When all job differences are accounted for, the pay gap almost disappears
economist.com
economist.com
Some points of discussion are (unrelated to article):
1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
2. Women are less likely to negotiate salary and assert themselves, as women in general are more agreeable than men. Is this behavior based in biology or is it social construct?
3. Women tend to choose lower paying jobs, such as teacher, caregiver etc. In general women tend to care about people, while men care about things (STEM). Again: biology or social construct?
For example in Sweden, which is doing it's best to increase gender equality, sex differences between men and women maximized http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf
So perhaps occupation differences are healthy and natural. Of course, in Sweden engineers don't earn 300% more than teachers, so it's not a huge problem like in the USA.
The logical solution would be to increase pay in women dominated professions. But this kind of thing spits in the face of capitalism.
It's a tough problem to solve, and I still have no idea how to go about solving it.
EDIT: Additional explanations
if the answer is "no" for women or any other particular group then it just proves the point of the article, i.e. there's barely a pay gap when factoring in exact job responsibilities.
Job title*
Which means that there is still a well-paying-job-title gap between the sexes
It reveals, as in a piece of data that wasn't typically part of the conversation, that some groups ask for less to begin with while the employer offers them more. But this 'more' amount is still less than employees that asked for more than that to begin with.
The average of black candidates, and women candidates, simply asked for less than the average of white male candidates. Got offered more, took the 'generous' offer and retroactively find out they are on the lower side of the pay gap, again on average.
Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because. And I think that is not an entirely productive discussion, if all the reactionary HR training fails to find this while other aspects aren't even discussed at all.
Nobody says that. It's the larger society, which also teaches black people and women to ask for less
group 1 is told they are talented and that the test is hard group 2 is told if they work hard they wil prevail
that was the gist, but I could be getting the wording wrong. The work-hard group did much better at the test than the talented group. I'm going from memory here and will try to find the test to post here. But don't you think it is valuable to prepare those who might have a tougher time with knowledge about how discrimination operates within our institutions that confer power for situations they may face and that certain strategies are better (based upon data from history) than others in understanding the basis of these? When one understands how the opposing army operates, one can create a more effective and hopefully victorious strategy. Especially if one is told that winning battle strategies productively use insider knowlege of one's opponents strengths and weknesses in an innovative and sustained counter-measure.
I agree that the phenomenon is much more complex than conspiratorial movie villains, and it's unproductive to simplify things that way (often out of anger). But I'll add some complexity to what you said: They would be wise to ask for less because that is what the market will bear, due to widespread discrimination.
It seems beyond debate that discrimination is widespread, though again I agree we need to understand that simple statement in detail. The black, female, Latino, etc. candidates would have to be deaf and blind not to be aware of it, and would need unusual courage to try to ignore it.
Anecdotally, I was at dinner with a retired female biologist. She was discussing the challenges of being a female scientist in her generation, and how today's women in science take their opportunities for granted. Later in the meal, she told me that women are naturally worse at math and computer science, and that males of northern European ancestry are naturally superior (which flies in the face of even current discriminatory hiring in IT). It wasn't anything I haven't heard before, unfortunately; even in my personal experience, explicit discrimination is not so rare as to be shocking.
but there is also another side. women that i have worked with have used social norms to ask for more. like in some conversation make a joke about how they deserve promotion and pay incrase, like hehe im such a great team member/worker i deserve a pay incrase, wink wink, and such comments multiple times. I never heard a man use this method. If its from a man then he asks to speak to you and directly says what he wants.
I think all of this points to women not attaining the same rank/position as the key factor in gender differences, not a discriminatory pay gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_theory
It's possible that society better equips men for job searching in general, and too much focus is placed on the very moment of agreeing to a salary.
So the data from the article corroborates that idea.
That is not what the article said.
2. "women in general are more agreeable than men"
???
3. "women tend to care about people while men care about things"
???
"For example, women are often found to be more agreeable than men (Feingold, 1994; Costa et al., 2001). This means that women, on average, are more nurturing, tender-minded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men."
"For the people–things dimension of interests, the results in Table 1 are clear, strong, and unambiguous. Men tend to be much more thing-oriented and much less people-oriented than women (mean d = 1.18, a ‘very large’ difference, according to Hyde (2005) verbal designations"
As for why capitalists don't trip over themselves to hire only women to increase their profits, well, what makes you think they don't, at least in industries where margins are low and there isn't a strong counteracting social force? Take a look at the gender ratio in the notoriously low-margin garment industry, for example.
There has been a lot written on these topics, if you look around. You can learn a lot very quickly if you move beyond the realm of HN comments. =) That might make it easier to decide what to believe.
THis is not how it works. at all. There's not some cabal taht decided they should pay women less. Instead, the larger culture prootes behaviors and attitudes and devalues others that, as a consequence, lead to women getting paid less. Those are unconscious biases that influence hiring or promoting decisions. One example: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.107...
> I find it useful to be different than other people, I believe I can make use of my unique cultural background in my work
So the recruiters in that study decided candidates that make an explicit issue of their ethnicity in their CL would not be the perfect fit for a team (they were asked to select for coherence). What a bunch of racists!
Therefore the market forces are different or nonexistent, who hires a $500,000/year rock star grade school teacher? Even if such a thing exists and has real impact.
But the market is clearly there - plenty of people here pay $25-$30k/year for private school. With a small class size of 10-15 students that's $250k-$450k/year.
On top of that most people here pay maybe $10-$15k to schools via property tax. So that's another $100k-$150k.
There are already metrics for teacher performance (at its crudest: What's the average grade going in and out of the teacher's class?) which could be used to determine salary. (And maybe it is in some places.)
Social construct. Look at Asian countries that by all accounts have less gender quality than the west but have more women science graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.
The fact that Sweden has skewed representation doesn't capture what I call the "princesses and fairies" problem. Just because society doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that it's not telling women that they should be interested in princesses and fairies instead of legos. My daughter, four, is the only one of a few girls in the STEM programs I signed her up for at summer camp. This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.
My mom grew up in bangladesh in the 1960s. She majored in chemistry as did several of her sisters. The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work. But the western gender norm about women being suited for certain professions doesn't exist.
Perhaps money is still a better motivator than gender equal society.
The problem is, even if they didn't do that what about parents who grew up thinking that and then project it on their kids? What about TV and other media consumption that shows stereotypical roles?
It's hard to account for and eliminate all types of gender roles because many are more subtle and / or "normal" to most people who grew up with it.
A quick anecdote: my daughter, who loves science and computers, was playing 'house' with her classmates in preschool when several children told her she had to play the role of mommy while they go out and work in this pretend scenario they created. This made my daughter think "I want to be a boy because girls can't have cool jobs". Those kids she was playing with weren't ever told this is how things had to be but they all had stay-at-home moms so they just assumed it was normal and how things are supposed to be. My wife is also a stay-at-home mom which likely helped reinforce it regardless of how much encouragement we both give our daughter.
So everything influences kids. It's hard to control for all of these variables.
Parents claim they've learned nature trumps nurture. They gave girl firetrucks, found her tucking the firetruck to bed. Parents conclude it's the nurturing feminity.
Psych asks "who tucks her to bed every night?". Oops.
