Young women earn more than young men in several U.S. cities
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ft_20...
In other words, this is a predictable consequence of the growing female-male gap in college enrollment and graduation rates:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...
Pay gap for men and women only starts mid career. But this isn't the 80c on the dollar pay gap (that's median male earnings vs female). It's usually in the 90c range (iirc 93c is the median and even Uber found a pay gap in this range). There's also the glass ceiling. But neither of these things have a smoking gun to them. They are hard to solve and going to require a lot of us to start talking about them. So I'm not sure why we only discuss median gender earnings, which isn't a great way to discuss fairness. It's especially bad when we discuss median gender wages as if they are controlling for variables (like the 90c+ gap does, which you see in part of this data). But don't let the bad discussion of median earnings prevent a discussion over the actual phenomena that exist.
Edit: there's a lot I didn't say here, I'm glad others are adding more. But let's also try to be nuanced because it is a complicated topic. I also wanted to plug a podcast "The Pay Check" which goes in depth into these issues, including attempts to solve them. It's from the perspective of economics (by Bloomberg) and discusses all the common misconceptions like child rearing.
There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny.
This is a common misconception. The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this. It does affect the glass ceiling though, even if the women don't choose to have kids. I really do mean there's no smoking gun. You can even account for worse negotiations, prioritization of work life balance, work flexibility, family, and you don't fully explain a gap (albeit it does get smaller, but remember that even a 1% difference is significant here).
I really suggest listening to Rebecca Greenfield's The Paycheck. The first season goes into all this. I think it's a lot more convoluted and surprising to many. It's also not focused on median earnings and so I think is really good if you want to understand fairness (glass ceiling is also discussed). And I don't think anyone disagrees with your second paragraphs. Women should have choice. But there's still gaps that aren't explained and we shouldn't just easily dismiss them. I should also mention that this gap is in no way a phenomena strictly in America. It's global.
A lot of economists have put in a lot of work trying to understand this and there really is no agreement on what does cause it. So don't dismiss things so easily. Most problems in our modern and complex world have many casual factors and large casual graphs.
> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career.
>The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this
Articles like this are where I get my understanding. https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
It's standard to consider the null hypothesis as the answer if it lies within the margin of error of what you're measuring. Last I knew comparing exact jobs (not merely professions), actual hours worked (no "full time" category) and years of experience (not age) explained more than 90% of the gap. Are all these other causes you mention measured accurately enough to ensure the null isn't within the error range?
I would strongly recommend this podcast to anyone that enjoys leftwing propaganda, strong rebuttals of strawman arguments, and misinterpreted statistics.
In particular interesting was their implicit praise of slave-labour-supported childcare in Singapore and their analysis of the problem of falling birth rate by studying China.
I agree, and there's an easy test: I know from experience that there's a non-negligible slice of the population that look down on men who make this choice.
I feel the whole women empowerment has gone so far that it's like soccer goal keeper complaining they can't go out on the field and score a goal, and when they start doing that the opposing team scores goals on you and then your team loses.
People may have different commitments to work after having kids, and compensation can and should be adjusted based on that.
I definitely work much less than I did pre-kids, but my compensation has gone up significantly. I think this is typical for men. My wife also works less for more money post kids (but she had kids while doing postdoctoral work, and then moved to private industry).
Sorry, the market pays based on experience, not on age! You're asking for a subsidy.
* raising children would require zero time and overhead
* or people who don’t have children should be barred from working more hours than a working mother can reasonably work.
Of course this entire discussion is mostly classist to such a degree many people literally don’t see it. For a mother to work full time with young children requires a lower paid (usually a woman) person to take on the child rearing role. So it’s sexist for a woman to take a few years prioritizing her children, but it’s equality for another woman to raise those children?
This phrasing is bizarre and reflects a cramped notion of gender equality. Child rearing is something that has to happen. We will already face economic challenges due to our increasing ratio of retirees to workers, and bad things will happen economically if our population begins to contract.
Now, Americans can allow the fertility rate to drop below 2, and bring in immigrants, but that’s not a sustainable equilibrium. You’re just outsourcing the burden to immigrant families from cultures that don’t have the same notions of gender equality.
At the end of the day, women (as a group, not necessarily individually) have an indispensable role as mothers. They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. We should approach discussions of how to keep women in the workforce long term recognizing those facts.
