Male-female wage gap, managers

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Jun 6 07:10:27 PDT 2002


At 08:28 PM 6/5/2002 -0400, Doug wrote:
>Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
>>Thus a prospective employee may perceive herself as "less qualified"
>>(according to social stereotypes) and scale her job expectations
>>accordingly (e.g. by applying for positions for which she thinks she has
>>a greater chance of success). How would you call that behavior - "self
>>discrimination?" Sounds too damn close to "false consciousness."
>
>Sounds like someone who's internalized disparaging notions of women's
>competence. You seem to treat all these choices and preferences as if they
>weren't externally shaped by a patriarchal order.

I am not sure what in my post made you think so. I said that there are structural elements and there are individual choices and we need to acknowledge both, popular tropes notwithstanding. The cons tend to ignore structural constraints in order to absolve the system and its ruling class that benefits from it. The liberals tend to ignore human agency and blame the structural constraints for everything. The shortcomings of the conservative position are self-evident, at least to the members of this list, so there is no need to flog that dead horse here. However, the liberals and lefties systematically ignore human agency with all its "politically incorrect" consequences, such as that the poor also make choices, that those choices can be self-destructive, that they may include exploiting other poor. That warrants a discussion and someone's playing the devil's advocate role.

wojtek



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