Is Gender Pay Gap a Myth?
As a university student, it is the case that someone's constantly trying to convince me that there is an ongoing issue with discrimination against any and all minorities. I will not go into much detail as to why that simply isn't the case in Western countries. It's just ridiculous.
Closely tied to that, however, is so-called Gender pay gap.
"People Management analysed the gender pay gap figures from 570 UK companies, and found that the average gap in mean hourly pay across the organisations was 11%." I honestly have very little idea as to what this is supposed to mean practically, but along with the dazzling headline and a discrimination story of Carrie Gracie from BBC, it just seems like a piece of propaganda. There doesn't seem to be a reason to think otherwise. Appeal to emotions, use of numbers just to make the argument sound plausible, victim and a villain roles. Such is the nature of the articles that are written on the topic.
So, my question is, does a gender pay gap exist? If not, who benefits from use of such propaganda?
Closely tied to that, however, is so-called Gender pay gap.
"People Management analysed the gender pay gap figures from 570 UK companies, and found that the average gap in mean hourly pay across the organisations was 11%." I honestly have very little idea as to what this is supposed to mean practically, but along with the dazzling headline and a discrimination story of Carrie Gracie from BBC, it just seems like a piece of propaganda. There doesn't seem to be a reason to think otherwise. Appeal to emotions, use of numbers just to make the argument sound plausible, victim and a villain roles. Such is the nature of the articles that are written on the topic.
So, my question is, does a gender pay gap exist? If not, who benefits from use of such propaganda?
Comments (112)
Any reason I should really believe it?
You might as well ask why we should believe anything we read in the news or from the government, so I wonder why you're singling out the gender pay gap specifically.
I'm singling it out in this case because it is connected to the whole movement of victims of so-called discrimination, and current climate that can be observed at universities, in the news, at the workplace etc. You can never say anything wrong about women because they were apparently discriminated against in history, and well, there's this pay gap thing! It's easy to use something like this for purposes of propaganda, so why not question every source on it?
Otherwise, I do agree that, apart from trivial nonsense, what is in the news should not be believed.
Then I'm not exactly sure what it is you expect. You can either believe it or you can carry out your own studies. Dismissing it out-of-hand is certainly unreasonable, unless you have reasons to believe that you're being lied to.
To say that it doesn't exist is more than a bit of an exaggeration. It absolutely does, robustly, but to varying degrees in different countries. Even a very equal one like Norway - men make 27 pence extra per pound of woman earnings. The pay gap also exists when you break it down by occupation - though the difference between male and female wages decreases when women and men are employed in equal proportion in a given job (or occupational category). This is to say that controlling for occupation still evinces a pay gap.
If, however, you take the approach where median male earnings and female earnings on a yearly basis are linearly regressed upon a bunch of societal indicators - like occupation, work hours, age, time in current job - you'll probably see that occupation explains the most variance out of any predictor. At least this is how it breaks down in the UK. Nowhere near 100% of the variance (think, the trend of differences between women and men) is explained through the sum total of all predictors. UK analysis puts this somewhere between 30 and 50% of the variance. Which is to say, and Peterson is very fond of this formulation (when applied in other contexts) - at least 50% of the difference between men and women isn't explained by any socioeconomic factor other than gender!
Edit: The first paragraph is absolutely the right analysis for discerning whether there are pay gaps within occupation. It also applies to age and job experience with the same conclusion, go figure.
So, here is a factsheet, and I'll slip in an outright howler that Peterson's army of beta-male epigones seem to forget.
(1) Men tend to make more than women.
(2) Men tend to be in higher paying jobs than women.
(3) Men still make more than women when controlling for occupation (or other socio-economic factors).
(4) There is no personality test approaching common place enough to provide a society wide census of personality traits and earnings. Thus variation due to them cannot currently be modelled precisely in the population at large.
If you want me to provide some references for the UK I can.
According to the study I linked to above, "the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition results show that 36.1% of the difference in men’s and women’s log hourly pay could be explained by differences in characteristics between men and women included in the model." So unless I'm misunderstanding, that's 63.9% unexplained.
Aye. I've seen a few where it's over 50% when I've looked into it, but wanted to be conservative with the maximum unexplained amount.
No, don't know who that guy is. I do agree, however, that if other variables are included, then there is no gap. The point being that if someone says that women get paid less for doing the same job, it is far from truth for the simple fact that it is close to impossible to do the identical job when it comes to management, marketing, business etc.
And let's be honest for a minute, all that most activists in this area care about is how much they make if they work in an office. I don't believe that anyone truly cares about wages of factory workers. The biggest disputes are in the areas of office hierarchies and salaries in there. To that, a simple answer, it is a competitive environment, so learn to compete. What the current climate looks like is more: you don't know how to compete, so complain and someone will get on it for you. Disgusting. Move into some non-competitive areas if you don't want to have a hassle about money and office politics.
