Equal Pay for Equal Work

This morning I heard on CBS the continuing debate on women getting less than men for equal work; 77 cents for women compared to $1.00 for women. We voted for equal pay 50 years ago, but something has gone amiss. Almost everyone agrees this is wrong but how to address the problem varies a good deal.

One of the participants in the discussion on CBS, whose name I don’t remember had recently, written a book on the topic, the name of the book I also don’t remember. What I do remember is her argument. She maintained that women are just not aggressive enough when it comes to negotiating contracts and that they have lower expectations in terms of salary and that the lack the confidence that men have in demanding higher pay.

While I can agree there is merit with each of her points, I think there is something missing from these discussions. Her points all seem to me to say that women should be more like men when it comes to demanding salaries. Has anyone considered perhaps it should be the other way around?

CEOs, largely men in our society are getting higher and higher salaries; obscene salaries in fact. The estimates vary but I see figures in the Huffington Post to CNN say CEOs ear 127% more than the average worker to 380 times more. Shouldn’t we be talking more about the relative value of work between workers and highly paid executives? And shouldn’t we add to the conversation that aggressive male techniques of demanding more and more money are just plain greed at the expense of others?

Perhaps we should also add to the conversation that lots of folk have an exalted idea of the worth, are egotistical and are just pigs at the material trough? Men in our society are typically trained to be more competitive and aggressive than women in all types of interactions. Women on the other hand have role models that lift up cooperation, mutual respect and cooperative efforts. Studies in the past on synergistic principles (cooperative) are more effective in the long run than competitive models. We also see the company loyalty pays off in the long run as well – compare Japanese corporations to American corporations where Japanese workers on all levels stay with a company that cares for them all their lives compared to job jumping to go up the economic ladder in this country. A lot of wasted effort and training is used in our competitive model.

Instead of saying that women should become more like men in the marketplace, perhaps we should be promoting men to become more like women in the marketplace. The Shark Tank may make for good TV but does in make the best sense economically? I don’t think so.

In a social Darwinist dog eat dog type of mentality there is the allusion that the most fit rise to the top. I doubt that, perhaps we just have the greediest rising to the top, which in the long run makes us less competitive than those companies and countries with more of a yin and yang balance. For example, look at the styles of a lot of the young entrepreneurs in the electronics field that have very strange cooperative, team operated management systems that are making huge bucks and sharing them.

P.S. I now know who wrote the book and its name. The book is Womenomics by Claire Shipman and Katy Kay. Katy Kay was the one I saw on CBS and works as the BBC anchor for the BBC World News America. Claire Shipman works for ABC news. Looks like a good book.