What if the Wage Gap Myth Were True?

I’ve only been living as a woman now for a year and a half now, and I noticed my current job actually pays more than any of the jobs I had as a man.  It’s really strange that I didn’t see my paycheck fall to 77 cents of the dollar it used to be.  Of course none of my trans girlfriends experienced this either.  Do we get grandfathered (or grandmothered) in?  If you were a guy at one time, do you get to keep your guy-level pay?

That started me to thinking.  What if the Wage Gap Myth were true?  Now, remember, the “Myth” part of the Wage Gap Myth isn’t about how much women get paid!  As a demographic, women really do get paid less than men at the end of a fiscal year – the myth is that it’s because penis.  The reality is that it’s due to women’s choices, as nearly every single study into the matter has so far confirmed, or failed to refute.

If the wage gap really happened for the reasons Third Wavers tell us it happens – because women are less valued than men in society – it would mean that tens of thousands of companies all across the US are blatantly breaking Federal Law on a weekly basis, month after month, and they somehow all get away with it.

We never once hear about an IRS tax audit which found a company breaking federal law by paying women less than men.  Of course, that’s because the IRS is run by rich white men.  Don’t forget that patriarchy!

Fatalities in the work you’re seeing right now is 60 TIMES HIGHER than the national average. And we really can’t think of a reason why they’re paid more? Except that they hate women?

And what about all the other groups that could easily sue a company for that sort of thing?  I mean, why doesn’t a feminist group ever go to the ACLU and sue a company for paying a woman 77 cents for every dollar a man makes?  Oh – that’s right.  The ACLU is part of the goddam patriarchy too.  Dammit!

Okay what about class action lawsuits?  Why don’t *those* ever happen?  I mean why do I never hear about a company facing serious charges for paying women less if this really happens because women are just seen as less valuable, and not because women work part time twice as often as men, and call in sick 3 times as often as men, work fewer hours than men, and the dozens of other reasons every study has consistently found?

Then we have to ask why companies don’t just start hiring women all over the place.  I mean if you only have to pay them 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, imagine the savings!!  An entire department of women would save a large company a FORTUNE every year!  To make this work, Third Wavers will tell you it’s because society loves men so much, and thinks men oh so over-the-top goddam awesome, that men get hired *anyway*, despite that they cost more, and of course qualifications don’t matter.  Penis is all that counts.

Unless you’re trans!  Then you’re just unaffected for some reason.

The next thing we have to ask is why companies have such stringent sexual harassment laws, and why a man accused of harassment can be shown the door with just the point of a finger and a word from a woman, if men are valued, and women aren’t, and rape culture is supposed to make that kind of thing okay.

Here, the conspiracy theory starts getting pretty tangled.

Lets see… maybe it’s a cover?  Maybe all the men everywhere are secretly working together to make these harassment laws – along with rape shield laws, and created an entire Office on Violence Against Women, a part of the Justice Department, as a smoke screen?  That way they can pretend to care when they don’t?  Seems like an awful lot of work to pay women less just because you secretly hate them, and all companies everywhere are doing this as a collective passive-aggressive way of expressing their hate for someone having a vagina.

But you know what’s really proof of misogyny?

The fact that spell check sees “grandfathered” as a word, but “grandmothered” has a red squiggly line under it.

… … I think I might have just gave everydayfeminism.com an idea for their next post (which also has a red squiggly – dammit, spell check is part of the patriarchy!!!)