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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

> Cornell professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that women were paid 79 cents for each dollar a man was paid. Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

This is not supported by the evidence. See, for example, this article by Christina Hoff Sommers (http://time.com/3222543/5-feminist-myths-that-will-not-die/):

"No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing."

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Doesn't matter. They've won this point by repetition. I suspect most of them even know it is wrong. There's no defense against the rhetorical punch of "77 cents on the dollar".

The usual "So why don't companies hire more women if they're cheaper?" always work. It's also fallacious but at least it shuts some mouths.

If you are going to account for position, how do you account for the fact that women are often in a lower ranked position, because they are less likely to be promoted? You can't claim there's no pay gap just because it's being obfuscated by bias in job titles.

I'm not going to argue that this accounts for it entirely, but I do think it's worth pointing out that women typically are less interested in higher ranked positions than men tend to be [0]. They are less likely to be promoted because they are less likely to want a promotion.

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/40/12354.abstract

> They [women] are less likely to be promoted because they are less likely to want a promotion.

I don't think anyone could ask for a better example of systemic entrenched sexist bias than this quote. "It's okay, don't worry about it; they just don't want to be promoted as much as us men."

This is not that much different from the old "women enjoy being in their husband's kitchen and tending to the house, so it's okay most women are there instead of working independently!" Evidence clearly exists that lot of women used to enjoy being in the kitchen, but that doesn't mean women are less suited to work outside the kitchen -- to make an extreme example.

Hmm more like "those awful males are so competitive in pursuing career advancement. Maybe testosterone has some sort of effect."

I'd argue it more stems from childhood with the way boys are encouraged to approach situations and how that differs from the treatment girls receive. Boys are encouraged to be more aggressive while girls are supposed to be timid. When it's that deeply ingrained in society, you do not fix the problem through posting infographics on the White House website.

I think a lot of it has to do with sexual competition. Men know that women are (in general) attracted to power, so they spend effort on earning money and becoming more powerful. Conversely, women know that men are attracted to beauty and youth, so they spend time and money on trying to look younger and prettier.

Another very valid point. Different preferences naturally lead to different outcomes.

Invoking discrimination as the first explanation for any discrepancies is a way to debase the concept of discrimination.

Proper studies of this sort try to isolate variables by, for instance, submitting identical resumes except for the gender.

Is there a citation for women in general being attracted to power? Or perhaps you're just reinforcing gender stereotypes that are convenient for the narrative you're spinning?

Not trying to spin a narrative (I don't have an agenda), this is just based on my personal observations, both of people around me, and the society as a whole (famous people, media, movies, ...).

I mean, when you say that "women (in general) are attracted to [X]," since youre ralking about half of the world's population, that's a pretty extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence to support it.

I guess it's more like a working hypothesis, based on the (circumstantial and anecdotal) evidence that I've collected so far. It's by no means enough evidence, so I'm open to changing my opinion (given conflicting evidence).

It it really 'systemic entrenched sexist bias' if it's true, to the best of our available knowledge?

> systemic entrenched sexist bias

Did you read the source? I was not being sexist, I was stating a factual finding from a peer-reviewed journal... I believe you misinterpreted my statement.

> Evidence clearly exists that lot of women used to enjoy being in the kitchen, but that doesn't mean women are less suited to work outside the kitchen -- to make an extreme example.

Yes, and this is my point! If you read the article I sourced, it said that women found "high-level positions as equally attainable as men do, but less desirable". Evidence clearly exists that a lot of women want to prioritize non-work related factors in their life, which is why you see less women in higher-level positions currently, but that doesn't mean women are less suited to high-level positions.

Perhaps one of the reasons this aggregate category of "women" doesn't want "these jobs" is because of an expectation of harassment or bias on the job. It's kind of hard to want to progress anywhere that is openly or passively aggressive towards you.

I don't think "they just don't want the jobs" should be considered the end of the story or any sort of proof that sexism isn't happening. Regardless, even if it were, it isn't actionable information in any way. You can't go from "some women just don't want to be CEOs" to "thus, let's continue to operate the ol' boys club". Somewhere in the middle, a message or two are getting lost.

You'd really have to be living under a rock to think there is not sexism going in the workplace. All this study says is that it doesn't manifest in the particular, limited region surrounding compensation, which is by far not the sum total of the employment experience.