> that by all accounts have less gender quality
> than the west but have more women science
> graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.
How do you conclude "social construct" from that data? When external pressures are greater, gender differences equalize. When external constraints fall away, gender differences are allowed to express themselves. So it is no surprise that self-segregation is pretty much directly and positively correlated to measures of societal progress and gender equality. Just to repeat that: the more egalitarian and progressive the society, the more the genders self-segregate in the workplace.
Here's a quote from a BBC article asking "Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?" The answer is in the article: necessity.
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects." -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39579321
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010....
"Most importantly and contra predictions, we showed that economically developed and more gender equal countries have a lower overall level of mathematics anxiety, and yet a larger national sex difference in mathematics anxiety relative to less developed countries."
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
"Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637)."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18179326
"What might be surprising to most people, as we shall see, is the specific pattern of cross-national variation in the gender gap in authority. To cite just one example, in the United States, the probability of a man in the labor force occupying an "upper" or "top" management position is 1.8 times greater than the probability of a woman occupying such a position, whereas in Sweden, the probability for men is 4.2 times greater than for women."
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/CC-C9.p...
Your move.
India has massive and pervasive poverty and tech especially is seen as a way out of poverty. Many programmers there earn 5x the average wage.
Comparing that to the UK where programmers are not paid particularly well compared to other professions is disingenuous.
At the end of the day, part of being a good adult and parent in 2017 is not just accepting whatever constructs * you feel "society" is shoving down your throat. Think critically to form your own principles and beliefs, and act on them (so long as they are within the bounds law). Obviously this is easier said than done, and also there are probably places on earth where this isn't feasible. But I feel that in most of the developed world it is.
* not you rayiner, I mean you third person (I'm not accusing you of being a bad adult/parent!)
In my whole life I haven't faced a single situation where parents literally force a doll on their daughter instead of a Lego Kit. You are over stating the whole problem.
>>This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.
Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.
Also I'm not a great fan of forcing things on kids. People should do what they are interested in, else it creates meaningless pressure and kids are generally slotted and forced to make up to unrealistic expectations from parents.
Here in India, this is a huge problem where every single parent wants their kids to get into STEM. Most don't want to and when they do bad at school and exams, they have to face routine humiliation among social circles and peer groups as losers. Many are driven to suicide. These people will do way better in other walks of life and must be allowed to.
>>The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work.
As an Indian where social norms are similar to an extent this is not only ok, but rather even preferable.
If you look at how life unfolds here, there is massive pressure on men to be efficient and provide for their families to the best of their abilities. This not easy, forget about all this empowerment new age talk, in reality most men slog away whole life, working insane hours, doing weekends and working very difficult conditions to make it happen.
This is hard for women to do for many reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. Given this, financial security becomes way more important than making up to virtue signaling from other people. Hence marrying a rich spouse that can provide for life is more important than making careers in our culture.
For most men here, things don't feel like freedom and empowerment. Its a swim through an ocean of hellfire to provide for families.
I would be more than happy to sit at home and be oppressed. And let women have all this empowerment. But deep down everybody knows what the real deal is, which is why no one signs up for something like this.
>>Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.
US female, born in 1977. By the time I reached sentient age, my mother had bought, and encouraged relatives to buy for me, literally dozens of dolls, because she had decided at my birth that I would "collect" dolls. I was never very interested in the dolls and she never "forced" me to play with them, but the expectation was nonetheless clear.
For my slightly younger brother, Transformers and Star Wars figures were bought. I played with his toys and preferred them to my own "girl" toys, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to buy "boy" toys for me. I think they would have if I had asked, but the environment I (and they) grew up in was such that I (and they) were incapable of conceiving of the possibility.
And of course other girls at my elementary school had grown up in the same environment, so all I learned from my peer group/friends was to be interested in stereotypically girly things.
I agree that "society" is such a vague term as to be almost useless, but it doesn't make sense to assume all this behavior is based on conscious decisions by people truly aware of their own preferences (and the alternatives among which they can select a preference).
I believe this is a very weird ponderation. The whole point is that capitalists don't do that because there is sexism among them. They are ignoring rational evidence because they have a preconceived idea that women are worse employees. If capitalists were actually these rational straw man devoided of human flaws, we wouldn't have sexism at all.
So this line of thinking is basically saying: if there wasnt sexism we wouldn't have sexism.
A more practical way of making my point. In past decades black athletes werent admitted in competitive sports teams. Would you say that you believe that wasnt racism because if it was, team owners would be tripping themselves to hire talented black athletes that were being ignored by most teams? No, they werent because they were racists. It took a lot of civil right activism to give black athletes the same access to sports jobs as white athletes. And today we know for a fact that black athletes werent worse athletes back then.
Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?
There are, believe it or not, women entrepreneurs (and btw the very conservative Poland is leading the rankings[1]), so even if all male employers were in fact equally sexist, that would just mean female-led companies would out-compete them.
[1] http://wbj.pl/poland-high-in-global-women-entrepreneur-leade...
But you're right, there should be _some_ data-driven company with an analyst that would say something like: "Oh hey. We're getting as much productivity out of men and women, but the women are cheaper. Let's keep one guy on to manage and interrupt them and fire the rest."
Business books for ages are trying to give the "formula" to make a business success (and no one succeeded). It is irrealistic to assume that a company with undoubtably better hiring practices would necessarily and immediatelly (or in a short term) beat the competitors with worse hiring practices.
This even assuming the company would be hiring more productive employees. If the assumption is that it is the same productivity but less cost (as it is in the case we are discussing), the impact at the bottomline is even more diluted.
EDIT: I would add that if the impact was such straightforward and objectively measured it would be much easier to fight it as a society. This (how subjective is to measure productivity and business impact of knowledge workers) is the may reason why we are discussing pay gap as a gender issue and not still voting rights)
There must be at least one example of an all female company you can point to with clear advantage over mixed-gender competition if the pay gap is at all real, and certainly if it’s over 30% as claimed by, among others, president Obama.
Either the pay gap is too small to matter, or it simply does not exist. So far all evidence favors the latter.
This shouldn’t be surprising—after all wage discrimination has been illegal in United States for over 40 years.
The claim that there’s some widespread corruption, perhaps even a conspiracy, should be treated as any other extraordinary claim. With extraordinary skepticism.
I do not have an opinion If there is or there is not a pay gap (I do have the opinion that sexism is a real problem at workplaces regardless of the pay gap). But I dont think the argument "if there was, someone would benefit from it" is reasonable.
Hardly. It just requires that enough men are sexist to discourage women from entering a field in large numbers. One abusive person in a position of power can have a hugely disproportionate impact.
> For example in Sweden, which is doing it's best to increase gender equality, sex differences between men and women maximized http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf
It’s more likely women simply prefer different occupations, and auto-select for their own happiness.
Should we disregard either sex’s happiness in relentless pursuit of outcome equality?
