Girls are poor
As pointed out by Rye Bunny, girls are poor
The issue of differential incomes is... tough. It's fairly clearly dodgy when you have men and women in the same job with the same credentials and the girls get paid less than the boys. It used to be that this was flat-out legal, that you could pay women assembly-line workers a lower hourly wage than men (and children less still). Nowadays, the reason for this tends to be that women ask for and/or accept lower salaries than do men. Some would say that this is fair game, but it strikes me as a bit exploitive, kind of like going camping and saddling one person with most of the gear.
Then there is the issue of "equal pay for equal work." A nurse (teacher, secretary) needs six years of training and has a union job with benefits and salary worth 'x,' where 'x' is enough to take yearly vacations in Florida and put down a mortgage on a house. Most nurses are women. Let's say a specialist doctor (professor, lawyer) with an "equal" education (equal in years? in stress? in hours of studying? in the cost of education?) makes 1.5 times 'x'. Is the nurse underpaid? I really don't care. People making a salary of x or greater are amazingly wealthy in the context of history and the globe. They really don't get my sympathy when they want more money - better or more effective working conditions yes - but not cash. Besides, the nurse could've gone into stockbroking.
Comparing or levelling incomes from the perspective of who's worth more is a can of worms. Better and simpler to go with the marxist-feminist solution and remake the economy from scratch, or just provide everyone with the basics, thus undercutting the material threats of sexism. The alternative, to have calls for salary levelling based on utility-of-work will see me, the unpublished writer of far greater skill than Steven King, calling for his advances for my novels-in-progress (calling for them from who?) as well as a benefits package for being a basically nice guy.
When it comes to differences in income, the question should be one of poverty and job risk, not priviledge. What fraction of women are poor and what fraction men? Who is more likely to be laid off when they don't sleep with the boss? Who is less likely to be hired in the first place because the boss wants someone they think is hot? Maquilas pay sub-survival wages to poor women, is this exploitive of the women or unfair to the unemployed men? While men tend to be more likely to be homeless for extended periods, women are way more likely to be living below the poverty line, to have de-skilled jobs, to work in the community for free 1, and to have to support kids with pay and scarce free time.
In conclusion, we need to genetically engineer a society of uniformly gray-skinned communist hermaphrodites 2.
Thank you, and goodnight.
Graham Amy Fox
1 What about unpaid housework? Women report more hours of unpaid work in cooking, cleaning and childcare, but men tend to classify mowing the lawn, fixing the deck and de-grouting tile (I am not making this up) as “leisure.” I suppose there is always the university residence solution of “no one cleans up after themselves.”
2 Who will form a brutal caste system on the basis of eyebrow shape