On the Chris Hayes program, Guests Gone Wild!

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014

Discussing the gender wage gap: On line at the Washington Post—it hasn’t appeared in the hard copy paper—Ruth Marcus accuses the Democrats of “revolting demagoguery” concerning the gender wage gap.

She says she supports the Paycheck Fairness Act. She just doesn’t like the dissembling.

(Marcus links to this Fact-Checker piece, which gives Obama two Pinocchios for his recent statements. Glenn Kessler says he considered three. In this case, we think Kessler should have gone with the devils of his worse nature.)

Are the Democrats engaging in demagoguery? We’re not sure we’d use that term, but we’d say the deliberate deception is looking more and more obvious.

Before we cite an example, consider what happened on Tuesday night’s Chris Hayes program.

Ari Melber sat in as guest host. We’d say the program turned into a case of two Guests Gone Wild.

We hate to see Melber, who is bright, coloring hard inside the lines. But all must submit to the hard tribal laws of modern “cable news” culture.

Melber was doing his best. Then, up popped Laura Bassett from the Huffington Post.

Cable news is tribal now. Can Laura Bassett say this?
BASSETT (4/9/14): The Paycheck Fairness Act really goes after employers who are paying women lower than men who are working the same jobs, and that’s not the kind of discrimination that’s happening in the White House. What’s happening in the White House is, as Ms. Munoz said, more women are in the entry level positions than men.

And so the Paycheck Fairness Act really gets at a kind of different issue, and the White House question is a bit irrelevant here. Although I do agree with Republicans saying it’s disingenuous to use that “77 cents” number, because you could say the same thing that Obama’s saying about the White House. You could say, “Well, if you control for all those different factors and say, Let’s talk about the wage gap only for women working the same jobs as men, it gets a lot smaller, down to about 7 percent.”

So I do think we need to have a more nuanced discussion about this.
Say what?

“I do agree with Republicans saying it’s disingenuous to use that 77 cent number?”

“If you talk about the wage gap only for women working the same jobs as men, it gets a lot smaller, down to about 7 percent?”

Even this hammer blow to the senses? “We need to have a more nuanced discussion?”

We need to have a more nuanced discussion? Where does she get this stuff?

Can Laura Bassett say those things? Out in the lawless tribal regions, cable viewers were reeling.

And then, in response to the very next question, Josh Barro piped up with this:
MELBER (continuing directly): And look, that goes to the politics here, Josh, which is, this is highly disingenuous from a lot of conservatives who, I can’t mention it enough, actually hold the position that you shouldn’t put pressure on these employers. That’s their position. Having said that, there is an issue here, right, if what we’re having is a confusion around whether we need to hire more women in different jobs.

BARRO: Well, I think Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute, who put together this study, I don’t think he’s going for a hypocritical attack against the White House. I think his point was to draw out this response from Jay Carney, which is, “Look, these people have different jobs. In a given job, they’re being paid the same amount. And then you have these other drivers of the difference.”

And that’s the response he got. And when you add all those things up, that’s where you get to that 77 cents on the dollar thing. You have disparities in pay within the same jobs, which is 7 or 9 or some percent, depending on whose numbers you trust...
Thinking quickly, Melber gave Barro the chance to say that conservatives are being disingenuous too. In a moment reminiscent of “Message: I care,” he said he couldn’t mention this point enough.

Barro said he didn’t agree! Like Bassett, he noted that the gender wage gap is nowhere near as large as the standard number which is constantly cited, if we’re discussing pay “for the same or equal work.”

Are guests allowed to say that? Increasingly, the answer seems to be no. Consider this editorial today’s New York Times.

Rather plainly, the editors refuse to cite a number for the size of the gap which remains after you restrict yourself to “the same or equal work.”

They cite the iconic 77 cent statistic, and other statistics of that type. But they never estimate the size of the gap for “the same or equal work.”