> they werent because they were racists
It's more complex than that, and it's important to understand the mechanisms: My poor understanding is that racism was (and is to a great degree) a social norm, and as social science and life experience will tell you, humans are hardwired to follow social norms. Think of the common phenomenon of large numbers believing the same erroneous fact (as an easy example, in matters of science) - did they all coincidentally reach the same conclusion, or just follow the norm of their social networks. We unconsciously accept and assume norms, we hardly notice them (they are the everyday 'normal', after all), and to challenge them is to make yourself an outcast, which is dangerous and against human nature. Who even wants to be the only one going against the group in a meeting, much less challenging centuries of culture and your entire community?
I'm not excusing the actions of those team owners at all. But I would guess that there were a few advocates of racial discrimination and many who went along with the established norm. To veer OT: IMHO, standing up to those norms is a responsibility of all of us - if you silently acquiesce, you support them as norms in everyone else's eyes. By speaking you may not change the world by yourself, but consider how it looks from someone else who is questioning the 'norm' in their mind but afraid to speak up, just like you: Seeing one other person speaking out may look insufficient, but it's leaves a far stronger impression than if nobody says a thing, and that one person is more likely to yield two or three speaking out next time.
wouldn't this imply they would avoid hiring much, if any? why bother hiring people you don't feel are worth hiring?
> No, they werent because they were racists.
racists hire people they're biased against all the time if there is some advantage in doing so.
i'm more inclined to believe the circumstance you speak of was avoidance of socioeconomic consequences. there was a time when having a team with too many black athletes (heaven forbid mostly, or even all black) would tank your ticket sales.
> Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?
well, it helps that it doesn't hurt ticket sales.
Large companies, on the other hand, have to hire thousands of people a year; and for jobs that are not much fun and which often require considerable training. The effect often has been to reduce discrimination. To take examples from an earlier era -- many immigrant populations in the US found their way into one or another industry this way.
Notably they did not find their way into every industry equally; and some minorities have benefitted less from this effect; but it did happen. The comparable effect would be that we should see some industries adapting to the lower cost of women's labor in something -- though probably not the most elite (posh and desirable) industries.
There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated.
Of course. What did you think would happen when a field gets an oversupply of new employees who aren't pay-sensitive?
As an aside why do you think big tech companies are pushing for more women in tech? Because nerds and women don't focus on pay as much as men in general do.
The problem is that "thing" work often scales better than linearly while "people" work does not. You can't really socially engineer yourself out of that reality.
Invert this: what explains capitalists paying women 25% less for the same skills? Why aren't the salaries of men decreased in light of actual proof that the work can be done for less?
The way women selects men is heavily weighted towards how much the man earns. According to dating statistics from dating sites, its the biggest single strongest attribute to predict if a message sent from a man will give positive response. This can also be seen in surveys around the globe, like one which said that 90% of women in china would not consider dating a man who earn less than the median income.
So if this incentive based explanation is true, lets make some test by making some predictions. If its true then we should see that boys during adolescence think in a higher rate than girls about selecting a profession based on earning potential. We should also see a higher number of young non-married men around the age of 20 trying to enter the work force as early as possible in order to improve their own status and impress the opposite sex. Those men should be more eager to get higher wages and attempt more risky ventures in order to compete with other men. The need and risk taking for higher wages would be correlated to how much other peers of the same sex earn in their perceived environment.
Increase pay in women dominated professions would lower the earning difference, but it would not change the incentives. In order to get that we would need to change our culture so that either women stopped prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which men would loose that incentive, or men need to prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which women would get that incentive applied on them.
4/5 women in China are married by age 30. By ages 35-39 only 4.6% are unmarried. I guess eventually they all settle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu#Culture_and_statistic...
Something to consider, though I can't back it up: Perhaps the whole method of determining salary, the negotiation process, is a social construct. I mean, it is a social construct almost by definition, but maybe that process, and many other constructs of the business world, are creations of an era when business was populated by men and when therefore the processes and customs naturally were based on the way men interact.
Sometimes I try to think of it this way: If the business world had been populated only by women for generations, and if men were now trying to break in, how would things be different? Perhaps an aggressive negotiating style would be unprofessional, and people would say that men don't get equal salaries not because of discrimination, but because they don't represent themselves well.
Here's another claim I've heard many times and never seen refuted (or even challenged): Tall men are paid more than short men (extending into non-physical work such as programming.)
A company that recognizes this should hire a bunch of short programmers at a discount and trounce their competition...but they don't.
I'd suggest these factors:
1. Despite the fact that short men get paid less, you can't just take a tall candidate, find a shorter one with equivalent skills, and hire him at a discount. Finding and identifying the optimal fit for a job is already beyond our abilities--adding in this extra restriction just isn't feasible.
2. This bias isn't an explicit bias like "I hate short people". It's a subconscious "I feel better about this candidate". Our decisions are based on black box gut feelings, so offsetting our subconscious bias is extremely difficult.
3. Tall men might actually be more effective in programming jobs, simply because we afford them higher status as a society--that adds value in a job that involves working with other people...such as programming.
Suppose 3 is true--I suspect it is. Even if I overcome my bias and hiring challenges to get past 1 and 2, 3 means the rational thing for me to do when hiring is to pay the extra for tall programmers, because in our society, they'll perform better.
But an alternative universe where no one has this bias in the first place will result result in a more optimal allocation of resources.
There are times where you can get an advantage by overcoming a bias others experience, but there are times where you can't and the only fix is to fix society at large. (Maybe I can just fix that bias in every one of my employees, but limiting myself to the small set of people who lack a pervasive bias means reducing my talent pool--probably so much that it offsets the competitive gain I get.)
Part of the reason they get paid more is that they actually are smarter and healthier. Height correlates with good health and a well nutritioned childhood.
More detail here: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...
Spot on. Decades of outsourcing should have convinced everyone that businesses are not out to help the working class white man.
Profits above all.
Further women choose teachers, based on a number of studies, because they want to be home in the summer with their children and because they want to nurture. The one thing that most school systems do that is go is they have a pay matrix that determines pay on a step system where education and years of experience determine your pay scale and gender is not a factor. The downside to this pay system is that high performers make the same as sub par performers.
As to why women don't advance as fast ... my opinion is that it's primarily motherhood that does it. It puts a career on hold for 6 months times the number of children, and women are socially expected to be primary caregivers so they feel pressured not to work long hours (and so advance less). Before they get pregnant employers will suspect impending motherhood and offer fewer opportunities so as to rely less. It's not fair, but it is how it is.
My daughter is four. Her summer camp has all sorts of course choices every week. So I signed her up for "little engineers," "little scientists," etc. (There was also princess and fairy-related options.) Fast forward a couple of weeks and she's the only girl in "tech machines." I had to flip out at my wife, au pair, mother in law, etc. not to let anyone hint to her that there might be anything unusual or undesirable about this.
These are four year olds, they have no preferences. It's purely parents projecting gender roles onto their kids. My kid is super into princesses and fairies, but also comes home every day with a new project and says it was "the best day ever" because she learned about buoyancy or whatever.
Without litigating this specific case in any detail, I just want to argue more generally that of course 4-year-olds (and much younger) have gender-based preferences and that there is loads of research confirming this. It's remarkable that this is considered even remotely controversial.
I don't think this statement can be made so strongly. There is certainly debate within the academic community on this topic. For instance this meta analysis[0] found an extremely large gender difference along the "people/thing" dimension, which could easily explain why more men are in STEM.
