Quick and dirty thoughts on International Women's Day and pay gaps for single women

Me, being not surprised.

So it’s International Women’s Day and I’ve been reading Wells Fargo's gender pay gap report looking at single, never-married women. It has so much to unpack. It's like it was made for The Budgette. Here’s BNN’s article.

So obviously I'm going to talk about it because I have articles I bookmarked about this.

First, I'm not that surprised by the findings, tbh. One reason is we do get penalized when we ask for more compensation. Get rid of that nonsense that women do not ask for raises. We do.

See this HBR article from 2018.

Then there's the other belief that if you're single, you should be working a lot more but if you don't, you're also penalized. See this article from the Washington Post that looks at workplace penalties single women face. This article is from 2022.

This paragraph stood out to me:

"But sociologists recently found that even early in their careers, well-educated women without families are also disadvantaged because they are more often stereotyped as lacking leadership abilities. These women were often seen as too “masculine” for leadership when the same traits benefited single men. They also lacked the “communal, relational” leadership traits expected of women who were coupled and raising children."

So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I am glad that more light is being shed on this issue but again, I am not surprised by the results.