Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]
scholar.harvard.edu
scholar.harvard.edu
The decline of two parent households and rise of single motherhood strikes again.
What's wrong with that? I think that's a fine way to plan one's life. It's over simplifying some things. Not all high school educations are equally valuable, for one thing, which then also relates to point 3.
The mother's side of my Cane River creole ex-girlfriend's family had values like this. I knew some very graceful people of African American descent who also had values like that. In my experience, it's such values, however they come about, which are the causal origin.
I find your apparent preconceived notions on who gets to hold which ideas disturbing. Ideas are ideas, not flags or arm-bands.
The study addressed this. There are sexist gender roles at play even among single parents, potentially. (To wit, you didn’t lament the rise of “single fatherhood.”)
From the study,
> These results suggest that single men are able to take care of their dependents by working more overtime, possibly to pay for child support or to finance other forms of child care. Single women, on the other hand, appear to be making the decision to do the caretaking themselves rather than to caretake through additional earnings. It is, of course, possible that for women this situation is not as much a personal preference as it is a constraint.
How can we determine those aren't preferential choices?
(To wit, you didn’t lament the rise of “single fatherhood.”)
There is an apparent bias against men getting custody of the children. There also isn't a lamentation about men's under-representation in certain medical fields in certain countries.
It is, of course, possible that for women this situation is not as much a personal preference as it is a constraint.
Why is it a constraint? How are they being coerced? Are you implying that some mothers would rather spend more time working, make more money, and have less time with their children, but they are being compelled to do otherwise? There are some wealthy mothers who do this by hiring caretakers.
Where did I cite that as a "solution?" You are revealing your biases and projections quite clearly. Rather, it's actually support for your position, with regards to the possible range of natural behaviors observed in our society. You asserted that women would choose to work more, then spend more on child care, but they are somehow less free to make that choice. How is that so?
Isn't that mostly caused by a sexist judiciary. I know that as a man in America in the event of a divorce it is very unlikely that I would get majority custody of my children. From what I've seen it takes a lot for a woman to lose custody if she wants it.
It appears that the majority of custody decisions are made by the parents themselves, without recourse to the court, or even to an external mediator. If the judiciary is causing a disparity in custody outcomes, it must be indirectly.
The men know that if it does go to trial, it will cost a lot of money and they will probably still lose the kids. There's no point in playing a rigged game.
If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity necessarily exists.
In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.
Certainly, there were some people who took advantage of those arbitrage opportunities to some extent. But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time.
Today, if there is a pay gap it would be exploitable, no? Salaries are typically the by far the most expensive cost for most tech startups. Discrimination against women is illegal and socially shunned today. So what's stopping entrepreneurs from arbitraging this opportunity?
I think Jesse Lee Peterson might have something to say with regards to that. I suspect that there were perceptive people who took advantage of societal conditions and hired industrious people for less money.
But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time.
According to Thomas Sowell, with some kinds of work, some American slaves were paid additional bonuses for certain kinds of work requiring care and attention to detail. Otherwise, the proper level of motivation couldn't be maintained even through torture. Biases certainly can distort market forces, but the market forces will also bend society. Southern bus and train lines were opposing Jim Crow laws quite early on because they didn't want to spend money on extra vehicles/train cars.
You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price, all this while still offering more money than their supposed current employer who is underpaying them.
If all of this were true the price would shift over time on these margins, and this "gap" would disappear.
Why is it that we must constantly slice up society on demographic lines, point out a statistical in-congruency with some ideal (non-extant) world, and then claim some third party is culpable for causing this?
If women were malevolently directed away from a field by educators, families, or traditions, why is it now an employer's responsibility to calculate said deficit in interest for a field and allocate resources sub-optimally in one direction or another for the sake of aligning statistics on some dubious spreadsheet?
Don't tell women no, encourage them in what they want to do in life, and if in the end they don't choose the path that aligns with your macroeconomic utopia... get over it.
You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price
In reality, the likely outcome is that the 7 women would end up working at Google, who can and will gladly way out-compete you on salaries, and you end up hiring 7 quirky men, then firing a few of them.