We’d have to say it’s becoming clear that pseudo-liberals in good standing have taken a group pledge. We’ll talk about the 77 cents—and yes, that is an actual statistic, one which is worth discussing.

But we won’t present the types of statistics Bassett and Barro did. It’s increasingly clear that we have agreed that those smaller numbers won’t be mentioned, except by Guests Gone Wild.

Plainly, the discussion of the gender wage gap is going to run through the year. We expect to spend next week trying to tease it out.

That said, the conduct of the liberal world has at least begun to resemble demagoguery. More and more, we pseudo-liberals are aping the conduct of Fox.

Final point: Sometime after 6 this morning, Nexis finally posted Rachel Maddow’s transcript from Tuesday night. Her discussion of the gender wage gap was easily the worst on her channel that night.

The snark and the misstatements ran wild. The clarity called in sick.

We’ve really started to conclude that something has gone badly wrong with Maddow’s basic honesty. We’ll review her segment next week.

Her presentation was misleading, flatly wrong, bad. On the bright side, we did get a boatload of snark!

It’s what the tribal world runs on.

57 comments:

  1. "Guests Gone Wild"

    Wonderful play on the Soft Core Porn Video Series.

    Excellent follow up to "Sexy-time sex talk"

    Somerby seems to be sinking into sexist quicksand of his own making.

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    1. Yes indeed. Noted Harvard educated "journalism" expert Bob Somerby, whose work "What’s the matter with (the term) “rape culture?” shows us something less than great about our emerging “progressive” culture.

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    2. Once again, a troll replies to himself pretending to be another person agreeing with him. LOL.

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    3. "Once again, a troll ... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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    4. Una vez mas, titere de calcetin.

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  2. A baseball player should earn less money than a social worker. An engineer should make as much than a social worker.

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    1. In a free society a baseball player should earn whatever people
      pay to see him play. A social worker should be paid whatever
      people he serves think is just reward for his assistance. Engineers much than the same.

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    2. A baseball player shouldn't be paid at all. She should play for the love of the game.

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    3. They do. But only after they die. In Iowa. The state Chris Matthews lied about Karl Rove lying about.

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  3. The 77% and 7% figures measure two different aspects of discrimination. Both are important and they should not be confused with each other. Agreeing to disappear one while focusing exclusively on the other would be demagoguery. I think the defenses of Obama do fit that category, as do the attempts to minimize a focus on discrimination offered by conservatives. I think Somerby has been less than clear about his own stance, about why he thinks the discussion quoted was so terrible. I frankly don't see his point.

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    1. Female comedians should be paid as much as males, if their jokes are just as funny.

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    2. Male comedians are not paid based on how funny their jokes are.

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    3. Well, Anonymous at 1:10 PM would you at least be kind enough to agree that feminists shouldn't run around saying that women make 77 cents to the male dollar for "doing the same work," seeing as we've established that that's bullshit?

      HB

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    4. Which feminists have said this?

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    5. Actually Mr.Braintree we shouldn't ascribe a gender to the dollar. It seems like a rather asexual piece of currency used to compute value in the exchange of goods and servies. However, some people place religious value on currency, as in "Worship the Almighty Dollar." Those same people are much like those, who in their monotheistic worship of a Supreme Being use masculine terms to describe that being. So maybe it is a male dollar after all.

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  4. Boy, did we ever dodge a bullet. We almost elected a demagogue:

    ----

    At a White House ceremony marking Equal Pay Day, Vice President Al Gore called the income gap unacceptable.

    "We insist that women receive full and fair reward for their work and that the nature of that work reflect a full and fair recognition of women's accomplishments," Gore said. "For me, it's a simple matter of wanting my daughters to have the same opportunities in life that my son will have."

    "It is not merely a matter of women with the same positions as men getting lower pay, it is also a matter of women with the same merit as men getting lower positions," he added. "Women in almost all types of jobs make less than men."

    http://www.cnn.com/US/9804/03/equal.pay.day/

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    1. God bless Chris Matthews for sparing us from that.