There are two methods in analysis discussed in it. Both include other factors, both still conclude a pay gap. I'm not sure how you obtained this interpretation of what I wrote, but I'll restate it:
There are still unaccounted for differences between gender pay when including relevant social economic indicators.
When directly comparing men in occupation X with women in occupation X, men tend to make more money.*
*this goes for other socioeconomic factors too, age category X, experience category X...
Does it get smaller as time goes on? Possibly. Could be getting smaller annually as more and more women are owning businesses, running businesses, etc. It could (and does seem) to exist in pockets, especially among smaller, non-publicly traded businesses.
Quoting Coldlight
You don't know what that means? Jack up your rent or mortgage by 11% just because.
Quoting Coldlight
Yes. Adults that are actually in the workforces can tell you that as a granular detail in the nitty gritty of the landscape, even though it may or may not be lost in varying economist big data visualizations and interpretations from orbital points of view.
Quoting Coldlight
Since, for most people it does seem to exist as reality, let's look at the idea that it is propaganda for folks who claim that it isn't. Who would, and why would, benefit occur in the claim that it does not exist?
Occupation does not mean that their work brings the same value to the company, which, ultimately is what is the most important for each company.
Completely inconsistent standards of evidence. If you get to speculate like this without the data, so do those feminazi libtards.
Edit: also, I already said, in cases where men and women have equal experience - men still tend to be payed more.
Are you trying to say that it doesn't matter what value a person brings to the company? Does just the occupation title matter?
Oh, well. It exists for them as a reality so that they have something to complain about. It's easier than competing and trying to improve one's situation, no doubt.
If you want to know who would benefit from no-pay-gap propaganda, then it is quite clear that business who would get away with paying less money. Then again, businesses always find ways to pay less money to their employees, so that's not news, and has been around regardless of whether pay gap exists or not. Take as an example the fact that if a student wants to get some practice in a specific field before getting their degree, chances are, they will have to work a couple of months for free as no one will pay them for their work, and employers know they need to get experience. That's just business.
Quoting Coldlight
If this explains the gender pay gap then why is it that men bring more "value" than women?
Regardless, it's a gender pay gap all the same.
No, I'm saying that when looked at from a societal level with the most comprehensive data available the wage gap is robust to controlling for occupation, experience, age and other socioeconomic factors. This includes experience/tenure, which is as close as you're going to get to an operationalisation of value added to a company by a worker. The article linked by Michael even has an effect in its equation (ctrl+f for 'interaction term') to account for this in the aggregate analysis (the second one I discussed in my first response to you).*
Do you want to base your opinions on analyses done on the best data with fairly robust research methodologies? Or do you want to engage in the knee-jerk reactionary discourse you're so rightly criticising?
*to account for this = to measure something like 'value added'
Never changes, just read history.
False. There's also a gender pay gap.
Furthermore, it's a truism that the top 1% wealthiest people have more money than the rest. That's just basic maths. So I don't really understand what you're trying to say.
There is only one pay-gap.
There are many reasons why men bring more value to the company. Oddly enough, these will not be included in your data because no one wants to talk about them, and if they do, they get fired.
Businesses treat their employees as investments. Who would you invest more in? In a guy who is aggressive, and committed to step on someone's neck to achieve the sales target for you? Or a woman who is just doing what's in her job description. Of course, the situation can be reverse, woman can be highly ambitious, and a man can be a lousy worker. Let's, however, not pretend that that is the case for the overall majority of employees out there. Oh, and women who did manage to be competitive, and entrepreneurial, also managed to make more money, so they probably don't have to complain about inequality and pay gap :P.
Does it really take a tremendous genius to understand that companies treat their employees as investments, and have every right to do so? Does it really take so much to get that there are different values delivered to the company by each employee?
If anything else, this so-called gap is a pure nonsense because it states the obvious - ALL employees may earn differently based on the value their bring. Of course that value is assessed by the business, and of course it may appear unfair. Such is life. Rather than to complain about it, action needs to be taken to become more competitive and able in the current market. The gap is certainly not there because someone is a man or a woman. If you being a man/woman leads you to different decisions, approaches, and work in life is your own responsibility. It is not down to businesses to respect such approach.
It apparently takes a tremendous amount of genius to read an accessibly written government report which addresses your concerns quantitatively and then makes the opposite conclusion from the one you're drawing.
No, there's also a gender pay gap. There are lots of studies.
No. There is no gap. There is simply different amount of many being paid for different work that brings different value. Is it so hard to get out of: so every your statement leads to the fact that there is a gender pay gap? I've heard that one before. If we had two women working as managers and two men working as managers in the same company. Two men earn an x amount of money more than the two women because they deliver different value and work on different projects. How is that a gap?
I don't take the report seriously, so.. Will the report still be held with the same respect in 20 years? I doubt it. If all the nonsense with the "gap" vanishes, these reports will become just as worthless. So, no, I'm not going to be impressed by the amount of quantitative data anyone throws at me. Just because there is difference in numbers doesn't mean it's a gap :-} That's what I am addressing.
