AS233: The Gender Wage Gap

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 233, and I am your host, Thomas Smith. Really, you know, there's a lot of podcasts out there, and I thank you for choosing mine. At least for this first 45 seconds that you're still listening. I just want to say I appreciate it. Joining me right now is Ms. B, and that's Ms. Bea Haven from the Promoting Secular Feminism podcast. How are you doing?

0:00:59 Thomas: I am really excited to talk to you. As people may know, by the time this airs, it's been, I don't know, a week or so since so-called Equal Pay Day. And I thought it would be excellent on the recommendation of Eli, who is kind of a mutual friend, to have someone come on and talk about the gender wage gap. And I'm so happy that you agreed to come on, kind of short notice too, which is really cool of you to do. And so why don't you tell us, tell people who might not be familiar a little bit about yourself, about your podcast and all that.

0:00:58 Bea: Awesome. Well, I've only been involved in kind of the secular movement for three years now, being involved in a local humanist group. I'm living in North Carolina right now, so yee-haw there. I've been dealing with quite a lot of issues down here lately.

0:01:53 Thomas: Is that where everything's being boycotted? Do I have the right state?

0:01:55 Bea: Yes, it is, yeah, Because of the bathroom laws and

0:01:57 Thomas: Oh, Oh, wow. So I'm, I'm sorry if you are a fan of the boss, but it sounds like you won't be getting your Bruce Springsteen concert anytime soon.

0:02:00 Bea: Um, Yeah. And a lot of concerts have been donating to things like Equality NC, uh, so that's been nice, uh, alternative, especially for people who couldn't get out of their contracts, um, Yeah. So it's been quite a mess down here, um, and, uh, the podcast that I'm involved in is, uh, only been going since August of this past year, um, it's got two co-hosts, uh, Demand a Right, which is my better half and myself, and also both of our husbands, who we call the penis gallery, and And our producer, God, he doesn't, he doesn't talk much, uh, But we talk about, uh, women's issues, gender issues, uh, feminism, uh, secularism, we cover a lot of topics, I talk about sex positivity a lot, um, and, uh, issues with like medical science and things like that, sometimes just because I'm interested, uh, but we also put a spoonful of sugar with it, so there's always a comedy sketch at the end of every episode that we do, and sometimes some bloopers in between things, depending on how our editor, me, feels about leaving things in there, so every time somebody says, edit that

0:02:21 Thomas: Oh, right. Yeah.

0:02:49 Thomas: That's good. I like that. Oh, man.

0:03:36 Bea: Out, I'm like, no, It's Gold, You

0:03:37 Thomas: I was going to say, I always love on a podcast when I hear edit this out, edit this out. It's like, well, it sounds like they didn't. Yeah.

0:03:44 Bea: Know, like, sometimes it's like, don't tell her I put this in here because she doesn't listen to the podcast.

0:03:49 Thomas: Oh, well. OK. If you have someone else editing the podcast and you don't listen yourself, then, you know, I think you kind of deserve it if they sneak something in. But yeah, it's a delightful podcast. I heard Eli on it. I think that's your most recent published episode as of now. So I checked that one out. Really cool. It It seems like it seems like a very positive kind of easygoing place. You know, it just it was very like, huh, just kind of nice. You know what I mean?

0:04:02 Bea: Yes, That's Kind of the idea is that we're, we're trying to, you know, bring positivity back to, uh, feminism, and particularly secular feminism, because I, I feel at, at least, that we can be doing a lot better for ourselves and for our future by embracing secular feminism rather than apologizing for it.

0:04:39 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, that's really cool. I like the stated goals and I hope that you continue to have success with that. So let's I guess by way of introducing our topic, let me ask you, does the penis gallery make one dollar to your 78 cents or in your podcast? Guest? Or how does that, or are you all broke? I don't know. It could be, could be one or the other.

0:05:01 Bea: You know, that's a good question. I haven't actually asked one half of the penis gallery what they make in a year, but I know that my better half, Demanda, makes as much as an adjunct makes, so not a whole lot, since adjunct professors are very, very poorly paid. And I work for the state, so I don't make much either.

0:05:27 Thomas: That makes two of us, although very different states, very different States.

