Brasília
Milan
Why do women earn lower salaries than men?
Labor market
Hello. For some time I have been questioning why, despite performing the same duties and in some cases surpassing men in the quality of their work, women earn less than men. That is a fact. Look through the salary ranges of men and women, from elementary positions requiring only a high school education to the most specialized positions requiring the highest and best qualifications, and you will see that women’s salary range is lower than men’s. This is nothing new, I know.
Analyzing and following the family reality of friends and relatives who today are nearly a century old, in a very superficial survey, I found that the massive entry of women into the labor market occurred from the 1970s onward. Women were already in the labor market. But I repeat: the massive entry took place from the second half of the 20th century onward.
If we look at the value money (currency) had until the 1960s, we will conclude that its purchasing power was far greater than the face value printed on the banknote. How many of us did not experience having a NCr$ 1.00 note and delighting in a bag (that’s right!) full of treats?
I have been following the devaluation of labor and the ability to make money go further in one’s own hands. Let us momentarily disregard any investment or allocation of money in financial institutions. Let us focus now on the reality we experience in our daily lives.
Month after month, the purchasing power of a worker’s salary (or even an entrepreneur’s pro labore ) is reduced, not only because of the cost of living and inflation. Let us return to the beginning of the text and to the reality experienced before the 1960s. The acquisition of real estate, for example, was much more common than it is today. Have you noticed how many houses were acquired by a single person or how easily people changed their residential address for a larger property?
Civil engineering still signals economic recovery or decline today. This is no coincidence. Few assets are as highly valued as real estate. And the ability to purchase one’s own home is one of the gauges of the real value of currency compared with the number printed on the banknote. Remember the 2008 crisis in the United States? The real estate market was the clearest indicator that something was happening.
And what does all of this have to do with women’s entry into the labor market? Encouraged by a movement that claimed to be innovative, women were induced to enter the labor market by a group of people who called themselves feminists. And this group motivated these women to fight for equal rights, the right to leave behind pots, diapers, brooms and embrace calculators, typewriters, shorthand pads (worth looking up!), among other work tools. Except that this is not exactly what happened.
Women did embrace typewriters, calculators, and shorthand pads, but they could NOT abandon pots, diapers, and household duties, giving rise to a second work shift. And that shift was free, unpaid. According to the view of that feminist group. It was paid, yes, because their spouses, husbands, partners, fathers—that is, because the male figures, highly sought after in the market, received compatible or even better salaries. Competition rewarded the best professionals with the best salaries, and they had, at most, completed a technical course (the equivalent of high school—see previous post). But the education received at that time far surpassed the information received today at the best universities.
Financial degeneration thus began with the feminists. They motivated women to compete in the labor market. These women, however, were not qualified to occupy the positions in which they worked. And so they agreed to receive lower salaries than men, who had been in the market much longer and were properly trained to perform their duties. This reality persists to the present day.
It is not difficult to find, around the world, articles comparing the allowances (that’s right!) given to boys and girls. And girls, guess what, receive less. The justifications are as bizarre as possible. My line of thought is that, from childhood, girls are trained and conditioned to receive a lower amount than their male siblings. That is very sad. Especially because it is a worldwide consensus.
Do you still think your professional qualifications are not compatible with your income? Shall we talk about it? http://localhost:8083/cursos.html