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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace.

Yeah, I am not sure what to think of the data. It's not what I would expect.

How is US, Canada, Austria having such a large gender wage gap, followed by Canada.

Then Greece, Bulgaria and Romania are all the way on the left. Having lived in Eastern Europe, I would not consider it overall a bastion of women's equality and rights, not according to the West European standards at least. Granted though, during the Soviet times women and girls were studying math and science just as well as the boys even if not better and it was never specifically promoted or pushed via a "women in STEM" or such similar programs I have seen here, it just happened. Perhaps there is a remnant of that mentality and maybe there is something to be learned from there.

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This horse has been beaten to death, beaten again, and is now resembling something less than horse-like, but women that are given equal opportunity to pursue any career path they want will choose paths they enjoy instead of paths that offer raw financial gain. Same is true for men too, actually. It just so happens that more women prefer socially oriented jobs like teaching and nursing than men do. It's not complicated. Freedom doesn't mean everyone is equal in every aspect, it just means that everyone can choose what to be instead of being told what to be and - shockingly - not everyone wants to be the same thing.

The explanation is simple.

When you provide women the opportunity to become anything they want. They choose the careers that they choose. Which tend to me more social related careers. Teaching or nursing for example does not scale well; therefore salaries are limited.

Whereas men pick more "stuff" categories. It's men who work in STEM creating things. A car or an iphone is going to be generally speaking men who design it. These scale very well and salaries can be larger.

By these modern approaches that allow women to go into whatever they want to do. This is what creates the gender wage gap.

The 'people just choosing different careers' throws a lot of inequality under a rug and calls the problem solved.

1) If we tell women their whole childhood that some jobs are for men and some are for women and vice versa for men then ask them when they turn 18 what job they want we'll get horrendously unequal outcomes even though people are completely free to choose.

2) Valuation of jobs is based partially on the view of the value of the work in addition to the actual value provided. e.g. there's huge amount of societal gain to be reaped by providing better education to our children but various forces keeps the wages to teachers depressed relative to the gains to be had from providing smaller classrooms. In a more solid sense it's much harder to evaluate the value provided by a better elementary school teacher because most of the metrics for success are either years in the future (wages, college graduation rates, etc) or tied up in a huge number of other influences.

These kinds of defuse benefit jobs are a lot of what have been traditionally gendered as women's jobs and in the past were just part of the huge unpaid work that women were expected to do and often are unfairly characterized as easier or less educated/lower skilled jobs. There's a whole gendered history tied up in just how we evaluate these jobs and their benefits.

1) Except that in the western world we do not tell people their whole childhood that they are to do X because of their gender. We actively tell people they can be whatever they want, and as far back I can remember in primary school (early 80s) that's been the case.

2) Valuation doesn't always equate to monetary remuneration. For example (at least in Australia), police, teachers etc get FAR more leave and holidays compared to the rest of the country. That needs to be taken into account as part of the valuation. Stress also factors into why certain professions are "worth" more than others. IT is highly stressful, in comparison to other social professions.

Not explicitly can't but there's a lot of 'boys work' and 'girls work' gendering around work and skills. Progress has been made sure but there'll be a lag of decades before changes at the childhood education level work their way through to employment stats.

1. Could you provide a source showing this discrimination in school? I went to school, men and women were definitely told they could be anything. Also the schools are extremely left-wing SJW(Canadian schools teach children that the right-wing are all racists) so I find this assertion to be immensely unlikely.

2. Teachers in Ontario receive ~$140,000/year for 8 months of work, 5 hours a day. This is publicly available via the sunshine list. If you're using teachers as an example of bias. You're barking up the wrong tree here these inflated teacher wages raise the wages of women on average.

Furthermore, teachers are outside the standard capitalist system. If you want to use them as an example of valuation of you must support the privatization of teachers. I would support that idea. Might not end up well for those $140,000 teachers.

The point is though, women are not 100% teachers and the teacher unions are extremely strong; women and men are being paid the same as teachers.

> 2. Teachers in Ontario receive ~$140,000/year for 8 months of work, 5 hours a day. This is publicly available via the sunshine list. If you're using teachers as an example of bias. You're barking up the wrong tree here these inflated teacher wages raise the wages of women on average.

"5 hours a day" because all the material and lesson plans just appears out of nowhere along with all the graded work and administrative work...

Also I'm very happy that Ontario seems to have a good grasp on the value of teaching but that REALLY isn't true in the US where our average salary in 2016-17 was ~$38k [0].

Also my point wasn't that women are being paid less as teacher but the kind of 'social jobs' typically filled by women that the OP was talking about are valued less. Gender equality within that job isn't particularly relevant there I was talking about the profession as a whole vs other professions.

[0] http://www.nea.org/home/2016-2017-average-starting-teacher-s...

>> average salary in 2016-17 was ~$38k [0]

average STARTING salary -- I think you knew that and "conveniently" left out that one important word. Big difference.

A very brief look at your NEA source (i.e. the lobbying org for teachers, so of course it is biased) reveals that it is obviously flawed. $38+change is the average of each state's average salary -- like the Senate, it gives equal representation to California and to Wyoming. It's pretty easy to see that the most populous states tend to have averages above $38k, in fact many well above $40 (Cali, Texas, NY, PA) while many of the lowest salaries are from much smaller states (W.Va, Montana, Idaho). There is no way, if the state averages are accurate, that the national average is only $38+change. I think you know this too but choose to quote these stats verbatim anyway.

I will also note public school teachers have almost zero chance of getting fired, no worries about their "company" going out of business or bought out or taken over, and become eligible for generous pensions.

> Valuation of jobs is based partially on the view of the value of the work

This is false on multiple levels. Functional water treatment have a much bigger effect on health then functional health care, but water treatment employees are paid far less than doctors. We can likely make a similar argument for sewer treatment, garbage collection and mortuaries. We can see similar disconnect between teachers and veterinarians, where those that work with our children are paid less than those working with our pets.

A large part of Marxism is the disconnection between pay and value. There is no easy answers and bias is a poor explanation in order to understand the issue.

> If we tell women their whole childhood that some jobs are for men and some are for women and vice versa for men then ask them when they turn 18 what job they want we'll get horrendously unequal outcomes even though people are completely free to choose.

This would make some sense if women had been in the workforce for centuries and were well-established in particular fields, but women have only been in the workforce for a relatively short period of time and the cultural influences that might direct them into one job over another are not even remotely strong enough to play the role you think they do. There is almost nothing except the non-stop message of "you can do anything you want to do" given to little girls today and they are electing to do what they want to do. To assume they are trapped by some sort of cultural force that prefers them to do medicine instead of engineering (neither of which existed as a female field prior to the 20th century) is nonsense. Today, most medical school and law school graduates are women. Most engineering graduates are men. Unless men are fiercely protecting engineering for some weird, inexplicable reason, it would seem like women have had their say and chosen what they want to do.

I think it is worth noting that the quality of the data can vary a lot from country to country. On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate. Of course, it doesn't mean there are no truths to the data, it just needs to be taken with a grain of salt even if it is the OECD.

> On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate.

Great point. Yeah I can see that happening.

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