0:05:32 Bea: Absolutely. I like to think that I'm doing my part to drain the state dry at this terrible time in our history. But in doing research about this, I was reminded about that quote that's attributed to Mark Twain all the time that's like, there are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics. And I was reading this great article about the gender wage gap on PolitiFact. And they were really good about pointing out the subtle differences in using statistics like this. There was in Obama's 2012 re-election run he ran an ad that said women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men. That was rated mostly false by politicians.

0:06:28 Thomas: Right. Right.

0:06:29 Bea: However when he reworded it in the 2014 State of the Union address saying women still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns that rated mostly true. So

0:06:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, but there is a key difference there.

0:06:45 Bea: Yes. Yeah. It's not for the same work, it's for every $1 that a man and, yeah.

0:06:47 Thomas: Yeah yeah. So the statistic, I've been doing a little research too, and to add on to that, which is, which is interesting. I hadn't seen that political fact thing. That's really, really fascinating. To see, to hear rather, but it's the median, I think if, let me know if, if you, if I have this right, but the median income of a full-time, I suppose, female worker is 70, roughly 79%, I think now, of what the median outcome for a full time male worker is. Is that right?

0:07:24 Bea: Yeah, and it depends on what the method is of actually analyzing, analyzing the data, but also we're coming from as far as where you get the data. And that same PolitiFact article talked about the difference between, like, if you're getting data from the Census Bureau, they only track annual wages for men and women regardless of their occupation. So Their data showed in 2012 that women earned 77 cents to every dollar earned, and in 2013, 78 cents. Whereas if you are getting data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they track weekly earnings of workers in full-time wage and salary positions from the Census Bureau's monthly current population survey of 60,000 households. So it's a smaller population, but it's also very specific data. And theirs shows that in 2013, 2013, women's wages were 82 percent of that of men. It, and even worse, is if you try to compare hourly wages, the wage gap shows a completely different number, and I don't actually have that one. Um.

0:07:35 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

0:08:39 Bea: But it's it's a lot of it is based off of what, what methodology was being used at what time. And the problem also is that experts completely disagree as far as which method is the best way to represent the reality of the wage gap. One quote that I found very useful, the Institute for Women's Policy Research, that a briefing on the gender wage gap that talked about, yeah,

0:08:40 Thomas: I Think I've read that one last time. I, I talked about this right?

0:09:11 Bea: It was talking about more than twice as many women than men have jobs with full-time wages under the federal poverty threshold for a family of four. So, I mean, if we're talking about, like, the reality of a situation as far as how somebody can support their family, then that's, I think, much more useful data than saying 77 cents to every dollar. Like, looking at the reality, for me, it's about the story of the person that we're about to talk about.

0:09:21 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Well. I'm glad you say that because I will, I will say I did do a bit of a, I don't know what I would call it, I guess a little bit of a segment on this, it might, maybe it was last year around this time, maybe it, it was for Equal Pay Day. I can't remember now. But my thing was, I was a little bit put off by some of the ways that Obama had represented it in his speech, where he just said, like, it's just math. A woman earns 78 cents for the same work. You know, and I was like, well, when you misrepresent things like that, you give people on the other side such easy outs.

0:10:20 Bea: Yeah.

0:10:20 Thomas: And I do, I am very, I'm conscious of, I're not trying to be a tone policer, and I do understand that that's something that can be very irritating, you know, to when, when whoever it is, when women are talking about inequality, when, you know, people of color are talking about inequality. I understand. I'm not trying to be the white guy who's like, listen, you need to talk about this differently. But it's, it's hard when it's like, well, this is a statistic that it, it does feel. And I'm glad you said that at the beginning. If you put it one way, it's kind of misleading. If you put another way, then bingo, you've got it. And all I'm saying is I do like the language you used the second time, and what you just said about twice as many women having jobs below the poverty line, I, or like that, where it's, okay, okay, now we're being consistent, we're being factual, still expressing the problem.