> Perhaps one of the reasons this aggregate category of "women" doesn't want "these jobs" is because of an expectation of harassment or bias on the job. It's kind of hard to want to progress anywhere that is openly or passively aggressive towards you.

Sure, perhaps. While we are throwing out guesses, perhaps it is because women consider other things in life more of a priority than achieving career power.

When asked to rate their life priorities, women tend to put a lower ratio of work related goals. Cultural influences teach men and women to prioritize different things in their life. That's probably a bigger gender problem worth tackling.

> I don't think "they just don't want the jobs" should be considered the end of the story or any sort of proof that sexism isn't happening.

Definitely, which is why I said "I'm not going to argue that this accounts for it entirely".

> All this study says is that it doesn't manifest in the particular, limited region surrounding compensation, which is by far not the sum total of the employment experience.

Also true for sure, but the original article posted by OP is about compensation, and I never suggested that the study covered the totality of workplace experiences.

You're certainly didn't seem like you were taking up the "we need to do something about decision in the workplace" position. Seemed more like your taking up the position that nothing should be done.

The Swedish government agency responsible for statistics do a yearly survey on what people value in their job and by job seekers. Attributes like pay, social status, work environment, safety, and so on is evaluated and then correlated to things like gender.

And yes, there are differences. We could blame it on women for consistently valuating social status higher than pay, or we could blame men for consistently valuating pay higher than social status.

Here is an idea. Lets increase pay for female dominated professions, but lets restrict it to only jobs that has low social status, is risky, and with unfriendly environment. At the same time, lets apply affirmative action to female dominated professions with high social status and low pay, and get a minimum of 40% males.

Those changes would have a almost guarantied effect to eliminate current pay gaps, but would be completely rejected by any feminist group, for the very reason that it would go against the current female and male culture that created the pay gap.

How do you reliably distinguish someone intrinsically not wanting a promotion from someone not wanting to deal with the crap that comes with trying to get a promotion?

From the abstract: "In studies 5–7, when faced with the possibility of receiving a promotion at their current place of employment or obtaining a high-power position after graduating from college, women and men anticipated similar levels of positive outcomes (e.g., prestige and money), but women anticipated more negative outcomes (e.g., conflict and tradeoffs)."

I think the study partially addressed this when they asked different participants to describe and rate their life goals. Men tend to consider workplace-related success as more important in their life:

"In studies 1 and 2, when asked to list their core goals in life, women listed more life goals overall than men, and a smaller proportion of their goals related to achieving power at work."

If you look at the trendlines for what certain types of jobs or fields paid (e.g., doctor, nurse, programmer, marketer), you'd see that when women enter a particular field en masse, the pay drops. And when the gender balance in that field goes from majority female to majority male, the pay increases.

Some well-intentioned parent is probably telling their daughter right now, "Look at field X, which is male-dominated and pays really well! You should study that." And by the time they've grown up to be of working age, the field is at 60F/40M, and the pay has gone way down.

The data should bear it out. If women are promoted less often due to discrimination (as opposed to other factors), they would also be paid less while they are at the lower rungs of the organization.

Ie you don't pay someone the same amount while stifling them during promotion time.

The quoted economists found an 8% gap adjusting for those factors.

Looking at the factors quoted they didn't include hours worked per week. Men typically work more overtime.

Removing even more factors have found that gap diminish even more. In some cases, looking at young adults with college educations with out children (with some other factors also made equal), they found that women out earned men.

Resumes with male names are ranked higher than identical resumes with female names.

Citation please.

There are lots of them: https://www.google.com/search?q=Resumes+with+male+names+are+...

I know that. I take issue when it is stated as an absolute fact when the most well-known study was done in a very specific field and therefore makes it hard to really extrapolate out to the entire workforce.

I'd definitely be interested to read any studies of other fields that have failed to show a similar effect.

Here are the first two on Google. I'm sure you can find more

http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

A relevant podcast from sysk that aired recently: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-the-gender-pa...

(not affiliated with them. Just a listener)

They go into exactly the point you make and talk about how gender gap still does exists (although no so extreme).

They mention that explicity > after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

8% is still a lot.

I'd like for companies to just show the data.

> I'd like for companies to just show the data.

