By Mike Tront – Support Mike on Patreon
On the left, it’s a standard rallying cry that women make less money than men for the same job, and we need government to fix it!
If you’re on the right, or you’re a libertarian, you’ve undoubtedly read study after study showing that there is virtually no wage gap for woman and men in the same job with the same qualifications.
Now this could be another article boasting statistics, charts, and research showing that the gap is virtually nonexistent, and is direct result of parenting choices, or that the pay gap has more to do with men entering higher paying fields than woman. Here, I’m taking a different approach. I’m going to put two liberal narratives together and see if they fit.
Narrative One:
Business owners are greedy, rapacious, villains that only care about money and the bottom line.
Narrative Two:
Business owners are sexist, and will make great strides to make sure that men make more money than women and that women don’t move up the ladder.
If you’re on the left, I’m sure you feel that there are a few good business owners out there, but by and large these two narratives will describe most businesses. If you don’t believe this, then why do we need so many regulations, laws, and minimum wages for businesses? And of course we know there is a huge wage gap, right?!
Well, let’s put these two narratives together:
First, business owners only care about the bottom line. We can’t argue much with that. The whole reason people take the enormous risk of starting their own business is to make more money than they were making working for someone else. Why else do it? Most businesses fail, costing the owner years of lost wages and a mountain of debt. Not to mention business owners are open to law suits from customers, employees, other businesses, and the government. Business owners work way more hours than they did working for someone else, and with much more stress.
With all this risk, stress, and razor thin margins a business owner has to deal with, are we to believe that owners are so sexist that they are willing to risk losing their business just because they can’t stand to see a woman earning as much as a man?
The fact is, if there was a true wage gap, and if businesses could get the same production out of a woman as a man for 3/4 of the pay, no man would ever get a job!
Put yourself in a business owner’s shoes, two people of equal skill and education are willing to work for you and one will accept $20 an hour and the other will accept $15 an hour, who are you going to hire every time?
If you’re greedy and only care about money, you’re going to hire the person willing to work for $15 an hour. The above cartoon couldn’t have said it better.
In fact, there are many wealthy, liberal business owners in America. Why do they even hire men? Why wouldn’t they just hire woman and pay them 90% of what men in the industry make? They’d get just as much production, but have tremendously more profits. They would put all of the sexist businesses out of business. They’d be able to provide customers the same services and they’d be able to do it at a lower price, women would be making more money, and sexists businesses would be losing money.
These terrible, sexist business owners would have two options at this point. Either lower the salaries of what they pay men, or bring up the salaries of what they pay woman. Or some combination of both.
So which is it liberals, do business owners just care about making profits? Or are they so sexist that they’re willing to lose profits just to keep woman down? It can’t be both.
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