0:11:14 Thomas: And so that's kind of my concern with this is I don't like giving people a really easy out. When you make statements like, here's the math, it's this, and technically you're kind of wrong, you know. I don'T know, that just turns me off a little bit. So apologies if that comes off as tone policing. But when I did this episode back then, whatever it was, a year, it's interesting when you look at controlling for by job and controlling by, you know, the actual same work, it does reduce it quite a bit, but it doesn't eliminate it. And I think that anyone who's trying to completely get rid of it by just saying, well, look, it's your original calculation is wrong. That's not going to work either. So, you Know, it cuts both ways. I just, I really like stating things as accurately as we can. So we know the actual extent of the problem.

0:11:27 Bea: Yeah. Yeah.

0:12:06 Bea: Yeah. And the that I really took away from the Institute for Women's Policy Research briefing was, quote, tackling occupational segregation is an important part of eliminating the gender wage gap. And that, for me, that said it all right there, where it was women taking jobs that would be paying less because of their nature, but also talking about even when you're controlling for different occupations, some occupations have much wider pay gaps, Whereas some are nearly equal. There was only one, uh, occupation that actually had equal median income between men and women. Oh, it was health practitioners, support technologists, and technicians, whatever the hell that is.

0:12:20 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Sure.

0:12:53 Thomas: There you go. Jump

0:12:55 Bea: Whereas

0:12:55 Thomas: Into that, women. Do it. Yeah.

0:12:58 Bea: Like, personal financial advisors had a wage gap of 62 percent, which was the widest wage gap in this study that had been done 2014.

0:12:59 Thomas: Oh, interesting. Personal financial advisors. Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating. And that kind of makes sense that that strikes me as something. I mean, this is just my impression. I don't know. You'd obviously have to study it more to get a certain picture. But that strikes мне as something where bias could be playing a role in that of like, look, I want to trust a man to tell me what to do with my money. You know, I wonder if that's, it makes sense to me that that would be such a wider gap for that, for our bias, you know?

0:13:07 Bea: Yeah. Yeah, study in particular was really helpful to me looking at the difference between the occupations. The study was called the Gender Wage Gap by Occupation 2014 and by Race and Ethnicity. And it had 116 different occupations, median weekly earnings with full-time work, and they were looking at the median weekly earnings and there still the possible problem that women could be working less hours or time per week in some of these, uh, particular industries, but even considering that, uh, in all of this, uh, women of color had far, far fewer earnings compared to

0:13:49 Thomas: Hmm. Sure. Yeah, it

0:14:23 Bea: Anyone else in the study.

0:14:24 Thomas: Gets a lot worse. Right. But the interesting thing is, I'm pretty sure if I have this right, that Asian women are higher than white women. Is that right? Did you see that in that report?

0:14:37 Bea: Asian men and women have the highest median weekly earnings of the different races that they had looked at. But I it looked like they were both higher than the median earnings for white men and white women.

0:14:49 Thomas: Yeah, that's consistent with what I remember reading too, which is fascinating. And I think that's something that someone like Christina Hoff Summers uses to try to poke a hole in the whole thing. What do you make of that? Because because I don't think because you have this example of Asian women making more that that wipes out everything else. It doesn't cancel everything else out. But it is interesting. I mean, what do you think about that? What conclusions do you draw from that?

0:14:52 Bea: Yeah.

0:15:19 Bea: Well, I I expect that there may be some cultural difference there because there there may Be more expectation for, say, Asian women to go into STEM fields than white women necessarily. I mean, I'm completely grasping at straws here, but it's a possibility that there may be more cultural pressure by Asian families to have women go into STEM fields.

0:15:23 Thomas: Sure.

0:15:46 Thomas: That's where it's important to emphasize that we're not talking about exactly equal work necessarily, because if it's broken down by job, then you would have that comparison, right? So if we had a chart of, because it wasn't your report broken down by the different industries or the different positions. So that would sort of eliminate that variable. It's kind of interesting. I really, myself, I'm not sure what to make of it. I really don't know. I don't think it makes the problem go away, but maybe it does tell us that if there is a solution, I mean, if Asian women are doing okay, maybe there's a lesson to be learned or maybe that means we can apply whatever they're doing to women who aren't doing as well. I don't know. It's a really curious thing and something that I don't think, again, I don't think it pokes a hole in the whole thing, like Christina Summers would say, but it is something worth thinking about.

