Why Do Men Earn More Than Women

As a person with a net worth estimated at approx. STG£ 85 million would it not be more appropriate for her to ask why there are such extremes of wealth and poverty in a supposedly civilised society.

Is Karen Brady really that much better a person than the average person? It smacks of hypocrisy. A little introspection might not go amiss.

Far better for her to distract the peasants and have them squabbling over crumbs than have them asking why they don't have a fair share of the cake in the first place.

A woman's work is never done!

I've heard of stories (how accurate I don't know) of women who are engaged being told by recruiters to take their engagement ring off before interviews especially when applyying for higher end management jobs as the employer will assume it wont be long before they will be off on maternity leave. Look at the stick Jacinda Ardern in NZ and Helen Mcantee here got for taking ML whilst in high profile jobs.

Since anyone can start a new company and make themselves the CEO - and institutions will happily lend capital to women, indeed there are many special women-only grant funds available now - the problem of brilliant women being under-promoted should be to some extent self-solving.

Plenty of new female-owned businesses in cosmetics and fashion industries.

In most countries women and men are paid the same for the same role and grade.

What makes the difference is the roles they may gravitate towards. For example Tech has been heavily male all through college, which follows through to the jobs after, and of course grade is affected by many factors, but evening out paternity leave should help there.

I work in tech, and it's very fair. Purely on performance. If anything women are paid slightly more for the same role

I think a lot of guys do care what a woman does for a job, if they are looking for a partner nowadays.

Women can earn the same as men, if not more. And the cost of living is so high that its more important than ever for a lot of prospective partners to date higher paid women.

The higher earners are usually those who were raised in households of high earners.

I think younger folks look for successful partners. Whatever the gender.

But maybe the older generations are a bit more traditional in that sense, yes.

I haven't seen it, have just read anecdotal stories over the years.

To pay a man more than a woman for doing exactly the same job, in exactly same set of circumstances, with exact same employment history, is illegal. Often examples don't fit this rule, and probably explains why there might be a difference in pay.

When boys do worse than girls in the Leaving Cert, the media routinely reports this as girls "outperforming" boys - yet I don't ever recall seeing the gender earnings gap being described as men "outperforming" women in the workplace.

Just the usual "Women are wonderful, Women are oppressed" nonsense.

Also, re: the civil service, a well respected poster on this forum is adamant that the civil service has positive discrimination policies to favour female candidates at the aptitude test stage.

Can someone please point me to a job in which two people can do "equal work"

Utter hypocrisy and stupidity if women select men on the basis of financial resources then complain about the gender pay gap.

I've had this discussion with a female work colleague who was moaning after there was some feminist rubbish in the media about how women were working for free for part of the year. First of all, we worked in the public service where pay scales are transparent. Secondly, this same woman had the usual female hypergamous tendencies - when I had previously asked her what she looked for in a man, answer was "plenty of money and a big car". She was fuming when I quoted this back to her after her complaints about the gender pay gap.

They have 'moved on' from that kind of thinking because legislation and cultural pressure forces them to, often against the interests of the business.

Senior managers - including cynical female senior managers, who are primarily interested in their own advancement - will try to dodge hiring such women if they can get away with it and of course keep it 100% deniable.

Call that hard-hearted, sociopathic or unfair or whatever but the business logic is pretty straightforward.

Most companies want to make as much profit as possible, leads to the question:

"Why do companies over pay men, when they could get women much cheaper to do the same thing?"

by the laws of economics if both units were the same (men and women) companies would fill with women over time.

Unless the market thinks the units are different of course.

Well done for stating the blindingly obvious. The only dumb thing here is your lack of understanding of what the thread is about. Women earn less than men because of women's own choices, priorities and instincts. They do not want men who will take time off work to look after sick children as that is not regarded as a male role. They also don't want stay at home dads. This feeds directly into the gender pay gap. It also means that if your workplace is female dominated, you are going to have major issues with staff all wanting to be off at the same time (generally when the free childminding service i.e. schools are closed)

"More than one-quarter of women surveyed (26%) said they fundamentally refuse to support a spouse's decision to be a stay-at-home parent. So even though the men in this survey are just as open to sacrificing their careers as women, women are more than three times as likely not to support the same decision for men."

https://medium.com/a-parent-is-born/survey-says-women-are-less-likely-to-support-stay-at-home-dads-48c5f15eb018#:~:text=More%20than%20one%2Dquarter%20of,the%20same%20decision%20for%20men.

