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Comment by SSJPython | Hacker News Reader

> While there is a wage gap, our result occurs primarily because most female physicians do not work enough hours to rationalize medical school whereas most men do.

The important part is here. The wage gap isn't because of discrimination or sexism like certain parties or factions claim. The wage gap is mostly a working gap. But that doesn't grab the headlines. Mass media would rather misinform and outright lie to the public. That's sadly the result of turning news into a profit-making private enterprise rather than a public good.

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The 77 cents on the dollar has become a What You Can't Say (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) fact that will get you in trouble if questioned in polite left-leaning company. Another one of those factional shibboleths that reveals whether you've accepted the shared set of beliefs.

There are 2 different wage gaps that people that don't learn about get confused about. It is important to note that they answer two different questions. The first is the 80 cents one which is an aggregated measurement and better informs us about the monetary medians for career differences in men and women. But people often think this is when holding everything equal. When variables are held equal the aggregated result shrinks a lot and comes to roughly 96 cents on the dollar. But this does not account for issues like a glass ceiling or other things which are quite difficult to accurately measure. It is also important to note that while women on average make less (holding factors equivalent) that there are sectors where women make more (e.g. professorships). A great example of this is the Uber paper and has been extensively discussed on popular podcasts like Freakanomics and The Pay Gap (which goes into a lot of the nuances I'm not mentioning).

I’d be surprised if many people mention a wage gap without knowing the different measurements. Like most things it’s the underlying assumptions combined with the view on ethics that people tend to disagree on.

For example, your assertion that the 80% gap “better informs” makes no sense without some context you didn’t share. As a random fact it’s no better or worse than any other, but it doesn’t explain anything. The 96% points to what likely represents a real (but small) ethical issue that needs corrected, it’s also a more precise and accurate statement that I’d say better informs.

Neither number says anything about a glass ceiling, and using them to argue about a glass ceiling just undermines credibility.

You’re generalizing a lot based on a particular study that does say there is a wage gap.

And yet the takeaway from his point is entirely valid.

The returns from the money spent on education are not present if the time spent in the field is low (through either low hours or leaving the field).

Ex - Nearly 40% of female physicians are either part time or no longer in the field at all after just 6 years. And that's literally data coming from the AAMC (https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/why-women-leave-medicine).

22.6% of female physicians are part time after 6 years, compared to just 3.6% of male physicians.

That's your gender gap...

Further - the obvious cause is staring everyone in the face... children. Women are still disproportionately considered the primary caregivers for children. If you want to remove the gender gap... make it more compelling for men to stay at home and take care of their kids.

Personally - I think this will be a fairly challenging task, because I happen to see childcare as a very rewarding occupation (at least when they're your own children, especially below the age of ~12), which makes it obvious why women presented with the opportunity to stay at home take it.

But that reward is not financial.

I can't think of how we ensure that men and women have the same exact outcomes without taking away their freedom of choice or enforcing equal pay regardless of time worked.

Are there any societies out there that could not accept the inequality in earnings and successfully figured out a solution that felt both liberal and fair? It feels like you just can't get an egalitarian utopia without the government setting hard limits on how much or how little each person can work.

Seems like getting 100% parity would be mostly unsolvable, given human nature, unless we were to replace those workers with computers.

Personally - As a father, I think you could get a hell of a lot closer with the following

1. Free childcare (we've already gone a long way here with the public school system, which at the end of the day mainly boils down to childcare in many parts of the US)

2. Family stipends during FMLA leave for childbirth.

Number 2 in particular is required because social norms are still absolutely geared towards expecting new fathers to take considerably less time off to ensure a paycheck is coming in.

This sets a rhythm that is hard to adjust later - the father does not spend as much bonding time with young children. Housework falls to the mother because she is no longer working. Once the mother is recovered the patterns are already established, and the conversation about cost of childcare vs the mother's salary begins on a biased foot.

