COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN
Technology will widen
pay gap and hit women hardest – Davos report
Research into jobs
finds men’s dominance in IT and biotech is reversing trend towards equality
It's an interesting observation, but it's one of those
things where you say to yourself, "I should have realized that."
The dominance of men in IT is clear.
The future of IT as a component of virtually everything done
in goods and services is clear also.
So, the prediction seems an inevitability.
However, I do have a problem with putting it into these
terms: "Technology will widen pay gap and hit women hardest.'
I don't think it is accurate to talk about a "pay
gap" when comparing completely different jobs. This language creates a
false sense of an issue of equality or social justice.
To take an extreme but instructive example, no one thinks of
the pay gap between, say, cleaning staff jobs and engineers, whether we are
talking about men or women.
If men are attracted to and successful at IT jobs and women
are much less so, it is just a natural phenomenon that the difference in
average wages will grow.
I don’t know, but the trend may well become an empirical
measure of some innate differences between the sexes, just as in the realm of
intensely physical activities, we recognize differences by having versions of
sports for men and versions for women.
Any differences in pay in these versions of a sport are
really the result of the two markets’ sizes and people’s preferences for one
version over the other. I don’t see how, unless women show a new level of
interest in IT, the same division can be avoided.
