How many times have you heard, “A woman makes seventy-four cents on a man’s dollar?”  Some people would like everyone to believe that employers are deliberately paying women less for the same work that a man does.  This is simply not true.  The statistic is being taken out of context in order to push the feminist cause.

Comparing the average male salary with the average female salary without considering context is wrong and misleading in so many ways.  If women truly did the same work for less money, all businesses would hire all women employees to cut the extra cost of hiring men.  Certain corporations cut costs by hiring undocumented immigrants, or outsource to poorly run, cheaply paid workers overseas.  If women did the same amount and quality of work, then these corporations should be hiring more women than men.  That has not been the case overall in business, so there must be something wrong with the initial statement that women do the same work for less money.

Upon closer examination, men are more likely to take riskier jobs, jobs during odd hours, and jobs that are further from home for the sake of a higher wage.  Women sometimes choose lower paying jobs in order to have more conveniences such as jobs that allow for more time at home, low risk jobs, and jobs that allow for more flexibility.  If family and children were taken out of the equation, women can and do in some instances make just as much (if not more) than men [1]. That said, when children are taken out of the equation, are performance quality equal? Not necessarily. In some cases, women without children still take more time off from work than men without children [2]. We can’t blame everything on the kids. Sometimes, it’s actually about the quality of work.

What do you think about this view: male workers have the rights to earn more money because, when comparing men in general to women in general, men actually do more work?  Take professional tennis as an example.  The Wimbledon Championships have been traditionally the most prestigious tournament in the game of tennis.  In 2007, after women players protested for the right to have equal prize money, Wimbledon conceded in giving both the men and women equal prize money.  Although the prize equality would make sense in regular tournaments where both men and women play best two out of three sets to decide a match, but in a grand slam match (and in many regular tournament finals) men have to play best three out of five sets while women still play only two out of three. Men matches also account for more fan attendance which means more money for the tournament.  Many women players celebrated this new equality and said it was a great movement that would help set the stage for more equality for women everywhere.  However, is it fair to offer the same prize for a lesser athletic performance?  Now, athletics should not be held to the same scrutiny as the professional sphere, simply because athletics depends on body strength, and males and females are biologically built differently. However, the inequalities in athletics could be used as comparisons to life in the professional sphere.

Raj!

U.C. Berkeley, Sarah Lawrence College

Raj was born as Rajagopalachari Maraikayar Mukhopadhyay in Madras, capital of the Tamil Nadu province of India. At age 5, he and his family moved to Berkeley, California where he garnered his current nickname of “Raj.”

Raj enjoyed the free-loving nature of Berkeley, California where he spent most of his time reading about the history of social injustice as well as advocating for the legalization of marijuana. His interests also include fighting the man, signing petitions, getting other people to sign petitions, chasing down people to sign petitions, and of course taking long romantic walks on the beach and getting sunbathers to sign petitions.

Raj eventually moved to New York, where he is currently enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College for a Ph.D. in ethnic studies and is officially employed as the South Asian grassroots coordinator for the Obama Presidential Campaign. There in New York City, Raj enjoys organizing big rallies, counter-rallies, counter-counter rallies, and making most of his best friends at rallies. Everything else about his life, according to Raj, “you should Google.”

Professor Mao!

Hillsdale College

Professor Mao was born as Liu-Ching-Fai Mao in the province of Heilongjiang, China where he grew up dissatisfied with the quasi-communist rule of the People’s Republic of China. While educated in reputable secondary schools in the province, Mao grew tired of the growing influence of liberalism permeating throughout the coastal provinces and cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Thus, with the encouragement of his parents, Mao eventually fled to North Korea where he sought refuge in ultra-conservative values of the one-party state.

After graduating at the top of his class from the University of Pyongyang, Mao decided to instill the issues of conservatism in Amsterdam, Holland. This endeavor proved quite unsuccessful, however, as he was chased down by an angry mob after publicly claiming he had sabotaged the city’s largest underground marijuana supply with a deadly cocktail of talcum powder, tabasco sauce, chinese licorice, and flesh-eating bacteria. Nevertheless, Professor Mao was granted asylum by the United States where he pursued a professorship at Hillsdale College.

Professor Mao currently resides at Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he is an avid supporter of Palin-McCain ticket (not the other way around) and teaches a popular class called “Fighting Spin with Spin: Resisting the Liberal Elite Media. (Bless their Souls!)”

