I work in a setting where everybody gets the same wage based on their job level and experience. I assume that out office staff has parity between the genders.

The blue collar part of the company is 99% men.

Speaking from the purely meritocratic view that capitalists take, I’d hazard that if the wages were similar then men would still get better employment because they’re less likely to take time off for menstruation.

I suppose that’s only really a benefit if you’re employing salaried workers though, so if you’re hourly they might actually be more likely to hire women because then individually they’d each get fewer hours. Depending on legislation, that might interfere with their requirements to pay benefits or something. We often see that businesses prefer to employ four employees at 10-hours per week as opposed to one employee at 40-hours because individually the part-timers are less expensive.

There’s always going to be some way to be exploited.

My wife and I have this conversation from time to time that women should get an extra week off every month to deal with their period. She has a pretty rough go when she’s menstruating, and I totally get it. She’s not even a particularly exceptional case and she has a nasty period. So many people have it even worse off, I don’t understand how they keep showing up for work.

I’m anti-discrimination and believe in equality, so honestly I think everyone should get an extra week off. Men and post-menopausal women should be equally entitled to worker benefits.

Some people think that’s pretty radical. “How are we supposed to get anything done if we have to pay for people who aren’t here a quarter of the time?” Well, the average CEO’s compensation package would probably pay for each of their workers to take a week off each month. And they’re usually not even in the office even a quarter of the time.

Something tells me that if we strove to be more equitable, they could afford it.

Wat

Orthodox economic thought suggests that in the labor market, whenever wages increase without anything changing in the underlying supply and demand, employment would fall… I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never been big on religion so I suggest taking that with a grain of salt.

Regardless of your conclusions and what you make of the orthodox argument, it is important to consider the total cost and aggregate risk of a company of hiring a woman vs a man or other genders. If, for example, regulation establishes that women have the right to a different amount of postnatal days off than men, that would be risks that companies would take into account at the moment of deciding who to hire.

Different roles would still attract different genders because of factors like fewer women in Tech and Engg, unconscious biases, etc