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Comment by afpx | Hacker News Reader

What if gender pay gap was just a result of men being pressured to take on more risks in life (i.e. a wider gaussian). And, the ones that have failed (or died) are no longer included in the data?

For instance, when I look at the homeless people in the US, 95% are male. I'm sure the prison population is also skewed toward males.

What if ... men just are over represented on both ends of the curve but the low end isn't given attention?

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Men are overrepresented on both ends. See https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10670 for some of the data.

However that doesn't explain why in many industries for many jobs, apparently equivalent men and women are paid differently.

Good point. But, what if it still comes down to risk taking? (not assuming a biological component)

An interesting theory there is that it's primarily a combination of (a) women aren't socialised to negotiate as hard (b) everybody is socialised to regard a woman negotiating hard more negatively than a man doing so.

Since both of these things seem to me to suck anyway I figure we might as well fix them and see what happens. Of course, exactly how 'fix them' works is a tricky question.

Interesting link. It's disappointing that the author doesn't link to some form of source however (to the skeptic to this hypothesis, the claims are to be taken on the author's word).

> What if ... men just are over represented on both ends of the curve but the low end isn't given attention?

Or the low end is bounded, by say minimum wage. That would skew/artificially alter the distribution from an e.g. Gaussian by effectively cutting off the low tail.

Compelling - "Invisible Men."

You're kind-of right, but as the parent says, the actual lower bounds are homelessness, prison and death (the vast majority of workplace deaths are men).

men being pressured to take on more risk

95% of workplace deaths are men, so yes, it could simply be that more dangerous jobs have a higher pay.

This actually borders on being a rather comical point. People in prison have an income of zero. So if we're going to arrive at 0.77 by dividing one average by another, I for one would like to know, is the prison population being included?

Where can I fund a journalistic investigation into the matter right away?

I would say the income of a person in prison is a large negative. "According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the average cost of housing an inmate in the U.S. was $31,286 in 2012." [1]

[1] http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost...

That's funny, but the pay gap is about how much people receive in compensation, not the net amount that goes into sustaining their existence.

0.77 isn't actually the pay gap. It's much, much smaller than that, below 10%. It's one of the biggest victories of feminists that they have been able to shape discourse around a completely wrong number.

No, that's not true. If it was true, it would mean that the vast majority of the stupidest people are man and the vast majority of the smartest people are man. And the later statement will get you into lots of trouble...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences

That's the fallacy GP is anticipating and parodying.

Smart / Stupid is irrelevant. Just assume both groups are equal except that one group is forced to take more on risk.

Also, assume that higher risk results in more variance. More of the riskier group will end up on the far ends of the curve.

Now, what happens if the riskier group's left side of the curve is ignored?

IIRC then this is somewhat the case, the bell curve for IQ points is "flatter" for men, there is more tendency to go into extremes, while women tend to have a tighter distribution.[1]

This does however not mean that there is a vast majority in either extreme, rather that if you look for the extreme ends of the spectrum, you will find that one sex is over-represented.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...

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