Of course, the person is not the population, so it's obviously very possible that while on average women tend to be more people-oriented that your daughter is more thing-oriented and drawn to STEM.
But I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from your one experience that gender roles come entirely from parents. It could just be that 1) your daughter would be interested in STEM regardless of how she were raised and 2) at a population level that's less common (which is not to say rare) in daughters than in sons.
I don't have answers to these questions, but the long term economic burden of children will more often than not fall to a greater degree on the woman should there be any deviation from the social norm of a nuclear family.
There's a lot more to it than just that. If there was only a one-time hit to income, everything you said afterwards would hold true, but that's not the only issue, and you're quite naive for thinking so.
Also it shows poor faith in the community to hide behind a throwaway. I wouldn't down vote you for stating the opinion you just stated, but I will take the argument you just made less seriously because your making it in a cowardly fashion.
I take downvoting someone very seriously and will only do so if I think they are harming the community with their speech.
Regarding my lack of faith in the HN community, I like your attitude, and I also take downvoting seriously. Unfortunately empirically the comment was downvoted, so obviously not everyone agrees with us. It's become politically (both here and elsewhere) unacceptable to have a belief that perhaps being a woman in America isn't so bad. I think it's worthwhile to have this discussion, but I'm not interested in having my head put on a pike for it.
While the wage gap between men and women is close when you adjust for "job differences", I think the strong reaction against that caveat is "adjusting for job differences" equates strongly with "behaving like a man".
Fair point on the community our regard for being politically correct is obnoxious, and I definitely don't think you should have been down voted for expressing an intellectually earnest opinion, c'est la vie.
> According to data for 8.7m employees worldwide gathered by Korn Ferry, a consultancy, women in Britain make just 1% less than men who have the same function and level at the same employer.
At the same level, company and function the pay gap is small. Yet, women are stuck in lower-ranked positions in greater proportion for some reason.
Typical example: Nobody asks a male CEO or politician who is staying home to take care of the kids.
8 hours work day for 5 days a week was fought for and became standard by the work force during a time where men worked and women stayed at home. The balance became that the home got half the work force and the work got the other half.
Today when both adults are expected to work and people decide to have children, that change in society comes to a breaking point. It is problem that a disproportionate amount of women need to sacrifice their career to restore some part of the hours needed to raise children, but is the solution really that men too should sacrifice their career in equal amount, or is the problem on the 8hrs work day that was based on a society that no longer exist?
In my first corporate job I was the most technical employee by far, I did the work of far senior roles because my managers were wise to use a lot of my technical skill to get complex work done all the while having HR tell me I didn't have enough years and experience to have the higher paying job title.
Just because someone has the job title they have and the pay to go with it often has nothing to do with the work they do.
In both directions.
That's not about "the same work being paid the same" in general. Individual businesses can pay more or less for the same tasks, even the same business can pay people differently for the same task. Senior employees might be paid more while junior employees do all the real work, etc. Those things are true.
But this article is not about that, it is about whether on average women and men are paid the same for the same jobs.
It seems like the article is actually precisely about that. If the authors didn't take these factors into account, their findings would be useless.
What if you had been underpaid because your name was Carl?
Perhaps jobs that pay less are less attractive to men who can be better paid at some other job, so these jobs attract more women.
If the above is true, then there is indeed a "pay gap", but it is not the consequence of any systemic sexism.
So a woman in a female-dominated industry may suffer not only from their own negotiation tactics but also the negotiation tactics of most of the workers in the industry
As someone that works in the biotechnology industry, I can see a lot of corollaries. Scientists love being martyrs and there is a strong culture of "don't care about your pay - only care about the work." I could see how women could be more susceptible to this line of reasoning and/or taught to care more about "passion" than their bottom line (compared to men).
Again, lots of spitballing. Probably way off.
It could also be due to men leaving industries that have ongoing lowering of wages.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Are+women+paid+less+than+men...
(Click on first link from economist.com)
It flies in the face of economic common sense that if you could hire an equally skilled women and they would consistently accept 75% the pay as a man, then companies would have taken advantage of that fact. Just like they do with lower paid immigrant workers.
It's systemic issues - which are harder to fix.
For example: women as a whole are less likely to be in higher paying jobs in STEM roles. Or CEOs. Or high level Politicians. Why? Multiple reasons but the overall point is there is institutional and social pressure (mostly unconscious or learned) for women to avoid those fields.
So the average gets lowered.
This is also true of socially acceptable behaviors causing issues: women are usually less comfortable pushing for raises for example. Or negotiating for a higher initial salary after an interview.
So the average gets lower.
Then we get to what is the more contentious issue (at least… in places like HN) - community behavior. It's inarguable that many STEM fields have a very hostile default behavior that women (even if it's not directed at them) find unpleasant enough to avoid. The level of drop outs of women in tech due to this is very high.
This is the point that usually is the "sexism in tech" conversation.
But arguably that's just a symptom of the previous problems.
If someone is able to teach occasional yoga classes, do little PR work, and still travel internationally 3 months out of the year... who is to say that is less desirable than a full-time, higher paying job?
Apologies if I'm interpreting you incorrectly.
I'm saying that if women are doing that and not men then the gender-specific pressure (on both genders) is a part of that.
That's could explain why even decades of public policy in countries like Sweden didn't even come close to a situation of near 50% STEM workers.
Less than 20% of students who take the AP Computer Science test are female. [1]
So whatever makes women uninterested in programming happens before college.
Men are much more thing-oriented than women, who are more people-oriented. The size of the effect is "very large", larger than any other difference in personality [2]. Programming is obviously a thing-oriented activity.
Anecdotally, this split seems to happen at a young age - little boys play with cars, little girls play house, etc.
Anecdotally, kids are far more sexist than any adult I know. Try being a 5 year old boy who likes to play with dolls.
(EDIT: maybe not 5 year old. I don't have kids of my own, I forget exactly when kids start thinking the other sex is gross, maybe a bit older)
I don't know how to even begin to fix this, as far as I know children learn most of their culture from each other and older peers, not from their parents or teachers [3].
I'm willing to bet that most of the problem comes way upstream of the workplace. The tech industry can do as much hand-wringing as they want over sexism in the workplace, it's not gonna fix the fact that adolescent girls are choosing to not take the AP Comp Sci test.
[1] https://thinkprogress.org/not-a-single-female-student-took-t...
The culture problem in tech is not the cause, it’s just the end symptom of many things - including what you’re taking about.
> The level of drop outs of women in tech due to this is very high.
But if that were true I'd expect women would be underrepresented in tech compared to AP Comp Sci. As it is they are slightly over-represented.
If you have clearer evidence on that point I'd like to see it. I've heard convincing anecdotes of women dropping out because of sexism but I find it hard to reconcile with the data.
I get what you're trying to show but the comparison doesn't follow.
I'm not disagreeing, but "systems" is the reason I've often heard in this discussion without ANY real hard data expanding on what these systems precisely are and how they aren't a reflection merely of, let's say, biology. All I see generally when referring to "systems" are anecdotes and high-level conclusions based purely on personal experiences. None of which helps further the discussion. If you can find these systems, prove them, I'll be right there with ya tearing them down.
