The Pink Collar Ghetto

just how does one build a career when it's simply not possible to make "career" the center of my life.

That's from a piece called A Female Pattern Career Plan. The phrase Pink Collar Ghetto means jobs that tend to be female dominated and typically pay less than male dominated jobs and women tend to get stuck in underpaid positions of relatively low rank.

I used to work in a Pink Collar Ghetto when I had a job in insurance and there was no evil plot by the company to oppress women. That pattern existed because the company had a shockingly good track record on diversity and inclusion and they designed jobs that served the needs of women so well that the department simply attracted a lot of women workers who loyally stuck around because it served their needs as working moms who couldn't give their all to the job like men tend to do.

The conundrum that causes American women to be forced to choose between being a devoted mom or having a real career is that we have a system that expects you to go all in on one or the other and doesn't support some means to travel back and forth between the two nor be serious on a part-time basis about your career. 

Technology has changed the work landscape and gets decried a lot as RUINING things for workers. I think it's not that simple and also it doesn't have to be that way.

While extremely ill and homeless, I did work that had a terrible hourly wage well below minimum wage under circumstances where I shouldn't have had any earned income at all. I was thrilled to have that opportunity and it existed because I worked for one of those gig work platforms that have terrible reputations for being underpaid.

As I got healthier and better at the job, my hourly wage trended up. But my low income was largely rooted in my inability to get my act together, not per se lack of available work on the platform or how pay was structured.

The Pink Collar Ghetto exists due to another feminist catch phrase: The Second Shift.

This phrase captures the fact that after a working mother gets home, she needs to cook dinner, clean the house, help the kids with homework and tend to countless other unpaid personal responsibilities. And research shows women choose jobs that leave them enough time and energy to do all that.

Employers don't force women into those jobs. Women typically want kids and whether you wanted them or not, once you have them, you need to take care of them, like it or not.

There are tremendous larger societal forces and biological forces pressuring people to assume the husband will devote himself to earning the lion's share of the money and the wife will devote herself to raising the kids and other forms of women's work.

If you are an employer facing challenges in trying to get enough workers at the right price and whatever or dealing with a factory overseas in a different country with a different culture and things aren't going well, there's a substantial body of research into the relationship women have to paid jobs and all the many reasons they end up not able to compete with men and not able to earn on par with men.

Most of the research I am aware of doesn't actually agree with the narrative you typically hear that "Men are ALL sexist pigs!!! GRRR! And just WON'T hire me or promote me because SEXISM!!!" It mostly says women have babies and society has a lot of baked in assumptions that she's going to raise the kids and dad will provide for them.

European countries generally have a better track record than the US for closing the gender-based wage gap. Years of reading suggests they did that not by bullying men into some nebulous concept of RESPECT women, damn it!, but by accounting for the burden that child bearing and child rearing imposes on women.

Last I checked, the US is the only developed, prosperous country in the world without universal maternity leave. Some companies and some states have it. The federal government doesn't mandate it.

The history of feminism in the US has followed a peculiarly American pattern of angrily yelling in your face "Don't tread on me!" Women here take the openly hostile position that if you sexist pigs will get out my way and LET me show my stuff, I can too do the job like a man!

And that works for a tiny percentage of women who are able to make about 98 percent of what men make who have comparable education and experience. And it falls apart the minute she gets married or has a child, at which point women tended to make about two-thirds what men made decades ago when I was in my twenties (that figure has changed some over the years).

Two-thirds what a man makes is what The Bible says women are "worth." So for 2000 years, that figure has remained fairly stable.

European women have instead taken the position that if you help me carry this lopsided burden of child bearing and child rearing, I can more readily keep up with the men if I'm not so severely handicapped by that burden. They've had a better track record on closing the gender-based wage gap.

I'm using handicapped here in the sense it gets used in horse racing where they add weights to a horse who is too fast to skew the odds and give the other horses some hope of beating him.

Europe has done a lot more than offer maternity leave. European countries trend towards lower divorce rates than the US, you are more likely to see daycare provided by a relative (often grandma) and they do things like help cover daycare costs. It's just generally a better place for a woman to have a child at all, but especially if she wants to also have a career.

I know a lot about women's issues. I know a bit about cultural friction because I grew up in a bilingual, multicultural home.

Cultural friction is a bit harder to talk about because we have a lot of different cultures. Gendered friction in the work place is fairly universal and seems to be generally for essentially the same reasons which makes it useful as an example to give of the problem space.

If you want your business to succeed, get over your personal biases that "Those people are just LAZY!" or stupid or whatever. That's probably not TRUE.

Most people want a better life and are willing to work for it -- IF the system is designed to allow them to benefit personally and improve their lives, not just yours.

You may need to do a Public Health Event or improve housing to get your workforce up to where you want and need them. But the thing you, as an employer, have the most control over is designing a job the people will want.

And that's probably about details rooted in working conditions more than "hourly pay" per se. 

Which isn't meant to justify intentionally SHAFTING employees on pay but I've had a class in Negotiation and cash per se is frequently less important in the negotiation process than making it work practically for the flesh and blood human you want something from whose big sticking point is "I don't want to get up that early." or "I need to get off work before school ends so I can pick my kids up." or "My religion has different holidays from yours and you don't give those days off!"