Republican Lawmaker: Unequal Pay Justified Because Men Are ‘More Motivated’ Than Women
One Republican legislator in New Hampshire has a rather unique take on the equal pay issue:
A Republican lawmaker from New Hampshire on Wednesday said that women are paid less than men because they don’t work as hard or as often, insisting throughout his speech that his argument was legitimate, despite objections from his fellow lawmakers.
“Men, by and large, make more because of some of the things they do,” state Rep. Will Infantine (R) said during a speech on a paycheck fairness bill. “Their jobs are, by and large, riskier. They don’t mind working nights and weekends. They don’t mind working overtime or outdoors.”
Infantine’s colleagues’ protested almost immediately, to which he responded that he pulled all of his information from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
“This is not me,” he said before continuing to explain why women make less.
“Men work on average more than six hours a week longer than women do,” he said, adding that even among business owners, women earn less. “Women make half of what men do because of flexibility of work, men are more motivated by money than women are.”
Somewhere in what this guy is trying to say there is a rational argument, I suppose. Indeed, as I’ve noted before (here and here) there are plenty of excellent policy arguments against the “unequal pay” meme that the Obama Administration and its supporters have been pushing. But, this guy is just an idiot and, assuming he’s married, sleeping on the couch tonight.
More broadly, when Republicans wonder why they have problems with female voters, they need only look at people like this guy.
How many times can Republicans shoot themselves in the foot before they bleed to death?
Why do I want to lock this guy up with two 4-year old boys on a sugar high?
Yeah, I could see it if I squint. Problem is that it’s still wrong. Men don’t make more because they do riskier work or work nights or work outdoors. (Honestly all these things indicate low-paying work.)
They get paid more because employers can get away with paying women less. Period.
Now the question is why….and dude is no where near answering that.
Also, they forgo child-bearing.
research – A
analysis – B
presentation – D
Michael Kinsley – “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”
@Pinky: I’m thinking more B, C, D respectively.
Nights? Outdoors? As in, in the parking lot of our local 7-11?
Yes, I’d say that – on that basis – men deserve a minimum wage differential that is about 10% more than that for women.
Seriously, why and how would anyone conclude that Republicans are somehow complicit in a war on women?
@al-Ameda: Think more “Deadliest Catch”. And the data supports him.
Image all of the interns and low level staffers with Ivy League degrees and great credentials who work at progressive organization and are forced to search through everything said by Republicans and pick out the statement that warrants the daily two minute hate. It is amazing how coordinate the leftist organizations are in launching a daily two minute hate. What is also amazing is no one is thinking about how these trivial two minutes hates will affect policy and governance in the future.
I wonder what political reporting and coverage will be in a few years when the Republican Party has ceased to exist and all of the people in the media who have careers in political news and analysis have wasted years on Team Blue/ Team Red Reporting and cannot bring themselves to look critically at the dominant political structure in the U.S.
@grumpy realist: I have two that he can borrow! I’ll throw in their 6 year old sister because she’s the leader of the pack but, since she’s a girl and all, she tends to get bossy and shrill.
@Pinky: Look up what the mortality rates for pregnancy used to be…..
Also, if we’re talking about being financially risky, becoming a mother is expected to shave off up to $1M of your expected earnings from your life.
I’d also suggest you read books like “The Feminine Mistake” showing exactly how much at risk becoming a stay-at-home-mom opens a woman up to.
@KansasMom: I just shake my head when I run across someone who doesn’t think that taking care of babies or small children is hard work.
Luckily, most mothers can quickly educate their husbands by leaving them with the kids for a weekend.
P.S. and parenting is definitely NOT a 40 hr work week. This guy is an idiot.
@grumpy realist:
The now-defunct Sklar brothers vehicle The United Stats of America said in their Death episode how most things that you fear dying from (like snakes and plane crashes) are hideously unlikely to kill you, while in-home accidents and infections kill way more people per year.
@grumpy realist: You missed my point. I’m not saying that women aren’t brave, or that they don’t work hard. I’m saying that they don’t on average prioritize earning money the way that men do.
Why do you give him that much credit?
——–
Rep. Will Infantine…New Oxford American Dictionary-infantine infantile… childish.