Do I think American society needs to incentivize having children through government intervention because of our falling birth rate? Yes
Do I think those women are making the right choice for both themselves and society by choosing to at the margin spend more time with their kids than working? Yes
>They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do.
From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(
And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
wow
I worked at a union shop where everyone was paid on a tenure based scale, and you qualified for advances as long as you had 500 hours of paid (working or not) time in a calendar year. There was literally no way to have a pay gap.
But… a group of women complained, and the company agreed to open a few female only promotions to buy them off.
There is enormous quantities of analysis.
This anecdote you tell does not counter that
Medians without context are dangerous. If you’re trying to assert discrimination, something like adjusted hourly wage makes more sense.
Another stat will be total compensation male v. female; this is the statistic used to make this point in union shops with pay scales. Then the argument shifts to assert bad promotion practices.
Is a big red flag for me.
You can't control for age. This subject is generational. The underpaid 40 year old women in 2010, are the same underpaid 50 year old women now. We didn't get a new group to sample.
We can talk about 'the average 30 year old' within one generation. We can talk about 'the average 30 year old' across time. But they are easily mixed up and mean very different things.
'mid career' is not a useful phrase.
---
In the same vein, the middle is steadily shifting as our pension age shifts from one generation to the next.
I don't have much proof, but it is almost certainly caused by the lost experience/networking/politicking of maternity leave. There are some very rough studies and pieces like this [1]. To me, it is obvious that if an athlete took a season off in their 20's that they would experience a gap and ceiling in their lifetime earnings compared to those that didn't. Having a baby in your 30's can be this transformational as many future CEOs would be starting their upper management careers around this time. If this is indeed the case, there is no clear solution as forcing paternity leave just doubly hurts the family but would equalize the aggregate statistic.
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2019/05/14/how-paid-...
The best study I could find at a moment's notice is [1]; didn't read the full study in depth, just the write-up, but it seems to be a large factor.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-child...
And we can’t measure the quality of the focus per day, obviously. (But we can measure the toilet time. It’s mean but results always go the same way).
1% of $60k is $600, which after tax is probably $400. Not exactly life changing money.
The article in OP says the gap starts below 30 in 91% of metro areas.
As it stands, this focus on women exclusively is only reproducing the divide from generation to generation, male managers being reluctant to hire women after the 2016 #metoo movement.
Thanks! I updated my comment
The article states that in ~10% of USA cities young women earn the same or more than men.
If my arithmetic is working that implies that in ~90% of cities young women earn less than men.
You should look at the prime age employment participation rate https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Some other people think it's women entering the workforce, but that not a 1 for 1 affect here and it seems women have possibly hit a similar downward point.:
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-labor-f...
We have significantly decreased the cost of chores. They are still extremely painful, but 1/10 the burden they used to be.
- Loss of manufacturing jobs since 1950, primarily held by men
- Women's increasing participation in the labor force
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-labor-f...
Young men (used to) bring assertiveness and a created an atmosphere of competition.
Maybe these roles aren't so clearly divided any more. For the vast number of job positions, it doesn't matter much in terms of competence who gets the job. It matters so much more that the coworkers are comfortable and enjoy the workplace.
Men had obvious advantage in physically demanding jobs, but fewer and fewer of these remain.
I as a man, prefer to work with women. I've met some remarkable women and learned a lot from them and not only in tech.
The issue is at the margin there are a lot of kids going to college who are wasting their time. But still most of the kids in college are making a good financial decision even if all of the aren't.
Not likely. The data continues to show that incomes are stagnant. If there was a financial benefit, not just filtering, incomes should be rising alongside the rise of college attainment.
The filtering effect is real. Colleges put a lot of effort into rejecting people who aren't "born successful" to maintain an aura of prestige. Colleges pumping out graduates with severe mental disabilities that hinder learning, for example, would not serve the brand well. The model only works if you limit the possibility of graduation to those considered the "best of the best". The same people who are more likely to do well in their careers. There being an income spectrum, with some making a lot of money, and some making very little, predates the existence of college.
The decline in college attainment among males no doubt comes on the back of colleges recognizing that males are now less valuable in society (i.e. they are less likely to be among the best of the best) and apply the appropriate filters in response, not the other way around.
This is a good argument college isn't making workers more valuable. But that doesn't mean college won't increase your personal income. Just imagine a world where all the jobs stay the same but employers preferentially pick college grabs because they believe they're smarter and harder working.
