DOUBLE STANDARDS – Canadian oilfield workers and the pay gap

D

I ran across this on the Guardian today. They run articles from blue collar workers who describe their work and then answer questions below the line. The first one I saw was from a long haul trucker in the States and this one is by Tyson Cornfield, who works in oilfields in Alberta. He lists all kinds of accidents and mishaps that could kill or injure anyone unlucky enough to happen to be in the way.

He describes getting up and eating breakfast in 15 minutes and the grueling labor involved in pulling the entire length of pipe in a hole when something goes wrong.

He finishes his article by discussing how avoiding injury for others and yourself is rule number one. I wonder how much that is on the mind of anyone in one of the underpaid, supposedly equivalent jobs dominated by women. I know it has to be on prostitutes’ minds but other than that, probably many at all.

I didn’t see even one commenter ask about any kind of pay gap between men and women in this job. It occurs to me that we have yet to hear any complaints from feminists about under-representation of women in this particular workforce or any calls for affirmative action to redress the imbalance. And somehow there was no mention of any kind of gendered pay gap either in any of the comments.

Imagine that.

 

Jim Doyle
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Jim Doyle

<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="3217 http://www.genderratic.com/?p=3217">4 comments</span>

  • oh, after reading the comments, you shoulda called the article Rig Pig…

  • “I didn’t see even one commenter ask about any kind of pay gap between men and women in this job”

    Why would they ask the oilfield worker when they also fail to ask the female executive or anyone else who is supposedly affected by the “wage gap”? They know that the reply they are likely to get wouldn’t support what they claim.

    I’ve not come across anyone, feminist or not, online or offline, who can reliably say that they have encountered a discriminative wage gap (for the same work etc) in the real world. At most we see very rare 1-in-a-decade cases in the news.

    Their case for the wage gap isn’t based on any real-world observations or evidence. It’s based purely on playing with fallacious statistics, unsupported claims based on dogma and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works.

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