Because pool 1 believes that gender is not a significant factor, they know that wage discrimination on the basis of that factor would be illegal and open them up to lawsuits. Pool 2 does think gender is significant, maybe indirectly laundered through other things like personality assessments, and they therefore think they can and should act on that information.
Critically it doesn’t matter if the sexist pool is openly sexist or using factors more strongly correlated with sex than job performance (like whether or not the employee looks the mental model of the part). The result is the same, they believe they are justified in paying women less. The arbitrage opportunity would never occur to them because they don’t think the labour is worth more.
But if you see the arbitrage opportunity, that puts you in Pool 1 by definition. And so those who are aware of the opportunity know that it would be illegal since the gender isn’t relevant to their position.
So you don't need to engage in wage discrimination to hire women, since that is evaluated within a company, not in relation to a sector has a whole. That is, if McDonald's pays all their employees $10 an hour and they are mostly women, and Burger King pays all their employees $15 an hour for approximately the same work and they are mostly men, I don't think there is any (legal) claim for discrimination?
If they set wages at $10/hr hoping to capture all the women turned away, they will also fail to capture male employees worth $15/hr. That puts them in the same pool as Burger King. There isn’t an arbitrage opportunity based on gender here.
Assuming that Mcdonald’s and Burger King are the only employers, this also doesn’t get rid of the pricing gap. Women are paid less on average because they are turned away from the higher paying Burger King disproportionately. Burger King thinks what they are doing is not discrimination. Mcdonald’s must also think what they are doing is not discrimination, or they have a vast conspiracy to violate the law. They are both Group 2 companies.
It was group 1 one or a variant thereof that I meant to discuss: this group presumably values women equally to men [1], hence wants to exploit the wage gap as the GP suggested by hiring mostly women and hence getting ~30% more for their hiring dollars.
You proposed that this group would be knowingly paying women less, therefore acting both unethically (depending on your ethical view of the matter, anyway) and opening themselves up to legal liability.
I'm saying that this group can just offer positions close to the lower going rate for women: this would presumably result in them hiring mostly women (and some men due to variance, etc). As long as all hiring and wage decisions are gender-blind however, they would not be discriminating - they are only "passively" taking advantage of the gap via their range of salary offers.
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[1] I.e., to them the wage gap is not logical hence women are being underpaid.
Not just that. That company would also need to offer more workplace flexibility, if we are to believe the study.
> I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better-quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women.
But in order to arbitrage this, you have to be willing to pay women and men differently. It's not impossible to see a market where everyone internally values work equally, but believes the market does not, and thus all lower their offers made to women.
> But in order to arbitrage this, you have to be willing to pay women and men differently.
A very simple way to arbitrage it without discriminating is to set your wages somewhere between what others pay men and women. Women will flock to you, as you pay better than elsewhere, while men will tend to leave to the discriminating jobs. You pay everyone the same, but the result is your cost in wages is lower than your competitors'.
Also, the discriminating employer is presumably not discriminating openly, or they will be sued. So there is limited information on your part to find the right pricing for just women.
Wages are also sticky, it is hard in many industries to blanket cut them across the board without a real cost to morale and the quality of the labour you attract.
In practice I cant imagine a real firm that could execute on this strategy.
Even if there really was a pay gap of that magnitude, it could still persist in the short run (compare to, "in the long run we are all dead"). The wonderful thing about high-prestige fields is that nobody really knows how to measure productivity.
There's also the possibility of bias in school or training programs, which would lead to differences that the labor market is not responsible for because they exist earlier in the pipeline.
But the biggest issue with that is: you basically wrote "if there is systemic sexism, there's profit in exploiting that". Why would anyone want to work for you in that case? You're not improving the situation, and benefit from it continuing - that's what's wrong with the idea.
My guess is that even assuming a perfectly rational employer (with no unconscious bias), the viability of this sort of arbitrage would depend on women _costing_ $0.70 to the dollar to their employers when compared to men, not on women _earning_ $0.70 to the dollar.
