Ten Modest Proposals to End the Gender Pay Gap

An anonymous Swiftian guest essay

An anonymous Bet On It reader sent me this semi-satirical piece in the noble yet grotesque tradition of Jonathan Swift, famed author of “A Modest Proposal” as well as Gulliver’s Travels. Enjoy!

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Eighty-three cents on the dollar. Need we look any further to know what our society thinks of women?

And not just our society… every society. Every country, even the so-called egalitarian ones, over every year measured has paid women less than men for the same work.

Neither our laws nor our lawsuits nor our slogans have beaten it back.

But this is not a call to despair!

It’s a call to action. Different actions, though. Specifically ten actions. All of which are grounded in a strategy that dissects and decomposes the sources of male economic advantage and proceeds to systematically neutralize and reverse them.

Action 1: Discourage your daughter from reading

There’s a basic mystery underneath the gender pay gap. Our economy rewards intelligence and conscientiousness. Women beat men on both—higher test scores, higher grades. Yet they earn less.

At first glance, the problem is a math problem. The Math Jobs—engineering, tech, finance—pay better than the Word Jobs–HR, journalism, advocacy.

Men take the Math Jobs. Women take the Word Jobs. Almost as if alliteration itself were conspiring with patriarchy!

But women are just as good at math, albeit with lower variance—a fact you should extrapolate nothing from unless you too hope to be fired like the once president of Harvard.

The culprit here is reading ability. Women demolish men on verbal assessments!

The result? When it comes time to choose a profession, women are disproportionately subjected to the siren song of Word Jobs. Sometimes meaningful, rarely lucrative.

Men don’t face this temptation. The linguistically eloquent, low-paying siren employers find men utterly unworthy of seduction. And so men settle for higher-paying Math Jobs.

Were your daughter as barely literate as your son, she too would settle for a higher-paying Math Job.

A good feminist prepares their daughter for high-paying jobs. A great feminist ensures she’s unfit for low-paying ones.

Action 2: Teach your daughter the hierarchy of professions

May you oft repeat this adage in your daughter’s ear:

Better to be a doctor than a nurse

Better a surgeon than family practitioner

Better a plastic surgeon than obstetrician.

But best of all is finance.

If every young girl aspired to work in private equity or, better yet, at a hedge fund, we could turn the tables on the gender pay gap.

Consistency matters though. Too many members of our movement think they are advancing our cause by working long hours as low-paid policy advocates.

Remember: the gender pay gap is total pay divided by total hours–raise the numerator, shrink the denominator.

Full-time, low-paid advocates are the exact opposite of what we need!

Which raises the question: when we assess both tops and bottoms, who does more to fight the gender pay gap, the activist or the prostitute?

Action 3: Stop the babies

Nothing limits women’s economic progress more than having a child.

Even in the most egalitarian marriages, having a child disrupts a mother’s employment. And when she returns, she’s always tempted to cut back and “make time for what really matters.”

All this occurs at the key moments when promotions are doled out and when the future Senior Vice President sheep are separated from the mere Manager goats.

Fortunately, fertility rates are in free fall across the world.

We’ll take some credit for this. We taught women that kids are career death and that it is far more meaningful to rise up the corporate ladder than to raise children.

But we also appreciate the contributions of movement allies. Environmentalists convince some would-be parents that their would-be offspring are grateful to not join our overburdened planet. Restrictive zoning policies render housing unaffordable to young families. Rising LGBTQ identification takes many would-be parents out of the market.

And we credit unexpected friends in unexpected places. The rise of figures like Andrew Tate helps us paint a picture of a pervasive and growing toxic masculinity. Asserting that a broad range of traits and behaviors once thought harmless features of manhood are problematic reduces our adherents’ interest in and interest to men.

Action 4: Put Mom in a nursing home

Even the childless can get screwed (ideally with protection), though, when the question of caring for aging parents arises.

Women are more likely to cut back on hours to care for an aging parent.

It would be great if a male sibling stepped up. But we know how likely that is and how well it would work out if one did. So, it’s time to close the gender gap in willingness to send Mom to a nursing home.

It’s a hard pill to swallow. But remember: right when you’d be easing off work to care for the parents who cared for you is precisely when you’ll be earning the most in your career.

If you step back after all those low-wage years climbing the ladder, you would have been better off for our statistic had you never joined the labor force at all!

Actions 5-10: Final tweaks to improve our numbers

Closing the gender pay gap basically comes down to two rules: work in high-paying occupations, and don’t let anything get in the way of work.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t use a few more tricks to claw back a few more cents on the dollar.

5: Close the incarceration gap. Incarcerated men would otherwise be low-wage earners. Pulling them out of the labor force boosts average male earnings. If we incarcerated more women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, we could produce a similar boost to average female earnings.

6: Discourage new moms from working part-time. Part-time employees make less per hour than their full-time counterparts who sell work-life balance in exchange for higher pay. Either jump all the way back into work, or don’t come back until you can.

Until new moms get the message, we feminists should be willing to bully moms just a little more for their choices!

7: Put male gender quotas on low-wage majors. Mandate that half of admitted students into journalism, social work, and elementary education be male.

8: Enforce degree requirements on all high-wage jobs. Women out-degree men, let’s make sure that translates into out-earning them.

9: Test-optional is good. Test-prohibited is better! Standardized tests are the one academic indicator where men are closest to parity with women. The rise of test-optional admissions helped women whose GPAs skew better than their test scores. By moving to test-prohibited, we can economically block the group of mostly male students whose test scores are stronger than their GPAs.

10: Close the fraud gap. Bernie Madoff boosted male average earnings while his fraud was active. And when it ended, he was out of the labor force and out of the statistics. Where are all the Bernadette Madoffs? We should celebrate Elizabeth Holmes’s trailblazing work in this regard. May many more women follow in her well-paid footsteps!

In Closing: Women Workers of the World, Unite!

Women’s economic oppression is not an inevitability! If patriarchy can conspire across all societies and all eras of history to limit women’s economic freedom, surely women can follow a simple ten-point plan to restore their freedom!

In our cause, commitment is king (and by that I mean queen!). As we sprint down this path, we can’t afford to ask if women will fare better in a world with more plastic surgeons, financiers, prostitutes, inmates and fraudsters, but fewer mothers. Those who feel conflicted about women’s economic liberation are simply parroting the patriarchal poison they grew up on.

We choose to keep our focus on basic truths. The best and only way to assess women’s well-being is to divide their total pay by total hours and compare it to men’s. No controls. No caveats. Just justice.