EP119: How the Pay Gap Steals More than Money from Women

This week, I’m calling out what the gender pay gap really represents: and it’s not a few cents on the dollar. It’s a power gap that has quietly stripped women of wealth, visibility, and recognition for decades. I unpack why women in both corporate and entrepreneurial spaces keep getting excluded from positions of influence, how “equal pay for equal work” misses the point entirely, and why midlife women are waking up to a system designed to profit from their silence. This episode dives into leadership, authority, and what it takes to step outside the system and start architecting your own. Caution: It may trigger you into rebellion. 

Chapters

• 0:03 Welcome And Show Intent
• 0:51 The Shocking Numbers Behind The Gap
• 3:06 From Money Problem To Power Problem
• 3:46 The Broken Rung And Missing Floor
• 4:56 Entrepreneurship’s Mirror Of Underrecognition
• 8:12 Midlife, Receipts, And Invisible Credit
• 9:46 Wealth, Visibility, And Power Gaps
• 11:10 The Hidden Costs Women Absorb
• 13:03 Forced Choices And False Opt-Outs
• 14:31 Step Outside The System

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Welcome to the business class to make this week question. Take your choice to the online business space and the reference with which they're helping. I'm your host they're coming. Speaker, strategic and BS listing that. Join me each week in which we can launch the norms, trends, and overall bullshit status quo of entrepreneurship to uncover what it really takes to build the business that you want to build in a way that honors you, your life, and your vision for what's possible, and maybe piss off a few gurus along the way. So if you're ready to commit business blasphemy, let's do it. Hello, hello, blasphemers. Welcome to Business Blasphemy, where we encourage bold women to cut through the bullshit and claim what they want without apology or compromise. I'm Sarah Kahn, speaker, leadership strategist, and business advisor, and your blasphemous host. Let's get to it. I am really, really pissed off today. I read an article about the gender pay gap. Now, before you say Sarah, I'm an entrepreneur, this applies to you just as much as anybody in a traditional role. So let's start with a number that is really, really easy to overlook, but honestly, impossible to ignore when you understand what it means. 81 cents. That is down from 83 cents in 2023, and that was down from 84 cents in 2022. And if you're thinking, okay, Sarah, um, but I'm not American, I'm Canadian, well, guess what? In 2022, women in Canada earned 84 cents for every dollar a man earned. And that was based on the medium hourly wages of women and men aged 15 or older. So in 2022, we were only earning 84 cents compared to the dollar high school kids working at McDonald's were making. And in 2024, yeah, that bumped up to like 89 cents for every dollar. But when you think about the fact that in 1997, the year I graduated with my first degree, we were only making 81 cents. So in all that time, we've only gone up eight cents on the dollar. On paper, it's a few cents. In practice, it's a system that is in decline. For the first time in 25 years, the gender pay gap is widening. And over a lifetime, that tiny difference adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings, in lost savings, and the ability to invest. And that's the problem. We've been taught to see this as an accounting problem, a dollar and cents discrepancy that we can close with enough mentorship or salary negotiation workshops or confidence coaching. But the truth is the pay gap was never about money. It's never been about money. It's about power. It's about who gets it and who's denied it. And who is told to feel grateful just to be at the table. I'm gonna give you three guesses on who that is. We've been shouting the slogan, equal pay for equal work for fucking decades, because it sounds fair. It sounds like progress, but it's not. Women don't just earn less because they're paid less for the same job. They earn less because they are strategically excluded from all of the pathways to higher earning roles. And it starts very early in your career. That broken rung, right? We've heard about the broken rung on the ladder. That broken rung at the first promotion, where women get passed over for management, that creates a chain reaction that compounds over an entire career. And by midlife, that missing rung has turned into like, well, a whole fucking missing floor, right? There's fewer leadership positions, there fewer, there's fewer equity opportunities, there's fewer networks that actually open doors to those opportunities. And this isn't just about corporate life. Like I said, it's it's the same in entrepreneurship. Women are overrepresented in underpaid sectors, coaching, creative services, caregiving industries. Why? Because we've been socialized to serve, not to scale. I mean, I've told this story here a number of times, right? And I know that most women out there have a similar story that you are getting excellent reviews in your workplace, right? You are you are the top-rated employee, employee of the month, flavor of the month, whatever. But for some reason, you never get promoted. You keep being overlooked for that