Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Not really helping

Perhaps realizing that if she wants to call herself a feminist Megan might need to acknowledge the existence of other women, we get a post on pay discrepancies. Obviously this is a genuine issue, and equal pay for equal work, along with equal access to opportunity to work, should be a given. But the piece is about how female lawyers are screwed out of billable hours by their firms. That is wrong, duh, but you have to a lawyer for it to matter to you.
Megan is hinting she's the worst kind of second wave feminist; she confuses rich white women's issues with women's issues. I'm sure she's "aware" of the legitimate, and often well accepted, criticisms of the unconscious biases in the focuses of the midcentury mass feminist movement, but I doubt she's taken them to heart.
There's no "women's" minimum wage. (Tho there are gender inequalities in workplaces across the economic spectrum.) The difference between making 70k and 100k is more than countless millions of women, and men, earn in a year, and depends on having the opportunity to work in the first place.

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