Let's Not Become Victims

Last Tuesday was the celebration (?) of women not being paid as much as men.  It seems odd that people would go out of their way to make themselves feel bad, but that’s the way it is.  Maybe taking on the status of victimhood draws sympathy or gives one a chance to express pent up anger and resentment, but it doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem.  What’s worse was the blatant exaggeration to make the point – 20% indeed!

But that’s what politicians were telling us last summer and for many years, and there is no reason to change the story now.  CBS proudly reported:  “The gender pay gap is a well documented phenomenon” according to a new study by an organization called Glassdoor.  The lead was that a survey of half a million people in America revealed that a woman earn 76 cents for every dollar a man earns.  But they then added, the “statistic may be slightly misleading, in that it doesn't compare men and women on an apples-to-apples basis, such as comparing women with similar levels of education and experience with men in the same situation.”  Later in the article this apples-to-apples comparison yields a real difference of 5.4%.  Another source using similar calculations had come up with about 1% less.

In a different article they elaborate on this:  “Yet even when controlled for those factors and other issues (such as employers and job titles), women earn more than 5 percent less than men.”  So where does the 20% number come from, except from an attempt to purposely make the gap look a lot worse by using an invalid comparison?  Apparently trying to soften this discrepancy, they argue:  “Male preschool and kindergarten teachers earn $16.33 per hour, compared with $14.42 per hour for their female counterparts.”  Instead of providing further evidence for a deliberate gap, this should strike us as odd.  Don’t almost all kindergarten teachers belong to a union that negotiates wages for schoolteachers?  I’m sure their contracts don’t say, “Just pay the guys a little more.”  As an attempted example of a valid comparison, this statistic is incredible.

Yet people continue to make these false claims about the size of the gap, despite the ease of finding information like this from Forbes to clearly explain the misconceptions, both from faulty calculations and from poor understanding of the situation.  “President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, making sex-based discrimination in pay illegal.”  We don’t need more laws; we need better enforcement.  The government is quick to point out to a business owner when there are fewer than the required number of handicap parking spaces, but for nine presidential administrations this wage-gap problem persists.

Of course advertisers have been jumping on the bandwagon to promote the falsehood.  Several businesses showed support by offering a 20% discount for women on the wage-gap “holiday” last week.  Some say those businesses are doing this to “try to raise awareness” about the unfairness.  Get real! – They are not trying to raise awareness; they are trying to sell stuff and to develop a base of loyal customers.

Now it’s not right that any woman with the same background and experience should be paid less than any man for doing exactly the same job.  Until the 4% or 5% becomes zero the problem is not solved.  (Nor would it be right if positions were reversed.)  However, it’s also not right to intentionally mislead women by exaggerating the size of the problem as a ploy to gain support for political or commercial gain.

Something About Rights

Thinking about how people behave toward the rights of others lately can become very confusing.

About six weeks ago leading up to the election, there was quite a bit of talk about exercising your right to vote. Public service ads appeared on TV about how important it was to vote and how your vote made a difference. As is usually the case around election time, some volunteers worked with car pools and vans to make sure all voters were able to get to the polls.  Some continued to subscribe to the argument that requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls was a burden and discriminatory. In short, many people came together in an effort to make it as easy as possible for everyone interested to exercise their right to vote.

We also have a right to bear arms, yet I have seen few efforts to make it as easy as possible to buy a gun. In fact the opposite seems to be true. Exercising this right is burdened by several requirements:  background check, waiting period, etc. Where are the people who will drive me to the gun show or the firing range if I have trouble getting there on my own? – The idea of this seems silly.  There aren’t television ads encouraging people to exercise this right, and most comments are to the contrary.  Two rights receive opposite reactions.

We also have a right to trial by jury and to be considered innocent until proven guilty.  This seems to be a right everyone is in favor of for themselves, but objects to for others.  If law enforcement or courts do not do what citizens think they should have done, based on knowledge of the case picked up from the news or social media, the protesters begin demanding “justice.” Sometimes they even ignore the crime victim’s or their family’s pleas for calm and patience as the process plays out. 

We also have a right to free speech.  Supposedly you can say what you want to without repercussions, particularly from the government.  But students at various universities protest against the appearance of outside speakers because what they say may be offensive or not correspond with their worldview.  Students are supposedly in college to learn.  Sometimes their ideas are wrong, and sometimes it’s just educational to understand another’s point of view.  Instead they protest demanding a cancellation of the event or attend to heckle the speaker already having made up their minds that the person is evil or offensive.  When confronted with the idea of freedom of speech, they smugly argue that the First Amendment only applies to government interference.

It has gotten to the point where a few universities have adopted the Chicago Principle, originated at the University of Chicago.  It holds that if the speech or written statement is legal and not threatening, harassing, defamatory, or a substantial invasion of privacy, it must be considered, discussed and debated regardless of whether it may be thought by some to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.  This action tries to move the focus from some vague notion of offense or anticipated offense to one of learning.

And it’s not just students.  Society bans the use of certain words by certain people, and they can only refer to them by their initials, even when discussing the word itself.  Many people feel they must consider their word choice very carefully for fear of committing an inadvertent offense or micro-aggression.  If you refer to America as a melting pot, you are demeaning someone’s heritage and traditions.  If you refer to our Forefathers, you are subjugating half the population.  And on it goes.  Political rallies have become scenes of name-calling and accusations rather than of debate and the post-rally walk to the car features fighting in the streets.

Critical thinking leads to the conclusion that we don’t treat rights the same.  Some are encouraged, some defended, some ignored and some applied selectively.  Isn’t that worth considering?

Equality, Indeed!

On February 15, 2014 Ray Rice was arrested after he lost his temper and punched his then fiancée knocking her unconscious.  The news media and social media went crazy.  They were demanding that something be done.  This kind of behavior on the part of a professional football player was unacceptable.  What was the league going to do about it? 

The commissioner took action in the form of a 2-game suspension.  (Note:  “Former Ravens cornerbacks Cary Williams and Fabian Washington earned two- and one-game suspensions, respectively, for similar first-time offenses of domestic violence, though neither was caught on tape.”)  The news media and social media went crazy again.  This was insufficient punishment for such an egregious act.  There were calls for the commissioner’s resignation based on his obvious insensitivity.  The league went into the huddle and came out with a personal behavior policy to standardize the punishment for these outside activities instead of leaving it to the discretion of the coach, owner or commissioner to rule on each according to the situation.

On September 8 the team released him and the NFL gave him an indefinite suspension.  Since then Ray Rice has been unable to play football for any team.  He is now a free agent, but any team that signs him will, according to some reports, likely have to deal with possible public backlash.

On August 11, 2015 IK Enemkpali a linebacker for the New York Jets “sucker punched” his quarterback, Geno Smith, after an altercation in the locker room.  Smith will miss 6-to-10 weeks of the season after suffering a broken jaw from the one-sided confrontation.

Except in the sports news, there was hardly a peep.  Outside of that, the news media made very little of the incident and there was not a ripple on social media.  The coach called the behavior childish and cut Enemkpali from the team.  The next day the Buffalo Bills signed him off waivers for $510,000 for the 2015 season.

Both incidents involved a professional football player losing his temper and striking a defenseless, apparently unsuspecting person.  In one case the woman publicly forgave her attacker and later married him.  In the other case the reaction is unknown because the news coverage was so scant. 

I understand the difference between domestic violence and violence committed in a football locker room, but is it enough of a difference to elicit such vastly different public reactions?  Both broke the law.  Both are bad role models.  It kind of makes me wonder who is pulling our strings and deciding what we should get really upset about and what we should ignore or let pass.