This value the degree holder gets is called signalling theory. And it'll make the degree holder richer without making the economy richer.
Median income of a plumber is $59,880 [2].
The big gaps you'll find rely on either average income (where an uncapped high + hard capped low = inflated numbers) or household income. There are numerous biases that deserve mentioning, but the simple component of college debt vs earn while you lean means plumbers are probably already better off on "average".
But I think my argument that >50% of college grads are better off having gone to college than plumbing school is true.
If you broke it into quartiles i bet the top quartile college graduate does much better than the top quartile plumber. The second quartile grad does moderately better than plumbers. The 3rd quartile about the same and the 4th significantly worse.
I see the quartile data for plumbers trying to find it for bachelor grads.
They had to spend 14,000+ hours in order to earn those wages. Also depends on what their expenses are and if they are saving anything.
The purported wage gap was always a manifestation of other facts like aggregate job choice, as shown in the death gap — that men die 10x as often in the workplace, according to BLS statistics.
Here's a detailed article that goes into these things: https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
It makes sense that young women would earn more, but the gender-wage gap appears once you get into middle age as by that point childrearing expectations have destroyed women's careers.
Most people hate their jobs[1] and not everyone wants to work a 9-5. Raising a child can actually be more fulfilling than working for a tax filing company for example.
[1] https://www.staffsquared.com/blog/why-85-of-people-hate-thei...
My Wife Won't Get A Job While I Work Myself To Death: Why This Is Unfair
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/antonia-865/my-wife-wont-ge...
The wage gap is largely a function of how men are expected to work more at worse jobs to provide for women and children.
They're two sides of the same coin, of course. But the relentless focus on how gender roles victimize women serves to distract from the fact that gender roles are a two way street that women are co-equal enforcers of.
Not just expected but also want to.
Money for men is like makeup for women - it makes the person (appear) more attractive.
We had to decide all by ourselves how our family would handle it.
But if the larger pay gap we fight over is explained, that explanation is dismissed because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The facts don’t matter. What story the facts tell, and what story is heard and believed, does.
While these traits can be advantageous in some situations, modern education often requires sitting still and focusing for hours.
Is that a modern phenomenon? At what point in history didn't college level and higher education require sitting still and focusing?
Which is been rather strongly been debunked in the last 20-30 years of modern research. Testosterone does not cause aggression, nor does it causes poor concentration. One of the few surviving theories on what testosterone actually do is that it amplify cultural defined behavior associated with social status and sex, primarily during encounters where status might be lost.
Abnormal levels of either low or high testosterone is associated with irritability, mood swings, poor concentration, and even delusions. Those findings are quite similar to studies on estrogen and progestogen.
I know this is just one example, but I remember the pretty fascinating study linked below quite well, where mens' testosterone levels were the determining factor in seeing how they reacted to their dogs' loss in an agility competition: men with high levels of testosterone punished their dogs by yelling and hitting them, men with lower levels of testosterone supported, petted and praised their animals. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to see how the "high testosterone response" would have been a status benefit to the man in question in the not-too-distant past, but now is much more likely to be a liability.
https://news.utexas.edu/2006/09/19/research-reveals-connecti...
So if they want to make it/continue their careers after having children, they need to take themselves much more seriously in their 20s.
There is absolutely a correlation between education being focused on female success (a combination of predominantly female teaching staff and optimising for traits generally held by women such as agreeableness) and the trends we've been seeing for 30 years now.
Unfortunately this is not the popular narrative, but it does need to be discussed.
EDIT: I, unlike the parent, am not trolling, so if you're going to downvote I would prefer a rebuttal.
Citation 1 (agreeableness as a direct consequence of academic success): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160802...
Citation 2 (women on average are more agreeable than men): https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178
Citation 3 (Gender distribution of academic success over the last few decades): https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb2015/pxweb/en/STAT/STAT__30-GE__04...
Citation 4 (Gender distribution of teachers in the USA): https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr
Citation 5 (Gender of teacher affecting academic performance of same gender): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/696203
So we have direct correlation with a personality trait, it being attributed to a sex and a seeming consequence.
I could be wrong, but while correlation does not equal causation: this does seem to be a very strong correlation.
Which is pretty heavily at odds with the “easily outpacing” statement.
The article shows men earning more than women. But the discussion is all based on the interpretation that women are now outearning men.
It’s entirely possible to have a culture where women can have families and careers at the same time. It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
Scandinavian countries do everything you are advocating for and have the same fertility trends as everyone else.