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    2. Somerby didn't say that any discussion of any gap constituted demagoguery.

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    3. No, he was his usual weasly self:

      "Are the Democrats engaging in demagoguery? We’re not sure we’d use that term, but we’d say the deliberate deception is looking more and more obvious."

      So in light of that, I will correct my original statement to read:

      "Boy, did we ever dodge a bullet. We almost elected a deliberate deceiver."

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    4. 1;32 we thank you for looking more and more accurate. Your Howler gets results.

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    5. But Al Gore didn't say anything about 77%.

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    6. It wasn't 77% when Al said it. He took the initiative to create the correct statistics he quoted when he said:

      "Growing prosperity is important, but making sure that all share in it is also critical. For too long, men and women have seen vast disparity in their earnings. Although the gap has closed in the last decades, the typical woman still earns only 73 percent of what the typical man earns. It is
      time to close that gap."

      Gore-Lieberman "Propserity for Amerca's Families"

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    7. Bob fan: "Somerby didn't say that any discussion of any gap constituted demagoguery.

      Bob: "That said, the conduct of the liberal world has at least begun to resemble demagoguery. More and more, we pseudo-liberals are aping the conduct of Fox."

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    8. What behavior is he referring to with that statement about "conduct"? I don't see any contradiction between the fan statement and Bob's, as quoted.

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    9. Of course, you don't.

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  5. One problem with market forces determining salaries (based on the values assigned to different professions) is that those forces reflect the prejudices of the larger society. If we decide it is wrong to allow such prejudices to affect the ability of a group to make a living, we must intervene in some way. A productive discussion might focus on how some other societies intervene to achieve social justice in their economies.

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    1. Would that discussion include a fair and open hearing from people who think the very premise of the discussion is profoundly flawed?

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  6. Ah, the usual Maddow "tease." It's going to be interesting to see what horrors digs out of Tuesday night transcript. "Her" presentation? Virtually the entirety -- almost every statement of fact -- comes not out of Rachel's mouth but from her guest, Professor Hartmann. And Hartmann did not, nor did Rachel, ever use the words, "seventy-seven per cent."

    Here is one part of Hartmann's answers:

    "MADDOW: I just want to ask you a very basic but specific question. Do American women make less than men while doing the same work?

    HARTMANN: Well, it`s that doing the same work that is tricky. There are many companies in which a man and a woman in the same job would get equal pay. But it turns out there are many companies where they don`t. And you know, we take a look just recently at the 20 largest occupations for women, these are occupations that sound the same like let`s say customer service representative, retail worker, and the wage gaps range (INAUDIBLE) range from like 68 percent, women making only 68 percent of what men make in retail to 94 percent women making 94 percent of what men make in customer service work."

    Later, Maddow, without objection, lets Hartmann report that Millennial women are making about 93%, and even, without snark or complaint, let's Hartmann describe that as "pretty good."

    So what should we say about this comment from Bob? "We’d have to say it’s becoming clear that pseudo-liberals in good standing have taken a group pledge. We’ll talk about the 77 cents—and yes, that is an actual statistic, one which is worth discussing.

    But we won’t present the types of statistics Bassett and Barro did. It’s increasingly clear that we have agreed that those smaller numbers won’t be mentioned, except by Guests Gone Wild."

    What we should say is that it's Bob-narrative gone wild. It's bullshit. Almost every time you see the 77% number thrown out there by one of the despised liberals, it is qualified with the statement that that is "on average." Here, the very worst offernder is actually letting her guest, the one she invited to the show, throw nuance all over the place without once shrieking or snarking, "You lie, the one and only number that matters is 77%."

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    1. Here you repeat the problem Somerby has been complaining about. The 77% is not "for the same work." It is averaged across the range of occupations, not making a within-occupation comparison. The discussion by Hartmann does refer to within the same job classification, but that it not what 77% refers to in these various discussions.