It’s like asking someone to “prove philosophy”. It’s not quite the right question.
This entire thread illustrates the confusion – and that there is absolutely no consensus that even an issue exists in the first place.
I don't think that, by itself, lets industry off the hook completely. We still have to make a culture that isn't downright repulsive to half of the population.
I want to retire someday, and I also want my kids to be free of student loan debt. So I guess all it takes to defeat sexism once and for all is massive financial stress upon the middle class. Way to go, everybody!
Is it wise to assign a heavy weighting to an unmeasurable, unverifiable, ethereal sense of discouragement?
What is measurable are character traits that tend to exhibit themselves more strongly in one sex over the other (of course, this varies from individual to individual), and this could help to explain why men and women tend to choose different career paths.
If you believe that women, as a whole, tend to possess the qualities of caring, empathy, and compassion more than men (the cause of which could be biological), it stands to reason that careers which allow them to actualise these qualities would be more attractive, at the expense of monetary gain.
The result of this is, on average, more women occupy a subset of jobs that are difficult, worthwhile, but ultimately of lower economic value in our version of capitalism.
While this does and could not account for the entire issue, it offers one plausible reason that's worthy of some merit.
It would be if it was either of those things. It's really not. The accuracy of the measurements you can debate but it's certainly verifiable.
But we don't hear as many complains there. My guess? Those jobs are known to be hard. STEM seem like a breeze from outside (that's just office work) but when you work there you realize it may not be physicaly hard but the stress is there. So people who value a better work-life balance decide to get out. People who have the option to decide to not work will do it.
The flip-side of the gender role is the number of articles lately shaming young males who decide to work part-time and enjoy life instead of working for a family. Also, the number of high achieving women who complain about the lack of available good men. Marrying down? That's for the males.
This isn't news to me - or anyone with any interest in this area.
Lets say there are differences in how much certain demographics of people get paid over another. Lets take short vs tall people or black vs white or with blood groups positive vs negative. Lets say that there is a difference in average pay for people with positive blood groups vs negative blood groups. So what? It could be completely arbitrary or there could be an underlying cause that makes employers pay one type of blood group over another. Either way, why should an employer pay any more than what they think the position is worth as long as someone is willing to voluntarily work for that amount of money? What's in it for any employer to pay more than the employee negotiated to work for?
This notion that businesses exist solely for a short-term profit for their shareholders is patently destructive.
Given the stories we regularly hear from female employees in the tech industry (of being harassed and/or left out of the "inner circle"), it seems unreasonable to conclude that the effects we see might be "completely arbitrary" as opposed to caused by those attitudes (in addition to other causes that have been pointed out, such as difference in priorities, of course).
Depends.
>If we once believed (and no doubt some still do) that black people are worth less than white people, and so black people were effectively forced to accept less (though nobody was holding a gun to their heads), was that an acceptable state of affairs?
Yes. Westerners didn't arbitrarily decide that blacks were worth less to them, it was because they were. Blacks could not contribute anything to the westerners other than slave labour... and they were too ignorant of the western power structure to organize themselves to fight for equal worth from the states they were in. When they figured it out however, they did get the same worth from the states they were in.
>What was in it for any of the (non-black) people to change anything about it?
Not sure about all non-blacks but the Republican Party of the US which was founded by anti-slavery activists who believed in independence and freedom for all people. They already had examples of free blacks who were just as capable of learning and contributing to the society and letting some people own some of them and treat them as animals wasn't acceptable to them and a lot of others. So, they used it for political leverage and were very successful.
>Given the stories we regularly hear from female employees in the tech industry (of being harassed and/or left out of the "inner circle")
Nobody is stopping women from having their own niche occupation where they make their own inner circles... oh wait there are those occupations, they are called nursing and teaching. Men and women in general have different life goals and different preferences in their careers. Also, "harassment" happens to men too (specially when everything is harassment)... men just deal with it differently i.e. by not complaining about it to others and doing something about it themselves.
I know I have my own anecdotes about this, but I'd like to see some hard data.
(The `flag` button above to mod this comment into oblivion.)
If Software Engineer II makes less than Software Engineer III, and women of equivalent skill and experience to men have a significantly higher chance of being Software Engineer II than III, then the wage gap exists for "the same work".
This is particularly difficult to measure, but still possible with proper diligence, because rank throughout a career is a compounding advantage.
P.S. disable javascript to get past the paywall
Unfortunately, there's no evidence whatsoever that this is the case.
At a quick glance, your links don't speak to that aspect at all. And that's sort of the most important thing.
It's time that we start considering the family as a unit again.
A good example is teaching. Teaching is an incredibly valuable job. It's also dominated by women. It also happens to be way, way underpaid.
It embarrasses me to see this on HN.
What? Can you explain how that is possible? As far as I know, people value things according to what value they obtain from them. There is no way for that to be 'sexist'. People are paid according to the value they produce. To call that sexist is just completely inconsistent with any reasonable conception of economics to my understanding.
EDIT: In your edit you added the example of teaching. And that is, fairish. I'd grant you that teachers are underpaid, but that isn't sexism, it's a consequence of the structure of our education system. They're not underpaid because they're women, they're underpaid because they're being paid by a bureaucracy.
Kinda works both ways as an argument. If they were so concerned about pay, they can try and negotiate for more. Men are taught/encouraged to do this more from a young age. If you want to be paid more, you gotta haggle, you can't just accept the price on the sticker.
Women are not pressured to be breadwinners, so they're more likely to pick careers that sound fulfilling and satisfying, but are less lucrative.
Media likes to focus on the pay gap, but has anyone investigated the fulfillment and satisfaction gap? I wouldn't be surprised if overall men are less fulfilled and satisfied by their jobs.
We teach men that their value is in their accomplishments, which is a) more empowering; b) more under their control; and c) more conducive to independence and pursuit of self-realization (in career or in other aspects of life), positions of power, and yes, powerful and high-paid careers.
For example, let say we take two groups of men in the age of 30. Those in group A have traveled and accomplished a bunch of personal goals, but are at this point jobbing at minimum wage jobs. Those in group B stayed put and studied and work hard to position themselves at high earning jobs. Which group is rewarded highest by society? My bet if they did such study would be group B with a very clear margin.
Men are being taught that their primary value as human is to chase wealth. This causes men take more risk, die at a earlier age, and have a smaller social network to take care of them at old age. Regardless of gender, neither men or women live a life of roses, and being valued for physical attractiveness rather than wealth has benefits and drawbacks.
If I have a high income, I have many options to swap that for fulfillment and satisfaction. I can buy stuff, I can go on interesting vacations, I can have expensive hobbies, I can donate to charities, and I can partake in a large number of experiences that are only available to those who can afford it. And finally, I can give it all up and pursue a life of simpler pleasures. Those are all options I have.
If I have a low income, I might still feel satisfied and fulfilled, but that could change. What options do I then have?
p.s.: my niche loves my old lego's more than the girlish ones.
feel free to source that in a way that can be proven. The assertion is just pseudo intellectual excuse making. Society is NOT telling women to NOT be sanitation workers. Society is not telling women not to work on offshore oil rigs. Society is not telling women not to be surgeons but to in fact be veterinarians. Society and "gender role" excuses don't hold up to reality. Time to accept that the women you know, or imagine you know make their choices, largely based on their own interests.