Coldlight, as a university student you are in a milieu of maximum exposure to the various ideological debates going on in society. Once you leave university and get a job in business, read the newspaper (or website) of your choice, associate mostly with people like yourself, you will hear less about all of this discrimination and pay equity stuff.
Pay rates have not been equalized across the board in the U.S. but it is far better than it was 50 years ago, before inequality began to be challenged. Pay in public employment covered by civil service rules achieves better equality because pay rates are public. In private employment they are not public, so there is greater inequality, even if it is less than it used to be.
Over the last 50 years the reason for women being in the workforce has changed as well. In the post WWII boom it was possible for a head-of-household to work one job and support his or her family--at least if he or she was working full time in a reasonably well paid job. Once the boom ended, it became necessary for both partners to work to maintain a given lifestyle (whatever that was). But women entered the workforce later than men, and this is one piece o the inequality picture.
The boom ended in the 1970s, and with it came inflation, slower wage growth, or for many people, no wage growth. Some areas of employment (managerial, technical, highly skilled labor, etc.) did very well, and continue to do very well.
It's quite possible (don't have a data set to reference) that women who were entering the labor force out of necessity after the 1970s missed the gravy boat of the post-war boom. It was difficult, if not impossible for them to catch up, just because they hadn't been in the work force earlier.
All that is water over the dam at this point, but the problem of inequality still exist, even if they aren't as extreme as they were in the past.
What, exactly, does it mean for there to be a "gap", then? You seem to just be defining the term "gender pay gap" in such a way that your claim is a truism; each person is paid exactly what the company is willing to pay them (minimum wage laws notwithstanding).
That's not what these studies mean by the term at all. There's the unadjusted pay gap that is defined (at least by the EU), as the relative difference in the average gross hourly earnings of women and men within the economy as a whole, and the adjusted pay gap which takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience.
Agree. It is just the current climate that I am in, and there is undeniably a reason why that climate is the way it is.
Quoting Bitter Crank
This is closely tied to it, but my comment would be off topic. All I'm going to say for now is that roles have changed, and it is now okay for women to be as ambitious as men when it comes to careers, work, business etc.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Why is inequality a problem? Was equality in the USSR any better, for example?
A gap would exist if:
I work in a factory making an x amount of components.
You make the same amount of components in the same time.
We get paid differently.
That's is completely inapplicable to managerial, and other business roles. And as I said before, no one gives much of a thing for factory workers anyway. They only care about how to complain their way into earning more in their offices :P.
All manufactured political distraction.
Or the slave labor in Africa, Latin America or Asia.
The demographic data it's based on will still be the same in 20 years. IE, it will still be true of 2017. Studies have been done either looking back into the past - still a gender pay gap. Studies done at those times also find gender pay gaps. I really have no idea what you're talking about.
Is exactly what happens - the pay gap remains when you control for work hours, tenure/experience and their interaction.
They count to the people who are being paid less than their peers.
I have not idea what conditions in the USSR were with respect to pay rates, though soviet women were far more commonly employed in professional and technical fields than in the United States, at least.
One reason that pay inequality is a problem is that people don't like getting the short end of the stick, whether they are male, female, black, white, or what have you. Another reason it is a problem is that western societies SAY that everyone should be treated equally, and unequal pay for equal work flies in the face of that ideal. Pay inequality adds to the amount of social friction (which is the reason you are hearing so much about this).
IF women are as productive as men in a given job, everything else being equal (like time on the job) then they should be rewarded in the same way that men are.
But they aren't.
Starting from the obvious fact that people behave differently with men or women. Besides, it's unlikely that in any work organization someone does exactly the same work, so those in denial can allways talk about different career paths even if it's the same job. Things like job performance, getting promoted at work aren't as simply things people depict them to be.
Last year there was a telling example when two co-workers, man and woman, swapped their emails for two weeks. Now their job was basically interact by mail, so the swap was possible. The women absolutely loved it, the man hated it.
All those kind of little things do add up.
Personally, I think the gender freedom gap should be a bigger concern. 93% of inmates are men. If we're going to target equality of outcome, we should address that first.
Forgive me for saying so, but that's pretty arrogant and spoken with authority that you haven't earned yourself, especially if you do not share knowledge about, or the particulars of, others' experience. You also make some broad projections on whether it can or can't still happen to women even if they do "compete and try to improve their situation".
When I state it exists as a "reality for them", I think you misunderstand the context and equivocate the conclusions. It is a not a "relativism" of what is true for one may not be true for another. When I state it is a "reality" for me - it is not because I just think that is true because I heard it somewhere or someone told me or I read it in a textbook. It is a "reality" because of actually occuring events and dollar amounts, in my directly lived experience, within an existing business, and with actual living people.