If the shoe fits…
Ahh, so it’s their fault that they make less then men do…
@Pinky: Or like I said, men for the most part, just forgo that whole pregnancy thing.
@OzarkHillbilly: Maybe I should point out that I am saying that women, by and large, get “stuck” with that whole child rearing thing. 40 hrs per week my ass… Kids cut into that whether one likes it or not. And if the boss has to wonder whether one is going to put in the extra hours or wipe little Johnny’s runny nose…
I can tell you from personal experience that construction at the very least, is not single-parent friendly.
@Pinky: What does that even mean? On average, in fact in general, most households have two earners, mine does. Not because we are all greed heads who prioritize money over family, but because it is absolutely necessary to live even a lower middle class life. My husband would love to be a stay at home dad and is temperamentally more suited to it than I am but we just can’t afford it. I would argue that men today are actually more inclined to be involved with their kids and families to a much greater extent than previous generations. That they can’t afford to is not a values judgement on their priorities.
(BTW, I’m an RN, my husband is a carpenter. We earn roughly the same per hour, but I work all year, even when the weather is crappy. I guess he “prioritized” earning more money by supporting me while I went to nursing school.)
That Republican outreach to women is working great. I can feel the love they have for me and my fellow females, how they really “get” us. How we hate having enough money to pay our mortgage, buy food, keep the electricity on, and how completely pointless we think it is to save for retirement since there is no way we will live longer than the men in our lives.
Yep. That man really understands women.
@ Pinky
Maybe you can get a tshirt made that says “my experience with women is limited”
I watched my mother battle her way into the workforce when it was still a somewhat novel thing for a woman to do. I see how hard my wife, and countless other women I know/have known work. What utter crap this is.
@ KansasMom
Look, the little ladies just ain’t motivated the way menfolk are. Nothing agin ’em, it’s just the way God wants things. Will you go bake me some cookies now?
The basic argument of this guy is actually the same as Doug’s argument on the thread he references in his last paragarph. It is that the purported pay gap is really due to the choices of women. If women would just go into demanding occupations, work longer hours, and above all not have children, the pay gap would disappear. Despite Doug’s facepalm, the legislator’s argument is just a cruder, bigoted version of tte argument Doug made, and the policy recommendation is the same: that the government can and should do nothing to help narrow the pay gap. I’ll just repost one of my posts to the thread:
Mr. Infantino’s statements just confirm my beliefs on this point. I honestly don’t know why any intelligent working woman would vote Republican, unless they are rich (or the wives of rich men).
@KansasMom and others: On first glance, women earn 77% of what men do. Adjusting for experience, profession, hours worked, et cetera, women earn somewhere around 92-95% of what men do. I don’t know if that remaining portion is due to sexism or due to some other factor we haven’t adjusted for; I don’t know if the government can close the remaining gap without causing more damage through compliance and litigation costs. I do know that the bulk of that 23% gap can be explained by a fair labor market. That’s not to discredit the hard-working women of the past and present. It’s a statement of fact.
We all claim to want honest politicians, but when a politician says something truthful we call him a sexist. Or, arguably worse, we approach his statement as image consultants, ignoring the content of the comment completely.
@Pinky: OK, not to do that thing that the guy does whose name I can’t remember, but if anyone downvoted/downvotes the above comment, could you please explain why?
@Pinky: Have you had and raised a child? If not, then don’t be so facile with your throwing around of “choice.”
Choice isn’t choice when the culture is set up to push you into it. If you’re female, you get nagged at, day in and day out, to have and raise children, asked “why don’t you have any kids?”, told that you’re “not a real woman because you don’t have kids”, and then, when you say you don’t want kids, get told “oh, you’ll change your mind when you get older, dearie.”
(I didn’t punch the sweet little grandmotherly figure who said the last, but god was I tempted to.)
“Choice” isn’t choice when the entire damn economic system is set up on the assumption that people will spend 50 hours a week nose to the grindstone in the office and leave the task of running the family unit to Someone Else. Someone else can pick up the groceries, the kids from daycare, take the kids to the doctor when they get sick. No, we won’t allow flex-time. No, we won’t allow part-time work. No, we won’t allow you to telecommute. We’re going to make it damn impossible for you to work and have kids and then, when you throw up your hands in exasperation and quit, we’re going to blame your “choice” on you.
