by Renee Mitson
Renee is a public relations and social media professional who recently moved from Boston to Toronto. She has a B.A. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Simmons College and a M.A. in Media Production from Ryerson University. She is interested in confronting gender issues in the workplace and creating a strategy for gender equality in the business world.
Many will argue that men and women are paid not only equally, but also fairly. The first point they make is usually that men work longer hours, followed by the fact that women like comfortable positions that don’t involve risk, and then the entire discussion is closed up in a tight little package with the argument that women are busy having babies, and what are men doing that whole time? Right, working.
We can argue till we are blue in the face that women in the SAME POSITION get paid less (such as my friend who got offered 11K less than her fellow graduate and friend for the same position when she had a higher GPA and more experience in a computer engineering position). We can argue that women do not “choose” lower paying jobs, and that last year more women graduated from law school than men. Going by that statistic and the one-sided logic alone, it should only be a matter of months before women are out-earning men, right?
We all know this argument is crap so let’s not insult ourselves by having it. Read more