Agreed. If anyone in government was serious about this, they would lobby the SEC to require publicly listed companies to disclose this information on a granular enough level that comparisons inside and outside of industry were possible.

'Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) US Government agency, with the purpose of protecting investors from dangerous or illegal financial practices or fraud, by requiring full and accurate financial disclosure by companies offering stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other securities to the public.'

Why should SEC be involved in feminist causes? Their charter mentions nothing about it. I mean we can't go around demanding government to promote our pet causes because we feel like it.

I'm short and I wish there was no height discrimination. But I don't think SEC should deal with it :)

If this is something you feel strongly about, shouldn't this be dealt with by the legislature?

Oh, ok. So, logically, it must just be that women-associated occupations tend to be lower payed than men, women tend to be slotted into lower positions than men, women aren't encouraged into or supported in higher education the same way as men, women do not receive job tenure as easily as men, and/or gendered pressures cause women to work less hours per week (on careers rather than, e.g., a disproportionate share of domestic responsibilities) than men, resulting in women being paid on average 23% less than men. I guess that's alright, then.

No it's like saying most investment bankers are male and make 500k a year, most nurses are female and make 70k a year, Injustice! Look at that pay gap! Outrageous!

- It makes zero sense.

EDIT: What I meant to say is men go into different careers than woman and for different reasons. Usually men go after higher paying jobs (investment banking). When people compute the pay gap they dont take this into account, so they compare pay across industries (investment banking to nursing) which is meaningless, and likely is propaganda.

Is there something about the male gender that makes one a better investment banker? If not, how do you explain why that is in the first place?

There's abundant evidence that women prefer to work fewer hours than men and working insane hours is (for better or worse) a requirement of investment banking.

Whether the preference for fewer hours is innate or learned I don't know.

Women flat out don't want to do it. Some do, but not many.

I flat out don't believe that.

It is outrageous if a similarly-qualified woman would have a lot more trouble getting the $500k investment banker job. In that case, society is getting lower-quality investment bankers despite spending $500k/year on them.

Which is illogical. I will tell you my company would love to hire someone at a 30% discount.

Except when you consider that wages rise and fall in fields depending on the gender makeup of those positions [0].

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-...

Consider this. I have a group of 100 people, 50 male and 50 female. Job x is available in industry y. Job x is highly sought after and all 50 men apply for it. Industry y is traditionally male dominated and for whatever reason, none of the 50 women have previously applied for the job. Through the magical powers of the internet, women are now suddenly interested in the field and not only do the 50 men apply for the job but the 50 women do also; doubling the applicant pool.

How will the employer react to the sudden surge in applications?

But that's not what the article is talking about, it's talking about male-dominated fields that were once female-dominated and vice versa.

One of the previously male-dominated field that the article mentions is computer programming. There is no other field in the article that has undergone such a fundamental shift from when women used to dominate the field. There were virtually no barriers to entry to the field back then either in the form of requiring a degree or societal norms ingrained from childhood.

Other fields mentioned either require longer hours or were simply more demanding. We can get into what are reasonable hours or demands in a separate conversation but all things equal, employers are going to pay more for someone who works longer and puts up with more demands.

For everything else, when you introduce half the working population to a field that they were once closed off to, wages are going to drop. I am not pretending that it's the only factor but a huge over supply of labor will cause wages to drop; all things equal.

5 downvotes? Alright, I guess I'm wrong. "The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week", but also, it's not accounted for by any of those things, and doesn't exist.

And by "the evidence", you mean none of the evidence that demonstrably shows a pay gap, right?

The pay gap of 77c/$ still matters. Not only does the gap persist to a lower extent when you control for everything, "controlling for everything" is not actually a clarifying approach when discussing the gender gap issue.

see: "The problem with controlling for 'all other factors' when looking at pay discrimination" (https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/49k23i/the_pr...)

But it's not 77cents:

> Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

The 77 cent thing is a myth and the 92cent thing isn't even that massive a gap.

I have a hypothesis: if you could measure the confidence of both men and women and relate them to job type and income, I bet you'd have a stronger coloration than gender.

It's pretty difficult to test because things like confidence are subjective. There's an article in Salon called "The Confidence Gap" that shows women often don't ask for higher paying positions because they lack confidence in their abilities.

Without controlling for job title, how much does the average man make, and the average woman make?

