When male CEOs have daughters, relative pay for women at their firms goes up
www4.gsb.columbia.edu
www4.gsb.columbia.edu
Interesting fact: in the U.S., single, childless, women under age 30 in urban areas earn more (10-20% in cities like New York) than single, childless, men under age 30. See: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.....
This is not to undervalue the statistic presented in the article, but I'm always a bit wary of comparisons involving "equivalent education and experience." In Denmark, for example, 20-30% of women (depending on the study) work part-time, versus 8-10% of men. How do you compute "equivalent" experience with a part-time worker? Is 5 years of working an 80% work-week "equivalent" to 4 years of working full-time? Does a 30-year old woman who took 2 years off after college for childcare reasons have "equivalent" experience to a 28-year old man who did not? Mathematically that works out, but part-time work and time out of the workforce are death-blows to a resume, far out of proportion with the resulting differential in actual amount of experience.
I appreciate the ideas discussed in the article, but as the father of a daughter and the husband of a very ambitious woman, I have as slightly different perspective on the issue. Yes, it is important to avoid bias that results from the perceptions of men higher up in the hierarchy. At the same time, it's crucially important to look at the other irrationalities in the system. I think it's irrational that a women who takes a year off after the birth of a child is viewed by HR managers in a worse light than a man who took a year to backpack across Asia. I think it's irrational that men are never expected to be the ones who downshift their careers for a time to help raise kids. I think it's irrational that a period of downshifting is perceived as such a negative light in the first place.
By education level (subdivided if you wish by educational specialty), women consistently make less than men. But women comprise about 60% of the entering college class, and a similar portion of recent college graduates. The result is that on the whole, women make more.
That's why "equivalent education and experience", as flawed as our attempts to measure them might be, is a very important qualifier.
Isn't it wonderful how easy it is to ignore that college education is biased towards women and women's needs , and that men are put at a giant disadvantage when it comes to education.
I can imagine how the headlines would read if the numbers would have been 60% men and 40% women in college.
What do you mean by that? (honestly curious)
Bullshit on several levels. First of all, the "never been in more trouble" in the first sentence gives the impression that these are all worsening trends. In fact, school dropout rates have been consistently declining over the last 40 years[0].
Secondly, as of 2009, the dropout rates for males and females were 3.5% and 3.4% respectively, so assuming equal numbers of boys and girls, that's 51% male and 49% female. But that report was published in 2011 and only goes back to 2009. Maybe back in 2001, the most recent year they had data for was 1999. Let's look at what it was then, shall we?
Oh look, the split between male/female was 4.6%/5.4%. In other words a sizable majority of high school dropouts were actually female that year (and the year before). At no point in four decades have dropouts been anywhere close to 80% male.
>and attention deficit disorder diagnoses.
It is likely that the actual rate of ADHD is about equal in males and females[1], and that it is simply more often diagnosed in males. Underdiagnosis of ADHD among girls is a disadvantage for female students, not an advantage.
Two things about that. One is that even in that case, it still doesn't put boys at a disadvantage to girls. There's no indication that treating someone for ADHD when they don't have it will be disadvantageous to them.
The second is that contrary to public and media perception, ADHD is probably not overdiagnosed. Hilariously, this commenter supplied the following article: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/adhd/problems-overdiagnosis-... . Apparently s/he did not actually read that article all the way through, or even skip to the concluding paragraph, which begins:
>The public’s fear that ADHD is overdiagnosed and that stimulants are overprescribed is not generally supported by the current scientific research.
In my experience (caveat: I'm a man who admits to knowing little of women, haven't been young myself for some time, and don't have kids, so take my suppositions with a grain of salt) boys seem both more inclined to follow bad examples from the "role models" available and less likely to be discouraged from doing so ("boys will be boys!").
There is little the education system can do about this once they get to that age - it needs nipping in the bud earlier than that. I'm not sure who I'd blame for this not happening, probably a mix of the images/sentiments thrown at them by TV/music/whatever and parents not being able/willing to effectively filter that flow - it certain won;t be a single factor answer.
80% of Silicon Valley engineers being men = "men and women choose different career paths based on preferences."
Things that will be said by the same people...
Glibness aside, you'll get no argument from me that the disparity in college education between men and women is a problem. That said, college attainment among white men from higher income families actually outpaces, slightly, college attainment for white women from higher income families. Much of the college gender gap is driven by 2:1 or greater ratios in college attainment, in favor of women, among blacks and hispanics. The increasing gender gap in college is intricately tied up with the country basically abandoning black and hispanic as well as lower-income white men.
So, yes, the first example is an example of discrimination (possibly non-intentional), while the second could be caused by choices (there are probably other industries where there are many more women than there are men).
I hesitantly suggest that of the people who choose to go into blue-collar work, most are men.
