As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops | Hacker News Reader

As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops

nytimes.com

11 pointshvo11 comments

If you look at the theme of "workers get a smaller fraction of income because they have less bargaining power", women entering the workforce doubles the potential workforce, thus cutting the bargaining power and cutting wages.

When women entered the workforce they took many of the entry level service positioned filled by black men, so now black men are in jail.

Similarly, if universities want to hire professor's children to be professors, now there are twice as many professor's kids. Every (other) kind of discrimination can be pursued with twice the intensity with women in the workforce.

Of course, women entering the workforce mean that women's work gets taxed, makes billionaires rich, etc. And then of course two-income families can afford to spend more on housing, driving up the cost of housing, they can spend more to educate their kids.

Women entering the workforce has been a huge driver of economic inequality but neither the left nor the right wants to talk about it.

You're acting as if there are a fixed number of jobs. More people with jobs -> more people with money -> more demand for goods/services when they spend that money -> more jobs to produce those goods/services.

How do you expect it would work otherwise? Countries with too many people would run out of jobs? Is it population density by land area that determines whether we run out of jobs?

I know that price elasticity is a commonly known, and well-studied field.

I wonder if wage elasticity is similarly studied. I'd expect that in the short term, more qualified candidates suddenly entering a field (due to institutional barriers being torn down), would drive wages lower. In the long term, things might stabilize towards the previous status quo.

However what is 'short term', and what is 'long term'? This is something I'd love to know if it has been researched, or if we're still floundering for an answer.

>When women entered the workforce they [took positions] filled by black men, so now black men are in jail.

How are those two things even closely related? Does the "War on Drugs" have nothing to do with it, something that's part of a pattern of racial persecution and sky-rocketing incarceration rates?

the article draws some weird conclusions

>> Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.

so, men made the computer programming prestigious and better paid? How about construction, why is it not prestigious (or not as prestigious as programming) despite the fact it is clearly dominated by men? how about plumbing? taxi?

There's absolutely nothing to back up the claim that programmer wages rose when more men took on that job.

The basic reasoning in the article is to produce the appearance of a conspiracy so structural and so vast that it doesn't matter if each individual claim is provably false or contextually misleading, the broader narrative remains somehow irrefutable.

>> The basic reasoning in the article is to produce the appearance of a conspiracy

right to the point!

"Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women."

This statement requires historical perspective:[0]

"Coding implied manual labor, and mechanical translation or rote transcription ... [women] would code into machine language the higher-level mathematics developed by male scientists and engineers."

In other words, women did not do the type of "computer programming" done today. The job changed significantly as technology became easier and more accessible, and these type of "coders" became obsolete.

[0] http://womensenews.org/2012/03/women-were-first-computer-pro...

I stopped reading the article at this point, as this statement didn't merely undermine the the author's credibility, it actually collapsed their credibility into a gaping sinkhole.

"The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women)."

My company has both an IT Manager and an HR Manager, and I interact with both and they have different roles and duties. This is not a fair comparison.

OR new workers are never paid as much as the previous generation in the current regime of structural suppression of worker wages.

Sorry, but yeah kill all men.

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