Les écarts de salaire persistent chez les conseillers juridiques

Compute this
Women get on average 78% less then men, and they are 100% more likely to get pregnant and take extended maternity leave. I'm sorry but it's a fact and it's costly for a company. They never factor that in when they do these surveys. Would that explain the gaps, maybe? Just saying.

Pas politiquement correct
Le sexe comme seul critère de comparaison donne un portrait teinté de la situation. Outre le fait de porter la seule responsabilité pour la gestation d'enfants, s'ajoutent des choix de vie. Je travaille dans un cabinet où les jeunes femmes travaillent plus fort que leurs collègues masculins. Elles sont généralement meilleures dans la majorité des aspects de leur pratique. Et elles sont mieux payées, ont de plus gros bonus à la fin de l'année. Leurs statistiques justifient leur meilleure rémunération. Certains avocats mâles se concentrent sur leur vie de famille, pas de soirs ou de weekends au bureau, et acceptent une rémunération plus basse. Si par choix de vie les avocates décident de travailler moins, de se concentrer davantage sur la vie de famille, elles ne pourront (et de ne voudront) pas se maintenir en haut de la courbe de rémunération. Ça n'est pas aux cabinets de subventionner entièrement et indéfiniment les choix de vie de ses avocat(e)s. Ça n'est pas sexiste, c'est mathématique.

Agreed
People (sometimes, even people one would label as "intelligent") need to stop perpetuating the myth of the "gender wage gap". It just doesn't exist.

When they say, in Canada or in the U.S., women make 78 cents or 80 cents for every dollar a man makes, do you know how they arrive at that conclusion, statistically? They look at every male salary reported to the tax authorities, and every female salary reported to the tax authorities, cross-reference this with labour department data, and calculate the "mean male salary" and "mean female salary". Inevitably, the mean male salary is somewhere like 25% higher than the female one, and idiots everywhere claim that there's an unfair pay gap. Of course there's a pay gap! But this gap exists on a societal/macro level, not at the level of individual jobs. Ergo, the man and woman both hired to do the exact same job, with the exact same functions/responsibilities/title, for the same amount of hours per week, in the same company, are making the same base salary. If this were not the case, and corporations truly could get away with paying women substantially less than their male counterparts for the same work, why on earth wouldn't all the major corporations in the world have liquidated all their male employees and replaced them with an all-female staff? They would save so much on overhead!

There are several reasons justifying why, on a societal level, men make more, on average, than women. But this does not in and of itself mean that some great injustice is being perpetrated against women...

For example, men are more likely to work longer hours and do overtime. They are more likely to work outside, to work dangerous jobs, to work in remote locations, and are more likely to consider moving for a job prospect. They are more likely to take up a trade. Men are also more likely to work in fields (S.T.E.M., for example) that are more easily scalable, whereas women are more likely to choose fields of employment where they deal with people (as opposed to things), which cannot be scaled so easily (health care and the humanities, for example). Psychologically speaking, it has also long been settled that women tend (statistically) to be generally more agreeable than men. Therefore, this may penalize certain women who are less likely to "aggressively" demand a salary raise.

Also, let's not avoid the elephant in the room. Many women (not all, but a considerable amount) choose to temporarily leave the workforce in their late twenties or early-to-mid thirties in order to start families and, you know...actually spend time with those families! Several of them, as a question of timing, leave positions where they either had reached or were beginning to reach the higher salary levels (think junior partners in firms, for example). This isn't the doing of some pay gap "patriarchal tool of oppression" orchestrated by men! Some women want to be mothers and have families, and since they are the only sex in our species that gives birth, unfortunately they must leave the workforce to do so, and they end up earning less money. This isn't an injustice. We can debate about what would be the optimal and fair way to reintegrate these women into the workforce, should they desire it, but that is different than simply yelling "gender pay gap!" and patting yourself on the shoulder for how progressive you sound...

Lastly, let's not forget that since the figures that the pay gap myth are based on are government tax statistics, the mean male salary is skewed upward by a very minute percentage of incredibly high-achieving, highly-productive men who earn a ridiculous amount of money: CEOs and other executives, professional athletes, and super-successful entrepreneurs etc., who disproportionately tend to be men. But their experience is hardly representative of the typical "male experience" and is a weak argument to be used to justify the existence of a "gender pay gap".

So let's put this one to bed, people. But mostly, I'm expecting you all to tell me what a sexist pig I am, even though I'm a woman and, let's face it, most of you probably assumed I was a man while reading this...maybe you're the one who needs to take a long look at themselves in the mirror ;)

Encore une autre occasion ratée de ne pas commenter
Espérons qu'une représentante de la gent féminine a eu l'intelligence de ne pas s'associer à la transmission de vos gènes, DSG! Comme si les femmes prenaient des congés maternité pour le plaisir, un peu comme si elles décidaient de prendre une année sabatique pour se consacrer à un projet dont 50% provient de gamètes males.

long terme
Malgré toutes ces stats, il faudrait comprendre pourquoi un, deux ou trois congés de maternité de 6 à 12 mois impacte autant le salaire moyen d'une femme sur une vie entière, (30 à 40 ans de carrière?). Allez...expliquez-moi. Mathématiquement, ça ne s'explique pas.