So yes, for those who were paid less (at the time of my experience with the situation anyway), it is "true for them", because it actually happened to them, and was witnessed by me. That, by the way made it true for them as well as for me - because it actually happens, even though it may not be "true for you", because you just think they must have been lazy, or not worth as much to the business, or whatever.
The real discussion is how much of that pay gap is due to discrimination by employers.
I think the answer is not as much as just posting the statistics sometimes implies.
Women doctors for instance on average make less than their male colleagues in the same specialty.
This is not because insurers pay women doctors less than men on a fee for service schedule.
It is because in general women see fewer patients, work fewer hours and do fewer procedures.
They spend more time with their patients and try to achieve better balance between family, children relationships and their professional life.
In many ways this makes them both better doctors and better people but the overall result is less pay.
I think one would find similar factors to account for much of the pay difference in many fields.
I'm curious as to what moral code you're using where "a guy who is aggressive, and committed to step on someone's neck to achieve the sales target for you" is seen as honourable competitive behaviour, but appealing to the power of your government to equalise pay is somehow 'cheating'. What rulebook are you using exactly?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorikozlowski/2012/03/22/women-in-tech-female-developers-by-the-numbers/
And even if it's not a myth, it's not something that we should actively seek to eliminate (I don't see why women should, on average, have equal pay with men - women don't do the same jobs, on average, as men, and even if they did, it's again a question of value added). By all means this equality shouldn't be centrally planned, if it arises naturally, no problem.
Quoting Coldlight
It's not that they won't pay them, it's simply that they have a lot of learning to do, and they're not willing to pay people to learn. Most students at that age go in a company and they don't even know what's what - you need someone to babysit them, they are expensive, they don't really know how things go, etc. etc. It's more of a hassle than anything else - that's why small businesses, for the most part, don't accept students.
Quoting ssu
A lot of it is politics it seems to me. Which is why I dislike working in that kind of environment.
I can confirm that this was definitely true - though I'm not sure how true it is nowadays.
What world are you living in! Since when does anyone behave entirely rationally, have you ever even picked up a psychology textbook?
People who don't have skin in the game don't behave rationally, that's true. So middle-level managers who have no stake in the company, etc. don't (always) behave rationally.
But the entrepreneurial types do behave rationally, and that's almost a given (it's simply what it takes to succeed).
What percentage of crimes (punishable by jail) are committed by men?
Here's an article by Forbes outlining the main biases in business leaders - https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/09/13/the-impact-of-unconscious-bias-on-leadership-decision-making/#bbdcc525b3f4
The economist Sanjit Dahmi "It is likely that the top levels of management in firms (henceforth, CEOs) exhibit several behavioural biases."
Greg Filbeck - "Evidence indicates that CEOs tend to be optimistic, overconfident, risk averse, and self-interested. Optimistic and overconfident CEOs overestimate future earnings growth and underestimate the earnings' risk, thereby perceiving a larger cost for issuing equity than debt."
Kiseo Chung - "We find that CEOs are significantly more likely to purchase targets near their birth place, consistent with either informational advantages or familiarity bias."
But don't let me interrupt your neat little world view with actual data from experts in the field.
Whatever the percentage, surely it's due to systematized social constructions and not that men are inherently more criminal than women, right?
My point is only that engineering equality of outcome is a misguided, neverending pursuit. But IF we get to a point where we're taking it seriously, being imprisoned is a much bigger deal than making a bit less money.
Yeah of course, because the better the performance is on paper, the more they get paid. So if they can make the performance seem better, and if they can make the company seem like it is going in a great direction (even if it isn't), they stand to profit from it. It's not like they overestimate future earnings because they're idiots - no, they do it on purpose.
Quoting Pseudonym
That's not a bias, that's normal. I tend to work with what I know too, everyone does that. You have better performance that way.
Woosh.
As I said, if you're just going to cherry pick the bits that suit your world view and ignore the rest, I will leave you to it.
Thank you.
>:O
What percentage of crimes (punishable by jail) are committed by men?
That's the problem with purely statistical or empirical approaches to these problems.
There are more African Americans and other minorities in prison than Caucasians. Is that prima facie evidence of overt discrimination by the courts and the police? You have to take a closer look at the problem. It turns out there is discrimination but not of the degree that just looking at percentages would imply. There is more crime in those socially and economically deprived sectors and areas.
This applies to both the wage gap and the freedom gap.
That's true. Also statistics can be used to deceive or they can be made up. Everyone who worked in research knows this. It's not difficult to twist statistics to get them to show what you want them to show. Much more important than that is understanding the underlying phenomenon.
Great post fdrake! It would be great to see some references for these.
To expand slightly on your 4th 'factsheet' point, this idea that personality differences between women and men partially explain the differences in wage gap has been touted by 'Youtube intellectuals' such as Jordan Peterson (who seems like a rebranded Ayn Rand) and James Demore, the Google engineer that was fired due to the pseudo-scientific farrago of garbage he wrote.
This explanation depends upon a study written by David Schmitt, who has written in response that while there are psychological differences between men and women, the variance is minimal, and likely decreases for people in the same occupation.
