Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

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Where, exactly, do you draw the line? Do you want tolerance or support?

Gay: Suppose the "gay germ theory"[1] is correct. To allow vaccination/prophylaxis or not?

Labor: Freedom to legally organise is to me utterly unobjectionable, but I remember picking up a book on trade unionism in the library once and being completely unable to grasp the sense behind one of the articles in which the authors took it as given that striking should not even in theory be grounds for firing. Striking is part of a negotiation, it's a tool in the dance of "How shall we divide the money that is earned as a result of my employment between empolyer and employee?"

Where is the "right" place between freedom to organise + at-will employment, and a system like France, where unions "represent" workers in their economic sector who aren't members and get legally binding regulations, or like Germany's, where union representatives are always on the board, with voting positions?

Women's: Women make less than men on average. They also make very different choices of what jobs to work in, how many hours to work, and they are much more likely to have interruptions in their career. Given the second, is the first unjust, especially if the difference when you compare like with like is small?

Black's: Affirmative action here

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogenic_theory_of_homosexual...

Women's: Women make less than men on average. They also make very different choices of what jobs to work in, how many hours to work

The problem is not that women make less than men on average, they often make less than men when doing the exact same job, for the exact same hours.

and they are much more likely to have interruptions in their career.

Did you read the thread about job hoppers, where many men said that job hopping was a good thing because it was in their best interest?

The problem is not that women make less than men on average, they often make less than men when doing the exact same job, for the exact same hours.

Could you share any citations?

Thus far, when trying to research this issue, keep running into the well-debunked The 76 cents (or 72 cents or X cents) on the dollar myth that still enjoys popularity amongst feminists.

Unfortunately, that statistic simply compares the earnings of full-time workers with the same job category. It ignores the hours of work per week, experience, danger, and a host of other factors. It quite literally compares the salary of people with years of experience who are working 60 hours a week directly with new hires of the same job title who are working 40 hours a week. It lumps them all together.

Study after study I've seen which have actually controlled for factors such as experience, hours worked, travel required, etc have found very little pay disparity. This NCPA article is a brief explanation of The Wage Gap Myth:

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba392 http://www.iwf.org/campus/show/18948.html

The Cato institute and others have done more in depth analysis.

Okay, let's go with the GAO: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-04-35

Unless I'm horribly misreading the study, the claim a figure around 80 cents on the dollar after controlling for external factors, including hours worked, experience, and occupation. It's a lot worse before that.

Did you even read the report? Pages 11-14 deal with factors not controlled for and the summary of the report was this:

In conclusion, while we were able to account for much of the difference in earnings between men and women, we were not able to explain the remaining earnings difference. It is difficult to evaluate this remaining portion without a full understanding of what contributes to this difference. Specifically, an earnings difference that results from individuals’ decisions about how to manage work and family responsibilities may not necessarily indicate a problem unless these decisions are not freely made. On the other hand, an earnings difference may result from discrimination in the workplace or subtler discrimination about what types of career or job choices women can make. Nonetheless, it is difficult, and in some cases, may be impossible, to precisely measure and quantify individual decisions and possible discrimination. Because these factors are not readily measurable, interpreting any remaining earnings difference is problematic.

This was a meta study that looked at data up to the mid-90s. Essentially the conclusion was that not everything can be explained through simply dividing by hours worked, but there are a variety of possible explanations including both discrimination, career choice and work/family balance.

Come on. You can take issue with the methodology of the study, but at least have a little basic respect.

Essentially the conclusion was that not everything can be explained through simply dividing by hours worked,

Which is exactly what you'd expect if there were a pay gap.

but there are a variety of possible explanations including both discrimination, career choice and work/family balance.

Fair enough, there are multiple causes. But if you look at the factors they account for (and which therefore fail to explain the missing 20 cents on the dollar, see pages 2 and 9), many of them are closely tied to work/family balance and career choices: experience, occupation, marital status, hours worked per year, etc. Few, if any, are proxies for discrimination or other social phenomena out of any particular woman's immediate control.

The problem is not that women make less than men on average, they often make less than men when doing the exact same job, for the exact same hours.

I am really suspicious of this, because it simply doesn't match my own experience. I've worked behind a bar, I've been a lifeguard, I've done a few jobs in hi-tech and equality is the norm.

Here in the UK the Office of National Statistics ripped apart Harriet Harman's figures on unequal pay... Turned out to get the political outcome she wanted, she was comparing the pay of female part-time workers to that of male full-time workers.

Incidentally, 80% of those working more than 50 hrs/week are male, and 98% of those killed at work are male.

Well, it does matches my experience. When I had relatively simple jobs like working behind a bar, there was no inequality, but in IT there was. Sometimes it was disguised. Men who did the exact same work as women had a different title, so they earned more because technically they had a different role.

Dutch research indicated that a big part of the 20% difference is because of the choices women make (though of course, it is still open for debate whether those choices are always true choices), but even accounting for that there was still a 7% difference that couldn't be explained (of course they also accounted for hours worked). This is a Dutch page with lots of info http://www.loonwijzer.nl/home/vrouwenloonwijzer/beloningsver...

It does say that the Netherlands is a bit worse than other European countries.

Also: I think some technical explanatins as to why it is "logical" that women earn less are nonsense. It makes no sense to penalize a women because she had two babies six and four years ago and therefore was out of the workplace for a few months if there is no objective difference in quality of work today.

I don't think danger has anything to do with pay. If it did, firefighters would earn a lot more than IT consultants. I also don't think responsibility has anything to do with it. If it did daycare workers would earn a lot more than programmers.

And I have never met a regular employee who honestly worked more than 50/hrs a week (in one job). In every case they could have done the work in 40 hours but they slacked off during the day (because nobody can stay focused for 10 hours a day every day). I had a parttime job once, but I never, ever browsed the internet on company time even though all the "hard working" 100+ euro/hour consultants were checking the popular weblogs all day long. But then those consultants go on record as working so many hours and therefore people apparently think it is logical that they earn more money per hour than me, a lowly parttime employee.

Perhaps you should open a company that exploits those arbitrage opportunities?

And I have never met a regular employee who honestly worked more than 50/hrs a week

The statistics include all the dirty, dangerous and manual jobs. The ones that are done predominantly by men and that campaigners forget about when they demand equality.

Ah, where I live it is illegal to work more than 50/hrs a week (on average) in those kind of jobs, so my info is not based on those statistics.

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