Today is International Women’s Day. Over time, March 8 has become a festival of demands marked by a cacophony of grievances and a lament of victimization.
Patriarchy
In essence, neo-feminists are taking advantage of this Day to bring out the refrain of oppression and brandish the wage gap as the perfect symbol of the patriarchal conspiracy against which all women should fight.
To convince, they point out that for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns around 90 cents. This statistic is certainly reliable, but it in no way allows us to conclude that women are victims of sexism or any salary conspiracy.
By invoking the wage gap, neo-feminists are mistaken and deceiving us.
On the one hand, no honest analysis can rely exclusively on an average, because this statistic betrays reality by being sensitive to extreme values, by ignoring the complexity of distributions and, above all, by ignoring context.
On the other hand, like the wage gaps between workers of the same sex, those between men and women are the result of a complex reality dependent on numerous factors.
Choice
Claudia Goldin, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics, has also shown that, contrary to neo-feminist propaganda which explains everything by discrimination, wage gaps mainly result from personal choices.
These choices concern the sector of activity, the type of employment, work flexibility, professional interruptions, as well as professional constraints and lifestyles deemed acceptable by men and women.
According to Mme Goldin, a multivariate analysis makes it possible to nuance reality and minimize the discrimination dimension. Moreover, if women really receive 90% of men’s salaries, shouldn’t employers give priority to hiring them?
But let’s not ask the patriarchal conspiracy theorists to think. It’s so much easier to reduce all the intricacies of life to male oppression!