      There is nuance in the discussions reported by Somerby and the discussion with Hartmann above. That is why Somerby refers to this as "Guests Gone Wild." He is saying that this kind of nuanced discussions is unusual. That it violates norms for how the subject is supposed to be (or is generally) discussed. The "Gone Wild" part signifies that the guests are breaking expectations, doing something different than usual.

      So, you are both saying the same thing. The main difference is that Somerby is claiming that Maddow and others normally do not present this nuance. Not that it isn't occurring in the examples provided (as exceptions to the rule).

      I agree that it is unclear of Somerby to have presented his post this way.

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    2. Bob has simply lied through his teeth throughout this discussion. Put his sexism aside. Bob does not know how to tell the truth on this issue.

      Anyone who wishes to prove me wrong, please do so.... But I don't think gender pay equity is an issue Bob ever discussed until Bob saw it as a way to attack Rachel Maddow after her appearance on Meet the Press during the 2012 election cycle.
      He has been lying about things ever since.

      If anyone can find a post on it before that, let us all know.

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    3. "Lying" and "Sexism" are terms way harsher than anything Somerby has said or done on this issue.

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    4. Rachel never said the 77 cents was "for the same work." The "same work" reference came in a different sentence that made a different point -- that almost across the board by category there is a difference of some kind to the female's disadvantage. It all averages out to 77 per cent.

      Go ahead, prove me wrong. It has always been crystal clear from everyone talking about it, including Maddow, that the 77 cents refers to an overall or average figure that has many factors, including different career choices that themselves many, especially women, believe have been driven by gender-inequity issues. It has never been intended as anything more than a galvanizing number for action. Nobody is saying we have to raise women's wages 30+% to make up for that difference. That is a perfectly legitimate use of a round number which was publicized, in fact, by the Federal agency responsible for measuring wages. Somerby's punctilious obsession with it is absurd, and I have to agree that this ostensibly substantive obsession is primarily driven by the obsession with Rachel Maddow and others of the "we liberals" tribe. If that means carrying water for right-wingers who throw up any crap to see if it will stick, so be it.

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    5. No, you are misunderstanding the 77 cents. It does not mean that for the same work, sometimes the difference is bigger and sometimes smaller and it averages out to 77 cents. It means that averaging across all the kinds of work women do and averaging across all the kinds of work men do, the difference between those two means is 23%, with women earning 77% of what men earn, on average. When you look at salaries within a single occupation, controlling for all those extraneous factors, the average difference is around 7%.

      We all agree that the 77% figure is legitimate, including Somerby, who says so today (and has not said differently). But the two numbers do not measure the same things. Somerby seems to be complaining that Democrats now want to focus on the 77% figure instead of the 7% because one is bigger than the other. Somerby doesn't like playing games with figures because that is the essence of propaganda and manipulation of public opinion. That is why he cares about this, and that is a large issue not a triviality. I think his "obsession" looks less "absurd" in that context, and I too do not want to be manipulated for ulterior reasons by news media, especially not the media that supposedly represents my political views. I want to get truth from a news source. That means focuses on little abuses like this, as well as on the larger ones that are easier to relate to and whose wrongness is more obvious.

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    6. 3:01. You bear the burden of proof if you make the claim.

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    7. 9:08 You want a doctoral dissertation length comment?

      All you have to do is use Bob's search engine and search for "gender pay gap." Go back to his earliest postings, which began in 2012 when Maddow appeared on Meet the Press. Then read the comments. The lies are noted with each post. In what Bob likes to call REAL TIME.

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    8. 9:08

      What's wrong with (the term) Rape Culture
      Sexy-time sex talk
      Guests Gone Wild

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Gone_Wild_(franchise)

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  7. Poor BOB. He can't help it. He was born with a slender appendage between his legs. (With apologies to the late Ann Richards

    As a result, perhaps he can't be blamed for lying on the gender pay gap issue. Who knows. As the old saying goes, some men think with the thing. We can't be sure if that is accurate. On our planet, there are many ways to skin a cat.

