My senior year at BYU included a teaching internship in the local community. I was blown away when the males and some females campaigned to adjust the pay scale to award males more pay simply because they supported families. The teacher I worked with was recently divorced and secretly confided that she was livid that these jackasses thought they deserved more money for the same work. When I told my LDS friends/family in other states they didn't believe me. To my knowledge it was never enacted, but the attempt was there. This was in the 90's. Only in Utah...

Bill Burr does a great riff on why men deserve more pay, which starts, “I get more per hour than you ladies because if we should all happen to find ourselves on a sinking Titanic, I have stay on the ship while the women and children.. “

He sounds like the type who would elbow his way onto one of the life boat, leaving some shivering child to go down with the boat.

That is an absurd argument, anyway. You get paid 25% more your entire life because there's a chance (and I'm going to go out on a limb here--a SLIM chance) that you might have to go down in a luxury ocean liner in 1912?

I know, huh! What kind of a comedian talks like that?

Oops. I didn't know who he is.

He does have a rep for misogyny...

He has another routine that starts, "How come a guy can't hit a woman..."

Arguments like these were very common in decades past. I once ran across a batch public-service-type advertisements from the mid 1940s in the National Archives. They urged women to quit their wartime jobs and go back to the kitchens at home because the "boys" returning from the war needed the jobs. It was portrayed as a patriotic duty to step aside and let men have their jobs because the men would need to support families.

Yes, indeed. My mom, who was working as a tool and dye maker during WWII, fully expected the pink slip that she would get as the troops returned home. She told me that one of her female coworkers later returned to tool and dye work. It was a job that paid well!

I fully remember the "men need to earn a family wage" and "women shouldn't take a breadwinner's job away from him" attitudes being widespread into the 1960s. Where I grew up, working women were often looked at with disdain and suspicion, even though we had a female judge living on our street, and a female pediatrician living on the next street over. Attitudes started to slowly change in the 1970s and beyond as greater numbers of women entered the workforce.

It's ludicrous that some people still believe that way in 2017, but evidently that's the case.

We laugh at the concept but we practice a slightly different version in this country.


When my wife passed all of a sudden I took a huge take home pay cut as I slipped from the married tax bracket to the head of household bracket.

A few years later as my last child became independent my take home pay fell again as I slipped into the single tax bracket.

My child who has kids snd a partner pays more in taxes bevause they are not married. Though their family size would not change there is a penalty because there is no piece of paper.

You guess there is a tax break for appearing to potentially bring another taxpayer into the world.

Posted by: HikergrlAZ:

"My senior year at BYU included a teaching internship in the local community. I was blown away when the males and some females campaigned to adjust the pay scale to award males more pay simply because they supported families---Only in Utah".

P: "Only in Utah": Not so, HikergrlAZ.
In the early 50ies, in Glendale, CA., I had a job as a "Clerk-Typist II" while working for the City of Glendale. They excused my "less pay for the same job" on the same basis: "because males supported families". I had quite a lively discussion with my male co-workers and supervisors over this subject. (Especially in that these men had little to do in the way of 'work', except to watch ME work, and try to find something to criticize me regarding my work.) (Five men in my group, and one female.) Plus, I had to put-up with a full-time smoker just behind me.

Time warp, right?? This was in the 90's and not at all legal.