Women, Income, and The Sexual Paradox: Explaining America's Gender Gap | Hacker News Reader

Women, Income, and The Sexual Paradox: Explaining America's Gender Gap

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25 pointsCMartucci37 comments

The best book I've read on this topic is "Why Men Earn More", written by a former director of the National Organization of Women. The book is essentially a guide showing women how to earn more money, offering a huge example of interesting statistics. For example, people working 45 hours a week earn about 44% more than those working 40 hours per week, and women tend to work many fewer hours than men, while preferring jobs that end mentally at the end of the shift. I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in a more nuanced view.

Long story short, the pay gap can be explained almost entirely by the male tendency to work more hours, at harder and more dangerous jobs, while being more flexible (e.g. Willing to move, travel nonstop, Work in uncomfortable conditions, etc.). Further, men do this largely to acquire and provide for women and families, so women tend to benefit from this. In a lifetime, men tend to spend at least an order of magnitude more on finding a mate than women.

Sincere question: how am I supposed to use the information, "order of magnitude more?" I see it all the time and usually wonder, what's the scale? How many orders are there? And, in general, how to get a solid number range from it.

"order of magnitude" usually refers to the base 10 exponent, e.g. two orders of magnitude more means approximately 100x

What a silly article.

Furthermore, even assuming that women do in fact choose lower-paying jobs, to what extent is this tolerable? After all, whether the cause is societal pressure or neurobiology, either way women are influenced by something outside of their direct control.

If you're going to declare it "intolerable" when a person is influenced to do something by their neurobiology, then what in life is tolerable?

What would it mean to be free of the influence of our own neurobiology? It's not even a meaningful question -- our neurobiology creates all our desires from the will to power to the need to poop.

Besides, instead of asking why women choose low-paying careers, perhaps we should be asking why men choose high-paying careers. After all, high-paying careers largely tend to suck -- they're physically, mentally or emotionally draining and the hours are long. But young men want to earn a lot of money so they can... you guessed it, impress women.

I came here with that exact quote in my clipboard. Also entertaining is the hand-wringing and explaining that goes on whenever someone notices that education doesn't perfectly predict income.

You could look at it from the point of view of realizing the most of the potential of society. If it is true that women perform better academically but then go on to lower-paying jobs, this might indicate that there is a lot of potential that goes to waste. As a society, it might be useful to think about how to activate it.

It's not silly. I brought up that point out of fairness. I, personally, do not believe that a choice is unfair if it is influenced by our neurobiology. I am a materialist and determinist.

I mean...there are biological explanations for RACISM. Does that mean racism is tolerable? Of course not. I think I brought up a fair point -- Yes, it may be the case that women are influenced by their neurobiology to choose lower-paying careers. Does that mean we should stop talking about the issue? I don't think so.

If there is gender discrimination in pay, then this is the kind of thing that the market will eventually figure out, provided that not everybody actually believes that the labour of one sex is worth more than the labour of the other.

If Alice is underpaid relative to Bob at company X (or for that matter, if Bob is underpaid relative to Alice, or if Bob is underpaid relative to Charlie) then some smart employer from company Y will figure this out and offer Alice a job for slightly more money. Nature abhors arbitrage, and employers won't go round hiring men for more money if they can get the same quality work out of women for less money.

The market is not some magic fairy, it is a result of how we all interact. Employers have gone around hiring men for more money than women, perhaps because those men have been able to trick them into thinking they were better than the competing women - a lot of decision-making is about perception, after all.

Many facts of life are only questioned rarely. People complaining about gender inequality will cause some of those facts of life to be questioned and that can trigger the kind of reaction that you outline to correct this type of arbitrage.

Bottom line is: The market is not magical. It takes precisely this kind of discussions for participants in the market to become aware of the kind of opportunities that can make markets produce better outcomes.

The article mentions Pinker, but doesn't say anything about his main argument in this question: evolutionary biology suggests that in most abilities there should be higher variance among men than among women (even if the average is equal).

