The Pay Gap and the Feminine Ideal

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the news that we all already knew, but I thought this crowd would particularly enjoy the snippet at the end of this note on the AAUW’s findings about college and the gender pay gap:

The organization found that women’s scholastic performance was not reflected in their compensation. Women have slightly higher grade point averages than men in every major, including science and math. But women who attend highly selective colleges earn the same as men who attend minimally selective colleges, according to the study.

”The pay gap is not going to disappear just through educational achievements,” Hill said.

Wilkes has a really informative post on this on Girlpower 2. I also wonder how this intersects with general “Be Yourself and Be Perfect Too” and “Gamma Girl”-ism as Kirkwood and Jacob mention on Girlpower 1?

There is an interesting dynamic between this growing notion of women doing everything, and doing it well, and this sense nonetheless that women’s labor is less valuable than men’s. Is it that being “perfect” is just another, albeit achievement-oriented, permutation of women needing always to look beautiful? It is an interesting connection, if only because the attention given to women’s beauty has also historically been a way of simultaneously ignoring and devaluing women’s labor: women, apparently, don’t really care about work.