Stuff on Norway, general pay gap is less than 27% - that was for a specific type of employment and I misquoted. P29 of this thing is the income comparisons.
Stuff on the US with a breakdown by occupation.
Michael's post earlier in the thread is this year's report on the topic for the UK.
Should be noted that showing the pay gap exists in the aggregate doesn't contradict:
(1) Some women are payed greater than or equal to men in mostly equivalent circumstances.
(2) There are social disadvantages for men, too.
Nor does it explain each instance of disparity.
Jordan Peterson certainly has dominated his opponents so far. There are very few people on the left who could stand up to him at the moment I think. For example:
The problem with the left is precisely that for quite a long time the left has had what were essentially pseudo-intellectuals. Peterson is, in a way, also not really an intellectual (because as I said many other times, he has very little knowledge of philosophy up to Nietzsche). But he certainly has greater knowledge than today's "intellectuals", postmodernists, etc. And this is something that shows.
Many people call themselves intellectuals because they have a lot of statistics in their heads, or they've read the latest books in some domain, etc. etc. But that's not what it takes to be an intellectual.
Jordan Peterson is a learned man by today's standards, he taught at Harvard, and he is certainly an intellectual. Comparisons with Ayn Rand make YOU look like a fool.
Jordan Peterson's competitive advantage is that he's primarily concerned with truth. He doesn't have to do mental gymnastics in service of ideology like his opponents. That's not to say he doesn't have an ideology or that he always succeeds in speaking the truth. The honesty is refreshing though, admirable guy.
I think his main advantage is that he's a guy who is slightly more cultured and knowledgeable in a sea of idiots, which is what modern culture pretty much is.
Certainly, Augustino, you are not equating a seemingly arbitrary journalist with a "left-wing intellectual". Just as most left-wing philosophers, or philosophers in general, rarely reference or confront Ayn Rand's Objectivism, so too, I imagine, they can safely ignore Peterson's unoriginal, uninteresting, self-help "philosophy". He resembles many modern intellectual conservatives (e.g. Ben Shapiro), who pimp out sound-bite friendly, cherry-picked statistics, or makes vapid claims sound meaningful by stating it with assertiveness and conviction, making it easily digestible to young, frustrated men, who are more interested in feeling right then being right.
Riiiight, a Harvard Professor compared with Shapiro. And Ayn Rand. Nice. >:O
If you don't see there's a huge difference of culture and learning between these cases, you need better glasses.
I guarantee there are many professors at Harvard who vehemently disagree with Peterson. And Ben Shapiro received his JD at Harvard Law, so I'm not sure what your point is exactly. Then again, you've never been one to either state or defend your point well.
That's not the same as being a Professor there. So my point was stated very well, thank you.
Quoting Maw
Maybe, so what?
Peterson is more learned than even a lot of those people. He is similar to Osho, though at a lesser level. Osho was also extremely well-educated, there are very few human beings on the planet who could have claimed similar levels of education. Just in terms of breadth - I mean, there probably was no important philosopher or religious thinker or artist that Osho failed to comment on - he even commented on some of the most obscure ones! Such breadth is rare, and this is before the internet! Peterson doesn't have even 30% of Osho's breadth. Not saying that I agree with Osho (I disagree on most things), but he was extremely well-educated, there's no denying that. He could easily run circles around all your Harvard professors probably. Many professors in this age have a lot of depth, but very little breadth.
So Peterson is extremely insightful in this sea of over-specialised people, who only know one small thing well.
This thread is about the gender pay gap, not Peterson, so, I don't care to digress into that conversation here (or Osho, for whatever reason you decided to ramble on about him). If you want to discuss the merits of Peterson and his "breadth", create a new thread and I will perhaps comment on it. I've been watching some of Peterson's videos and he's a sophist who wrestles with his ghosts formed from his own delusions.
This doesn't actually mean that on average, considering experience, tenure, position, and performance, women are paid 15% less than men per hour on average, it just means that if you look at raw totals you find women are earning this much less per hour overall than men.
The earnings gap is real but isn't exactly a problem. The pay gap is almost non-existent, and only affects people in elite positions who already make too much money anyway, so I don't care...
Right, I'm glad you finally remembered the subject of this thread after you brought up Peterson, and after you thought that having a JD from Harvard is the same as being a Professor there. However, it's time for me to go to sleep, not open threads atm.
Yes, Agustino, I mentioned Peterson (he was brought up before I mentioned him, however), and now I am ending the conversation lest we further digress off subject.
I never said that graduating Harvard is equivalent with being a Professor there. I see you haven't lost your knack for putting words in my mouth. What I don't understand is you bringing up the fact that Peterson used to teach at Harvard. Does that make him smarter than Shapiro? Does it make him better than him, because he had an occupation at an elite institution whereas Shapiro "merely" graduated there? Feel free to make a thread whenever the hell you want. Or, perhaps, better yet. Don't. I always seem to forget how unbearable it can be to converse with you.