(Of the people who go into blue-collar work not because that is what they want but rather because that is simply where their life takes them, I would expect more balanced numbers. I don't have any numbers at all to support any of this.)
Choosing between two careers, say engineering and being a marine zoologist are equivalent in socially attributed worth and both require a similar amount of effort education-wise. Most people wouldn't argue that being an engineer is in an obvious way "better".
Choosing between going to college or not, for most people isn't an equal choice. The vast majority of people view going to college as a better option.
[citation needed]
[1] http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/05/13/male-s...
[2] http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/03/20/men-in...
Of course there are individual examples of advantages that women have over men in various areas. That does not equate to women being advantaged overall.
In the world of acting, dwarfs have some advantages over non-dwarfs. For example, a dwarf is far more likely than a non-dwarf to land a role as a dwarf, a christmas elf, a leprechaun, or a villain's creepy little minion. This advantage does not outweigh the disadvantage a dwarf has when trying to find work in any other type of role.
Do some people not realize how bigoted this sounds?
You have it backwards. It's pointing out that the person you're talking to has said something that's quite silly. Fighting for women's rights doesn't mean you don't care about men, and it doesn't mean that men are universally better off.
How is ridiculing concern for men supposed to express that?
Person A: "Women have it rough. Patriarchy."
Person B: "No, see, [bad thing happened to this guy one time], so there's no possible way there's systemic bias against women."
Person A: "Yeah, _what about teh menz?_"
Feminists deeply care about men's issues. But they won't tolerate using specific instances of things being bad for men as a means to deny that there is systemic bias against women.
Second, mistercow discusses the context and the reasons it was said in this thread below, you should take it up with them.
The phrase should certainly not be used if someone merely complains about a problem that men have. Rather, it is intended to be used when someone tries to derail a discussion about prejudice against women by talking about how hard it is for men.
Note that the comment I was replying to was in a thread about education, and it immediately started trying to shift the discussion to suicide rates and the judicial system.
>> "B-but... you were in a restaurant... choosing desert?"
Consider a closely related group, Marxist anti-racists. They claim to be against racism, yet they reject color-blind policies on the part of government agencies or universities. Why would they do this, if they are truly against racism? It is because they seek power.
Stop it. Feminist bigots like you need everyone to view women as the "true victims" in society, so any discussion of men's issues is inevitably and swiftly met with that bullying phrase.
Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. Being a man has sucked throughout history, but modern western feminists furiously point to the men at the top of society as evidence that things were worse for women, completely and conveniently ignoring the men at the middle and bottom of society.
Predictably, modern western feminists fight tooth and nail to preserve female privilege.
Despite their rhetoric, western feminists give hyperagency to men—they try to hold men responsible for the behavior of women. At the extreme, you get posts like this (hopefully satire, but apparently it isn't):
http://i.imgur.com/FkVKqJH.png
It's sickening to witness the absurd mental gymnastics western feminists perform to absolve women of all responsibility for their actions and failures, with the blame almost inevitably falling on a man or on men in general.
On the flip side, to justify their own existence, western feminists do everything they can to make women feel helpless, scared, and powerless. The western world is a warzone for women, if you listened to their rhetoric. And any potentially empowering advice you give women for avoiding dangerous situations is considered "victim blaming".
These attitudes are not only ingrained in our legal system; they're completely ingrained in society at large. If a woman is struggling, men and women (and feminists) eagerly rush to save her and scold the mean men put her in that situation.
If a man is struggling, th—WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?! Why are we even talking about him?!
Do you need to go to the powder room and have a good cry about it?
But in all seriousness, no I don't need everyone to view women as victims. That's absurd. I also don't think that there's anything wrong with discussing situations where gender inequality harms men. In fact, I think that it is essential to the larger discussion, because there is often an intrinsic connection between harms to women and men caused by gender prejudice.
Would I would like however, is for obscenely privileged morons to stop acting like female privilege is anywhere close to (much less greater than) male privilege.
Yes, there are some feminists who disempower women and men alike by treating women as the frail victims of sex-crazed men who are biologically incapable of showing empathy or controlling their emotions. There are feminists who don't consider valid the intersection of sexism and other forms of oppression. There are feminists who accuse trans women of "objectifying" the female body. Fuck all of those people. They're idiots. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence. If someone thinks that all sex is rape, and that same dipwad thinks that male privilege is a problem, that is not evidence that male privilege isn't a problem.
In other words: "I'm going to emasculate you by comparing you to a woman and giving you stereotypically weak female traits like crying.
But YOU'RE the one who is a sexist."
Take for example this: http://littlemissgeek.com/about
The image it's painting is rather obvious: women aren't just disadvantaged in technology, they have been falling behind over the last 2 decades.
And yet, we find that university gender ratios used to be about 50/50 in 1985, and are now 60/40 skewed in women's favor—that is, 3 women enroll and graduate for every 2 men: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/ccap/files/2012/02/blog-chart...