Advocate for those policies anyway, if you want to, but don’t claim they are going to move the needle when we have evidence they won’t.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Can't be a good mother and a good worker. You can't be at home taking care of your baby and at work being productive for your company/boss/etc. Not rocket science.
> It’s entirely a cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
The most egalitarian societies with the most women-friendly workplaces have some of the lowest birth rates. Your assertion, which has been around for decades, has been well tested and well debunked. For decades, wealthy western societies have increased benefits for working mothers. Birth rates continued to decline.
If you want higher birth rates, you want women to spend less time in school/work and have children in their prime birthing years ( 18-29 ). That's simple biological fact. The question for society is whether we want women at home with their babies for the benefit of their families or we want women at work for the benefit of corporations/shareholders. The elites have spoken and it's the latter. It's why the elites want more immigration. We need to maintain the population somehow.
The issue isn't complex unless you want it to be complex because you don't like the simple truth.
Is this a pressure applied to women, or to people in general?
Is it easier for men or for women to return to work after spending a few years taking care of their kids?
Perhaps discrimination goes the other way.
Perhaps society shouldn't make men choose between a career and jerking off all day
Society does not. You do.
It may seem like that if you’re living in a super high cost of living city and everyone in your work social bubble is in their 20s and early 30s, but step outside of those small bubbles and age groups and there are plenty of happy parents.
This whole “lol parents are dumb” meme really needs to die.
Daycare isn’t prohibitively expensive for any of us in tech careers. Anyone quitting a $150K+ job to avoid paying $20-30K for a good daycare for the few years before kids entire school isn’t doing it because it’s the optimal financial decision.
You don’t stop having a career or earning money or having career advancement when you have kids.
I wonder if young adults making 120k are hearing “kids are crazy expensive” from families living on 60k, and developing a somewhat warped perception.
However, given the way taxes on two earner families work it is a much cheaper decision then it looks like at first blush.
Maybe this is a good thing. But it is a bit counterintuitive if you think of salary in pretax dollars.
Because it is?
Seriously, everything now revolves around your child--as it should.
You can't "just stay jobless" for a year anymore. You won't take that project that makes you skip your children's play, sports, etc. You probably won't move very far (or at all) if you change jobs because your children are in school somewhere. You will stay in a job that may be suboptimal because uprooting your family is lots of effort. etc.
And, this is doubly so for women. Women, in spite of everything, are still expected to be the primary child caretaker.
How is this not the "end of your life"--especially if you are female?
Same with school later. You can't have kids 12 hours a day there.
The world already has almost 8 billion people though (with population momentum landing is at 10B-11B by the end of the century), so I’m hard pressed to argue for more children (and the necessary policy and financial support) when we, in aggregate, already don’t take care of the ones here (no subsidized child care, limited parental leave, half a million kids in foster care at any one time [US], ~120 million unintended pregnancies globally annually, etc). Also consider that in parts of Europe where pro natalist policies are very robust (subsidized childcare, very generous leave policies, and “baby bonuses”), the fertility rate continues to decline regardless. Kids might be valuable to society, but the data supports the idea they are not as important to individuals (opportunity costs, life choices, etc).
Isn't it strange how there are only three factors of production? Land, capital and labor? Ultimately everything is being derived from the land but surely it doesn't take much imagination that humans are also derived from female humans. Reproductive work is not part of any economic model. It's just lumped in with labor even though it is not compensated and the very thing it produces is labor.
It’s the small child that needs years of care that does that.
Edit: bc I forgot, we can't even replicate human breast milk fully well!
Edit: ADHD, dark though disclaimer.
COVID was a dress rehearsal. Deaths were heavily skewed toward poorer people, who had to go to work as essential workers despite the danger, or dumber people, who refused to get vaxxed. We'll likely have a famine later this year and into next - rich people will wince at the hit to their pocketbook from higher food prices, poor people will starve and die. If we get nuked, it's going to hit the inner cities, where relatively poorer people concentrate in dense housing, rather than the country estates and vacation homes of the rich. Poor people join the armed forces because it's their best option, rich people go to college and get a draft deferment. If a hostile totalitarian government takes over, the "brightest and most diligent" will bribe the right people to be left alone, the hoi polloi will get shot in the streets if they look at an armed soldier the wrong way.
