Filah Lah Lah READY (2024)
A text about the gender pay gap? In the AI/electric-car year 2024? Are we really still on that? The topic admittedly is rather old hat, but we are still on that: In 2023, the wage gap between men and women globally still averaged out at around 20%. The reason behind this discrepancy, in addition to sexism impacting women’s work, was long thought to be that female employees were less likely to ask for a higher salary.
And that really was the case once—in the 90s. New studies show that this “asking gap” has not only disappeared, but that since about 2007, women are in fact seeking out salary negotiations more frequently than their male colleagues.
So how come the gender pay gap is currently still wide enough for a small child to fall into it?
Well, women now ask more often, but also get turned down more. According to researchers, this is at least partially due to the very topic of this text: The persisting myth of “women not asking for raises” amplifies gender stereotyping in the workplace as it makes women seem less assertive, and therefore less deserving of a raise. Further, this same narrative has led to companies taking little direct action against the gender pay gap because it suggests that women ought to simply ask for more raises in order to close the gap. Which they now are doing, but—well, you get it.
Ugh. Or as Filah Lah Lah puts it more eloquently in her bouncy and soulful song “READY”: “You better be ready with my checks / I need a stack thicker than my legs / thicker than my ass.”
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