I'm under the impression that the 77c figure is related to this "total" disparity, that better accounts for the separate, but related, issue of "predominantly female" fields paying less than male ones.

That's another issue entirely. Also you need to take into account things like maternity leave as well as women who man chose not to work full time, that bring that number down as well.

They also don't ask because when they do they are more likely to be shot down, just like they are less likely to be hired in the first place. When women ask for something they are seen as complaining, when men ask for the same thing, it's seen as confidence.

I'm sympathetic to the notion that discrimination can include subtler factors of pushing women into lower pay positions.

However, the problem with the 77 cent figure is that it's frequently stated like this: "women get paid only 77% of what men do for the same jobs." Which is entirely false. Yet, if you asked most people about the 77 cents figure they'd think it actually meant women got paid much less to do the same work.

If a conversation begins with a lie, it's going to be tough to address a systematic issue and to work together. Distorting the facts is manipulative and prevents rational discourse.

There may be some dumb people out there misinterpreting the stat, but there are also an incredible number of people "straw-manning" the ENTIRE opposition as glib.

For example, I've seen people cite the White House page as "fallen to the delusion", when in fact it is quite explicit:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/equal-pay

> In 2014, the typical woman working full-time all year in the United States earned only 79 percent of what the typical man earned working full-time all year. Phrased differently, she earned 79 cents for every dollar that he earned. The pay gap is even greater for African-American and Latina women, with African-American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white non-Hispanic man. Decades of research shows that no matter how you evaluate the data, there remains a pay gap — even after factoring in the kind of work people do, or qualifications such as education and experience — and there is good evidence that discrimination contributes to the persistent pay disparity between men and women. In other words, pay discrimination is a real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange American women and their families.

There is absolutely no lie or imprecision there. It is a common rhetorical trick to tar your entire opposition as idiots. The people claiming that the pay gap is a "myth" are just as just as zealot-like as the people misinterpreting the 77c figure.

The only thing it is explicit about is that full-time working women as a whole get paid less than men. There is a vague assertion towards the fact that a gap still exists "after factoring in the kind of work people do, or qualifications such as education and experience" but no numbers are provided.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that women as a whole get paid less than men and that minority women even more so. What I have an issue with is that by being purposefully vague, proponents are acting like employers somehow just hate women so much that they become blinded by this hatred and throw all business-sense out the window by deciding to pay men a load more than women. It's completely dishonest, proposed "solutions" only serve as a band-aid fix, and distracts from the actual issues at hand.

All the information we have is hourly wage, income, and job title. We can't know if a woman with the lower-paid job title of "Programmer Analyst" is doing the same work as a man with a job title of "Senior Software Engineer."

The "same job" is a subjective distinction, so you can't say it's entirely false; it's really a matter of opinion.

> The "same job" is a subjective distinction, so you can't say it's entirely false; it's really a matter of opinion.

No, it's not. Certainly there are some distinctions at the margins, as you note.

There are, however, some very clear distinctions. Women dominate elementary education, which I hope we can all agree is a very different job than programming (for example).

To reiterate, I don't know whether these preferences are innate or learned. In fact, I suspect it's the latter. But we shouldn't ignore them_if women were in fact paid less for doing the exact same jobs, solution would actually be a lot easier.

That interpretation is misleading for a few reasons.

One is that "to the point of vanishing" is still very nonzero. There's a report by Consad Corporation prepared for the Department of Labor that reaches the figure 5-7% after accounting for differences in jobs (their website is down at the moment), even though it concludes that "there may be nothing to correct." That's also the number Sommers herself writes in her HuffPo article she cites in that Time article: "After controlling for several relevant factors (though some were left out, as we shall see), they found that the wage gap narrowed to only 6.6 cents." So the Cornell claim of 8% is basically the same. I don't think there's an argument to be made that a 23% gender pay gap is a scandal but a 5-8% gap is totally fine.

The other is that occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked is affected by existing wages. I was unemployed by choice for several months last year, learning Rust and working on a few open-source projects, and I became a more valuable job candidate as a result of that. I could not have done that without the savings to take those months off. If my previous job had paid me anywhere from 8% to 23% less, I would probably not have decided to take those months off, and in return I would have been a less competitive candidate and my job would probably have been one of lower position.

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