Wages are bounded from below but not from above, the lower tail of the distribution (unemployed, homeless, people in prisons) is not included in the calculation (where men are overrepresented), but the higher end of the distribution (CEOs, professors, etc.) is included (where men are also overrepresented), which gives the disparity.

In school, grades are bounded from above (degree inflation), but on the lower end plenty of variation remains (with more men there), which again gives the mentioned results.

I'm sure this is not the whole story but it is quite an important argument to miss.

You don't need a lower bound, you just need wages to follow a log-normal distribution.

It mentions Susan Pinker, not Stephen Pinker.

Yes, my mistake, I saw the "According to Pinker..." paragraph first. AFAIK they are siblings otherwise.

This article would have been irritating if it had proposed Yet Another Solution. But that might just be my bias -- I don't think there is a solution here, which makes me think there's not really a problem, either. It may just be that no matter how hard we try, discrimination is so deeply part of how our brains work that we'll never be free of it. Heck, even wanting to be completely indiscriminate is a sort of bias when you look at it sideways.

One thing I would like to see is income distribution across people in the same profession. Obviously, it is difficult to control for things like skills sets and where they overlap. But then you have too small of a sample population...

Yeah, I'm so glad, too, that I don't have to do anything and can continue in my position of privilege (which of course, isn't! woot!)

Um, check the GP profile.

yes, i assumed the person i was replying to was male, and i am sorry (not just sorry i look dumb, or because i am being downvoted, but sorry because it was stupid of me, might cause offence, and weakens my case, which i believe in).

but there clearly is a problem. you could take that article and substitute "woman" for "decent person" and "man" for "over-competitive arsehole" and it would make as much sense. the problem is that the system favours over-competitive arseholes and those are, predominantly, men. that's not ok. and just because it's "natural" and i don't have a solution does not mean it's not a problem.

Do you think it could be disparate risk aversions between men and women (or decent people and over-competitive arseholes)? The system only appears to favor them. The system also punishes them severely at the opposite end. Risk takers make the most money. They also go bankrupt (or to prison. See: Enron). "Decent people", on the other hand, play it safe, and the system neither rewards or punishes them.

lkozma makes an excellent point here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524031

Assuming risk profiles are the cause, then the problem is by nature the fact that men are historically the bigger risk takers.

So that's kinda what I had in mind. From general appearances, it does seem that squeaky wheels get oiled, regardless of how much they actually contribute to an enterprise. Slapping an adjective on bias is something of a false dilemma. I am philosophically opposed to labeling bias in a way that politically polarizes arbitrarily delineated groups. It's the ship with no captain problem.

PS: I've been in situations where it's hard to ignore the fact that I was passed over for something because of my gender. I have bouts of existential angst over it -- why do I persist in growing my skills set only to be passed over for something I cannot (reasonably) control? The answer is always the same: because it feels good. And that's worth more than money to me.

In 2009 the Department of Labor sponsored a study [1] as to the nature of the wage gap. They determined that much of the wage gap can be explained by other factors. There may still be discrimination, of course, but it seems to mostly not be the wage-discrimination that people talk about so much. I suspect that what discrimination there is is more subtle, and of the more social kind that leads women to choose different occupations.

This sort of discrimination is hard to detect, especially in areas where blinding is difficult. Look at the widespread discrimination that occurred in orchestras around the world [2].

[1]: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

[2]: http://mldc.whs.mil/download/documents/Readings/Orchestratin...

"Furthermore, even assuming that women do in fact choose lower-paying jobs, to what extent is this tolerable? After all, whether the cause is societal pressure or neurobiology, either way women are influenced by something outside of their direct control."

What is inside someone's direct control if not their choices?

I'm not commenting on the content of the article or the issue of discrimination in general. But the above sentence is horrible reasoning.

I didn't know so many people would have a problem with that sentence. I thought it was clear that I was merely playing devil's advocate. It's not horrible reasoning. It's merely a question that I thought should be raised.

Granted, "free will" and "choice" are complex topics.

But it's confusing to use a word like "choose" and then immediately say "outside of their direct control".