    He does it again in the opening paragraph. Dissemble we mean. BOB, who rose to fame decrying bad quoting and paraphrasing by the New York Times in reporting on Susan Rice, employs the same tactic in paraphrasing Ruth Marcus.

    "Ruth Marcus accuses the Democrats of “revolting demagoguery” concerning the gender wage gap."

    He then quickly, and correctly notes Marcus says she would vote for The Paycheck Fairness Act. So what is the demagoguery? Is it, as BOB would have you believe, "the gender wage gap."

    Not if you read Marcus unfiltered by the Word of BOB.

    "It is simultaneously possible to believe that women are entitled to equal pay and to not support the Paycheck Fairness Act.

    Not that you’d know it from the rhetoric President Obama and fellow Democrat are happily flinging at Republicans who dare to oppose the measure."

    You see, Marcus is upset with the insinuation by three Democrats she quotes, Obama, Reid, and Stabenow, that opposition to one piece of legislation means opposition to equal pay. That is the demagoguery of which Marcus is speaking, not bringing up the issue of pay gaps.

    Marcus discusses the legislation in detail. BOB never mentions it.
    BOB is on a crusade again to prove an error he once made, falsely attacking Rachel Maddow and later Obama for use of the 77 cent Census figure, is not an error at all. Therefore it is necessary to disappear the fact central to Marcus's column...the legislation and the rhetoric around it.

    Does Marcus mention the pay gap figures and the problems with using statistics on this issue? Yes. And she defers to Kessler which saves her the mental gymnastics Kessler has to go through to turn a true statement by Obama into something of a lie. Does she deny the gap exists? No.

    Kessler's long rant, in which he himself acknowledges there are many, many ways to calculate the gender wage gap (all of which end up showing there is a wage gap, by the way) ends up with this emission that BOB would otherwise call a Howler:

    "The president must begin to acknowledge that average annual wages does not begin to capture what is actually happening in the work force and society." Say WHAT????

    Sorry BOB. Sorry Kessler. It is precisely because this statistic most dramatically illustrates the disparity between male and female earning that it does show what goes on in the workforce and society. The question is whether legislation on pay equity is needed to reduce that gap and whether it will do so.

    Marcus focuses on the latter question. BOB shouldn't make up things to make her views fit his meme. That is what he accuses others of doing. Like Rachel Maddow, whose BOB created caricature begins to resemble BOB more and more every day.

    KZ

    The earth is warming. It is still round. Black American children score below other groups on standardized tests. Women in American society make less on average than men. Almost a quarter less. There are certain facts one should quit denying.

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    1. Don't be shy -- tell us about your apprendage, KZ. We know you want to tell us about it. That's why you're really here, right?

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    2. You know, KZ, the very first Equal Pay Act was debated, passed and signed into law by JFK in 1963.

      At that time, the gap was around 60 cents on the dollar. And the very same arguments Somerby uses here: "Sure, women make a lot less. But there are good reasons besides the fact they are women that women make a lot less."

      Very similar tactic to those of the global warming deniers who say, "What about sunspots and volcanoes and cattle farts? Until you give ol' Bossy some Pepto-Bismol, I don't have to give up my Hummer! Besides, it's April and the earth has cooled a lot since last July."


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    3. Somerby isn't defending the 77% statistic. That pseudo-quote isn't an accurate statement of his views. I've never heard him deny climate change.

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    4. Anon @ 6:36

      We once read an explanation from deadrat to another commenter's inquiry as to the purpose for BOB using the first person plural in his writing.

      We use plural for another reason.

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    5. "I've never heard him deny climate change."

      Neither have I. But Somerby uses the same TACTIC of argumentation on the wage gap issues that global climate change deniers use.

      To wit: When confronted with an undeniable fact, he sits at his computer and conjures up all sorts of reasons that might diminish or explain away the statistic that can't be denied until the conclusion is reached that the problem isn't really that bad after all, and nothing really can be done about it.

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    6. Except he hasn't done this.