Genealogical studies have indicated that most Europeans living today are descended from the nobility of the High Middle Ages. What happened to all the peasants? Well, between Black Death, the Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses, Wars of Religion, and other mass-casualty events, most of them caught fatal diseases from living in crowded and unsanitary city conditions, or they got sent to die in some nobleman's war.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...
In other words, in 228 of 250 US metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn less than their male counterparts. Why is everybody reacting so weirdly?
What remains to be seen, and what has people acting weirdly, is whether this trend will stop once pay equalizes or if it will continue farther and result in a pay gap in the other direction.
Is it weird to worry about the direction the future is heading? Plenty of problems can be seen before they arrive, so why not start thinking about them sooner?
original > Young women earn more than young men in several U.S. cities
vs.
alt. 1 > Young women earn more than young men in a few U.S. cities
or
alt. 2 > Young women earn more than young men in some U.S. cities
>I don't know what the cause of the weirdness is though.
Might I suggest that you're reacting favorably to young men earning less and having the deck stacked against them even more and more, calling it the 'dismantling of the patriarchy'? perhaps that is making people a little bit weird?
Because "dismantling the patriarchy" isn't what is happening to begin with, and the current actions are coming at the cost of young men. Meanwhile, it is questionable whether young women are getting much better from it.* There are many variables compounding on one another which are very difficult to interpret, despite people on both sides of the debate claiming they can.
The majority of people are still ruled primarily by a bunch of rich men. The majority of people are women and men. This hasn't changed at all. What has changed is the giant sandwich of men and women between the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich shuffling around, while they also have a smaller piece of the pie as a whole.
*: Yes obviously not being dependent on others is a good thing. However, there is an underlying connotation that women are better off in the workforce than they are doing what they would do as of old. Considering many other social factors at play, there is enough reason to doubt this.
Unless you are banking on some cities favoring women while others favor men long term.
Is masculinity being shunned here? Are men not prospering? That's not what the data says. The headline is about outliers.
Young women are also having children later in life, and the disparity between women and men enrolling in college and completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
I think you’re actually re-explaining the outcome of the report, not pointing out a flaw in their methodology.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the gender pay gap still exists even if you do control for these things, albeit it becomes smaller.
Has that ever been true? I have heard people say "Men push women out of engineering" but in my experience it's been the opposite--it's been men trying to get women interested in engineering.
There are uncountably many WISE, SWE, girls who code, etc. groups that try to encourage women to go into STEM. Women get STEM scholarships that are only available to them.
Of course it's not true. If you majored in CS at a decent university probably 1 or 2 out of 100 students were girls, and in the "labs" the TAs spend the ENTIRE TIME talking to the girls/helping the girls. "Men push women out of engineering" is just a performative statement that means nothing. You will find this in any field where men generally are better at something, like chess. There are plenty of people who whine that "women are pushed out" of chess and so on, and if you ask people to explain that, they can't. It's just pathetic and of course predictable that the same people who can't understand the logical reasons why the demographics of certain groups are the what they are, happen to be bad at activities that require the ability to perform logical operations in their head, like chess, or engineering, etc. All they can do is whine about it emotionally which is the same reason why they can't do engineering or play chess.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/the-gende...
Including in higher paying first job degrees, professions, or however you want to make that adjustment?
Not disagreeing, just curious. Many on HN probably studied CS or EE with a very male cohort, for example. Is that balanced by a programme(s) (with well-paid graduates) that skews heavily female? Maybe medicine (not as much as EE/CS though surely)?
On the medical side, some numbers and research are in order.
Nursing is dominated by women; 90% women, though the trend is slowly decreasing. Nursing is a physically demanding job.
Pharmacy school grads are over 60% women and the trend is increasing.
I had a harder time finding dentistry numbers but 60% of all practitioners under 44 are women. The trend is increasing.
Medical school is 51% women and the trend is increasing.
These are highly paid professions with far more stability and prestige than software engineering. Even nursing is on par with the average software engineer, but with more stability.
With actual compensation for time worked, you’ll have to exceed L5 to get a meaningful jump ahead of registered nurses.
I only special-cased EE & CS because that happens to be HN's skew, not because there's something more special about them than some other engineering or science.
What it doesn't show is that business are treating women better. Maybe they are, maybe they havent treated them as badly as the wage gap politicians want you to think they still are, and maybe things like paternal leave are starting to make a difference.