P.S. Basically, childraising and the extra sacrifices (financially, to one’s career) that the caretaking parent makes is a tax that the U.S. seems perfectly happy to shove off on a sizable percentage of its population while continuing to insist that the country gets absolutely no benefit from any of that uncompensated labor. Ditto for ALL unpaid caretaking labour, by the way. It’s considered “women’s work”, something they’re supposed to do “because they like it/are suited for it” and heaven forefend that we ever compensate them for any of it.
From the very beginning, the measure of GNP has left out the value of the above, which means most of our economic statistics are worthless.
@Pinky: I down voted you because you referred to what the guy said as “truthful.” He talked about men being willing to work nights and weekends, while women weren’t. Just flat wrong. I mentioned I’m an RN, well hospitals, nursing homes etc are all open and staffed by nurses 24/7. Nursing is a field that is still majority female so who do you think is pulling the 6p to 6a shift on a Saturday night? I worked Easter Sunday and didn’t get paid extra to do it. He also mentions the work men do is usually more physically demanding. So what? I can’t help the fact that my husband weighs 100 pounds more than I do and is therefore more suited to heavy lifting. But on the other hand, I can’t even describe some of the procedures that I perform every day without making him actually nauseous. So he’s, once again, wrong. I realize I’m arguing from anecdote, but I doubt I’m the only woman who takes puke detail most of the time
@grumpy realist:
And it starts really, really young.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/04/24/allowance_gap_boys_are_making_more_money_than_girls_even_before_they_re.html
And this is almost certainly mostly unconcious on the part of most of the parents. That doesn’t make it any less real.
[incidently, I googled around for rebuttals to this study, and all I found were hilariously weak “conservative” rebuttals that basically handwaive it away by pointing to a Facebook poll of parents]
For reasons rooted in centuries (millenium?) of history, women’s labor is simply less valued than men’s. Trying to explain this away by saying “Deadliest Catch!” is really weak. There aren’t nearly enough jobs in commercial fishing or other dangerous male-dominated professions to make that argument fly. The pay gap is driven by largely non-hazardous work for which men are paid more. This is partly due to outright employer discrimination, and partly due to more subtle things.
Now we can actually tackle this – and that doesn’t just involve politics – or we can pretend it’s all “natural” (as if anything about our technologically advanced human society is “natural” !!) and therefore ok.
There have been various studies that have concluded taht some of the gap is closed if you adjust for educational attainment, precise job title and so forth. The closest I ever saw it get was 7%. I’ve also seen 16% and 19%.
But you see, the point is that this extends well beyond the labor market. If we have other structural inequities, a “fair” labor market will simply replicate those inequities in the workplace. If we work on those inequities (by, say, recognizing that upaid childcare isn’t “women’s work” by default, and so forth), then a fair labor market (which, to be clear, we do not yet have) will reflect that more equal outside-of-work reality.
@grumpy realist: From one of my favourite SF authors:
Sorry about the length :-).
I was in the restaurant business for a long time. Roughly half the people who worked the night and weekend shifts were – prepare yourself for a shock – women.
@anjin-san: And why did they do that? I would guess that for many women the appeal of nights and weekends is better tips and wages (even though it usually means working harder and longer during the busiest times) and spouses or parents or whomever that are available for childcare (reducing childcare costs). Hmmm, women making decisions that are centered on how to increase their income and decrease their expenditures?Sounds an awful lot like prioritizing.
I’ve been looking around, and I don’t see any stats about night and weekend work by sex. My guess is that Infantine was using the expression in reference to putting in extra hours at a 9-5 office job.
That you would even say this leads one to think you have never worked in an office. At any rate, have fun pushing the goalposts around.
@Pinky: Well, then, he’s a total doodle-brain. There are a heck of a lot of us out here of the feminine persuasion who love having paid overtime.
@grumpy realist: You missed the point. There is statistical support for the idea that men work more overtime than women.
@anjin-san: I don’t really think of it as moving the goalposts, considering I’m the one who brought up the apparent lack of statistical support. Anyway, I’m not trying to score here, just trying to figure out what the data says. It’s kinda sad that you think of this in terms of scoring points for your team, though.