I'd actually much prefer being a full time stay at home dad, but holy fucking hell is the stigma running strong there across our society at large.

From the other point of view, what would it mean if women will spend much less time with children. For example, if they will be some better compensated. Will children be spending time in nursery? From the financial point of view that seems to be wise for women.

But what changes does it bring to the socium? For children, spending time mostly in a nursery while both parents work hard vs with mother (or both parents) is very different.

Of course, it's also possible for the father to deprioritize career and take on childcare duties. But that's much harder to make happen, and it's not because companies don't provide enough paternity leave.

I took more paternity leave than my wife took maternity.

I got SO much fucking flak for it from family/friends/co-workers. Especially the older crowd (45+).

The deal on paper is often not the deal you're expected to take. Opting out of a career in favor of childcare is considered a privilege reserved for woman in many circles.

I'd happily be a full time stay at home dad - but I make 3x what my wife does because I went into software and she works for a non-profit. So currently we balance both full time jobs and pay for daycare. But that starts to make less sense if we have kiddo number 2 or 3 - because then daycare costs begin to eclipse her salary.

The problem is that 5 to 8 years from now - all the kids can attend public school, and we'll likely both want to work full time at that point regardless of what we do now, but the person taking the gap will likely end up making less (they will be 5 to 8 years less senior & experienced).

In theory yes but your wife wasn’t planning to earn that much money anyway, extra 5 years at a non profit probably won’t boost earnings much if at all. That actually happens to a lot of families, the woman is often not that interested in bringing in income and just focuses on whatever she ways to do. That’s a luxury that many women get and that gets reflected in the salary averages

And, what could be the potential factors which lead to " lower working hours" for women compared to their male counterparts?

We need a government program to prevent women from choosing to work less than men.

This reads so dystopian that I'm hoping it was said in jest. It's scary that I have to ask though, too many people actually think like this.

Women and men both enforce gender roles. The expectation to work longer hours at less fulfilling, more rigid jobs falls on men; the expectation to perform more hours of childcare falls on women.

The existence and origin of societal expectations can be it's own thread. But as long as it's clear that one party does have other responsibilities to cater to, which in turn leads to lower amount of time available to invest in their chosen professions.

Also, it's primary care physicians, not specialists. Specialists earn considerably more.

> That's sadly the result of turning news into a profit-making private enterprise rather than a public good.

Let’s take a look what NPR thinks about gender pay gap:

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/16/1086732450/on-equal-pay-day-w...

Are they clear that the gap is mostly about number of hours actually worked in a year, and difference in gender distribution across occupation? No, these are only alluded to in passing, if mentioned at all. In fact, this nonprofit venue’s messaging on the topic is the exactly the same as the one you can find in for-profit venues.

Profit motive as explanatory factor for why media misinforms people is greatly overstated.

Audience capture strikes again.

The paper doesn't say that the wage gap is mostly a working gap. It says the earnings gap is mostly a working gap. In other words, both things are true:

* Women get paid $9/hr. less than men with the same level of experience (wage gap) * Women work 11 fewer hours per week than men (working gap)

.. and the paper claims it's the second factor that is the primary cause of the earnings gap.

There's nothing there that either confirms nor refutes discrimination/sexism. Interestingly the paper states:

In our data, both the median male and median female doctor work at least 40 hours per week in every experience bin. Despite both being “full-time,” men and women nonetheless work substantially different numbers of hours in our data. The commonly used methodology of estimating earnings equations with no controls for hours worked (apart from restricting the sample to FTFY workers) would conclude that men’s wages are much higher relative to women’s wages than they actually are.

In other words, the authors are saying that a naive analysis would support the (in their estimation) incorrect conclusion that the earnings gap is purely a wage gap. If that's true, and their paper takes a new step forward in disambiguating these factors, then it would be unfair to paint the previously held received wisdom as deliberate misinformation and lies.