A cold February breeze scattered powdery snow outside the quiet Cornell lecture hall where the bid presentations to the East Coast Asian American Student Union National Board were taking place. Pride and contentment were prominent emotions as colleagues Anjlee Joshi and Caspar Wang announced the conclusion to the 2009 ECAASU bid presentation from the Rutgers University Bid Committee.

A roar of cheers from a sea of scarlet apparel demanded the attention of every other school in the room. Rutgers had indefinitely won the bid to host ECAASU 2009.

Since then, months of weekly meetings for the newly elected 21-member planning board have consisted of forcibly tossing ideas, arguments, and jokes alike across the lengthy Asian American Cultural Center conference room table. Livingston Campus has never quite looked the same for these active leaders.

Joshi and Wang, former bid committee members and current Co-Directors, have facilitated numerous meetings consisting of sponsorship discussions, GoogleDoc sharing, and curry tasting. Jane Ryu and Riddhi Shah, Finance chairs, meet often with Ji Lee, AACC Director, in hopes of raking in a generous budget amidst a teetering economy. Ryu and Shah have known from the start that this conference is absolutely nothing without money and work diligently to gain a lead with companies and their very large corporate piggy banks, knowing full well those same piggy banks may be long broken and cleaned out as early as weeks from today. (The sponsorship Google Doc is filling up handsomely!)

As Ryu and Shah work numbers at one end of the table, a quiet and dignified Isha Vora sits at the opposite end working networks that, until now, she never knew existed. With the American job market in crisis at a 6.1% unemployment rate and major companies making layoffs like daily breakfast choices, Vora is optimistic that students will, nevertheless, donate their time free of charge to the ECAASU cause.

Seated next to her is Jodie Shin, Internal Entertainment Chair, who is adamantly explaining the benefits of soy ink for printing conference packets over the sound of Secretary Jessica Lai’s rapid typing. Shin’s counterpart, James Kim (External Entertainment Chair) is busy working on a promising multicultural sponsorship proposal for a mobile-phone titan, confident his epic Saturday night entertainment will be financially viable.

Philip Chen, Housing Chair, is anything but swayed. He geniously suggests a personal contact from Project Michelle, a bone marrow foundation, as a potential table at the conference’s career fair and then discreetly returns to his game of N-Blox on his Mac. Unknowingly, Chen freely surfs on the same server on which hundreds of people, in hospitals across the nation needing blood & bone marrow transplants also play to pass the time. Many of these same people live day to day with insufficient or no health coverage at all.

In short, we are busy students here at the ECAASU meetings, but seeing beyond the present is what keeps us striving for the success of this conference. The United States, a whirlwind of political instability, social inequality, and economic downturn, still has freckles of unchanging faith like us here at Rutgers. Our distinct world may toss and tumble at the mercy of international human dynamics, but our one vision as a people is what draws our attention away from the clamor and up towards a brighter future that we continuously strive to be a part of.

Started off by recapping the Boston and NYC Mixer. Boston mixer is explained in detail in the post below, so I won’t go into that. At the NYC mixer there were some interesting conversations. One attendee brought up the topic of Asian American men sexuality as examined through pornography industry, which could be an interesting workshop or discussion group. We also discussed exclusivity v. inclusivity with Asian American groups on campus. We confirmed the date for Philly mixer, but I think now there’s some more confusion. So the Philadelphia mixer is either on the 8th or 15th of November. TBC. There is also talk of doing a mixer in the south, maybe at U Florida, in collaboration with the SERCAAL board sometime in the spring. That is still in the talks though.

We moved on to discuss other projects, like this blog. We came up with two characters for this blog. The young and spunky “Raj,” and the old and traditional “Professor Mao.” Their bios are still being drafted, but their first blog entries are deadlined at end of the week. They will discuss various topics of interest… political, non political, mostly opinion, and definitely aims at inviting conversation.

We also talked about the Bid. There are now 5 schools interested in a bidding–from NY, NJ, PA, MA, and GA. We discussed ways in which the National Board can help these schools in the bid process, threw around the idea of having a conference call “Office Hour” session (or multiple sessions) where anybody could just dial in to ask the National Board questions about the bid. This session is tentatively set for November 9th. We want to push for bid declaration to by due December 1st, and bid packet to be due January 15th.

Last we discussed our interview project.  Michelle H. will be leading this project now. She’ll be leveraging her committee members and Calvin Sun to do this. By next meeting, we should have a list of people we would like to interview and start sending out invitations to participate in this project. We want to do a combination of phone interviews and video interviews that will be made available to the public. This way, even if people can’t come to the conference, they can still get exposure to dialogue with individuals who might keynote at ECAASU.

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