0:16:08 Bea: Yeah. Yeah, And it occurs to me, too, that there maybe some wages that might not necessarily have been reported in this study. Like, um, I don't know if you saw that article a while back in New York Times about the horrendous practices of nail salons in New York City. Um, but I mean, people were earning like a dollar a day, kind of bad, and it was basically indentured servitude to get your visa to come work in the United States, and it was horrible, but something like that wouldn't get included in this study, probably.

0:17:10 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that probably wouldn't be a full-time... Let me think. So, yeah, it wouldn't Be salary, definitely, for sure. Let's negotiate a salary agreement. Okay. How is 8K a year? No. So yeah, I don't know. And one One thing I saw that was interesting, did you see the report recently that the female U.S. soccer team brings in more money than the male soccer team, but that the players on the male team are paid more? I saw this the other day. The female soccer team, the women's US soccer team brings in more money and achieved more things. And maybe I didn't have it just right. No, no, it's true. Their profit projected for 2017 is set to be $5 million for women and negative $1 million for men. Now, I don't know what the typical, some, different business ventures of different kinds. I don't know if this is a business or if it's a private thing.

0:17:23 Bea: Yeah. Yeah. I

0:18:22 Thomas: I mean, they will operate with losses. That doesn't necessarily mean, I don't know how they're structured or whatever. But one way or the other, the important thing is these bonuses are completely out of alignment. So if you make the World Cup roster per player, for men, it's a $76,000 bonus. For women, $15,000. If you qualify for the World Cup, $2.5 million bonus for men. $345,000 for women. It's pretty astonishing. These are huge differences. And the idea... So and if they... Let's check this one out. If they win the World Cup, the men would receive $9.3 million and the women $1.8 million. The whole team, the whole team.

0:19:06 Bea: For the whole Team. It was like Yeah. But

0:19:08 Thomas: Yeah. And yeah, and it's to the point where I think they're wondering, like their collective bargaining agreement, they're wandering if there's any sort of like, you know, if someone broke the law in that, because it seems ridiculous that there could be such a huge gap. And something like that, I think, is a really good, a powerful indication that, okay, maybe women aren't literally making 78 cents for men's dollar in equal, exactly equal work. But check this out. I mean, this is a pretty tangible example of what's going on, you know?

0:19:09 Bea: Still, that is huge, especially if they're bringing in more money, I mean, that you would think that that would be, you know, compensatory money as far as like what they're brining in, it should be, you know, a percentage of that rather than, uh, it's set amount. Yeah.

0:19:46 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Right. Because I don't know if we're ever, ever going to live in a world where the WNBA is going to bring in as much money as the NBA. I just, I don't know if that's ever going to happen. But when you look at a sport like this, where, hey, the women's team is bringing in a lot, you know, they're popular. It's a lot closer in soccer, apparently. And this huge discrepancy, there's a bunch of bonuses I didn't even say. I mean, there're more than this. If they reach the quarterfinals, the men get a $5 million bonus for the team. And the women, there isn't even a bonus for that. Zero.

0:20:32 Bea: There are no bonuses for them to to get any further than just qualifying, unless they place.

0:20:37 Thomas: You're right. Right. Yeah. If they don't get fourth place, then yeah. Right.

0:20:42 Bea: Yeah, and even then it's like barely anything. Although, to be fair, there is like if the men's team finishes in fourth place, they don't get a bonus, but the women get $240,000 for the whole team and

0:20:42 Thomas: Right, right. Sure. But that's, but that's nothing compared to the 3.6 million, 5 million and 4.5 million that they didn't get that the men already did just for getting that far. So that's crazy.

0:21:05 Bea: Not including the qualifying for the World Cup for the team and making the World Cup roster, per player. So, I

0:21:07 Thomas: Right? Right. So, I mean, this, this stuff is real and, and I, Recently, there was a Freakonomics episode. Are you familiar with this? Well, do you know the podcast?

0:21:21 Bea: Of Ergonomics. But I don't know the recent episode. Well,

0:21:24 Thomas: Okay. I think it was last week. It wasn't the most recent one. I think maybe the second most recent episode, maybe the third. They talked about the gender wage gap. And this was really powerful.