Rather 90% or 95% of the effect is probably not due to discrimination. Not 100% of the phenomenon is explained by working less. Be honest.

It is.

If the effect is largely not because of discrimination, and discrimination is far more often stated as the cause, I know who I'd be calling dishonest here.

This goes double for anything directed at the public, since a short soundbite is all you get.

Yeah but the order 5% is likely outlier men (boomers) that earn disproportionately larger salaries and are slowly dropping out of the data set. The next group replacing them will have better gender distribution, it just takes time for the effect to flow through

This is part of the problem with this topic: neither side talks honestly about the effect, and both sides collapse the nuances down to easily defeated straw men.

The "wage gap" has never been attributed, by any study, soley to the impacts of discrimination for equal work – though some effect is seen. For instance, the 2009 Bertrand showed that there was a 10% gap between new business school graduates, based on gender [0]. That difference never really disappears, on average, across the population [3].

However, the effect definitively widens at child birth, with women shouldering an unequal amount of caregiving responsibilities [1]. Whether married or unmarried, women with children take a hit. However, when married, even with children, men don't take a hit. Married men generally earn more than unmarried men. In fact, they generally earn more than everyone else – though this effect is shrinking. [2] Unmarried women, without children, will generally earn 90% of an unmarried, child-less male assuming equal education levels. We see a growing disparity, with unmarried, childless women overtaking unmarried, childless men in earnings due to the education gap. Eliminate educational differences, and the gap reappears.

When either side collapses the "wage gap" down to simplistic tropes like individualized gender-specific discrimination or "choices", they're generally signaling they haven't studied the topic beyond reading a few headlines.

It's way more complicated, and interesting.

[0]: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_t...

[1]: https://www.henrikkleven.com/uploads/3/7/3/1/37310663/kleven...

[2]: https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...

[3]: https://docs.iza.org/dp9656.pdf

> However, the effect definitively widens at child birth, with women shouldering an unequal amount of caregiving responsibilities [1]. Whether married or unmarried, women with children take a hit.

This is a a loaded phrasing, though. You could just as well say that men shoulder an unequal amount of wage earning responsibilities. Men with children take a hit in the amount of time and energy they are expected to spend making money.

Gender roles and social expectations are what's driving this, but the common framing is all too often men using their agency to force women into theirs, without allowing for the possibility that women are using their agency to do the same.

> You could just as well say that men shoulder an unequal amount of wage earning responsibilities.

You could say that, but I think most people would raise their eyebrow at you.

The implicit assumption here seems to be that the husband/father unilaterally allocates working hours and childcare hours, and that working more hours outside the home is a privilege everyone will go for given the opportunity.

"Everyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but I think the fact the gap lessens significantly for unmarried, childless women speaks to that.

When given a choice, many women do chose to work more hours.

No, there is a wage gap, which is discriminatory - it says that right in your quote - but the major impact on the studies analysis , which has to do with comparing lifetime earnings versus cost of education, had more to do with women opting out of the workforce.

Disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment.

Denying there is disparate treatment in women’s salaries relative to men’s is a bit like denying the moon landing or saying 9/11 was an inside job. No matter how you slice it - correct for time on job, school pedigree, etc, etc women are systematically paid less than men across all professions.

> there is a wage gap, which is discriminatory

Even if a wage gap exists, it doesn't automatically follow that it's discriminatory. Example: Women work less hours/take longer time off --> less job skills on average --> less promotions on average --> wage gap.

If you correct for all of that - only compare women who work the same hours, have the same degree from the same school, same number of years on the job - it always comes out that women are paid less. Because you aren’t aware of this doesn’t make it not true.

Source?

I don’t see how it’s discriminatory if it’s the result of a choice to work less by the person. Who is discriminating, and in what way? I do accept that there are reasons women end up working less that don’t apply to men, and sometimes this can be due to unfair pressure, but not necessarily from an employer and often it’s just a lifestyle choice.

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