On reflection, I think the point that you were trying to make was something like:

"Regardless of whether the cause is societal pressure, neurobiology, or personal choices, women are potentially suffering from lower pay."

I liked the article before the conclusion, however.

Lol. Well, perhaps I'll reword the conclusion. I suppose it was a bit confusing. I was arguing that a woman's "choice" could be caused/influenced by societal pressure or neurobiology. And either way, to what extent is this a robust "choice"? Personally, I believe that neurobiology is the cause of all our behavior. However, I think it is still worth bringing up the implications of that line of thought. As I said before, there are neurobiological reasons for racism. Of course, these reasons do not JUSTIFY racism, they merely EXPLAIN it. And so, in my conclusion, I wanted to bring up the issue -- "Although we may be able to explain lower pay, either through neurobiology, societal pressure, or otherwise, this does not necessarily justify it."

Yes, that wording is much better.

Person1: "My house washed away!" Person2: "I have found the cause: it was that hurricane last night. My work here is done; glad I could help; you are very welcome."

Regarding the "education gap", there was one study (source unknown) that found on average students of liberal arts and other social sciences had higher GPAs, while students in math and other hard sciences had higher SAT scores. My point? GPAs are a terrible way to compare academic aptitude, because they are created from self-selected courses, and not evenly comparable. SAT scores on the other hand are standardized tests that attempt to make clean comparisons. Math and engineering are generally considered "harder" than English and art, so even if smarter people (as demonstrated by SAT scores) chose them, it's likely that they would under perform their social science peers in GPAs.

Another more insidious assertion is that GPAs are typically softly selected and subject to human bias, especially in a field like English. Given that more women choose to go in to teaching, could they be giving preference to their female students? (I doubt it, but it is something to consider.)

Note: I don't believe this study made any conclusions about gender, just education.

There's probably still a gender gap, but look at the trend -- it's been shrinking steadily since the early 70s: http://i.imgur.com/RnpSl.png

Can you look at that graph and claim 80% is a ceiling?

The data [1] for this isn't even adjusted for "equal work", one of the difficulties mentioned in the article. It's just median individual income, which probably overstates the disparity -- see eg yummyfajitas' comment [2] on number of working hours.

[1] page 36: http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524159

Maybe its the philosophy major in me, but where exactly is the paradox? None of the reasons discussed seem unintuitive or defy logic.

The Sexual "Paradox" is the name of a book, one of my sources. Yes, to nitpick, it is not a true paradox. The "paradox" Susan Pinker refers to is the fact that women perform better than men in school, and yet end up in lower-paying careers. It's more a seeming contradiction than a true paradox, you are correct.

I found a simple explanation for much of the gap. In terms of hours, Women work 12% less than men.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat22.txt

So really, the gap is only 8% (not 20%), assume a strictly linear relationship between hours worked and money earned.

So on average men work 40 hours, while women work 35. What this study doesn't show is whether the women wanted to work the full 40 hours and were not allowed to, or if they chose not to for external reasons (child bearing, social activities, etc.) There could still be discrimination within the hours allocated for working.

What this study doesn't show is whether the women wanted to work the full 40 hours and were not allowed to,...

It helps to read a report before claiming it doesn't show something.

According to the report I just cited, 32% of part time men wanted to work full time but were unable to, but only 20% of part time women women wanted to work full time.

The page formatting is awful which makes it difficult to read, and the columns I mentioned (total worked) showed 35.6 hours worked for women, and 40.4 for men.

Where in the data does it show whether men or women wanted to work full time? All I see are vague labels "for economic reasons, for non economic reasons, usually work full/part time". (With the poor formatting, I can't be sure which labels are nested, but it looks like they are.) How could any assumption about the subject's intentions or desires be inferred from those headers? Is there another part of the report you're referring to?

Part time "for economic reasons" means people who wanted to work full time, but were only able to find part time work.

This is the first gender discrimination article I've read that isn't horrendously biased and attacks the issue from both sides ending in a "we don't know."

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