position. Nine out of 10 times it goes to a guy. Usually someone who's underqualified, less qualified than you. In entrepreneurship, I've seen this so, so often. You have someone who is an incredibly competent business owner who really wants people to achieve their goals. And so they keep their prices, quote unquote, accessible until you realize that your clients are actually out-earning you, right? We've all been there. I've been there. Because what are we told? Don't charge too much. I mean, now the rhetoric has changed, and now it's like high ticket this and high ticket that. But again, we are not, we're not setting people up for success. We're yelling at women to raise your prices because charge your worth, but then we're not giving them the infrastructure to actually deliver on the type of quality that those high-ticket prices demand. So it's no different in entrepreneurship. Because then what that does is it hinders her ability to consistently make that level of revenue. And when we treat the pay gap as a performance issue, we ignore the system designed to profit from women's underrecognition. Look around the entrepreneurial space. We have so many women who are absolutely freaking amazing at what they do. And yet when you Google top-rated coaches, it's usually men. But let's talk about what underrecognition throughout your career looks like once you hit midlife. And if you're still thinking midlife is like, you know, 55 plus, no, midlife starts at 35. Sorry to burst your bubble. When you think about the average age of a woman in the US or in Canada, midlife is 35. Sorry, not sorry. But at this stage, you know, particularly when you're like in your 40s and 50s, most women have tons of receipts, right? They've done the work, they've carried teams, they've mentored the up-and-comers, they've made other people look really, really good. And yet somewhere between your 40s and your 50s, you realize the math doesn't math anymore. You have worked twice as hard, you've played by every rule, and you're still not seeing a return. The gap in your bank account is mirrored by a gap in your recognition. You can actually see the correlation. And the titles that you were promised years ago, if you just worked harder, were more of a team player, stayed late, blah, blah, blah, the person who got it instead is still asking for your fucking advice. I shared on the podcast last week a story about how I was instrumental in the development of an entire new division for a business that I worked at. And it was an incredibly successful venture. And when I presented it to the senior leadership team and they were like, yes, let's make this a permanent part of our organization, they handed leadership of that division over to somebody else, somebody who was not even involved in it, like at all. So not only didn't I get to lead it, but I wasn't credited for it in the least. You can go on their website and look. My name isn't anywhere to be seen. And if you've built a business, you've probably done the same thing in a different costume, undercharging, over-delivering, or outsourcing your authority to someone else's playbook. I had a post the other day about how so many people are working with coaches and the coach steals their IP. Their coach steals what they're doing. But because the coach has a little bit of visibility in clout, nobody says anything. And they, you know, they run with it because people know them. And the person who is the brilliance behind that, they're like, okay, well, what can I do about it? And we're told to just overlook it. It's fine, it doesn't matter. You know, because no one can deliver it like you. And yeah, that may be true, but it still fucking sucks. And it's usually somebody who is privileged in some way, who has the finances and the resources and the capacity that most of us don't, whether it's by marriage or association or the networks or the people that they're associated with, their patrons. Like there is so much dirty happening behind the scenes that most people don't know about. And this is not the episode to talk about it. But anyway, I digress. The gender pay gap. It's not just about wage gap, it's a wealth gap, it's a visibility gap. And really, at the at the apex of it, it's a power gap. And by the time you reach your 40s, those gaps don't just affect our finances, they affect how we see ourselves. They shape what we believe is possible for our next steps. The entire economy depends on women absorbing costs that never show up on a PL, right? The cost of childcare, uh the unpaid labor of caregiving, the emotional labor of managing families and teams and relationships. The countless times you've said, it's fine, I'll handle it. Don't worry about it, I've got it. Every one of those moments has an economic value and a human toll. I remember years ago, I was working for a telecommunications company. And my older daughter, who was very young at the time, she's maybe three or four, she developed whooping cough and obviously had to stay home. She couldn't go to daycare. So I had arranged to be able to do all my work from home so that I could care for her. First of all, they designed the system, our laptops and everything with, you know, secure fobs or dongles. I can't even remember the