitting yourself?”
While no physical punching is involved, denying wage discrimination toward women looks like a similar game. In a world were women face discrimination in their efforts to be fully respected adults, gender wage gap denial is about the blame game.
The wage gap is a highly complex and nuanced problem that varies drastically by demographics among women, looks different based on occupation and family makeup and changes over time. But retort to this established field of economic research is often doused by a sexist blame-game that makes the wage gap possible in the first place.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research in 2015 found that white women earned 75.3 cents for every dollar white men earned annually.
That gap grows for women with intersections of marginalized identities, with black women earning only 63.3 cents for a white man’s dollar annually and Hispanic and Latina women earning 54.4 cents. Asian women also face fewer earnings, earning 84.5 cents for every dollar a white man earned per year. Wage disparity still occurs in comparing men and women of the same race.
Economists and academics know well that a pay gap exists. Even so, less informed conversations conducted by unreceptive commentators prove the most formative on wage gap opinions. Among those who concede to the facts, the prevailing and problematic consensus happens to be that, yes: A gendered wage gap does exist, but it exists because of the choices women make.
A 2016 Forbes op-ed exemplifies this well, claiming the common 78 cents statistic “doesn’t take into account a lot of choices that women and men make.”
But for the discriminated majority, choices are not so simple. Women may be isolated from higher-paying jobs due to structural barriers like rampant sexual harassment and misconduct in the workplace or representation of women in affluent fields to begin with. After all, you can’t be what you can’t see.
Beyond choice, discrimination within the workforce plays a factor. Economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn estimate that half of the wage gap today is made up by occupational segregation and further segregation by industry.
With structural shuffling of women into lower-paying jobs traditionally deemed “women’s work” or discriminating on the job, it’s illogical to place the onus on them.
We blame women for being stuck between a rock and a hard place instead of questioning societal institutions and attitudes that reinforce gender discrimination and taking accountability for our contributions to them.
Denying the gender wage gap, either by its very existence or its causes, means taking part in gender discrimination and gaslighting women to believe our inhumanity is their fault.
By acknowledging the prevalence of wage discrimination and other inequalities, we normatively acknowledge that this is not OK, despite deniers all around saying everything’s fine.
jsbourkl@umail.iu.edu