You're welcome to try to convince women to become sanitation workers rather than paralegal interns in climate controlled offices. Good luck on that.
If a man says they are going to work on an offshore oil rig they are much less likely to get societal push back than a woman because it is seen as a normal thing for a man to do but not a woman.
If a woman is an elementary school teacher it is considered completely normal, whereas men are often looked down upon for doing so. The same happens with male nurses.
How can you read all the stories about sexual harassment in our industry and not think women are being discouraged from pursuing careers in tech?
The idea that there aren't multiple forces, often brutal ones, nudging men and women into particular fields is just preposterous.
I mean if you want to talk about cultural influence there's way more news articles celebrating women doing various things, celebrating women entrepreneurs, women soldiers, women and minority events and special recognition or conferences.
Read all the stories about sexual harassment? Anecdotally I've seen just as much sexual language coming from women in IT as men in terms of workers. Project mgrs, network admins, probably a few more. And those instances were miniscule and didn't make up anywhere near a day to day problem for people.
I have seen instances where a guy who was being a dick treated women poorly. He got a talking to and cut that out. I've seen women take their day out on men and women and never got any kind of talking to. It's really funny you're pointing to some sort of dysfunction and not demonstrating or sourcing anything but "all those stories"
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701
If you want to resolve this problem you need to either ask women to lower the bar and not seek men with resources or ask men to raise the bar and demand that women not only be youthful/fertile, but also have resources. Good luck.
A lot of the problem with gender roles is many feminists have internalized male actions as the norm and female actions as inferior...so they see women as underpaid over as having the flexibility to raise a family
That's not true. Very easy counterexample: negotiation. Women are generally less inclined to negotiate then men, causing them to earn lower salaries. Does that mean that people value jobs performed by men who negotiate more than jobs performed by women who don't? Of course not - it has nothing to do with the value-add at all.
Women generally don't handle negotiating the same as men. But negotiation skills aren't relevant to most jobs. So if that's a factor in how people get paid, it's _systematically_ sexist.
Because sexism or no, I think it's a tremendous problem when people get ahead for completely tangential reasons to their job performance and skills.
Unless your point is that the sexism is at a larger cultural level that fosters the average woman to be less effective at salary negotiations. In that case I completely agree.
If you want to argue that it's sexist that we socialize women to negotiate less, i'm all for that, though.
If that's the road you feel comfortable walking down, I think it's fine to compromise at that point. Regardless of how it happened, the result - women not negotiating - is still the same.
That means there's likely some kind of societal pressure keeping them from negotiating as much. There have been plenty of studies that show assertive women are seen as just being bitchy while assertive men are seen as strong leaders.
That societal difference is sexism. Individuals don't have to be consciously sexist for implicit bias to affect women.
That would mean basically a woman accepted 99K where a man accepted 100K. At that scale negotiating and gap is almost non-existent.
And you don't generally negotiate position and or rank. You apply for or get recommended for a job and get it or not, negotiating is usually about the dollars and cents after being in strong consideration for a position or after being given an initial offer for a position.
If women /are/ discriminated against you might even argue, based on this data, they are better at negotiating than men and that could make up for them being so close in pay for same rank / same role jobs. The point is the data doesn't support it.
This blanket statement seems sexist. Some are inclined and some are not.
Besides, as soon as one leaves the world of small business, the corporations stick to salary bands attached to specific titles. The variations within the bands are usually driven by longevity with the company as well as performance reviews. It makes things easier in HR department, and creates a paper trail on compensation decisions in case someone decides to get litigious later.
> Some are inclined and some are not.
That is what "generally" implies, yes.
There is an argument that women are generally less inclined to negotiate due to the effects of sexism.
"Miller and Douglas discovered that women who had experience with successful negotiation were superior negotiators to men, even when they rated themselves as only average negotiators."
In the same vein, people who have never studied French are generally less inclined to join a conversation in French.
Which is a very specific use case of a specific environment with mainly unknown opponents (as opposed to work relationships, where you typically know the boss), tight deadlines (need a car immediately) and little wiggle room (shopping around car dealerships is time-consuming, sending resumes to competitors to test the waters is less so).
You need only listen to the experiences of women founders in Silicon Valley to realize your comment really doesn't match up with what really happens. Women, especially in the tech sector, are treated like personal sex objects of some VCs.
There is not a single situation you listed above that cannot be attributed to similarity bias or cultural bias against, both completely unintentional.
I challenge you to question if either of these assumptions hold in all cases or just in an idealized world where everyone is a "rational consumer."
> I'd grant you that teachers are underpaid, but that isn't sexism
Sure; however a statement like "teaching is work befitting a woman" would be sexism.
Then, one day, society changes. "You can work, but you can only be a nurse, teacher, or secretary".
You don't think there'd be a supply glut driving down wages in those areas? Suppressing them over a long period as women gradually enter the labor force there?
And by the same token, that society that says you can't be an engineer or a CEO because you are a woman - that severely punishes those women who do seek those jobs - you don't think women would respond to that? That even if they could produce more economic value, the societal pressure can override the capitalist tendencies of organizations and individuals to maximize wealth?
This causes the persistent inequity in career pay that was caused in part by the original influx of women into the field when explicit sexism was rampant.
And in all cases, somebody has to be the first one; somebody has to show a path, often against institutionalized sexism. Once the door is open (especially when there are few doors) I can see careers tipping fast.
Of course computer science used to have a lot of women; especially when they were being used as human calculators(!), so I don't know what exactly changed that made it a boys' club.
Regardless of the cause, it has the perception, which makes it self perpetuating in some sense - women see articles about how tough it is to be a woman in tech, and are turned off by it, even if the higher pay is there and it's all just rumors.
I suppose though there is something of a reverse impact in some fields (in terms of labor force participation) - like nursing, which is so female dominated, there's actually negative pressure for men who try to enter it . But it also just isn't held up as high as medicine at the MD level.
But do they face strong institutional barriers and negative climates in some of the best paying professions (like engineering)? Yes.
The scale of it isn't like it was 50+ years ago, but let's not pretend like it's "All Better Now"
Now, I fully admit, there is a degree to which women at a young age are socialized into those sorts of professions. And I am absolutely willing to call that sexism, and totally support every effort being made to change that.
Supply and demand and value are central to the equation, but large variability in compensation among near identical profiles in the US and Canadian software sectors is an indicator that the individual isn't good at knowing their value.
That's a theory. The relevant question is, what evidence exists to support or refute that theory?
Not all jobs have direct "money in, money out" relations that you can use to judge value. This opens the door for all sorts of cultural bias that affects how people decide how much a particular job is "worth".
I know job prospects aren't as hot for lawyers as they once were[1], but it's still one of very few professions that I'd expect to reliably make someone's parents' eyebrows go up and an "oh!" issue from their mouth on hearing their kid's dating one, ya know? So the prestige is still there, unless I've missed something. And doctors are doctors, so certainly in that category, too. I really doubt "software developer" automatically gains one anywhere near as much social capital, in general company and without further favorable details/context.