technology, but there was a secure way to log into our servers that allowed people to be able to work from home. The men on the team did it all the time. They were mobile constantly. The sheer act of me asking for this opportunity was met with so much, like, ugh, what an inconvenience. They did it. They gave it to me. I worked from home for that entire week. I made all of my meetings, I made sure that all of my reports were in on time. Like my work did not suffer. And I went back to work the following week after my daughter was better. The director calls me into her office, her office, and she says, you know, you weren't really at work last week because you were caregiving for your child. So we're gonna have to dock your pay for five days. I shit you not. And I know there are tons of you out there who have experienced similar things, where you were expected to deliver work while caring for someone at home, or you had to choose family over career because the system left you with no real choice. I mean, we call these choices, but they're not choices when the structure makes literally every alternative impossible. We saw it during COVID. So when women opt out, and I say opt out in quotation marks, it's not because they lack ambition. We see it with women who go on maternity leave. Do I have a child? Do I not have a child? Because when I come back, I'm not gonna have the same opportunities I had before. People are gonna think I don't, I'm not ambitious, that I'm not a go-getter. But we're not opting out. It's a choice that we've been forced to make because there are no viable alternatives. So it's not a lack of ambition. It's exhaustion. Exhaustion from paying the fucking price for the ambition in a world that keeps discounting it over and over and over. So I want us to change the conversation. You cannot close a power gap by staying inside it. You have to step out of it. You have to decide that your energy and your authority and your ambition are assets, not liabilities. That is what I mean when I talk about restructuring your leadership. Stop negotiating inside a system that profits from you being silent. Start building systems that actually sustain and elevate your power. So, what does that look like in reality? That might mean redesigning your role at work, renegotiating your role at work, not just your pay, so that you are in a position where your strategic value is impossible to ignore. And you may be thinking, okay, so so what does that mean? Like applying for there's no roles out there. No, go and speak to the person in charge and tell them this is what you need. If you're an entrepreneur, it might mean rewriting your business model so that your expertise drives your revenue, not your time. This is something I help women do in my Firestarter advisory. We center everything, we anchor it in your expertise and your authority. I mean, ultimately, this all might look like redefining what success even looks like for you in this chapter of your life. I worked with a woman recently who is incredibly successful, but she was tired of having to prove it. We redesigned what everything actually meant in terms of success for her. She scaled back and she's enjoying work so much more now. And when I say scale back, I don't mean she stopped doing things, but she scaled down instead of scaling up. Look, at the end of the day, true equity is not equal pay for equal work. That is the bare fucking minimum. True equity means equal access to power, equal access to recognition, and to decision making. It means the wisdom and the creativity and the resilience that women have been quietly deploying for frigging decades are recognized as leadership capital. When women are able to lead from their full identity, not just the acceptable parts of it, they don't just change their own outcomes, they change the entire operating system for everybody who's watching. They build an entirely new model. And that is why this moment matters. That is why 81 cents means something. The data isn't just a warning, it's a call to stop subsidizing systems that were never built for us and to figure out how we can start architecting the structures that will sustain us in the future. So when you hear 81 cents on the dollar, don't reduce it to a statistic. See it for what it fucking is. A symptom of a power imbalance that has been normalized for generations. And then I want you to ask yourself the harder question: where are you still working for equality when what you actually deserve is sovereignty? Because closing this gap isn't about asking for fairness, it's about reclaiming our authority and our value. Once you claim your authority, it does not shrink back. You just need to stop pretending that the game was ever fair. Because our success does not deserve all of this frickin' BS. I'll talk to you next week. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Business Blasphemy Podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode, but in the meantime, help assist her out by subscribing, and if you're feeling extra sassy, rating this podcast. And don't forget to share the podcast with others. Head over to BusinessBlasphemy Podcast.com to connect with us and learn more. Thanks for listening. And remember, you can have success without the BS.