Do you know of a better study that shows that discrimination is negligible, as you suggested?
Edit: I've found this study that provides figures for both unadjusted and adjusted pay gaps:
So for a man earning £30,000, a woman in the same position and having the same experience is earning £28,500.
[i]The Gender Wage Gap and Wage Discrimination:
Illusion or Reality?
Howard Wall:
Despite laws to prevent wage discrimination in the workplace, the median weekly earnings for full-time female workers in 1999 was only 76.5 percent that of their male counterparts. A close analysis, however, reveals that much of this gap is due to non-discriminatory factors:
Weekly vs. hourly wages. Women typically work fewer hours a week than men. When you compare hourly wages, almost one-third of the gap disappears.
Education, experience, occupation, union status. A 1997 study shows that men's educational and experience levels are currently greater than women's and that men gravitate toward industries and occupations that are higher-paying than women, including union jobs. These factors reduce the remaining wage gap by 62 percent.
The remaining 6.2 cents of the gap, which is unexplained, is the maximum that can be attributed to wage discrimination. Some of this unexplained portion might be due to the difficulties involved in accounting for the effects of childbearing on women's wages. For example, women aged 27 to 33 who have never had children earn a median hourly wage that is 98 percent of men's.[/i]
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/public-policy/hr-public-policy-issues/Documents/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf
If we take my previous example of a man earning £30,000, that means an equivalent woman earns between £27,870 and £28,560. I don't think £2,130 a year for someone earning £27,870 is something that can just be brushed aside.
This recent study on the gender pay gap from Cornell University. Overt discrimination accounts for very little of the statistical gender pay gap.
[quote="blau & kahn" ] ABSTRACT
The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations*
Using PSID microdata over the 1980-2010, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably over this period. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution that at the middle or the bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women’s work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than say occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences. [/quote]
Well, not the title, but the work contract, yes. That's the Law!
We should not always leap to the conclusion that disparities are all caused by discrimination. At best it's presumptuous and potentially misleading, at worst it's a political tool to intellectually defraud individuals using deeply flawed statistical analysis. It's a favored tool for any political speaker focusing on identity to make an argument because statistical misinterpretation of raw data pertaining to arbitrary demographics is so easy to do while correctly processing it is complicated, tedious, and boring.
As far as I understand it though, wage disparity tends to be higher in elite positions rather than jobs of average (and largely standardized) incomes, which is why I'm not shedding too many tears over it. Granted, point out the discrimination and I'll happily help you stamp it out.
I would break down the reasons for pay differences into the following three categories:
1. policy differences. For instance, until the seventies it was common for employers to have official full-time rates of pay for a certain job (eg clerk level 4) differentiated by sex
2. non-policy, employer-instigated differences. This is when there is no explicit policy, but decision-makers at the employer tend to give promotions and pay rises to men more readily than to women, given the same performance profile. I would also include in this cases where employers treat women badly with the aim of discouraging them from applying for or retaining higher-paying roles. For instance 'boys-club' cultures in senior management and on boards may make women feel too uncomfortable in those environments to be prepared to put up with it.
3. non-policy, non-employer-instigated differences. This is where the employee voluntarily, without coercion, makes choices that lead to lower pay - eg not applying for promotions because they don't want the stress or longer hours, or choosing occupations that have lower pay, because those occupations appeal to them more.
Type 1 is easiest to address, because it is out in the open for all to see. That is why it has disappeared from most developed countries.
I think most would agree that type 2 is regrettable and we should try to remove it from workplaces. The trouble is that, being non-policy, it is undocumented and thus hard to detect. Most developed countries have anti-discrimination laws that forbid such behaviour, but there is a standard of proof that must be met in any individual case before any redress can be obtained.
We could reduce the amount of type-2 behaviour by toughening anti-discrimination laws, in particular by lowering the burden of proof. the balancing act here is that the more proof standards are lowered, the greater will be the frequency of non-discriminatory employers being unfairly convicted of being discriminatory. I think discussions about this need to be taken jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and take account of the details of each jurisdiction's laws.
Law is not the only available measure though. Consciousness-raising campaigns are another, eg advertising against discrimination, similar to what is done for domestic violence or racism. Again there is a balancing act though, as it is taxpayers' money that funds such campaigns, and there is debate about their effectiveness.
Finally, there is type 3. My impression is that most people are not motivated to try to do anything about type 3, but I think some are.
I would be particularly interested in hearing what people would like done about type 2, and from anybody that would like to change type 3 and how they think that should be done.
I think discussing what should be done about observed average pay differentials is likely to be more productive than arguing over whether there is a gap.
Congratulations.
Quoting Maw
Oh really? Then why is it that you told me:
Quoting Maw
You told me that for no reason? :s You brought up the fact that Ben Shapiro has a JD at Harvard when I told you that Peterson was a Professor there. And previously you compared Peterson with both Shapiro and Ayn Rand. Seems like you're not aware of what you're saying.