[1] as you correctly wrote, "Not all jobs have direct 'money in, money out' relations that you can use to judge value."
Yes. But I think you miss one point. People are not rational beings (even trained ones are not), and "value they obtained" is a result of some psychological process which is not strictly rational. And if people estimate value obtained from employee by sex of that employee, it would be not surprising at all.
> To call that sexist is just completely inconsistent with any reasonable conception of economics to my understanding.
Conception of economics is a theory. Reality is something different, theory is just simplified description of reality. Theory is much more formal, more simple and more understandable. Theory exists only in human mind as some entity of informational nature, while reality... well, reality is just a reality. Theory offers us laws that works in most cases. Or more precise, that laws works while axioms postulated by theory are fulfilled. But reality just works, it does not follow our laws and rules, it just works somehow.
No absolute truth exists. Every one axiom sometimes is not true. In a case when axioms are not true, theory becomes unreliable. If you think to rely on laws of some theory, then first you should check whether all relevant axioms are fullfilled in your case.
People use word "economics" and mean either theory or reality depending on context. This leads to confusion and inability to see the difference. Train youself to separate theory and reality on every occasion, try every time to use different words for theory and reality and you'll become immune to such mistakes.
As I undestand such a theory as economics, "people value things according to what value they obtain from them" itself is axiom. Here you see some case where axiom is false: its just a matter of fact. So reality and theory are different here substantially. You should choose some other theory to deal with such situation.
I agree in part. I agree wholeheartedly that the rational actor model is (at best) incomplete. We are not rational beings making perfect value judgments moment to moment. I further admit it is possible that, in individual interactions, the gender of the employee/agent we are interacting with may be a factor in price considerations.
However, ultimately prices are set by supply and demand. What the OP is positing, is that demand is suppressed by sexism. What would this mean? Some female-dominated professions are: Nursing, teaching, and social work [1]. Now think about what would have to be true in order for the OP's point to be correct. People would have to systematically demand less nursing, teaching, and social work in order to achieve the result they were implying. Do you think that is plausible?
When thinking about intra-profession discrimination, I would have no problem attributing that to sexism. That is, if you said to me that female teachers are systematically paid less than their male counterparts, i'd be all for labelling that sexism. But that's not what's being posited here. What's being posited is that because certain professions are dominated by women, people consume them less. People want less of them. But what is a profession's role in the world if not to generate its own demand? If people aren't demanding your services, you find a new profession.
In other words, if demand for the services women choose to provide is so elastic that it can be depressed by sexism, then maybe they ought to find better services to provide. Services that are important enough that the demand for them is non-negotiable, and can never be suppressed by sexist preferences.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/pink-collar-jobs-dominated-by...
Just about any teacher that survives to an old age will beat me earnings wise with their pension, which they don't have to fund. I have to fund my own 401K or IRA, as well as pay into the teacher's pension fund with my property taxes.
Whereas the socio-economic dynamic of women being driven by various forces, at play throughout their lives, into lower paying jobs (in which men are also paid less), which is what you seem to be writing about, is something other than "pay gap".
Also, I was under the impression the money in being a generic "doctor" was running your own practice.
During the school year, she probably does average more than 40 hours per week, but the excess is flexible and often done at her convenience and at home. That's quite a bit better than a 3AM emergency call to the operating room. And it's never 20 hours of excess.
She also got a signing bonus and all her undergraduate tuition debt paid off as part of the job offer. And she really does get a fully-funded pension.
We need to quit with this idea that all doctors are either emergency physicians or emergency surgeons. Most doctors are not that.
And does anyone really believe that if teachers worked just a few more hours per week, they'd all be driving maseratis?
I honestly don't know what your second sentence is referencing. I was simply stating that, contrary to some claims here, many high school teachers absolutely get the entire summer off and don't work much more than 40 hours per week during the school year.
I tell you what else the infographic leaves out: all the free shit doctors get. Doctors get free shit from all over the place, and sure, they don't get that long summer break that teachers get, but they do get to jet internationally to conferences/drinking sessions.
Not to mention that having twice the lifetime earnings means much more than having twice the disposable income. A carton of milk and a box of cereal cost the same for a doctor and a teacher, and nourish them just the same as well. Basically, that infographic is ridiculously slanted.
As for the second sentence, a maserati is a fancy car, and I was using it as an allegory for the difference in lifestyles between doctors and teachers. That difference is more than you could make up working a few extra hours per week on a teacher's wage.
[1] http://work.chron.com/thoracic-surgery-salary-3692.html
Edit: even more nonsense: the infographic claims 20,000 hours worked in residency, with only $150k payment for same. There are only 8760 hours in a standard year. Given that residents are paid around $50k (it actually rises throughout the residency, but hey), that means that the infographic has granted only three years for residency. There are only 26280 hours in 3 years (+24 if you're lucky enough for a leap year). That means that they're claiming that residents work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, no breaks, no days off.
That's working from, say, 4am to 10pm, for three years solid, and the rest of the resident's life has to fit in the remaining 6 hours per day - sleeping, eating, washing, commuting.
Also, a GP, whose salary is bringing down that $202k average (it's not specifically for thoracic surgeons), only has to do a 1-year residency. You can't fit 20k hours into a 9k year. And there are tons of GPs out there.
This is false in the US from what I can tell. I have several friends who are GPs and every one had to do a 3 year residency.
For the rest of your post, I think you're arguing less against anything that I said or wrote and more against an imaginary opponent that you've probably met in various forms online in the past and are projecting onto me.
Again, all I wanted to emphasize was that there are many teachers who absolutely get the entire summer off and who do not work much more than 40 hours a week during the school year, if any extra at all. Please consult the original comment I was actually replying to. If you don't contest this, then you probably don't actually disagree with me. I agree with most of your analysis of the infographic, but I never championed the infographic to begin with.
For clarity, here's what I was actually responding to and debunking:
> that only makes sense if you assume teachers barely work more than the school day itself, which seems implausible. It also assumes that teachers work 38 weeks per year. That would mean a 3.5-month summer break, which doesn't really match with reality.
Worth clarifying all of this as much as possible to work towards putting everyone on the same understanding of the situation.
I'm embarrassed because this kind of stuff can and will be used to continue the narrative of "women make just as much as men" which isn't true.
Teaching is done/funded by the society in most cases and paid with tax dollars. Some jobs being "underpaid" or paid too much are problems that come from the lack of real capitalism where everybody would be paid their actual market value and we could remove the whole word "underpaid" from the dictionary.
It embarrasses me to see someone not realizing this.
What? So you became a (I assume) programmer due to yourself alone? You didn't have any help learning how to use a computer from your parents, you didn't have any encouragement of your peers to continue, you weren't influenced at all by society and how it favors certain behaviors, no good teachers helped you learn the requisite math or science or critical thinking? It was all entirely a decision made in a vacuum?
Your viewpoint is far too reductionistic.
I became a software developer because I though computers were interesting. My friends called me a geek. My father tried to stop me because he wanted me to work in a construction industry LIKE THE REAL MEN DO. My mother wanted me to become a lawyer because it is a respectful profession unlike being a nerd. For about 10 years my parents continuously tried to prevent me from using computers and told me to "go outside and play" etc.