Little Miss Geek is by the way Belinda Parmar, who has come out and said specifically she will no longer speak or attend women-only events in tech. But somehow she still fails to see the obvious.
"In 1997, Metropolitan Life examined the way boys and girls were treated and concluded that “contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers’ expectations, everyday experiences at school, and interactions in the classroom.”[28] You did not read about this study in the media. And it had virtually no impact on the schools.
The impact of our belief in women-as-minority? It takes The New York Times almost two decades after women are exceeding men in college to acknowledge it in a significant story.[29] When they do, they devote more space to how the gap creates problems for the female students (“There aren’t many guys to date”[30] ) and how it turns men into dominant oppressors (“[the guys] have their pick of so many women that they have a tendency to become players”).[31] In contrast, articles about men being in the majority at the Citadel, or in the armed services, never mention men as victims because they have few women to date."
Here's another juicy nugget:
"The Lace Curtain’s power exists even in male-dominated institutions. For example, Dr. Charles McDowell, formerly of the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, discovered that 27% of Air Force women who claimed they had been raped later admitted making false accusations of rape.[12] The admission usually came when they were asked to take a lie detector test. With these admitted false accusations he was able to develop 35 criteria distinguishing false accusations and those known to be genuine. Three independent judges then examined the remainder of the cases. Only if all three reviewers independently concluded the original rape allegations were false did they rank them as “false.” The total of false allegations became 60%."
You can read the entire book here: http://web.archive.org/web/20031216215957/http://mndnet.com/...
Note that this is the same Warren Farrell who's been protested as a rape apologist and whose talks feminists have boycotted by pulling a fire alarm and blocking the doors, such as a few months ago at the University of Toronto.
Find me a feminist talk being protested in a similar fashion, and then we can talk about male privilege.
It's a load of shit to say that feminism is all about fighting male privilege. But since these radical "feminists" are the most outspoken people who describe themselves as feminists, they effectively define what feminism means to the public. You can say, if you want, that you think the problems men face aren't as severe, so you think they deserve less attention. That's a value judgement which no-one can argue with. But behaving like only women have problems is simply not honest.
This is really fucking dangerous, if you think that feminism (whether that means gender equality, or women's rights) is a good thing.
Men (at least, the men at the top) are really more powerful than women, and this isn't changing in the foreseeable future. Men put in the hard yards in the high-risk careers, and end up dominating politics, law, and the corporate world. As long as feminism has the moral high ground, that won't be an issue for women, because the small number of men in really high positions still have to do what is seen as the right thing.
But there's no reason why gross gender inequality can't exist in a modern society. Look at most countries outside the US, UK, and some parts of the EU.
Feminism probably happened because women were needed for the war effort. The men were fighting the war, so the women were able to show they could do the work men generally did. There's no real reason that feminism needs to exist in a modern society, it's just path dependence (you can't take a bone out of dog's mouth - people tend to hang onto the rights they have), and the fact that most people (including most men) think that feminism is a "good" thing.
If feminism allows itself to be defined by the radicals (who use some weird Marxist analysis about the class struggle between men and women), that's exactly what they'll get - a class struggle. And if it does stop being about right and wrong (as it has been, up to this point) and simply about men versus women, I have no doubt that the men will gradually try to chip away at the progress feminists have made.
Equality is a great thing. Equality is a thing which most people see as right, and that most people will support. A class struggle is not something everyone agrees with, and it's a war I don't think we really want to have.
If things continue the way they are going, it's not going to be long before a conservative politician can repeat the more reasonable points that men's rights groups are making (not the angry crap about their evil ex, or stuff about sexual assault, but the bits about women having too many advantages in things like the justice system). What will the feminists say? Will they say that they are fighting biases of all kinds, or that feminism is simply about fighting teh menz?
If feminists start fighting against equality, there will no longer be a bright line (equality) which everyone can strive for. It will simply about the two sides trying to push each other around. If you really want to put your money where your mouth is, and bet that women will push harder, that's a matter for you. I'm not really well read on the history of sexism, but I'd bet there's a lot more historical examples of men eroding the rights of women than women eroding the rights of men.
Can you clarify your point here? Are you arguing that women shouldn't have equal rights and opportunities?
The good guys don't always win, especially if they stop being seen as the good guys.
Wasn't the whole point of Hacker News to not have inane gibberish like this on it?
If you have a problem with argument, refute it. But acting like a child and mocking it does nothing but raise the blood pressure of everyone else reading the post.
Also, which "mainstream institutions" do you mean? News media? Educational institutions? These are also generally thought to be rather left-thinking, in my experience.