There's nothing actionable, no way to draw any meaningful conclusion, because it is observing the world through a fog of uncontrolled variables.
The Boston globe has an article out about all the single women in their 30s who never found a partner. The hypothesis being there are fewer and fewer men who match them in professional/career success, which stops them from settling down.
Another way to put this is that in the vast majority of metro areas, young women DO NOT earn more than young men. Even when you look at the areas where young women do outearn young men, it is not by a lot. For example, in the NYC area, young women earn 102% of what young men do. To my ear, that's parity.
From my personal perspective, it is sheer silliness, especially on the part of (a good number of) men. While I don’t agree with it, I can see why someone would be hesitant to date someone earning less than them. But I am struggling to see that many tangible downsides of dating someone earning more than you do.
There are, of course, some potential downsides in every situation. But given that men (in general) seem to have no personal qualms about dating women earning less than them, i fail to see why a good number of them would be so vocally opposed to the inverse of it.
Once upon a time if you were not an attractive woman, you could still be a very appealing match if you learned to be a great cook & were great with kids. Now, if you aren't gorgeous, a winning personality is the only play you have left. There might be a really interesting discussion there. Perhaps reduced role of homemaking has increased the pressure of beauty standards on women...
Age preference could shift- e.g. even if 25 year old men are less successful than 25 year old women, 30 year old men might still be doing better. This affords men extra time to take high risk high reward financial strategies & mature.
Continuing on the theme of risk, it could drive men further down the path of risk & split outcomes (men are over represented in boardrooms and in prisons). That could be socially destabilizing, with an increase in men on the bottom.
Or, preferences could transition to prioritize other things. Who cares if he is broke, look at those muscles!
The second order impacts are the crazy part to think about. If responsibility, providing, and stability become feminine traits, then do men culturally assume current feminine traits, like “free spirit” and “experimental”?
I really don't understand this, it feels like it's matter of culture. Success is subjective. I still wonder how success is defined in those studies. I have a difficult time believing that women really prefer men with higher social status, it seems like a bad meme. And if it's true, it would be interesting to hear what feminist think about this, because that would explain why men still seek social status in the first place.
Does wikipedia quote this?
Any other serious source?
But once women gain social status, I don't see why they would still desire men with higher status.
If most women still do desire men with higher status, it means most women have integrated patriarchal values, which is something feminists should really talk about.
Presumably, there was an influx of young male unskilled labor to set up all those mines, and this statistic was the result.
I'd be similarly curious what happened to the local dating scene.
It will be the same for wages.
I don’t think the same type of a thing would work for wages, as wages are fairly absolute. Your bank account doesn’t care which degree you had, it cares about the dollar number attached to it.
I suspect in the next decade progressives will fall out of favor as the masses get fed up.
For example, the headline is referring to 22 out of 250 metro areas.
How do we know that young men today don't lack the interest in monetary success that may have been possessed by their elders? I know I'm not the only guy who's made it to "senior" level in their career and realized that money doesn't make up for time spent with people and fulfilling activities.
This isn't to say there aren't other factors at play, or disadvantages specifically towards men, but earning more money isn't the end-all-be-all of success. Many wealthy people are actually miserable, and the suicide rate for women has also been increasing (yes, along that of men, but still). How do we know that women are proportionally reaching more life satisfaction, or that men aren't?
I'm looking at the bar chart with median annual earnings and a earnings gap percentage. The first gap is 7% (misleadingly labeled as 93%...), which does seem somewhat high.
But then it's for $33,598 vs $31,288. A difference of $2310, an amount that your average Bay Area FAANG SWE earns in two workdays or less (when counting amortized RSU vesting and bonuses).
You could argue that every single dollar matters for someone in that bracket. But what about when the 7% difference hits someone who is making over $500k a year in the Bay Area? Then it's a $40,000 swing. Most of that will get eaten up by taxes anyways.
Which one is worse? I would say the $2310 difference, since the $40,000 is really closer to $20,000 after taxes, and having $220,000 a year after taxes vs. $200,000 doesn't make a huge difference when you're competing for homes that cost $2 million dollars or more.
It would sound way worse with the title "x outearn y by $40,000 a year in the Bay Area", but only to people who don't realize how bonkers the financial scales are here in comparison to developing parts of the country.
This is one reason why it is a bad idea to locate a business that depends on intellectual capital in a state that denies women bodily autonomy, and that is generally hostile to anything other than "traditional" gender roles. Doing so further disadvantages recruitment.
