The answer to the world’s grossly gendered wage gap finally may be within our grasp. Only problem is, half the population may not be too pleased with how we can fix it.
Over the last few years, disparity between men and women’s pay – and workplace gender inequality more generally – has inspired all sorts of solutions that focus on how women can rise in the ranks and make more money: Ask for raises! Don’t leave before you leave. Count on karma?
But what if the boldest solution for the wage gap isn’t about raising women’s salaries at all? What if we paid men less?
Over the weekend, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson – fired in part, she says, over conversations about pay disparity – told a reporter that the best way for newsroom leaders with a limited budget to fix salary inequalities is to “bring the guys down to give a little more to the girls”.
“I did that at The Times. No one’s happy to get a cut, but too bad.”
Too bad indeed! The Washington Post’s masthead is about to become all-male. The US wage gap has barely moved in a decade. Politicians here are deriding new equal pay laws in midterm campaign ads, and the UK and elsewhere aren’t faring much better even when they do have such laws. Given the sad status of women and work lately, it may be that a little “I don’t fucking care if you like it” is exactly what gender equality needs right now.
Some men’s antipathy toward feminism comes from a fear that leveling the playing field will mean taking away from men’s existing power. And for a long time, feminists have been sensitive to that concern, insisting that equality is not a zero-sum game – that there’s enough money, jobs and justice to go around for everyone.
But sometimes there’s not enough.
Sometimes there’s a budget to stick to, or a hiring freeze. In those cases, should leaders really throw up their hands and put equality aside until it’s more convenient? Sometimes the deck has been stacked so overwhelmingly in one direction that it necessitates extreme action to undo the damage. We’re more than happy to fund study after study about why women make less money, or share think-pieces on work-life balance. So why not put our money where our mouth is?
But Fatima Goss Graves, vice president of education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center, tells me that in the same way an employer can’t “point to tough economic times to justify paying women less”, lowering wages for men to make up for pay discrimination would be a violation of the Equal Pay Act.
“I could see coming into a new organization and recognizing that salaries are completely out of whack,” Gross Graves says. “But you can’t fix it by lowering men’s salaries.”
Bummer. Because the alternatives sure don’t seem to be working.
Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, tells me that the most common way to address the pay gap in companies “is to give larger raises to the underpaid group and much smaller or even no raises to the group that is seen as overpaid for the work being performed”.
“It appears that Jill Abramson believed the women’s salaries were unfairly low for the work they did and she addressed that directly.”
Addressing gender imbalance directly: imagine that! No hemming and hawing about how the problem started or what women need to do to fix it – management fixed it, as they should have.
Now, I never thought I’d find myself arguing against something in the US Equal Pay Act, and I understand that men may not exactly love the idea of taking pay cuts – or giving up power more broadly – in the name of gender justice. But the scales have been tipped toward the men for too long, and if fixing a huge systemic inequality means that some guys’ paychecks need to take a hit – I’m always OK with privileging the marginalized.
This kind of progressiveness at the workplace is not about giving women “special treatment” or punishing men. We need to put a final end to a long-standing injustice and redress an unmoving wrong – it may take radical action, but it’s not a radical idea.
Given the legal roadblocks, cutting men’s salaries to offer women more may not be a realistic vision for pay fairness. But the World Economic Forum just reported that we won’t see worldwide gender equality until approximately the year 2095. At that rate, women will be riding around on hoverboards before they’re making the same amount as their male counterparts.
So I’ll take a temporarily unrealistic solution over an unfixed problem any day of the week – especially Monday through Friday, from 9 to 5.