0:21:37 Thomas: There's a female professor from Harvard who they had on on to talk about the fact that the 78 cents thing is kind of a myth. And it's something that it's hard because when you see that, when you say, okay, female Harvard professor says, this is a myth, it's pretty powerful. But then again, she also says it comes down to, and I think you touched on this, it comes down to women needing and choosing jobs where there's time flexibility. She thinks that the majority of the differences are due to that, are due to women needing flexibility and time because of wanting to raise a family. She would also point out that for women who don't get married, the gap is a lot smaller because of this, because they don't, they aren't looking for the family flexibility. So what do you think about all that?

0:22:10 Bea: I Think it's definitely, uh, something I've thought about in looking for a job, um, I, I definitely look for something where I could, you know, in the future, uh, because I do want to, you know, have kids in the feature, uh, take time to be able to go, you know, pick them up from school or something if I had to, uh, and earn the time to do so without losing money because I'm on a salary basis rather than hourly, but I think for women who don't necessarily have children, they may not necessarily have much of a choice after they've chosen a job, especially If one is very strict about hours and time, because, because many women still bear the brunt of the responsibility, culturally speaking, of taking care of elderly parents.

0:22:46 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Hmm.

0:23:36 Bea: And that's something that a lot of people don't think about. But if you think about the pressures of not only raising a family, as in raising children, but also of caring for elderly parents on top of that, that's a full-time job right there.

0:23:50 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I'm in this, this needing, the flexibility thing. It's a little bit interesting, I think, for both of us, since we've already established we work for the state. That, at least where I am, my state, that does tend to be one of the best jobs, I'd say, for the gender pay gap, for equality, because it's so heavily regulated. I mean, I would say that for me, the gender play gap was a difficult thing to wrap my mind around because all of my experience has been women earning more or, you know, the same or more than I do. And of course, that's just anecdotal. But it is something where it's like, wow, I had no idea.

Like, my experience is you just make the same amount of money if you have the same class code, you Know, so it's a little bit different, you know, but maybe is that how more jobs should be? Do we want that level of regulation? Do we, would these additional benefits like paid time off, paid family leave, I know Bernie is talking about that a lot, that sort of thing. I mean, the example that government jobs have set, maybe that's what we want in the private sector.

0:24:12 Bea: Oh, yes. Right.

0:25:05 Bea: That would definitely be the way to go, to add in the paid time off, the paid family leave, because so many countries in Scandinavian areas already do that kind of thing and have way more job satisfaction and people who stay with companies for much longer. And again, I don't have the statistics right on me, but I read this years ago about how many European countries have much more paid time off. Whereas, and I think that that should be for both parents, especially, you know, if, and I think it should also go for, you know, if you're taking care of an elderly parent, or grandparent, who might need you to be there more often, especially when somebody's dealing with Alzheimer's, or Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's, things like that, where it's it's going to be a very slow, long road ahead. I think that taking time off to help out an elderly parent is an honorable and good thing to do and that more job creators should be taking that into consideration.

0:25:40 Thomas: Sure, yeah.

0:26:18 Thomas: Yeah, I wonder, the pessimistic side of me thinks, though, that there's an element of of this that I don't know that we can eliminate, which is companies would naturally target the people who they perceive as like, you can be here rain or shine. I mean, I will say as much as I do work for the state, as I've mentioned, and we do have these benefits, I've gotten to the point where the more work I get and the higher up I get, it is kind of expected, like I can't really miss a lot of time, you know, and that's a big problem. There's more of a pressure on women, certainly more pressure on mothers, because it's sort of expected that they just do everything with a kid. And if you have a sick kid, you Know, that's really tough to deal with.

0:27:08 Thomas: I am pessimistic a little bit just because when we're talking about private companies and stuff, it's going to be very very difficult to somehow change their minds or get them to target employees differently. And I don't know, have you come across in your research and just in your knowledge on this, anything tangible that we could do to change the culture? What are your best recommendations for, I guess, if you could have your way, you know, like what could we do to maybe change some of this?

0:27:45 Bea: My dream workplace would compensate me based on what got done, not how long it took to do it. And

0:27:54 Thomas: Oh, man. Well, I hear you on that. But there'd be a revolt, though. There's so many lazy state workers just getting by doing nothing and filling the hours.