1. Fig 10. Marriage, Family Systems, and Economic Opportunity in the USA Since 1850 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.738...
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA: 98%
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA: 88%
Yes, I agree there are certain areas where gender pay gap exists and there are definitely some reports of it in news reports. But I want to know if it's a cultural issue at these companies or if it's a widespread problem nation wide.
Make it so that we only compare people with comparable skill sets and jobs and it magically disappears.
I thought they said women made a fraction of what men earn?
For example, women are heavily overrepresented in the veterinarian field, in some cases representing 90 percent of current veterinarian students. When an Australian university decided to offer a single scholarship with preferences for rural and male students to try to balance representation. The female vet students were absolutely shocked and horrified, despite several female scholarships existing concurrently.
Privilege as an absolute, ubiquitous, end-all and be-all trait pegged to immutable characteristics is turning into a mythological construct to justify continued discriminatory practices benefiting groups allowed to collectively act in their favor. Even many of the numerous articles or studies supporting discriminatory behavior are often specious at best.
In reality, privilege is a holistic measurement that changes with localized community composition. Applying discriminatory policies with broad strokes at this point is unjustified and negatively discriminatory. Society could do better, but it's deciding not to.
But how can we have this discussion as a society when anyone attempting to discuss it is shouted down as a bigot? (Which is odd because it’s unfair discrimination we’re trying to fix.)
In our workplaces it is acceptable to promote one side of the argument, which is declared by HR to be morally virtuous, but promoting the other side of the argument would quickly lead to termination.
Outside the workplace, any attempt to organize or speak out on this topic will similarly be intentionally misinterpreted and then the mob will demand the person be fired.
I’m not sure how we resolve this when only one half of the discussion is allowed.
Net result: HR lady laughed about it, let them know I had personally made the complaint, leading to teasing and mockery and no disciplinary action.
Now, imagine if you had a group of men talking about how much they loved big boobs in the workplace and ranking the women in the company on the perkiness of their tits...
Not that that would be worth making a federal court case out of things anyway. I just wanted to be able to sit down and do good work for a generally tolerable company without distraction.
The difficult part for men, is maintaining appropriate targeting and not supporting or even providing the appearance of supporting causes that could be easily construed as chauvinistic or patriarchal. The sooner collective action begins, the less damage current policies will inflict on the population in the long-term. The problem is as you described, it's tricky to navigate for fear of retribution of going against the current flow of interpretation. Special interest groups who benefit from current policies will ardently work against them to maintain their sort of market share of resources and political power.
Ironically, this is because it coincides with a preexisting sexist concept: the idea that men have universal agency and women lack it, leading to attribution of hyperagency to men and hypoagency to women. And from that we get the idea that the entirety of gender is Men collectively victimizing Women, blasting away all of the layered subtleties and contextualities of gender roles.
If you look hard enough, I'm sure you can find at least a few people "shocked and horrified" about absolutely any issue in the world. If you are building an entire argument on the alleged attitudes on some female veterinarian students in some Australian university, it could easily be taken down by a counterexample.
For example in this very thread, you have people arguing that it is "systemic discrimination" that men have to sit down concentrate (just like women understand they need to do) in order to achieve a higher education. So clearly the attitude that men should be privileged is alive and well in certain quarters.
And, yes, if a school system required all students to write right-handed and that resulted in lower grades and worse outcomes among left-handed students, that would absolutely make you a victim of systemic discrimination.
2) Just because certain outcomes happen now doesn't mean it's some absolute, immutable state of the world. We can and should have an educational system that serves both boys and girls.
The gap is still 7% overall.
Most of the biggest gaps are in small or resort towns: so it kinda makes sense. The closer gaps are in big metros where there is added value to the company to try and pull in from the thinner workforce of women in stem.
As more women get into stem there will be less bargaining power and therefore closer to national average for a position.
Supply and demand.
Pure fiction, which is why nobody can present a credible analysis to support it.
Try this instead:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/graphing-the-gender-wage-gap?s=r
Is that normalized to number of hours worked? Women often work less hours than men.
So therefore the number is virtually useless, except to identify aggregate level choices made by men and women.
Please provide a source. If you're the primary source, please present your findings and methodology.
Workplace discrimination like this already illegal and pretty well enforced in the US, so if it's true where are all the lawyers lining up to take the easy cases?
The linked article says the gap is 7% overall.