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Comment by bennesvig | Hacker News Reader

"The husbands' salaries to reflect the fact that a woman earns 78 cents for every dollar a man earns"

If that were actually true, why would any business hire a man when they could get the same work for less?

It's rarely the case that an equally skilled woman earns 78 cents for every dollar a man earns. There are a wide variety of factors that lead to the wage gap.

  * Women take more time off for child-rearing
  * Women still devote more time to household tasks + children
  * Women are more likely to choose careers for reasons other than money
  * Discrimination against women surely plays some part
  * Women are less likely to negotiate salary
  * Assertive women are often perceived negatively, unlike assertive men.

There are many others. But if you take a male and female, and put them in the same job for three years straight out of college, there won't necessarily be much of a wage gap. In some cases the women earn more.

Men are also more likely to take dangerous jobs that are more likely to get them killed, which pay better

Because you don't hire a receptionist to fix your plumbing. Men make more because the sorts of jobs they do make more money.

They make more inside the same profession, too, but not as much more. They also work longer hours, commute farther, and travel more on business.

People aren't rational. The top two explanations would probably be: society says women shouldn't be doing those jobs; the person hiring believes women shouldn't be doing those jobs or would rather have men around.

If we made every decision based off of sound economic or similar principles there's a lot that wouldn't happen. Gas guzzlers wouldn't be so popular (from a global or national perspective gas sippers make far more sense for pollution, personal finances, overall security because of reduced dependency on others). But they are.

Actually, the whole thing is kind of a myth. That statistic doesn't compare men and women working the same job for the same number of hours. Since men often work in more dangerous and harsh conditions then women, this would account for the disparity. Here is some more information about it:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/16/its-time-tha...

Strictly speaking this is true. For a number of (perfectly rational and moral) reasons, women on average bring home less money than men. This statistic is not terribly good evidence of discrimination, but it does make a bit of sense here, because we're talking average people.

I'm assuming the lower salary is because of assumed lower competence, so an employer engaging in discriminatory pay wouldn't want to hire only women.

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