~ A few days ago Simon told me that he finally had his Visa approved, and so will be coming State side for a while (mostly for school in Vermont). Before that starts though, he made time for a flight out to Portland! We finalized the flight information today, and he’ll be visiting from June 16th to 21st. I’m pretty excited, though I am not sure if Portland will be ready for it.
~ Yesterday was “Equal Pay Day.” It’s April 20th because the average woman’s wage is 77% that of the average man’s wage for the ‘same job’ – therefore, for women to make as much as men do in a year, they would have to work until April 20th of the following year.
~ I have spent a lot of time recently learning about the wage gap and getting different sides of the story. I want to share some of what I’ve learned, and to share a few thoughts on the matter.
1) The belief that women make 77% for the “same work” as man is most certainly false. To make the point, let’s look at how the data is collected: The U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics creates this number by asking what your gender is, how much you are paid, and what your job title is. The resulting number is that women are paid 77% of what men earn in the same time period for ‘same work.”‘ Does anyone besides me notice the glaring lack of controls used in this study? An honest gander at more in depth studies of this issue will show you that, any time a characteristic is controlled between men and women (say, number of years in the workforce), the wage gap gets smaller. So no, for the 77% statistic to hold, women and men are not equal workers doing equal jobs.
2) The belief that women are not discriminated against is most certainly false. Extreme “anti-feminists” will often argue that, when you control for all factors like the one mentioned above, that you will entirely eliminate the wage gap. I don’t think this is true – women and men are certainly treated differently to an extent, and we need to keep focusing on the differing treatment in order to dispel it.
3) This last point has to do with two different phrasings that I used in the preceding paragraph. Notice that the first sentence says “discriminated against” and the last sentence says “treated differently.” It upsets me that the wage gap is always referenced in the former sense as opposed to the latter. It belies the biggest myth of all: The belief that more money is always better. It is only with this assumption clasped firmly in hand that people can say that the wage gap discriminates against women while discriminating for men.
~ This error in thinking prevents us from asking some powerful questions: Why is it important for men to earn so much money? Could it be that men feel defined by how much money they make? Are some prisoners to their careers? What kinds of things might a man sacrifice in order to make more money – health, sleep, family time, dignity? Once we start asking these questions, we might discover the true nature of the wage gap:
~ Money isn’t everything, and it always comes at a price.
~ I’m starting to accumulate a lot of plants, and they are all doing quite well. I wanted to write a short post to update (via pictures), the state of some of my up and coming favorites.
I turned an expandable "shoe-shelf" sideways and made a DIY plant tower.
My African Violet is growing and blooming again - its flowering almost constantly now, I had to strip dead flowers off of it to make room for the new ones.
Speaking of flowers, the Christmas Cactus is blooming again too. This is just 4 months after its first flower.
I decided to try my hand at growing herbs. If I decide they're stable, I'll start harvesting from them for cooking. From left to right: Rosemary, Oregano, Chives.
I also got some mint plants. I'm hoping they'll act as a sustainable air freshener, in addition to contributing to the odd Mojito.
One of the cuttings of Dumb Cane is starting to grow. The full story of this plant requires a separate post. Note that the plants shown in the pot are not Dumb Cane, but Air Plants, related to Bromeliads.