still deeper pockets

Flamingo gave me an interesting link the other day.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Wide disparities in income still exist between white men and women, especially women of racial minorities, a report released Tuesday showed.

The wage gap between Asian-American women and white men, however, isn't as pronounced as that of other women workers, and Asian-American women are likely to earn more than other women, according to "The Status of Women in the United States," published by the non-profit Institute for Women's Policy Research.

Asian-American women earned an average of $33,100 in 1999, the most recent year measured, compared with $44,200 for white men and $30,900 for white women, making them the most highly paid female subgroup.

For the rest of the article, see here. For those of you who are interested, the entire report is available at the Institute of Women's Policy Research. (See the Full Report in PDF format.)

Color me -- hah! -- surprised, though not about the gap between male and female wages. Certainly I'm cynical enough that it came as no shock that that particular disparity, even after all our so-called progress, is a 25% gap. What I'm unaccountably impressed with is that the breakdown includes race, and that for a change, a minority group has out-earned the so-called majority. For that matter, it's my minority group.

Go, peeps.

Yes, I should be ashamed that this particular fact gives me pride. It's not an accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it ameliorate the staggering injustice of the massive, massive wage gap between one gender and another. I should be ashamed, but I'm honest enough to admit that I'm not. Why should I be? Asian women are kicking some booty. I'm down with that.

Here in the Bay Area, a large proportion of the women in high tech are Asian, mostly of Chinese and Indian stock, though there're plenty of other nationalities represented amongst them, Japanese being one of the more minor ones. I'm pretty sure that it's us highly-paid, well-educated Asian tech women who are singlehandedly tipping the scales in women's favor, because it sure as hell isn't young black women in CEO positions across the country, or Japanese chicks winning Oscars and pulling in six figure salaries, or Native American women being voted into high-profile public office. I can give you one example of a Japanese chick winning an Oscar. Someone else provide examples of the other two. Anyone? Anyone?

Okay. Yeah. Long way to go. You know how I'll measure when progress no longer needs to be made? When you're never again asked, "Give me one example of...."

Jokes about feng shui aside, ever since I've started working here, there's been a metal screw dangling from the ceiling, right over my coworker's head. This is not an insignificant screw, mind you. It's the length of a grown man's arm, for one thing, and it's solid steel, and it's Dangling From The Ceiling. The only reason I call it a screw and not a fucking big pipe is that it's got threads on it.

The three women in this block of cubes have been complaining about this pipe for the last two years; it's become her own personal Screw of Damocles. We've taken to joking that our chief executives have buttons in their office that they can push to make those things drop on the heads of troublemakers; the other dangerously dangling pipe is right over the head of one of our more, shall we say, difficult engineers.

Today -- CLANG!! -- it fell. Splut. Came down like a javelin, straight for her desk. Smashed a gaping hole through her keyboard. Scared the crap out of everybody.

...except her. She wasn't in her chair. She'd already gone home.

Much agitation ensued. The office manager came around the corner and gaped up at the pipes, while we jabbered excitedly.

"We've been complaining about this for two years!"

"--trying to KILL us."

"Where the hell's OSHA?"

"You should get your money back from that feng shui expert of yours," I told the Office Manager.

"No! Why?" The thought astonished her. "The feng shui worked! She wasn't in her chair!"

Personally, I've got to wonder about the talents of a feng shui expert who comes in and plants stuffed peacocks around the office, but neglects to notice the bad chi of a spontaneous trephination.

So in a fit of rage the other day, I deleted most of my wedding registry.

Oops.

My mother has a talent for pissing me off that is unsurpassed in Nature. I can only assume that 30 years of observing this particular monkey has given her a Goodallian sense for provocation. It's rare that I get angry, and rarer still that I get angry enough to be completely irrational. The random acts of idiocy I perform in my daily life are the acts of a mature, self-aware human being; the things my maternally-inspired rage prompt me to do have their origins in childhood, an untherapeutic regression into the worst excesses of my youth.

