There I was sitting with a cup of coffee in hand and skimming through various online news articles when I stumbled onto something that caught my eye and made the coffee in my cup boil from the heat emanating from my hands. “Women Retail Workers Make Less, Get Fewer Benefits Than Men, Study Finds.”
It wasn’t the news that I found so appalling, I mean it’s atrocious how that is still true in the year 2011 (almost 20-frickin-12), but it was the fact that most of the commenters on the Huffington Post’s Facebook page (men for the most part) found excuses for why this difference in pay was fair. The bullsh#t about giving women less to live on because only men take care of the family and that women take paternity leave for each of her 20 children is as backwards as a pile of clothes putting a human into a washing machine. It’s just stupid.
For the men who stay home, the women with women partners, the childless couple, the single mother, and the single female without kids who doesn’t give a f#ck about settling down any time soon, this blatant discrimination is just a slap in the face. I don’t know if it changed in the last 20 seconds, but the last time I checked women don’t get a discount off of their rent, food, gas, and utility bills. They pay the same amount to go to a movie, the same amount for their phone bill, and the same for pretty much everything else. So tell me this:
Why should women get paid 77 cents for every dollar a man makes?
I wrote an article a little while ago about a potential class action lawsuit held against the company from hell, Wal-Mart, by the hundreds of women who were discriminated against via the big corporate bag of f#ckery (I really don’t like Wal-Mart). The women were denied the right to form a class action to take down the chain, and the Supreme Court handed the victory over to Wal-Mart so that they could continue to not promote women in the workforce, pay them the same as the men working there, or treat them fairly.
It’s just rude, and it’s odd that this is happening in a first world country during the 21st Century. And like I said in my previous post about this subject, it’s not just a feminist idea that there shouldn’t be a wage gap between the genders, but a civil rights idea. There needs to be equality in the labor force (or anywhere else for that matter) regardless of gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, or creed. But I guess in the meantime us women still have a long fight before we see some frickin justice.
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