Quoting Maw
To show you that Peterson is not comparable with Ayn Rand or Shapiro, and Peterson is actually an intellectual in today's age.
Quoting Maw
No.
Quoting Maw
It must be difficult for you to always lose our debates :P
Society and work may have been different at those times. I would wonder if those who wanted equal pay would still agree with it if they saw the consequences - difficult family life, divorce rates, worse relationships, no work life balance, more difficult to raise children etc.
Quoting andrewk
Well, what is the same performance profile? They work on different projects, work is never the same, and there are more committed and less committed employees. A male employee A may get paid less than male employee B, too. It's not that they divide the company into two camps and decide to pay women less :-}
Quoting andrewk
Personal choice. Nothing wrong about that. As I've said before, if someone wants to enter a competitive environment, they have to be competitive. Otherwise, they can go down less stressful and competitive rout as you describe.
Quoting andrewk
EasyJet want to increase their percentage of female pilots to 20%. The current state is allegedly 6% of female pilots. How can you justify this? Whatever reasons for women not to be pilots as much as current pressure requires doesn't mean it's discrimination. If someone perceives they are being discriminated against, that's their problem. If you wanna be a pilot, put in the work, and try to get there. It is competitive. It is sad to me that someone manages to complain their way into having a specific job. Now, if EasyJet actually goes on to do what they said they would, it means that women would be pushed to be pilots, and the standard will be lowered.
Quoting andrewk
The effectiveness is dubious, and rightly so. It's just that because it surrounds people at work and in media, so people are just quiet because they don't want to stand up and call BS on stuff that they find ridiculous. Just attend some Discrimination and Equality workshop if you have an opportunity, and tell me anyone really takes it seriously. They will put on any sort of mask just not to seem contradictory to the popular opinion. It is still a question of how many people would welcome real discrimination as you describe in the type 1. policy differences.
Tightening anti-discrimination laws is not efficient because you're gonna discriminate against someone anyway, no matter what laws you make.
Quoting andrewk
Why would you want to do anything about it. It is their personal choice to do so.
You can never be 100% sure about any result. The fact that they will decide to be competitive, doesn't mean they would automatically achieve desired results. There are many people who don't succeed in that environment regardless of whether they are men or women. And yes, I do call complaining just by its name.
I agree. It just seems to me that someone constantly tries to push women to earn same amount as men and have same goals :-} As if there weren't other important things in life for both men and women.
Quoting Agustino
Yeah, and that's reasonable from the businesses to do so. It's not that we should organise a riot now about how we are discriminated >:O . It's just the way that business is.
I don't think the pay gap stats really deal with the issues. There is a gap, but I do not think most of it is because women are women or men are men, necessarily.
Averages can hide the truth.
If job A pays progressively due to increasing experience, then people who stay in the job longest will end up with more pay. In such a case men might be more likely to achieve higher wages over the long term, but it would have nothing to do with then BEING men.
In such work environments women taking time off for pregnancy and child rearing would automatically be playing catch up for the rest of their career. This is about personal circumstances not sexism.
If job B requires strength and mechanical skill and pays higher than other jobs that do not, this also may lead to increasing the pay gap as, in general, women are less likely to do well in such jobs being on average of lower strength. Additionally women, for whatever reason, tend to have less mechanical skill - this might be a cultural thing, rather than a natural thing. But it would not be the fault of the employer necessarily - thought they might apply the same cultural bias and not consider a women.
However - in really high paid jobs there is a clear and obvious pay gap, such as we find in the BBC, and there is an obvious male club in the stock market, and the board room which skew the averages.
But if you think it has to be addressed, despite the reasons, then that would make you the sexist.
Let's say there are non sexist reason (say a gap in her work record due to motherhood) that woman X is paid less than man Y, but you insist she be paid then same that would make you the sexist.
But all things being equal, if a man and woman, or a black and a white are paid differently then there is a clear case of discrimination due to the factors not related to the ability to do the job.
That's why there's a distinction between an unadjusted and adjusted pay gap. The adjusted pay gap accounts for such things as which jobs men and women have, how much experience they have, etc.
See here, where these extra considerations reduce the gap from 22.9% to 5.5%.
Credibility by association, I guess, even though I don't particularly care for Shapiro's brand of libertarian nationalism or whatever he calls it.
There are a lot of ways to interpret the modelling results on page 1098, and is actually evidence for the claim that men and women in the same occupations in the same conditions of education and work hours still in the aggregate make less money. The last row of each coefficient batch: time,education,occupation in the modelling scenarios has a uniformly negative female coefficient (ignoring basic since it's essentially an 'intercept' to compute an adjusted rate).
That's to say: women with the same circumstances are payed less than men. The paper goes on to say:
My bolding.
Later on:
Summary: people who work more hours in general earn more than expected - long hours -> higher earning job, that kind of thing. Will post the rest later.