Women could reduce the gender pay gap and share more of the child rearing duties with men by having children with men who work in family friendly roles. Problem is these are generally low paid and regarded as unmasculine so women won't do it. Instead they will, as I stated earlier, have children with bigshot and workhorse men on big salaries. Then, stoked up by feminist rubbish in the media will complain about gender pay gaps.

one of the buzz terms over the last 20 years is ‘ equality ‘ ….

life though simply isn’t equal…. In many situations woman have it better than men, in others such as pay it tends to be the other way around.

i worked in a job where two females were hired into our department onto the top of the grade with NO experience…. The rest of us went from midpoint to the top yet these two parachuted in….at the top.

one certainly was value after a short while... the other was capable but spent more time outside lighting up fags, making tea and gossiping, causing drama and organising her social life on the phone….

But was getting paid more then some more experienced staff..

A complicated matter no doubt, but I'd like to weight in on what I have read about, heard from people over the years. I'm a guy BTW.

I do think that in modern Western work cultures the men v women wage gap doesn't really exist in the purest form ie higher salary for the guy, lower salary for the girl assuming same role, experience and qualifications.

However you do have diversity hires, so to speak, where women and minorities will be hired and or promoted far quicker than the average man or even average woman. I've seen this happen with colleagues who had no problem with it really, apart from being paraded around in the newsletter and such. This may skew the true figure of true pay gaps as it may see a woman get a high paying job that may not have been the best candidate.

I have a friend that works in HR/ Recruitment and he says men typically ask for more money both at the initial call/ interview and at the contracting stage.

While a role might be identical, the experience and qualifications that the person brings may be worth a different salary. I recall my cousin telling me that her colleague once approached HR after she found out her male colleague was getting paid 25k more than her. They only matched her salary after she threatened media attention. So maybe there is shady inequality going on in the background to save the company a few quid, but companies are only doing something about it when it affects their image.

Toxic masculinity (if that's the right term). As a guy, we're told/ taught from a very young age either from family, tv, movies, societal standards etc etc. that we've to be the breadwinners, the lawyers, doctors, business owners you name it. Even in this day and age, its madness. Maybe and hopefully it's better now with the younger generation. Naturally we (sweeping generalisation) tend to train for and aim for high paying careers. And due those that don't achieve that are considered failures. Edit: for the record, I'm not in a high paying job and am okay with it.

This relates to a point made by a poster earlier in the thread, that men might just so happen to be in higher paid jobs. I know a good mix of people in higher paid jobs... on salaries that I'd probably never be on. I can probably say with confidence that most of them got the job based on merit rather than their gender.

Having babies is never really considered or mentioned in these surveys or debates. But the reality is time away from work equals to less experience and promotions during that time. The same could be said for anyone going on extended leave of some sort, not just women having babies.

There is the tired and old argument of but what about binmen and people working in mines and oil rigs etc etc. I think this falls into the fact that while we strive for equality in many ways, we have to accept that men and women are different and some are better suited/attracted to some things.

In summary, I don't think companies are going to leave themselves open for a discrimination case. I do think that there is positive discrimination at play here, however that's very hard to prove. (Albeit my old company's HR (mostly women btw) did openly declare and publicise internally they were lowering technical standards to attract more women into the job. This seemed a little demeaning and patronising to future women employees). But ultimately there's too many variables factors in determining a pay gap that I'd actually say it impossible. Experience, qualifications, people skills, soft skills, how to sell yourself,confidence, connections, negotiationskills and a bunch of other stuff influence pay that it'll be impossible to get a like for like comparison.