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  8. OMB (BOB Has no Clue. Neither Does the Census Bureau)

    BOB would have us believe, in the many times he has presented nonsense on this issue since he first thought he could get away with calling Maddow one of his many euphemisims for lying, that 77 cents on the dollar is an inflated and misleading figure.

    We agree it is misleading. It is not inflated. It should be lower.

    It is not, he has steadily maintained, a measure of workplace discrimination. It is not a measure of equal pay for equal work.

    We, on the other hand have noted what it is. It is a statistic measuring the annual gross pay of women considered to be working full time to the annual gross pay of men considered to be working full time.

    Today we will tell you what BOB never tells you about why it is not a measure of either workplace discrimination or equal pay for equal work. It does not compute the unpaid hours worked by women caring for children in their own home. That is cultural discrimination with an economic consequence.

    Go see the question asked by your Census Bureau. The don't ask you how many hours you work. They don't ask you how many weeks you work. They ask you how many hours and weeks you work "for pay."

    You see my dear BOB and all you foolish little BOBbleheaded friends,
    the role of women in society as unpaid caregivers for both the littlest and the frailest among you is an enormous amount of work that is neither counted as work nor does it earn measurable compensation.

    So to us, on a less than earthly plane, people who look for ways to statistically manipulate the numbers to narrow the gap are the consumate pig blind assholes of your social structure. It is why a comment like that of Glenn Kessler is foolish beyond belief.

    We would not suggest men do little or no uncompensated work around the home. We would suggest anyone who thinks it remotely compares to the amount performed by women come to you directly from the Maddow-Somerby loose screw factory. And they rarely get a penny for it. For those who do get paid to work while raising their children, whether alone or with a partner, the amount of uncompensated effort that goes into both child and elder care does not change just because they work outside the home. The work still needs to be done and disproportionately, in your society, women do it.

    But Zarkon, some say, (we would prefer they start with Your Majesty, but what the hell) this is not a wage issue. It is part biological. It is part women's choice. No, my little Earthlings. The compensation system, even if based on a long standing cultural tradition, is not biological. Women do not acquire their gender by choice. And you would, to use my planet's name, face doom if they made child bearing decisions, the only biological factor at play here, entirely based on wise fiscal planning.

    Now go those of you who admire BOB and defend his nonsense. For it truly is that, and deeply rooted in male dominated social norms.

    KZ

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    1. Let us also note that the "unpaid work around the house" done by males can usually be scheduled around work. For example, I mow my lawn on Saturday mornings.

      Or even this. Last summer, I took up the carpet, and sanded, stained and finished the 100-year-old hardwood floor that lay beneath it, and painted the rooms -- with lots of assistance from my wife who is of the stay-at-home variety.

      I was, essentially, paid for that. Yep. Took two weeks of vacation to do it.

      My wife? Well, she was in the work force at one time. Her employer had a policy that offered her three days of paid "bereavement leave" when a close family member died.

      Her father went into the hospital on a Saturday. During the night on the following Monday, he suffered a heart attack that put him in a coma. All day Tuesday, it was a matter of time before he passed, so she spent it to be with her mother as she watched her husband of some 62 years die. He died that evening.

      My wife took off work from Wednesday through Friday to help with the arrangements for the Saturday funeral. When she returned to work on Monday, still mourning her father two days after the funeral, she was told that she would have to use up a day of her vacation time because she exceeded the company's bereavement leave policy.

      Well, she squawked about it. Which got her labeled a trouble-maker. So her next job performance evaluation was her first negative one, and she was denied a raise because, and I quote, she was taking too much time off to attend to "family issues" and that was affecting the performance of her entire department.

      She responded like Johnny Paycheck -- Take this job and shove it.

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    2. By the way, this story is not one of gender discrimination. It is a story of how the U.S. workplace is not always "family friendly" -- and that is a big issue in suppressing women's earnings.

