A Woman’s Lifetime Earnings Lost To Pay Gap Could Feed A Family Of Four For 37 Years

[HiPointDem]

9. Something wrong with this statistic. For most people, 37 years is about close to a lifetime's work

(It's 37 years from age 22 to age 59).

Median income for all workers = $26K, which means half of workers make less. So if women make less than men, the majority of women make *less* than this figure for all women. But in fact, as you go *down* the income hierarchy, women's and men's wages equalize, with women out-earning men in some categories.

$26K a year for 40 years = 1,170,000.

IMO, this number is an artifact of the right-shift in "average" that occurs when income generally is skewed to the top. It's the same reason the "average" income of all workers is something like 50K while the median income = $26K. High earners shift the "average" right. The average income of me & bill gates = 45 billion, etc.

What pisses me off about statistics like this is that they actually "disappear" the *real* problem for low income women, which is not so much that they're paid less than their male equivalents, but that the entire segment of the workforce is underpaid, basically at a subsistence level.

Such analyses convert the problem of class power into a problem of "gender power", using low-income women as poster child.

However, it's not low-income women who benefit from such analyses, but high-income women -- & their male and female spouses and partners.