Feminism Sucks Part 2: Discrimination

Central to all of feminism is the concept of discrimination. Discrimination is a cause which follows the effect of sexism. I will give some examples of what I mean by "discrimination". Suppose a woman applies to a job, the employer is a male-chauvinistic pig, he is uncomfortable to hire her to the job because she is a woman, he is clearly a sexist, so he simply does not hire her. Sexism is an effect here, the cause of the sexism of the employer of not hiring the woman is discrimination. Here is one more example. Assume that a woman tried to run for president but she was denied the opportunity. If the people who denied her the opportunity did so only because she was a woman then they have discriminated against her. The cause was, again, the sexism of the people who denied her, and the effect was the denial of this woman to have an attempt to run as a president, so it is discrimination. Of course, there are other kinds of discrimination too, like racial discrimination, but this post will be unconcerned about that, we are only concentrating on sex based discrimination and we will simply refer to it by "discrimination".

The problem with much of feminism is that they assume discrimination whenever they have a chance to. The classic case of what I am talking about is the wage gap. I do not remember exactly what the statistics are but last I heard it was something of 70 cents for every dollar a male earns. Thus, women earn about 30% less on jobs than men do, on the average. The way a feminist looks at such a gap is immediately assuming that it must be discrimination. Feminists never justify why the gap is the result of discrimination, rather they just state it is discrimination and we have to believe them for what they say.

It is important to understand what determines wages. Wages are determined by the productivity of the worker (actually I think it is better to say "marginal productivity"). If a worker is able to produce 30 dollar worth of labor in an hour then the employer would have to pay less than that amount, otherwise the employer would be losing money. Thus, the employer would pay 25 dollars or 27 dollars but he would not pay 31 dollars because 31 dollars per hour would run the employer on a lose. Now suppose there are two workers for an employer. One worker produces 40 dollars of labor per hour and another worker produces 15 dollars of labor per hour. It would be then reasonable to expect that the worker who produces more with his labor would be paid a higher wage from his employer. The fact that one worker is being paid less does not in any way imply that the employer hates him. The real reason why one worker is being paid less is that this is how the economics work out, nothing to do with hatred or discrimination.

Let us consider work in computer engineering. I think it is fair to say that the height of people is irrelevant to the skill of computer engineering. Therefore, height should not be a factor to the productivity of a computer engineer. This would mean the following from a statistical point of view. If we were to compute the percentages for people's heights then the same percentages must be present in the subcollection of computer engineers. Thus, if 5% of the population is above 6' 4'' then we would expect to find the same percentage with regard to employment in computer engineering. The fancy way to say this is: heights are normally distributed, if heights do not affect computer engineers then the heights of employees in computer engineering should also be normally distributed with the same mean and deviation. Now consider professional basketball players. Height is relevant to the skill of being a basketball player. In basketball the population which is above 6' 4'' would probably be something like 95%. This is precisely because height is a significant factor for basketball. The managers are not discriminating against short players, it is rather that height is an advantage for more productivity in basketball. What this all means is the following important point. If in computer engineering an employer pays the taller workers more than the shorter ones then we can imply that he is discriminating against the short workers, however, if a manager pays for taller basketball players more wages does not imply that the manager discriminates against shorter players.

It is common for feminists to say that there is a wage gap, which is true, and to conclude that this must mean that there is discrimination by the employers. I would agree that the employers are discriminating against the women if they can demonstrate to me that men and women are equal in their abilities when it comes to various types of labor. But this is never demonstrated by feminists, this version of "equality" is something which is stated but never demonstrated. It is common for a feminist to say "men and women are equal" but uncommon (possibly even unheard of) for them to then demonstrate this statement. The only reason why they can get away with such a statement is that what they say is politically correct to say, but I am challenging them because I am capable of free thought.

There is a very basic economic refutation to the belief that women are being discriminated against. What I like about this refutation is that it uses no fancy pie charts or statistics, it uses only basic economic reasoning. Let us assume, as the feminists do, that on the average, men and women are equally good workers, that is, as said above, they have the same (marginal) productivity. If the women produce as much as the men but they are being paid less then it must mean that the employer is earning a larger profit off the women than he is earning off the men. Thus, the non-discriminatory men would have it in their interest to hire more women for their job in place of men. This would imply that the demand for women would increase while demand of men would decrease, consequently it will follow that women would have an increase in wages while men would have a decrease in wages. The male-chauvinistic pig who is not comfortable hiring women would be running at a loss when compared to his competitors. His male workers would be bringing him a loss, while the non-discriminatory males would go to hire more women into employment. As a result the male-chauvinistic pig would harm himself. Discrimination would become costly and the male pigs will drive themselves out of the market. Discrimination is not sustainable, yet the feminists imply that this is the case, they contradict basic economic principles! We must immediately conclude from this that the feminists must be wrong about their position regarding discrimination by men for the same productive work.

The question is then why is there a wage gap? It must be the case, as explained above, the men are more productive in most jobs than women, on the average. We should ask one more question, why are men more productive than women, on the average? Is it something which is innate in male and female nature? Not really. In some cases it is true that male nature is simply more preferable to female nature, for instance, being a construction worker, men have stronger bodies for that kind of work. But in most jobs, which are not physical, there really is not much of a difference between men and women. The research that has been done on this question suggests that marriage is the single biggest contribution to the wage gap between men and women. The reason is very simple. Married couples have a larger responsibility for their family. In general, women have more of a responsibility with the children and so she is not a position to be able to take as much work as her husband. Indeed, if we eliminate married people and only look at men and women who never been married we find that here is hardly a wage gap, it is almost eliminated. This hypothesis about marriage being responsible for the wage gap is an actual thought out rational response to this question, unlike the common feminist accusation that the market must be sexist.

Because of their delusion feminists support the "equal pay for equal work" policy. We will examine this policy. First of all, as explained above, there is no "equal work", if there was then it would lead to an economic unsustainability by the male-chauvinistic pigs; also I have provided the real explanation for the wage gap above. Thus, one major criticism of this policy is that it is based on a delusion. But the other problem with this policy, which is even worse, is that it will have terrible consequences. If the "equal pay for equal work" policy is put into place then it will protect the male-chauvinistic pigs and it will harm the women workers. The reason is as follows. The male-chauvinistic pigs will simply not hire women workers. It will harm these unemployed women even more by not having a job. But moreover, as explained above, the market makes discrimination unsustainable, this law will equalize the pay for men and women, as a result the male-chauvinistic pig will not be driven out of the market because their non-sexist competitors will not have an economic advantage over him. I think this example is a beautiful illustration of the unintended consequences of most regulation. Regulation, in this particular case of "equal pay for equal work", was set up to benefit the women, but as a result it ended up protecting the male-chauvinistic pigs from the market and harmed the women workers. Therefore, feminists are advocating policies that are anti-women and pro-sexism without even realizing it!

There is something we can learn from feminists here. The policy that feminists support under "equal pay for equal work" is one of equality of results. Women have an equal opportunity to work, however, they might be paid less, for whatever reasons it happens to be. What the feminists want is the same result (in this case payment) for women as it is for men. They want to use the law to obtain the same results for men and women. In my first part I have discussed various types of notions that "equality" can mean. I have said that "equality" can refer to equality of results or it can refer to actual equality between the sexes. What the feminist attitude to the alleged discrimination shows is that feminists are in support of these two notions of "equality". Discriminration can only be implied if there is actual equality between the sexes, and furthermore, having equal pay for the work must mean that they want equality of results.