      They are the ones who get the call when a kid is sick in school. Heck, until Clinton signed the Family Leave Act that the first Bush vetoed, women couldn't even take UNPAID leave to give birth without often losing their jobs.

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    3. KZ says: "BOB would have us believe, in the many times he has presented nonsense on this issue since he first thought he could get away with calling Maddow one of his many euphemisims for lying, that 77 cents on the dollar is an inflated and misleading figure."

      Somerby has not said this. He has said that representing 77 cents as unequal pay for the same work is misleading and incorrect.

      I think that raising this argument has given aid and comfort to conservatives who wish to claim that the 77 cents figure does not represent discrimination -- it does. Somerby argues that accuracy, not persuasion, is the higher value in reporting. He has the right to make that point without being called some sort of sexist for it.

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    4. Anon @ 9:28 we agree with much of what you say.

      You bring up a point we would like to clarify. When discussing the 77% average salary figure, we did use the term"inflated" to characterize BOB's portrayal of discussions in the "77 cents on the dollar" debate.

      A more accurate way of stating it is to say Bob believes the gap, which is 23 cents on the dollar, is inflated because other factors should be taken into account. And he has repeatedly mislead people by saying others who have used either of these two figures are implying the figures measure discrimination or represent pay for "equal work" when the people who used the figures did not say that. In the latter case we specifically mean Barack Obama and Rachel Maddow.

      Were BOB saying simply it is "misleading to say the 77 cent figure represents payment for equal work at equal jobs" we would agree. When BOB says the 77 cents figure "does not measure specific workplace compensation discrimination" we would and have agreed.

      The problem is BOB, who builds his blog tearing down others for "implying things" and "making things up" does each of those things with incredible frequency himself on this and other issues.

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    5. Sorry 9:28. Left off my signaure at 11:19 above.

      KZ

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    6. Indeed, KZ. Perhaps our friend at 9:28 can research and rescue His Royal Bobness by giving us a few examples of when somebody -- several somebodies in fact to lend credence to the claim that this is done often -- actually said that the ENTIRE gap can be blamed on the overt gender discrimination of consciously and deliberately paying women less for the same work.

      This seems to be what Bob infers from what he claims they "imply" while they either "make things up" or simply fail to think as deeply about the subject as his Harvard-educated brain allows him to think.


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    7. "A more accurate way of stating it is to say Bob believes the gap, which is 23 cents on the dollar, is inflated because other factors should be taken into account."

      Again, the tactic of global climate change deniers.

      "We cannot blame this on human activity until we accurately measure the impact of cattle farts."

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  9. Mika Brzenzinski wrote an excellent book about her struggles with MSNBC entitled "Knowing Your Value."

    Realize that Mika never insisted on "equal pay" with Scarborough, but she did learn that she was earning 14 times less than Scarborough, who was also pulling down big bonuses that she wasn't getting for hitting ratings benchmarks.

    And she learned, with Scarborough's help, that she was also learning less than the regular male panelists on the show, such as Mike Barnicle.

    She also notes that she would never have won her battle for higher pay without Scarborough advocated strongly for her with the MSNBC brass. At the same time, she notes that few women have such a strong advocate.

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    1. It is interesting that fairness arguments are not as effective as having a strong male advocate. What is the point of knowing your value if there is no mechanism for change? That's why legislation is necessary.

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    2. Another big factor Brzenzinski cited is that both Scarborough and the network brass feared that she would bolt for another network.

      She notes that few women have that kind of leverage either.

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    3. Anon @ 8:23 et al

      Perhaps if Mika wore the pants on her program like the perspiring pimp of piddle she could garner the big bucks to stuff in them.

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    4. Meanwhile, we judge Scarborough not be the contents of his pants nor by the color of his shoes.

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  10. Chris Hayes may have walked into it when he spoke approvingly of middle-aged white man Stephen Colbert's good fortune before realizing it was to be made a diversity issue.

    Pay the girls100%. As long as they don't give the Late Night gig to Cathy Griffin, it's OK with me.

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