So did I become a construction worker or a lawyer? Nope. Did I become a software engineer? Yes. How? Individual decision. I make my my own decision in life. Sometimes definitely influenced by others, but so what? If I get influenced by them it's my responsibility to handle it in the proper way and look for other opinions too. People pretend to be a weak and try to shift responsibility to other people/society deserve no pity.
The value of your teachers (or lack of value) will only become apparent over time - a long time. The value of your doctor may become absolute to you, several times over your life. God forbid that you or yours fall sick, but should your doctor be able to demand all of your worldly goods to heal you? What about farmers - should they gang together and refuse to supply food until starvation set in would that allow them to demand all of the cities wealth? If no then what is needed - is it a rule of law that enforces particular norms of behaviour?
Free uninterrupted competition will destroy people/companies overpricing their services or force them to compete as well => lower their prices. Basically, offering poor/expensive service in capitalist system will naturally invite competition until the optimal price/value point has been reached.
But like I said, that works in pure free market capitalism, which no politician would ever want to try because it would take power from them and give it to the people and markets.
I am pretty sure that teaching and medicine are the kind of good that would break these rules - political implementation, people and markets or no.
If all the farmers form a cartel, where does this mythical competitor come from? Farmland is a limited resource. And food doesn't just magically appear the day you start a new farm.
If you can't prove me men teachers are being paid more, your argument is invalid. Women choose very different careers and that's fine, but the choice is there.
Teaching as a profession is underpaid, and I don't think that teaching being dominated by women is a coincidence.
http://www.careerprofiles.info/middle-school-teacher-salarie...
What about this is embarrassing? Do you fee that women don't deserve the same high paying jobs as men?
It seems you are demonizing an article for saying the exact same thing that you are...
?? How about they choose different jobs?
Or, perhaps unctuous grandstanding should supplant market forces.
For example, is the fact that men tend to negotiate more a social construct, or is it based in biology?
Should society tax men for their behavior and redistribute the wealth to women?
I'm not arguing for any side by the way. Not sure what to think of this myself.
"These numbers do not show that the labour market is free of sex discrimination. However, they do suggest that the main problem today is not unequal pay for equal work, but whatever it is that leads women to be in lower-ranking jobs at lower-paying organisations."
My essential argument is that sexism creeps in when you say that women select lower-ranking jobs by default. I don't think that's actually true. I think it's more that society views the jobs women work as lower-ranking.
Consider nursing which is relatively high paying precisely because of the education requirements, specialization, and difficulty of the work. Wages are even rising now because of the shortage. Market forces explain the salary distributions much easier than sexism collectively driving down prices against market forces.
But even in nursing we see men being promoted faster than women.
When we ask why there are so few women tech leaders, or women in tech, we're told it's a pipeline problem: not enough women in STEM education.
But that's not the case for nursing. So why do men get promoted over women?
Here are some numbers from England. I've picked midwifery and ambulance staff, because there's some contrast there.
Midwives
Payband Men Women Total Ratio men:women
Band 5 11 2301 2312 0.00:1.00
Band 6 57 18294 18351 0.00:1.00
Band 7 36 4663 4699 0.01:0.99
Band 8a 2 183 185 0.01:0.99
Band 8b 1 31 32 0.03:0.97
Band 8c 2 15 17 0.12:0.88
Ambulance staff
Payband men women total ratio men:women
Band 4 2222 1479 3701 0.60:0.40
Band 5 5986 4072 10058 0.60:0.40
Band 6 3553 1889 5442 0.65:0.35
Band 7 610 202 812 0.75:0.25
Band 8a 85 25 110 0.77:0.23
Band 8b 49 10 59 0.83:0.17
Band 8c 14 1 15 0.93:0.07
Band 8d 14 1 15 0.93:0.07
Hard to say as I know very little about these fields. Presumably people in these fields are promoted because they show leadership or managerial qualities of some sort. Is there a reason to expect leadership or managerial qualities, or the interest in positions with those responsibilities to be unequally distributed among the sexes? Maybe. The differences in assertiveness is one potential explanation. Also the differences in status-seeking behavior. I'm not saying these differences explain it, but they're potential causes that can't be ruled out from the data alone.
If the pay gap almost disappears when accounting for job differences, then the problem can't be solved at the workplace. It's too late at that point.
Further study might reveal that women choose less profitable majors at University, for example. If that were the case, the problem won't be solved at University either, it would be too late at that point.
Further study could look at how women are socialized at high-school, middle-school and so on, until we find the cause. Complaining about people who study that stuff because you think they are insufficiently committed to the cause is counter-productive.
In our society men are mostly valued for their profession and how much they make. Women generally aren't. So of course men try to get into higher paying and higher status careers. They spend more effort to move up the ladder. Women don't have that same pressure. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, for them.
Almost no job is paid the full value it produces. There's always a split between the buyer of the job (whoever is paying the wage) and the seller of the job (who is receiving the wage). If the job-buyer didn't get any value, why would they buy it?
The question is: How is the split determined? Basically it's about negotiating leverage. Someone who is nearly irreplaceable (like Koby Bryant or Paul Buchheit) has a lot of leverage and can demand a lot. Someone who can be replaced easily has little leverage and gets a lower wage.
The problem with teaching isn't that it's female dominated. It's that too many people want to be teachers, because they enjoy teaching. Also because teaching doesn't measure the output of workers it's harder for the great ones to demand higher wages; they just get the average, like the bad teachers.
A teacher's job security and pension plan aren't available in the private sector at all. It's a complete myth that they are underpaid, focusing on salary alone and not considering the value of the whole package.
Teachers are underpaid? According to whom? Mid-career teachers make roughly the median household income in the U.S. (and with summers off).
I'm on paternity leave in California right now and if it wasn't for my wife's employer offering benefits far above those the government offers, we wouldn't be able to afford it.
Two things I've observed so far are that with my wife breastfeeding, she keeps her days full, but I'm bored out of my mind. It's not like the baby does anything other than eat and sleep. The other is that new mothers are typically accompanied by their own mothers - so my wife has her family around, which is great for her - but it's not the same as having my own family around.
She loves the outcome; I love the outcome; the kids love the outcome. It was about as close to a no-brainer decision as I've seen on an important topic.
The ladies at work here seem to be out for 1-3 months after giving birth, in most cases.
Parenthood can be a vacation or hard work depending on whether you are a good or bad parent. Just being a parent does not mean that it is difficult work. And if it is hard work, it can be easily argued that being a parent is more meaningful work than 99% of corporate jobs.
But the point is that those things you have to make adjustments for are the problem.
Theoretically, what the comment is saying is that women get paid less because they take more leave, not because they are women. Again, theoretically, if men took leave to the same extent, their salaries would also decrease to the same extent. That's the point of controlling for other variables, so that you can tease apart the individual effects they have before they're all muddled together.
Some perhaps but not most, and certainly not all.
So what if its not a caricature harmony like on stock photo? So what if they have completely diffrent plans? Its life, its not machines, and thats why it will outlive them.
Touch your navel- there is a blockchain, going a way back.