Woo Equal Pay Day.
Yup. I’ve seen it. It exists.
A coworker of mine, female, incredibly good at her job, was taking about this very subject yesterday. She has held her important, but extremely undesirable job in health care for years. She’s the woman who irate patients call and yell at when their bills don’t make sense or they don’t understand the mountains of confusing health insurance paperwork. She has to explain to hundreds of senior citizens that their secondary health insurance does not cover the entirety of what Medicare doesn’t cover. She has to set up payment plans with patients who don’t have health insurance because they make too much money to qualify for aid, but not enough to buy their own insurance plan.
No one wants her job.
She doesn’t want her job. Actually she moved over to a different position within the hospital and was very happy there. The Corporation hired a male replacement and everyone was happy, for a while. Then Male Replacement was fired for not doing his job and lying on his resume. Female Coworker was asked to come back intermittently. Female Coworker finds out that Male Replacement was given a starting salary of about 10,000 dollars more than she was making after 10 years in the position. Because he lied on his resume and has a penis.
Now Female Coworker is back in the position that she hates because Corporate says, “Female Coworker, can you go back to your old job for a while? We won’t offer you the same as Male Replacement because you don’t have the level of education that he lied about having” and Female Coworker has kids and if she says, “No, Corporate, I really don’t want to, unless you pay me what Male Replacement was making” Corporate will say, “Ok, well, see ya around. Good luck finding a new job!”
So, even though Female Coworker does a better job than Male Replacement and has more experience in the position, she gets the shaft.
