It’s hard to think of a more important job than caring for preschool children, or elderly care home residents, to take two examples. Yet as a society we’ve quietly accepted the fact that these female-dominated roles rarely command more than the national minimum wage.
Both supply and demand matter in pricing someting. When we’ve a job that half the country can do – if we’re to be sexist and limit ourselves only to women – then the price paid for getting that job done is unlikely to be high. Because supply – or at least potential supply – is really quite high.
This is also why cooking the fries at Maccy D’s doesn’t pay much….
Yet another attempt to align different jobs so as to screech about wimmins being underpaid. Even where they perform the same tasks, wimmin don’t necessarily deserve the same pay (see football as canonical example).
It seems independent experts have found that shop-floor jobs, carried out predominantly by women, score more highly on average on a range of factors, such as knowledge and responsibility, than distribution jobs, held predominantly by men. That’s crucial, because the retail workers say they are paid £1.50 to £3 less an hour.
We will never be free until we feed the last “independent expert” to the lions.
It’s mainly women who think that work in the home is worth less. And unfulfilling – OMG sooo unfulfilling.
‘Why, even now, do we think a woman’s work is worth less?’
‘Cos the bloke is supposed to support his wife and family as well as himself??
Not only is caring for children or the elderly poorly paid it’s often done badly. But you need to be extremely bad at it to get fired.
@Germaine Burchill: did you see that in their preparation for their World Cup the Brazilian Women’s team played the Queensland under-15 boys, losing 3 – 1?
“Won’t somebody solve the Servant problem?”
“It seems independent experts have found that shop-floor jobs…”
As was proved beyond all doubt there’s no such thing as an independent expert. To be polite we might say:
“It seems that selecetd data data shows …”
But we all know the reality is:
“It seems that after we tortured the data …”
And anyway, don’t we have laws against forced labour?
“It seems independent experts have found that shop-floor jobs, carried out predominantly by women, score more highly on average on a range of factors, such as knowledge and responsibility, than distribution jobs, held predominantly by men. That’s crucial, because the retail workers say they are paid £1.50 to £3 less an hour.”
So women are so dim that they can’t even work out that a job in the warehouse is easier work and better paid than their shop floor one……………
Of course it isn’t, easier work that is, but just using the internal logic of the article if you voluntarily chose to do a job thats harder work for less pay you must be a bit dim.
I don’t know how relevant it is to this discussion but we have just had our ancient combination back boiler ripped out and a modern gas boiler fitted. Two guys came in at around 08:00 and basically worked their arses off non stop until around 16:00. The job requires multiple skills and much thinking on your feet as every house is different and the new system has to be spliced into the existing radiators and hot water system. They are basically doing design work on the hoof. This is really useful work, these guys deserve every penny that they earn while doing it. There are women who can do this kind of work but they are pretty rare.
I’ve said this before but most female engineers I’ve worked with have gravitated to systems analysis/safety/environmental roles. Basically, office roles with preplanned on site presence. Writing this at 3 fucking am on the way home from a scheduled tunnel closure.
There have been a few that I actually respected and were willing to get out and contribute rather than just whining about my paperwork. But very few.
@Boganboy – “the bloke is supposed to support his wife and family as well as himself”
That has not been the case for many years.
And anyone wondering about why apparently valuable work is poorly paid should study the famous diamond-water paradox.
It’s not at all hard to think of a more important job than caring for preschool children. Multi thousands of women commute daily to other more important jobs than caring for preschool children, leaving the preschool children to be cared for by persons not capable of performing a more important job.