Women Workplace Discrimination

Rebuttals: 1. Legislation and Markets a) No contradiction made A contradiction occurs when two statements result in a conclusion is both simultaneously true and false at the same time. The two statements: “Legislation already protections unfair discrimination in the workforce” and “Underpriced labor is unlikely to occur in a relatively free market” do not contradict one another. Instead, the legislation argument creates further doubts that the wage-pay gap is due to discrimination. If readers are convinced that capitalism principles work, then the legislation argument does not change that capitalism principles does not work. Proof of passing this legislation is not proof of its necessity; it just creates further safeguards and redundancy. The legislators are not omnipotent, but made up of fallible people. As economist Milton Friedman notes, the government spends money in one instant for anti-smoking propaganda and also spends money on tobacco subsidies, two contradictory causes [1]. b) Businesses acting irrational. I did not state that businesses must act rational, only that it is unlikely that underpriced labor to occur in a relatively free market. In the case of stocks, individuals might believe a stock is overpriced or underpriced. However, the net result of these actors creates a situation in which it is unlikely for a stock to be undervalued. The result is that people cannot easily take advantage of undervalued prices for their own advantage. Even if some businesses do discriminate based on gender, other businesses can take advantage of their systematic errors and profit from it. So not only would businesses have to be acting irrational, the vast majority are acting irrational to such an extreme circumstance that nobody thought of the business model to hire all women to take advantage of the price difference. This is known as arbitrage and is practiced frequently in the market [2]. If PRO truly believes that women are undervalued in the marketplace, then he should start his own business, hire all women and recoup the profits. PRO is unlikely to do this, because he does not truly believe that the market undervalues women. So why are only 14% companies that originally existed on the S&P 500? In reality, this fact does not prove or disprove whether companies act rationality or not. However, why is Blockbuster no longer around? It’s because there is no longer a demand for renting movies at the store. Instead Netflix and Redbox have made movie rental stores obsolete. Yet, there was a real demand for Blockbuster beforehand, so it existed. The goods demanded 50 years ago are not the same goods demanded today. So why didn’t these companies come up with these new technologies? It is extraordinary difficult to find these “opportunities” for innovation, and just based on sheer probability, it’s more likely for an outsider to discover it, since there are more innovative people outside the company then in it. This indicates how difficult it is to find opportunities to increase efficiency. A simple idea is not easy to come by and the idea of simply taking advantage of underpriced labor of women would not work. 2) Wal-Mart Lawsuit Pro’s sources do not back up many of his claims. It shows no indication that the reason the lawsuit didn’t go through was because it was “too big to fail”. Nor do Pro’s sources demonstrate that women at Walmart women work longer hours than men on average. All it shows is that women work there slightly longer. I urge readers to take a look at Pro’s source themselves and read it. You won’t find anything to support these claim. However, I do have a source, the Supreme Court decision itself. The “we don’t discriminate based on gender” was an argument that the Walmart lawyers used, and is found in the primary source of the court case itself. The court case states: “On the facts of this case, the conceptual gap between an individual’s discrimination claimand “the existence of a class of persons who have suffered the same injury,” id., at 157–158, must be bridged by “[s]significant proof that an employer operated under a general policy of discrimination,” Such proof is absent here. Wal-Mart’s announced policy forbids sex discrimination, and the company has penalties for denials of equal opportunity. Respondents’ only evidence of a general discrimination policy was a sociologist’s analysis asserting that Wal-Mart’s corporate culture made it vulnerable to gender bias. But because he could not estimate what percent of Wal-Mart employment decisions might be determined by stereotypical thinking, his testimony was worlds away from “significant proof” that Wal-Mart “operated under a general policy of discrimination.” In a company of Wal-Mart’s size and geographical scope, it is unlikely that all managers would exercise their discretion in a common way without some common direction. Respondents’ attempt to show such direction by means of statistical and anecdotal evidence falls well short.” [3] Walmart hiring policy favors women over men. CON’s own source indicates that women make up a larger portion of their workforce, despite women making up less of the total workforce. Women make up nearly all the workers in both the men’s and female’s warehouse. Thus, since women make up a higher portion of unskilled workers, they obtain lower wages. As stated previously, women would rather have a more relaxing career and prefer those tradeoffs over higher pay, and men are pressured to obtain high-paying jobs that are undesirable. It is likely that most women would not want to work in these positions that are quite stressful and required long hours: “[Vicky Rice's] husband [who died of a heart attack] was incredibly overworked, as many Wal-Mart managers are. I believe he was an assistant manager, and assistant mangers are forced to work 70-80 hours a week. In some sense, they are more exploited than hourly workers, because they are salaried, so they don’t get overtime.”[4] It should also be noted that Walmart only consists of 1.4% of the entire labor force[5], not a significant amount of the labor force at all like PRO claims. 3) It’s all about the babies Of course, neither PRO nor I agree that babies directly cause a male-female gap. Instead PRO believes it indirectly caused it. I have cited 21 reasons why men earn more than men. The reason PRO believes babies effect the male-female gap is that women will more likely to work uninterrupted, work in a field that does not requiring updating, and work less hours as a result of having a baby, effecting 3 out of the 21 reasons why men work more listed. However, these 3 effects are not guaranteed to occur as a result of having a baby. It is only assumed? But why. Well, working fewer hours and taking time off from work due to child rearing can be considered a luxury. If women need money, they will not do these acts. As the graph shows, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be single-parents. This means that a black women with more children are less likely to work less hours, or take time off since she is the main source of income for her child. She has to work more and the baby will not affect this. Whites and Asians also are more likely to be college educated[6], which allows males to have the potential to earn more money, thus creating the gap. On average, women are less likely to try to take advantage of this potential since they on average do not value money as much and there is already a male in the household that makes a significant portion of income. [1]http://tinyurl.com...[2]http://tinyurl.com...[3]http://tinyurl.com...[4]http://tinyurl.com...[5]http://tinyurl.com...[6]http://tinyurl.com...