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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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"
The idea that there aren't multiple forces, often brutal ones, nudging men and women into particular fields is just preposterous.
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...
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."
> 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.
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.
That's a theory. The relevant question is, what evidence exists to support or refute that theory?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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.
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".
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?
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.
Also, I was under the impression the money in being a generic "doctor" was running your own practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Teachers are underpaid? According to whom? Mid-career teachers make roughly the median household income in the U.S. (and with summers off).
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.