0:27:58 Bea: I think that would actually, I think it would get so much more done, though. And in so many different areas, too. I mean, because, you know, you want more efficiency, you Want more productivity, well, then you can get it, but you only have the person working for an hour, you You know, and then people can actually live healthy lives and be fulfilled outside of their workplace and have three or four jobs and do different things where they feel like they have the skill to do it and they could do it for, you know, that short amount of time and then go on to their next job and do the other thing. I mean, it's a completely utopian pipe dream of mine, but I would really love to be in in industry where that occurred because right now I

0:28:09 Thomas: Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah, you ought to be an independent contractor, it sounds like.

0:28:57 Bea: Would love to do that.

0:28:58 Thomas: Yeah where you just kind of say, say, okay, I'll do this. Let's see how long it takes, and then I hear

0:29:03 Bea: Mostly because right now I'm doing the job of one and a half people.

0:29:09 Bea: And I honestly, to be doing the work that I should be doing, I should be working 60 hours a week at least. And I'm not allowed to work more than 40. Party.

0:29:20 Thomas: You. Oh, no overtime authorized, huh?

0:29:23 Bea: Nope, nope. I get in super big trouble if I'm a minute over 40 hours. So, and that's, that's really unfortunate for the people that I work for. Yeah.

0:29:34 Thomas: Yeah, I wonder if this will definitely hurt the brains of any conservatives who are listening, but this is something, this gender inequality on pay and all that, it's something that I really don't know that you could fix without a ton of regulation. Like, Like, I just think that companies that want to make money are always going to think I'm going to hire a dude who can, you know, or I'm going to promote, I guess, a dude who isn't going to be in the hospital delivering a baby at some point and taking time off. You know, I really, unless we regulate and say, and when, you know, this has happened a bit, there's FMLA, there is stuff like that.

I mean, there are some things, but we may need to go a little further in order to just make it so. Because my beliefs have come, this won't be terribly interesting to you, but I used to be a lot more conservative, at least fiscally. But I've recently started to think, you know, with how much America makes, with how high our GDP is relative to the next, you know, several countries, it's so much higher. Or couldn't we spare a little for some of these inefficiencies such as letting women, you know, take time off to to have a baby and stuff and not leaving them behind? You know, like I that that's been tend to be my philosophy on this.

0:30:19 Bea: And And I really think it's unfair that maternity leave is not standard and and paternity leave though too, that's the other thing, is that I will fight tooth and nail to have paternity leave be equally as common as maternity leave because I think people, you know, and FMLA covers a lot of that sort of thing, but it is not nearly enough to

0:31:02 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

0:31:23 Thomas: But that's like I think you can only get like half your pay. Right. Or I'm not totally sure how it works, but I know it's pretty tough to it just protects your job.

0:31:24 Bea: Right. It's it's not nearly enough to uh, to keep your wages uh to the point where they need to be when you have a baby or you know, if you are, you know, in a um, you know, male and male, male relationship or a two females relationship where you're adopting a child or you know, have a surrogate child or something like that too, I mean, you're going to have a lot of the same bills, you're gonna have a lot of the same problems, and you're gonna have a lot of the same, you know, needs. And I think that it would be completely unfair to say that the father wouldn't need that time off as well as the mother, or, you know, both mothers are both fathers.

0:31:33 Thomas: Right. Right, sure, right.

0:32:08 Thomas: Right. Yeah. So it may be, yeah, expanding those benefits because I know with FMLA, sure, it protects your job. It makes it so they can't fire me if, you know, if I were to have a kid and take a certain amount of time off work, but I don't get paid for it. You know, I don't, I, and it becomes a pretty quick economic reality of, okay, well, we had a baby and I'll get back to work immediately because we, you know, we're not making any money. And, and, uh, you know, I think that's something that as a country, I think my opinion is we could do a little better at, you I'm not, we don't have to go overboard or anything. It's not like you need a year off paid vacation for having a kid or anything, but I think we could do a little better than we're doing.

0:32:10 Bea: Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:52 Bea: And uh, you know, for the people who don't have children, there's always the possibility that they're going to have health problems that they're gonna have to take care of their, you know, spouse or other loved ones, elderly parents. And there's, you know, that possibility too, so it's not as though it's only going to be given to quote-unquote breeders only.