I'm not at all knowledgeable about how this is usually handled in the US, but what I've heard from entrepreneurs in Brazil (where I live) is that despite the fact that maternity leave here is paid for by our social security system, it still ends up incurring in additional costs to the employer, mainly because they need to hire/train a temporary replacement. (Who will most likely be less effective/productive than the more experienced person who took the leave)
Even if the law got updated to grant both genders the same parental leave time (or to allow a shared amount of months to be split by the parents in however way they prefer) it would still require a significant cultural shift to have men actually _choose_ to take the leave. (Anecdotal evidence: I've talked to several local male peers and most of them said they would not bother taking paternal leave even if available, and would rather stay at work)
This sort of market/cost-driven decision making is obviously not good from a moral perspective, and is especially unfair with women that don't want or can't have children, or would rather have children but take a shorter or no leave. However, I also understand that a lot of businesses have very thin margins and fierce competitors, so taking the actuarial calculation approach to estimating how much an employee will 'cost' you might be something they perceive as their only take on surviving.
I'm not sure on what is the best way to (re)align the incentives so that this doesn't happen anymore and the gap is closed for good.
EDIT: what other commenters have pointed out also makes a lot of sense: exercising this sort of arbitrage in the first place would likely require the use of immoral and probably illegal discriminatory practices
Anecdotal: I have a coworker campaigning to have the company let him take paternal leave.
I would love to hire female employees who are every bit as driven, thorough, methodical, and accountable as our best male employees (the ones we don't fire), who are also cheaper. But they do not seem to exist.
The rare female prospective hires who are available and seem good are often priced so high I assume their rates are the result of Fortune 500 companies competing over them to have an effective female on the team. Good for them, but until effective females become cheaper than effective males it doesn't make sense for us to hire them from a value perspective (we don't need the social signaling points).
However if it is Tech or some similarly male dominated field then of course competent women can charge more because they are more in demand. But that is in those specific fields and doesn't explain away the lack arbitrage opportunity from hiring women in general if they are indeed paid less in general.
In general, the pay gap due to discrimination is much smaller than the total pay gap. It's also not universal: it varies by city and occupation. If you're evaluating two employees who seem about equally qualified and one asks for a 30% lower salary, it's easy to see the arbitrage opportunity. But if the employee is only asking 5% less? It's less obvious. You may have felt from the interview that the other candidate was 6% better overall.
Then consider that discriminatory employers may not be evenly dispersed. In towns without much discrimination, there may be no arbitrage opportunity. In towns with heavy discrimination, there may not be enough non-discriminatory employers to hire all the undervalued workers.
The trouble is that the difference starts earlier than that.
Say you buy a tech company with 90% male software developers, aiming to balance it out. Turns out qualified female software developers get paid the same amount, but there aren't as many women with computer science degrees or relevant experience.
You could go round up some lower-paid women with no qualifications and train them to be software developers, but you could also do the same thing with lower-paid individuals with no qualifications who are of any gender. The problem in both cases is that once they're qualified for the higher paid work, you have to pay the higher salary or they can quit and go work for someone who does.
Hopefully you don’t congratulate successful minority friends for “bucking the typical trend.”
Which is literally what my friend told me on the matter. She deliberately chose to work less convenient hours with longer shifts for a higher pay rate.
Hopefully you don’t congratulate successful minority friends for “bucking the typical trend.”
I would so congratulate Jeremy Lin for doing so. It seems as though you have a particular problematic preconceived notion of what a minority trend is. Just who are you imagining when you write, “bucking the typical trend?”
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I would predict that their income would be lower, but not as much as the average woman. The risk of involuntarily childlessness would be significant higher and their social support network would on average be smaller. Health would be a interesting aspect to look at, which could honestly go either way.
I would also predict that for the subset of women who would go against those gender expectation would look rather similar. Involuntarily childlessness would go up but far below that of the average man. Their social support network would also shrink but again not below that of men. In trade their income would be above average but not as much as the average man. Average health and life span would likely go down but not as low as the average man.
Therefore; these predictions are not based on any data. They are based upon knowledge and assumptions of the world.
