I'm not trying to say that discrimination is ok, I'm just saying that the typical system requires you to ask for money, you're not just given it out of the kindness of your employers heart.
1) women negotiate less 2) women take more time off for children, thus advance more slowly
Basically showing that there is no inherent gender discrimination on wages in the US, in the aggregate -- that it's entirely due to choices made by women, not any kind of discrimination whatsoever.
On the other hand, there are also blind studies testing resumes in certain areas, which show that employers perceive resumes with male names to be stronger than identical resumes with female names. And on the other other hand, I feel like every engineering place I've worked would always hire an equally-qualified woman over a man, since there are so few of them to begin with.
So, who knows...
Simply because it's a choice made by women doesn't mean that they're not being constrained by discrimination or sexist norms.
Consider: what if the reason women choose not to negotiate is that the penalties for negotiation are higher for women? E.g., they'll be perceived as bitchy or ungrateful, while a man would lose nothing by negotiating or even gain character points for being assertive and proactive.
Not providing evidence that that's the case, here (though to some extent it certainly is). But even free choice is constrained by the system it's embedded in.
“1) women negotiate less 2) women take more time off for children, thus advance more slowly”
… not be due to inherent gender discrimination (mostly strict gender roles)? Those things explain gender discrimination, they certainly do not explain it away.
I'm not saying it necessarily is, but just that it's one theoretical way in which they might "not be due to inherent gender discrimination" or "strict gender roles".
Suppose testosterone makes men more aggressive (and thus more likely to negotiate), and women have less of it -- then that's purely biological right there, no gender discrimination required.
Perhaps if women are implicitly required to negotiate, and choose not to, then they will be recruited by another organization who is willing to pay them more without negotiation. You've just lost out on a good engineer - the employer has done themselves a disservice.
i guess like other people are saying, i'm not sure if people look at two equal candidates and discriminate based on sex/age/other.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.abst...