While it gets thrown around often, the idea of the gender pay gap isn’t just some boogeyman, it’s a real and documented issue. On average, in, for example, the EU, the gap stands at 12.7%. While this might not necessarily seem like that much, imagine, for a second, if you will, taking a 12% pay cut just because your employer felt like it.
If you are a woman, chances are you didn’t even have to imagine it. Many workplaces discourage employees from discussing this question for this very reason. It’s also worth noting that the EU has a lot of female participation in the workplace and even rules and regulations against this sort of thing, so the situation is likely worse elsewhere.
In the US, the commonly thrown around number is that a woman makes 84 cents to each dollar paid to a man. Again, this might seem like a smallish gap, but once you consider decades of savings for a pension and social security, the difference becomes a lot harder to justify. Remember, this is, generally, for the exact same amount of work.
Similarly, if you are a woman, depending on where you live, there are no doubt lawmakers who have decided that not only do they know better about feminine anatomy, but that it’s their duty to put in some regulations. This is particularly visible in the United States this year (2024) as twenty-one states have put in place restrictions (or full bans) on abortions.
This is not only a breach of bodily autonomy, a concept so horrible in practice that it has an entire genre of horror dedicated to it, it’s also a surefire way to just make women suffer. In other words, banning abortions doesn’t stop them, it only drives them underground. Pro-life folks, who have cleverly co-opted an innocuous sounding concept, are creating a world where not only is the fetus now in danger, but so is the mother.
Then again, so many cases of harassment and abuse go overlooked already, so it might feel futile to wonder why the champions of “life” don’t seem to have many good ideas on how to preserve it. Then again, if you can’t grasp the most basic parts of another person’s experiences, it’s unlikely that you can actually help or sympathize.
