Thursday, June 10, 2010

Don't Count On It

So I found this gem sitting in my twitter timeline.

The linked piece has a slideshow of different women holding signs about what they would do if they had that alleged:

There’s a $10,622 gap between the median yearly earnings of men and women. That’s $10,622 less per year for women and their families in a difficult economy.


Now the truth of that statement is that the $10,622 is a statistical median. This means half of the women have a much smaller gap or are out-earning men and the other half have a greater deficit. But the odds of a random woman on the street actually being paid 10 grand less than men of equal position, time on the job, etc. are very slim. So it is rather amusing to see random women, whom we know nothing of their actual employment situation, holding up signs about what they would do with 10 grand as if somehow they individually are owed 10 grand. And the quote implies somehow that some nefarious man group up and decided that since the market has collapsed they'll stick to women by paying them even less (never mind that men have been seeing the short end of the employment stick since the Great Crash(tm) )

I could take a picture of what I would do with 10 grand, but honestly I can't even prove that I am being paid less than what I should be SIMPLY based on my race. So the pictures of women with babies may pull at the heartstrings but I seriously doubt any of them are actually owed anything close to that amount as individuals.

Of course this slide show could explain why certain women feel that Ellen Woods is entitled to $3/4 billion from Tiger Woods.