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Comment by ciex | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see the first diagram with circles coloured according to average wage of the respective occupation. I would expect to see more high-income male occupations and vice versa – a correlation that explains most of the gender pay gap.

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Your statement reflects a misunderstanding of how the gender pay gap is analyzed. The pay gap is a gap between genders performing the same occupation.

Therefore, job position/title is not a confounding factor. Some confounding factors (which are well known and usually accounted for) are length of time at the job, education level and prior experience.

There is still a pay gap of ~5c/dollar adjusted. Non adjusted is 20c/dollar. There is no excuse for the adjusted discrepancy and the unadjusted discrepancy will require the crumbling of boys clubs.

While there's a small discrepancy, the "77 cents on the dollar" thing has been spread so much that I think it's important to put into context the real differences. I agree with your statement, but it's also true to say "the gender wage gap [as presented in media/by politicians] is a myth." To me, both sides seem at least slightly deceptive. Saying it's a myth outright makes people forget that there's a real issue, but saying that it exists outright confirms the false notion of a 23% gap for the same work. It's obviously extremely unfair that a man and a woman doing the same exact job in the same exact way are getting different pay. One thing that I started wondering about while reading your comment (as a confounding variable, I guess) is proportions of men/women in every company. Clearly if women were much cheaper to employ, only women would be working many jobs. What I wonder about is whether the discrimination occurs because employers with more women pay less on average. As an example, Google might employ more women than Facebook (their culture may be seen as more friendly to women, for example, or their hiring practices may differ). But at the same time, it's entirely possible that Facebook pays higher on average regardless of gender. So in this situation, women are choosing (or being chosen for) more lower paying jobs in the same industry, and thus being discriminated against indirectly in terms of pay. Clearly this too is an issue, but it changes the ways that this issue can be addressed.

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