If you just want some random sources, there is a government study here in Sweden that looks at involuntarily childlessness and there is a significant correlation with income and men. That was published just a few weeks ago. Dating sites have brought data and shown that both success and quantitative response is very strongly positively correlated with income for men. It is often mentioned when I read about social status, with the same old mentioning of correlation between income and men. People who look at divorce rate see a correlation when men lose their job and their wives filing, with a larger drop in social support for the men. The theme is quite common in many studies on the topic.
From listening to social experimental studies, when people try to reverse expectations, you often see stereotypical results decreasing, but as is often found, it does not go down to zero. When it come to life span expectancy and health, a common theme is that women prioritize and spend more time with the health sector than men. A commonly cited reason that men do not go to the doctor is because it conflicts with work priorities. Thus by combining that result with this study, I would predict that if you look at the subset that defies gender expectations, then a larger percentile of that subgroup will go to the doctor than the majority. However I have seen similar health related studies say that especially psychologists treat men and women differently and perceive men as being healthier than they are, resulting in worse health care even for those men which do defy gender expectations. To add to the problems, lower social status and smaller social support network affects health significantly which is why I am not sure if prioritizing doctors over higher income is better or worse.
the common saying "0.70$ for every 1.00$ of a man" is when you average all the women salaries against all the man salaries. It doesn't take into account specific individuals or interests.
I believe the main issue here is that womens are on average more interested in having a better quality of life (as shown with overtime in this paper), and are also less pushy during salary negotiations.
> These gender differences are consistent with women taking on more of the household and childcare duties than men, limiting their work availability in the process (Parker et al., 2015; Bertrand et al., 2015).
The workplace is not the one restricting the women to work more hours. It seems to be based on a choice and preference.
What I see in my circle of friends is that in most couples with kids, it is a conscious choice for the women to spend more time at home (and give up extra hour?) and for the man to spend more time at work. This is indeed a stereotype but there is nobody forcing anyone to follow those gender roles. We all know successful women/men going against those gender roles.
If you take a conscious decision to work less hours to spend more time at home, you cannot be mad at "society" for patriarchism etc.
One such thing is the question of whether income is genetically determined.
Well, there are 3 characteristics (aside from the direct sexual characteristics of genitals, mammaries, and presence/absence of a womb) that are associated with sex sufficiently well that describing them is a strong predictor of sex. Those are vocal register, height, and physical strength.
2/3rds of those factors make it awfully unlikely women will be playing in the NBA and getting those salaries. But the number of jobs where those characteristics are strong predictors of performance is vanishingly small.
So why are women making less money at the median? Women aren't genetically predisposed to desiring a better quality of life. If that's a real factor, there has to be a non-genetic reason underlying it. And that's what people are looking for. You can't just dismiss that as feminism.
As if there's something wrong with that? Precisely what are you coding in your assertion that something is just because of feminism? That it's worth less? That it's not important? If not those, why bring it up at all?
I wonder if a big part of this difference is that for men, making more money directly translates to better mating opportunities, which is a primary driver for humans. Thus climbing the male hierarchy is something many men will do at all costs, because they're programmed to associate that with much greater power and reproductive success (the, maybe unproven, theory that the top x% males get exponentially more mating opportunities than the rest). So for males, working themselves to the bone beyond a lifestyle that's "comfortable enough" still has significant evolutionary ROI (notice how many powerful and wealthy men also happen to be huge playboys, regardless of how clean and wholesome their media image often begins as), while the returns diminish noticeably for women.
Whereas for women, once a baseline of comfort is reached, let's say "I can afford live at a decent place, I can do my hobbies, travel occasionally, I can generally take care of myself" then the additional income doesn't make that much of a difference, at least not until you have a family and suddenly you have to make enough to afford the extra medical, babysitters, daycare, good schools, tutors, college etc.
That doesn't only help woman, that helps everyone.
No, it doesn't help anyone. What if I have a financial emergency and am willing to work overtime for the next month for some extra cash? How exactly am I "helped" by not having the option to do that?
But your motivation to spend that extra time in the company should NOT influence any salary negotiation.
Otherwise it brings pressure on all others while redefining what the 'social avg norm' is.
