document updated 13 years ago, on Jul 24, 2010
For a long time, I agreed the wage gap was bad, but I nonetheless mostly ignored it since it didn't affect me as a male. But then I contemplated coming out as genderqueer at work, and around that time, I saw a study that showed that the more feminine a transgender person becomes while at work, the more money they can expect to lose.* Suddenly the wage gap hit home.
Another thing that struck me was the real evidence that women harbored internalized sexism:
Floor-holding and topic control are associated with power in the conversational dyad. The traditional assumption is that women do most of the talking, usually about nothing. Yet Spender (1980) found that typically men hold the floor 80 per cent of the time. Further, even more surprisingly, when male active participation dips below about 70 per cent both men and women assess the result as “women dominating the conversation.” Other research shows that men generate most of the successful topics in mixed-group conversation: women's attempts are ignored by both men and other women in the group (Leet-Pellegrini 1980). Fishman (1978) suggests that, in intimate relationships, women do the conversational “shitwork”: getting even minimal responses from men.
- Fishman, Pamela 1978: Interaction: The work women do. Social Problems 25(4): 397-406.
- Leet-Pellegrini, Helena M. 1980: Conversational dominance as a function of gender and expertise. In Howard Giles, W. P. Robinson, and Phillip M. Smith (eds) Language: Social Psychological perspectives. Oxford: Pergamon, pp. 97-104.
- Spender, Dale 1980: Man Made Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
-The Handbook of Language and Gender, chapter 7 (emphasis mine)
* Yes, on average, people lose income just because of the stigma of being transgender. However, transmen actually gained an average of ~2% income, while transwomen lost 32% income. Transmen didn't gain as much as transwomen lost (indicating the "transgender wage gap"), but it's still clear that femininity was valued less (indicating the "sexism wage gap").
Schilt, Kristen and Wiswall, Matthew (2008) "Before and After: Gender Transitions, Human Capital, and Workplace Experiences," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 (Contributions), Article 39.