Last week in class we experienced a perfect example of one of my biggest pet peeves (when I say one of I recognize that, according to some, I am relatively neurotic and may have many, many pet peeves). We were discussing the ever-present wage gap between men and women, and of course, someone had to rebut with "I don't know about that but I do know that this one tech company will only hire women, and you can't even get a raise if you are a guy, so I don't know about how accurate that is anymore." AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHH! Stupid stupid stupid shut up shut up shut up!!
Don't get me wrong, I totally support first-hand experience as knowledge, but I have a lot of problems with this kind of example. First of all, it completely disregards all of the studies and hard work done that reveals hard data proving the existence of a pay gap. Second, it takes one example of one situation and mistakes it as being representative of all situations. Plus, you would think that someone in a WS class would pretty much accept the existence of the pay gap by now, considering the fact that it has existed since the beginning of time.
5 years ago