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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> Women will always have longer lifespans and higher average IQs than men

Then why is it that on average they get paid less than men for the same job? Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy and earning more than men. The fact that they don't points to some greater opposing force that needs addressing.

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What would you say about chess, go, leading physicists, e-sports, professional sports, scientific breakthroughs, notable inventions? Do we need Magnus Carlsen to step aside for a woman 3 standard deviations below him, or a woman from an underrepresented minority 5 standard deviations below him, as is done in law school admissions? What conspiracy exists among corporations, whose existence is based on nothing more than profit, that the real priority is the #1 motivation of corporations is actually to hire men over women? If women are underpaid as enormously as Cosmopolitan claims, an all-woman business would out-compete the marketplace with a fraction of the personnel costs. That's the way the marketplace works.

Every single person should be given every opportunity as every other, but we shouldn't continue this state-forced results based on people's personal politics about how they believe the world works.

Why do we have issues with providing everyone with healthcare, clean water, and safety... We're bombing seven countries, funding jihadists in Syria, creating a surveillance police state. Some US cities have murder rates higher than any country in Africa or the Middle East. We can't provide everyone with housing, and we can't successfully protect our environment. Give me a break. This issue is not about human welfare, dignity or equality. This is about people's personal politics and lawyers finding a way to cash in on laws that may have been well intentioned but since gone out of control.

Generally when you control for the number of hours worked, the pay gap mostly goes away. Women on average take much more time off to bear and raise children. The disagreement is mostly over whether this is an appropriate thing to control for. Some argue that we should take steps to ensure that taking time off for childcare doesn't hurt women's careers. Some argue that women feeling the need to take more time off is exactly the problem and we should change our culture so that childcare responsibilities are more equitably shared. I don't think you'd find anyone who has studied this issue who thinks the main source of the pay gap is still discrimination.

Men and women aren't equally incentivised to seek high paying jobs. Dating site statistics show a strong correlation to success for men and how much they earn, but not for women. Their correlation is with attributes like age and self-care.

The social ladder and ranking is also attached to the same incentives. A mans ranking is (mostly) based on his ability to support a family. A womans ranking is (mostly) based on her ability to raise a family. As sad and depressing that is, the message it sends on a cultural level is that no one wants to be near a poor male or infertile female. On the flip side, women are not punished by society for not focusing on maximizing earning potentials, and men aren't punished by society for not focusing self care and longer lifespans.

Going even darker when looking at incentives for earning and lifespans, we can look at the link between low income for men and suicide. About a factor of about 1000% according to some studies when comparing high vs low income. Suicide is also the most common cause of death for men at ages 15-50. The negative impact from unemployment (and low income jobs) effects men more, and a natural conclusion would be that the incentives to avoid it is thus stronger.

That ignores other factors unrelated to simple IQ. E.g. Women have to give birth to children, and are more likely to want to take care of them.

So yeah, sure, if you look at the scenario in simple isolation, then you could argue that there is a "greater opposing force".

> Surely if they are inherently "smarter", they should be dominating the knowledge economy

Does the CEO have the highest IQ in the company? Is the president the most intelligent person in the country?

Well, certainly not as of tomorrow!

Great. Now I need a hug.

maybe men on average get paid more because they need to be incentivized to take jobs because they're more likely to die on the job (20x more likely than women).

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