rshapiro@bbn.com (06/21/89)
The naive faith in that capitalism will cure the pay differentials between men and women is kind of charming, but hardly realistic. The process is more "dialectic" (if you'll pardon the expression) than that. As a particular kind of job becomes defined as a "woman's" job, it's status and pay decrease, which lessens expectations and self esteem of women entering the workforce, which lessens the likelihood that wage demands will be made. Thus jobs which become identified as women's jobs can safely pay less and offer less in the way of status etc. The reason all of this can work so smoothly is that we still, as a society, imagine that women don't really need to be in the workforce, that they could, if they wanted, be doing (unpaid) wife&mother work. Our tax structure favors this and the whole motherhood ideology very strongly pushes in this direction. So what's the upshot of all of this? Wages can be kept lower, the female workforce can be kept quiescent and yet the so-called women's work, paid and unpaid, still gets done efficiently. So much for the magic of the marketplace.