It was my sister who made the phone call from Seattle. My cell phone registered her name in the caller ID, and I picked it up without any of the normal precautions I take before talking with my mother.

"Hey," she said. "Mom wants to talk to you."

There was a rustle. Then, Mom.

"Yuuuuhri." This should have been a sign right there. The more 'oooh' sound there is in her pronounciation of my name, the more pissed off or irritated I'm going to be. "Yuuuuuuuuhri. Your register, it is so materialistic. You register for too much. People will thinking you for being greedy. It is so expensive. Why you registering so much? You not having room in your apartment. You should go change before people seeing."

"--which is ridiculous," Tara told me last night. "My mom looked at the list and was saying, 'Yuhri forgot to register for this, and this, and this, and this, and this--'"

"--and your list wasn't too long," my ex-roommate protested as well. "I looked at it and it was tiny. It only had, like, six things on it."

Unfortunately, this was later. At the time, all I was aware of was a sudden boiling sensation behind my eyeballs. I gritted my teeth. "It's not too much, Mom. I went with friends, and I registered for stuff I needed."

"But it is so much, I have shocking." Her entire conversation was in italics. She heaved a heavy sigh, prompted by who knows what evil genius; it was just what I needed to be tipped over the edge of maturity back into the thrashing, vengeful abyss of adolescence. "Maybe you younger people, it is different. I know what register for. When I am register when I get married, I am not registering so materials and greedy."

"Fine," I said. "I'll delete my registries."

"Now wait," said my coworkers, when I reached this point in my story. "How does that make any sense? She'd win if you deleted your registries. We'd have gone online and added more stuff."

"You have to understand the way I was thinking," I explained, "which is that I wasn't."

Life from the 7-year old's perspective isn't the same as life from the 30-year old's perspective. If you've ever seen A Christmas Story or been younger than, well, 20, you know what it's like. The 7-year old imagines wild thoughts of long-term punishment, where the parent is reduced to remorseful tears because washing her child's mouth out with soap has resulted in him becoming a blind, saintlike homeless man. The 7-year old imagines how being forced to practice her piano like Mom wants, instead of hanging out with friends, results in her becoming a suicidal, emotional cripple without friends or loved ones. The 7-year old imagines how deleting her bridal registry so she won't look greedy, results in her eventually causing mortification to the mother when she serves her visiting mother and sundry guests on mismatched cracked plates in a run-down tenement. If she'd only had a registry, she would have had dinnerware and been able to afford a house instead of spending all that money on plates.

"And how old are you again?" asked my coworkers.

Shut up.

My mother, on the phone, sighed a long-suffering, martyred sigh again, and said, "And now you are being angry. I should not saying anything. I should not have opening my mouth. I do not knowing anything. I am old. Maybe everybody is being rich where you live, and I am only surprise because I am poor, and I am thinking it so greedy. Your aunt and grandmother, they coming from Japan soon."

You notice how, even after my mother says she shouldn't say anything, she continues to talk?

I noticed that too.

After I hung up, I stormed to the computer, logged into my registries, and deleted -- well, almost everything. The Guy, who was a witness to the rage and subsequent swathe of destruction, hovered anxiously (and timidly) in the corners of the apartment, curling into small balls of fuzzy alarm whenever my attention swung a too close for comfort. Every so often he would scuttle into the periphery of my vision, wrap a comforting hug around my shoulders, then skid hastily away before I could turn around. "I refuse to be sorry!" I yelled after him, triumphantly deleting my linens.

Prudent man: he said nothing.

It took several days for my blood pressure to stop rising whenever I thought of the woman; while I'm at the point where I'll acknowledge that I might -- just might -- have overreacted (just a little), I'm still only just touching on regret for having done so. This morning I logged on and tentatively started piecing my registries together. Except it turns out that I can't, because some of the stuff I picked in the first place isn't available online. Brilliant.

How old do I have to be before my Mom stops being able to reduce me to a raving infant? Someone please tell me. I'd like to know that there's hope. Anyone?