@ Pinky
You really don’t see the inconsistency here? No, I guess you don’t. Get back to us when you decide whether you are guessing, analyzing data, or reading women’s minds so that you know how important money is to them.
@Pinky: So what? Some jobs require OT, some don’t. Some family situations require the man to work the OT, some don’t. Some people are single and don’t have family issues to worry about at all. The point, which you have clearly missed by miles, is that this guy made sexist comments, that are just as insulting to men btw, based on nothing more than his idea of typical men and typical women. The fact that you are trying to find statistics to back up this discrimination is the point.
@Pinky: So it’s perfectly great that little John and Jane have a dad that works an 80-hour work week and for all they see of him, he might as well be nothing more than a wallet?
Figures….
I suggest that you borrow a small child from a neighbor and take care of him/her for a week. And then come back and talk to us about “value” and “choice”. If you dare.
@KansasMom: Where’s the break point, where we stop caring whether or not something is true simply because it offends us? It sounds mean to state, as Stonetools puts it, that “if women would just go into demanding occupations, work longer hours, and above all not have children, the pay gap would disappear.” It sounds mean, but statistically most of the pay gap would and does disappear. I’m not telling women that they should do that, or telling them that they shouldn’t. I’m saying we shouldn’t criticize a politician who says that if the data generally backs it up. The ultimate question, as I understand it, is whether women get shortchanged for equal work. The data seems to show that they do, but by a lot less than most people think. That’s important information.
@Pinky: If women were to do what is “necessary” to close the wage gap, we probably wouldn’t have the next generation.
You might want to think about that a little.
Maybe we caretakers SHOULD go on strike. Leave you with the squalling babies, tell you to deal with the screaming two-year old, absolutely refuse to do any of that stuff until we’re paid for it. You want someone to raise the next generation? Fine–we’ll do it–but you’ll have to pony up.
@grumpy realist:
Of course that’s perfectly great. That’s why I said exactly that thing when I…ok, maybe not exactly that, but I implied it in my comment about…no, I guess “implied” is too strong a word; how about “said nothing like”?
@grumpy realist: Something else – you’ve referred to my use of the words “value”, “choice”, and “necessary” in quotes, but I can’t find anywhere on this thread that I used them.
@Pinky: Where did you show that whatever-the-hell his name is said something that was “true?” You mentioned stats and the Deadliest Catch (great show but no more indicative of typical man work than the Real Housewives are indicative of the average woman). You admit that you can’t find the stats on shift work. You’ve never bothered to address grumpy realist’s points about how little we value caregivers in this country, even though the stats (no I’m not going to look them up because they are freaking obvious) indicate that unpaid caregivers also work, usually full time, and then come home to their second full time job, be it with kids or elderly parents. The point, which you are still missing, is that sexist comments like these endear the speaker to no one who doesn’t already agree with him.
@KansasMom:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/21/barack-obama/barack-obama-ad-says-women-are-paid-77-cents-dolla/
This site is a good start. To be honest, I didn’t think I had to show that the 77% statistic is false, because there are a hundred good articles about it on the web. If you want it from the left, there’s http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gender_pay_gap_the_familiar_line_that_women_make_77_cents_to_every_man_s.html and if you want it from the right there’s this http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579483752909957472 . The AAUW has a good article about it in the first year after college (I don’t have the link offhand). All of them have their own spin, but they all mention that women work fewer hours and work in lower-paid professions. I cited the numbers myself, Rob cited similar ones, and Stone laid out the reasoning so concisely that I quoted him. I singled out the one number I couldn’t find (nights and weekends) because it was an exception. I didn’t address Grumpy’s point because I didn’t think it was relevant. I understand the argument that what the guy said is sexist, but, as I’ve said, I give more wiggle room to the person who’s communicating the truth.
Truth is, this is an opinion. And not a very compelling one at that.
But that’s not whatshisnut said Pinky. Anjin lays it out clearly directly above and you doubled down with the whole “men prioritize making money” bs. I know the 77% number is an exaggeration, your problem is 90% isn’t any better.
@KansasMom:
Well, it is 13% better.
Who is more “motivated” than a single mother supporting children? Rep. Infantine is two separate idiots.