Fast Company: Gender-based wage discrimination in traditional business settings can be insidious because women who start out being paid less may be continuously offered less competitive raises or salaries when they change jobs. But many female entrepreneurs in creative fields—perhaps even those who think that owning their own business shelters from such bias—are actually seeing a similar disparity play out in a different way.
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Reading the title of this article I was sure I wasn't going to be surprised by the contents of this article. The battle is still being fought to get equal pay for women and men. I was surprised however by the fact that in the creative fields, the gap was even bigger. Maybe I should have been, but I was. I don't understand why. I would imagine that since the creative field thrives from the diversity of experiences that women and minorities bring, they would be seen as equally valuable to the field, but I guess not. I imagine that as a freelancer, it would be even harder to know how your pay compares to those of your male counterparts, thus making it easier for such a large gap to exist. I agree with the end of this article in that if an employer won't respect the negotiation process, its time to play hardball.
Wow, these wage gaps are more disheartening than I would have thought. I think that the idea of the wage gap between men and women can be an easy statistic to list off when speaking about feminism, intersection feminism, and sexism, and is a fact that can be used to show sexism without the emotional side of how the patriarchy hurts a major part of the world's population. However, sometimes these statistics, while they do not give a very humanistic image of sexism, can be very helpful as a jumping off point to show the injustices of sexism. The 32 percent wage gap that this article highlights in particular for free lancing creative women is more extreme than I would have guessed. You would think that more "normal" nine to five office jobs would be the ones that had a larger wage gap, and it is quite sad that free lancers who already are so independent in getting work also have to overcome this struggle along with being a free lance worker in the first place.
It is entirely disappointing that female creatives make so much less money than male creatives. It would also be interesting to look at the disparities when we factor in issues of race, ability, and gender and sexual orientation on top of the issue of sex. It's a lot of things to factor in at once but I think it will ultimately yield interesting results.
Statistics like this, while an interesting jumping off point, do not ultimately do anything. Employers do not value females as much as men which is why they are treated so poorly in the work place. I'm not sure how this can change in the grand scheme of things but I know that if females begin to hold the men in their lives accountable. Addressing and questioning the sexism that is seen everyday will begin to reform and change men's attitude towards females, even if it's out of embarrassment rather than respect. One day these problems will not exist. With the continuing effort from females to end the sexism, of course.
I'm glad I clicked on a good old gender-wage disparity article. I vaguely knew that there must be gender disparity in creative freelancing, but did not know the exact number. Although the statistics and the numbers themselves cannot do anything, knowing the numbers and knowing where to refer to can be a powerful stepping stone for anyone who wants to negotiate the wage. One of the biggest problems of freelancing, at least from my experience was that I had no one to ask about anything. Only last summer I learned that you can ask for raise when you return to work for the same company. The 'raise' can include anything, from the actual fee, hourly rate, meals or transportation even. Having read the article that there is 32% gap in annual revenue for creatives by gender, the knowledge will lessen the burden of feeling like Scrooge for negotiating the value of my labor.
Gender pay discrimination is a major issue in nearly every industry. Women are routinely paid less for work than their male colleagues in similar jobs. This article is eye-opening about the world of freelancing. In some ways this would seem unlikely at first glance, since the free lance workers are the ones setting the wage and saying what they’ll work for. This is not a corporate institutionalized practice that systematically pays women less. However, on the other hand, that might actually be the problem. Since this happens in a “wild west” of sorts where there is no floor or ceiling on freelance pay. Additionally freelancers lack actual co-workers to compare wages with so there is even less transparency in the pay equity process. The issue is that this is difficult to fix, because of the fact that freelance work is often very specific, and no two projects are the same. The key I think involves empowering women to have the confidence to push for higher pay, which research shows women are sometimes hesitant to do, because they do not feel as valuable as their male colleagues.
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