0:33:00 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:33:15 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, true. Well, is there anything else you wanted to cover in this conversation? Anything that I didn't let you get to?

0:33:23 Bea: That on your last show you had a guest who uh, apparently was yeah.

0:33:28 Thomas: My gosh. Yeah. I wanted to start the show with this and I forgot. Okay. Yes, please. This is an insane coincidence. Go ahead.

0:33:34 Bea: So, I was listening, I was listening to the last show, uh, just very briefly, the beginning of it, and you had on um, Ben Young, and he was talking about how he had just been doing Scooby-Doo in Egypt, and I was like, what? My best friend from high school just got done doing Scooby-Doo in Egypt.

0:33:42 Thomas: Ben Young.

0:33:53 Thomas: Yeah?

0:33:53 Bea: And if

0:33:54 Thomas: How many people do, tend to do Scooby-Doo in Egypt? You don't hear, that's not something you hear from every other person when you're, that's a pretty, pretty small group.

0:34:02 Bea: I'm if I'm looking at the entire cast right here, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten people out of the entire world, and we happen to know two of them. It is insane.

0:34:13 Thomas: That is so crazy. That is a crazy coincidence.

0:34:16 Bea: But I am also a theater person, so that probably is that comes for

0:34:20 Thomas: Oh, well then let's talk about that. No, I'm just kidding. Let's do a whole episode on musical theater. We'll grab Ben. What's that?

0:34:28 Bea: Eight hours. I said we could go on for like eight hours.

0:34:32 Thomas: Yeah, we'll grab ben someday. Although I'm such a snob. I only like like Sondheim and a couple other things. But okay. But yeah, that is a a crazy coincidence. And I was, I was pretty blown away by that. What are the odds? 10 people out of, who knows? I don't know how to calculate that, but all I can tell you is it's a miracle and it definitely means there is a God. So, all right.

0:34:32 Bea: Okay.

0:34:52 Bea: I'm gonna find out Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

0:35:00 Thomas: Miss B, as in misbehaving. I like the, the pseudonym there. And the show, of course, again, was promoting secular feminism. And, oh, and I'll Also, I understand you're going to have an episode about this very topic coming up, right?

0:35:17 Bea: Uh, our uh, episode that has uh, Demand A Right, my co-host, was talking about uh, the gender wage gap, uh, particularly about social pressures when it comes to particular occupations, and uh, the cultural norms in uh, the, the workforce in the United States, uh, will be, that will be releasing this coming Sunday, which will be uh, April 17th.

0:35:43 Thomas: Right. So it will already be out by the time they're hearing this. So feel free to check that out if you'd like to check out more of Miss B in that show and the same topic if you want to hear more, probably from a bit of a different angle, it sounds like. Cool. All right. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

0:35:46 Bea: Yep. Yes.

0:35:57 Bea: Thank you for having me.

0:36:12 Thomas: All right. Well, sorry if there were a few clicks and pops there in Ms. B's recording setup. I tried to take them out as best I could, but a few couldn't quite be separated there. Sorry about that. But, interesting stuff. You know, the question I want to ask you guys is, what do you think about this gender equal pay day? Because I do believe that there's income inequality within genders. I do. I don't quite accept the the 78, 79 cent, whatever it is, percentage figure that, you know, for reasons that we discussed. So therefore, what about this equal payday? Does this cause more harm than good? Does this piss people off who have trouble with that statistic?

0:36:58 Thomas: Or does this bring visibility to it? I wonder what you guys, that might be something if you want to comment what you think about it. But overall, interesting. I always agree with bringing visibility to things like this. I was blown away by that news story about the soccer team that I saw the other day, the female soccer team. So good stuff. I want to thank recent patrons, actually. Thank you, John Turbek. Thank you, Bumboclaat. Interesting name. And thank you, Griselda. I don't think that I already thank these people. So thank you so much for pledging to the show. It's much appreciated. I hope I got you some bonus content this week. I can't tell because I'm recording from the past, but that's how podcasting works.

0:37:43 Thomas: All right. Thank, thank you guys so much for joining me. I'll see you on Thursday for a really fun science episode that I very much enjoyed recording and I think you will learn a lot from. So see you then.