> Mechanically, the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and women face different choice sets in this job. Rather, it is that women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work hours than men.
Naturally whomever is caring for children will want more flexibility at work and receive different pay to accommodate this, regardless of if that person is a man or a woman.
So we can identify a problem. The society (of the 1960’s and before in particular) required women’s work, but women were not compensated for their work. Given how critical that work is for society, it does strike me as a real problem.
A secondary question is what to do about it, which I believe you are asking. That is much more complicated. We have identified a problem, but perhaps have not identified a solution. However the lack of a solution does not mean it is fair to ignore the problem.
I bet feminists have suggested lots of solutions to this, but it’s telling that you and I (I expect) are both ignorant of them.
However, I do think this expectation of necessary unpaid work is unfair. Can anyone comment on proposed solutions to this in the feminist literature? Thanks!
Personally I don’t see it as an unfair bargain. I work hard at home, it can be stressful and tiring sometimes, but my wife takes on all the stress of providing income. I get ‘compensated’ pretty well - we have a good income and I live a great life. I personally think that home-makers who complain that they aren’t ‘compensated’ for their work are being churlish.
That’s great when it’s working well.
I suspect there’s a couple of problems -
(1) often the home-maker goes back to work, but the home-duties don’t get redistributed accordingly. The home maker is forever saddled with that burden, limiting their career options.
(2) In a divorce, the man is often left with a good income, through a valid, ongoing career, while the stay-at-home mom is left with an empty CV, the ongoing burden of the kids, and an allowance decided by the courts. Sure, men might have the burden of a new alimony/child payments ‘tax’, but otherwise they’re now free to do whatever they want. The woman isn’t.
(vast generalization of course)
The woman is effectively doing the work for the man (or for herself). She doesn't do the work for nothing, she does it in exchange for a roof over her head and food on the table, and medical insurance coverage and an address in a good school district for her kids etc. etc.
If the non-monetary compensation is less than she can earn by formally working as a cook or a maid (or a retail clerk or a biology professor) then she can do that instead. But if it's not, she's still not working for nothing.
If the transaction was formalized so that she was receiving a salary and then paying the same total amount for rent, food, insurance, etc., what difference would that make in practice?
> Her freedom comes from the man she is dependent on. And many feminists found when they tried to work that the job market was, surprise surprise, not welcoming to women.
You are referring to the job market in the early 20th century. This is obviously no longer the case, given that a majority of working-aged women do in fact now work for money.
The argument you would have to make now is that homemaker is a specialized profession that doesn't translate into another profession. Leaving aside whether that's even true (it's easy to prove you know how to cook and there are such jobs in many diners etc.), how is it different than many ordinary professions? If you have ten years experience as a calligrapher when you decide it isn't for you, you can't just instantly jump onto the middle of the career ladder as a mechanical engineer.
Nor is someone who prefers to be a homemaker tied to a specific person. There are many other men (and women) willing to enter into the same kind of arrangement.
But when people are not pooling resources as family units (for whatever reasons) it does seem like women are the ones left holding the bag.
If you're talking about couples who share an account, it doesn't really make a difference. The couple ends up with the same amount of money and domestic care whether one spouse does more or if they share responsibilities equally, as long as the total work hours at work and at home are the same.
If you're talking about a couple where the husband works and the wife stays home and the husband fully controls all the finances, then yes, that's pretty unfair.
Why?
Clearly you haven't been following the issue that closely if you think this. Of course woman have been forced to do household chores - up until this past century, they've had no other options.
Men take more overtime, women do more domestic work, men and women are paid for overtime, neither men nor women are paid for domestic work.
Whether women benefit from domestic labor or not, it's not something that would ever be reflected in wages. Wages are what people earn outside the home. It's an open question whether women are net beneficiaries of the informal transfers that characterize the domestic arrangement.
It's worth considering that during many eras almost all labor was unpaid. In prior eras, most people's labor was devoted almost entirely to domestic affairs: people made their own shoes, houses, food, &c. It was all "domestic labor". It doesn't mean nobody benefitted from it!