Quoting charleton
This is unfortunately true. You can question whether it's appropriate though. It assumes experience is a good indicator for performance, which it isn't and that managing a household does not instill a person with (management) skills they can apply to a job (which it does) that more than makes up for the "lack of experience" people claim. An untalented hack can have as much experience he wants, he's not going to be a better performer than any other person with potential.
Generally, most hiring policies and systems have an ingrained bias against women as the measurements applied favour men. For example, the sociable female lawyer that takes the time out to educate juniors and paralegals has less billable hours than the "busy" egotistical male lawyer, who thinks he's too good to help others reach their potential. The guy gets the partnership even though the whole department probably ran better thanks to that one woman. If you can't measure it, it is generally discounted. Which, by the way, also promotes billing inflated hours and face time. As a company lawyer myself, I don't hire external lawyers who brag to work more than 50 hours a week. They're not rested, less effective, it indicates bad time management and I worry how they will make time for me.
That is a matter for the employer and the market. The assumption does not have to have a bearing; the performance which is usually better due to experience deserves more pay, as it attracts more competitive pay. Employers have a great interest in keeping more experienced staff in that they tend to improve the performance of others around them.
Quoting Benkei
Are you in the US or UK? Traditional professions tend to keep ossified ideas OR Maybe you are just not that good a lawyer?
Except that the "market" has, like all systems, an impetus in maintaining the status quo and the reality is that most companies "get by" with bad hiring practices and bad management for a variety of reasons.
Quoting charleton
In the Netherlands. What does "being a good lawyer" (whatever that is) have to do with the issue of billable hours?
Imo the best part of the analysis is on P1109, where it actually looks at a log(hours):occupation interaction effect. Summary for those who don't want to go through the effort of reading the paper:
The disparity between men and women is higher in jobs where the amount payed per hour scales with the amount of hours worked. As @Benkei and @charleton and @Agustino have alluded to, this may be attributable to a preference for women to work part time or alternatively factors that make women more likely to do so. The study is concordant with this:
Regardless of whether people think the remaining pay gap is entirely attributable to discrimination, or they do something stupid like say the entire thing is attributable to discrimination, I think it's very likely that promoting joint, paid, parental leave and paid paternity leave would reduce the worst excesses of this effect. At the very least it would remove some cases where people's careers will be stymied for the sin of wanting to start and take care of a family.
Edit: could potentially be studied by looking at gender disparities in aforementioned target jobs in countries that have paid joint/paternity leave vs those who don't. Something to do if bored.
Clearly being able to attract those hours to fall into your lap relates to people's perception of you as a lawyer?
Impossible. Peterson has a good understanding of everything after Nietzsche, and there are some important philosophical traditions there - existentialism, phenomenology, pragmatism, postmodernism.
Quoting Thorongil
That's likely here.
We can try to encourage men to take time off when their wives get pregnant, but there will always be some men who refuse. Exact equality of outcome seems unreachable unless we were to actually start arbitrarily paying some men less and start paying some women more (generally, for the same work) or more directly start meddling in the career choices of free individuals.
I just don't see how someone can choose to start/care for a family and not have their careers somehow stymied. Or likewise how we can force women and men into career paths that they tend not to choose of their own free will (example: we're desperately encouraging women to enter STEM fields or men to enter nursing positions, but the gender disparity is still quite massive despite concerted effort).
If we really expected parity of outcomes, we might also be complaining that men are 10 times more likely to die on the job than women, or that less than one percent of garbage collectors and sewer/septic technicians are women.
Despite gender differences in career choices and entailed obstacles (i.e: pregnancy) the actual pay gap is quite low (nearly marginal in my opinion), and I'm not sure that any broad or systematic approach to eliminating the impact of these differences can be done without trampling on the freedom of individuals and the market itself.
Point out a specific instance of unfair discrimination though (of any kind) and I will wholeheartedly support legal recourse.
You said "no"; "no" to WHAT?
The answer is yes. You just write on a piece of cardboard "Lawyer", stick it on your door, invite people in, and start charging them! I once spoke to a Macedonian lawyer and he told me the right motto in business is "work less, charge more!" >:O
Just answer the question and stop being such a queen.
I resemble that comment.
Yes, that is what I have noticed about all of the politics of identify: it seems to always be people living privileged lives saying that they are victims of flagrant, systematic unjust discrimination because their personal wishes, such as starting a family, are not subsidized by the system.
Guess who has to make up for it when those people have to miss work because of their personal wish to have a family? Workers who do not have families. Consumers who the cost of maternity/paternity leave is passed on to, including consumers who do not have families.
It is wrong, we are told, if a woman has to choose between work and her wish to have a family, but it is not wrong if a childless person has to choose between work and his/her non-family life. Go figure.
And just because a person is not part of a nuclear family does not mean that he/she is not contributing to family life. You don't hear any complaints about discrimination there. Maybe it is because the unmarried and the childless are not an identify group--not yet, anyway.