The range of permissible mainstream thought is determined by the left. Essentially, the mainstream follows Harvard with a ~30 year lag. The infrastructure which propagates what Harvard believes to everybody else and determines the constraints of acceptable thought is what Moldbug calls "the Modern Structure"[1] or "the Cathedral"[2].
[1] http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-modern-structure.h...
[2] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-...
It's important, but how does one really qualify for equivalent education and experience? Usually when I see articles make assertions about the wage gap, the nature of the control for that equivalency is not stated, and the reader is left to assume that Simpson's paradox has been addressed. Never answered are the question about whether they've controlled for, say, two different MD specializations with different earning potential, different courses taken during a single degree program, or degrees from different institutions, or any of the other potential educational backgrounds that might be relevant.
Besides, in a market economy, education and experience are not valued, performance is, where sometimes future performance must be predicted. Education and experience are merely one predictor of performance.
This CEO study is interesting because it sidesteps the equivalent education and experience question. But that still limits its applicability and leaves plenty of unanswered questions about why the differences were found.
It's pretty easy to measure: Take all the men who are "of equivalent education and experience", and find the standard deviation of the plot. If that deviation is greater than the gender earnings gap, then you know your measure of "equivalent education and experience" is hooey.
Now it could also be that this is the point in their lives when society values women the most and this is why they get paid well at that age. Attractive young women are desirable as they make other (especially male) employees happier as well as having advantages in certain roles (e.g. sales). This 'premium' they enjoy is despite the risk of child birth being at its highest.
I know that this is very cynical point of view, but is it unrealistic? I have definitely witnessed it and it could well be a significant factor. Male attitudes to women are an extremely strong force in shaping society, and we might well expect them to go as far as distorting the job market as well. I know it is a little bit sad to undermine female accomplishment in this manner, but it is quite plausible.
This mechanism would also contribute the glass ceiling. It is desireable to have young,attractive women around, but not to promote them to the more senior positions.
Of course, I encourage equal opportunities, but there are some weird social interactions depending on the group's composition. This can be seen in male predominating places as well, which can be just as toxic (if not more) to somebody who doesn't look like the rest. I'm just pointing that hiring women is not all happiness all around, because hiring people is not happiness all around.
I guess it comes down to homogeneity, in the same way you can claim there is no racism in countries with low inmigration and no heterogeneous population.
Women in charge are usually much better at playing office politics, and I mean this as one of the highest of praises in an office setting. Being able to navigate through all the bullshit while keeping sane is precisely what somebody in a big company needs. I'm reminded of George Carlin's comment on God: "I'm convinced that if there is a god. It must be a man, because looking at the state of things, no woman would have fucked up so badly."
So no, hiring young, attractive women and not promoting is completely backwards. You hire women that you will promote, because they are so much better at leading.
That being said, all generalisations are wrong. I've met women and men alike that have been backstabbing misanthropes, but believing that men and women are equals is like denying that Dutch people are tall, or that I'm not too short to reach the top drawer at my house. That's why you have specialisation, I won't play basketball and it is unlikely there is a Dutch jockey. If you are hiring and thinking from the beginning in terms of men or women you are missing the real value of that person, which may or may not align with your precognitions.
EDIT: got the joke wrong (first "woman" is "man")
Troubling. Why would this be? What does the System have to gain by valuing women of prime child-bearing age more than women of other ages?
Less cynically:
Women also have a "career option" not available to men: mother, and by extension stay-at-home mom. Is it possible that this group of women self-selects out of the workforce -- or the other way around, the women that achieve high career status tend to select out of stay-at-home motherhood?
Errr... what? My husband was a stay-at-home dad for a couple years, and he wasn't the only stay-at-home dad in his "mommy" group. Approximately 3.5% of stay-at-home parents in the U.S. are fathers, and that number is growing.
Obviously nobody is forcing women to stay at home at the point of a gun. However, I think it can't be discounted the degree to which women are pressured socially to take on primary caregiver roles.
My wife and I (~30, educated professionals) have a 8-month old. My wife as zero interest in staying at home. But from the minute she got pregnant the pressure started. My mom and her mom (both of whom work/ed) suggested that may she should stay at home for a few years when the baby was young. She's constantly bombarded by parenting fads that tell her she's a bad mom if she doesn't breastfeed/wear her baby around in a sling/etc. Those fads are never very compatible with professional working life.
Meanwhile, nobody has any expectations of me. Nobody wonders why I don't take a few years off to raise the kid. None of the parenting fads are aimed at me. Heck, my own mother gets nervous whenever I have responsibility for the kid.
> Those fads are never very compatible with professional working life.
Otherwise, why would he even say that? He'd say, "my wife isn't convinced by the science" or, "my wife isn't interested in that" but he doesn't -- he says the 'fads' are incompatible with a professional working life (nb: breastfeeding & baby-wearing have been practiced since basically the beginning of humanity; calling them 'fads' is particularly uncharitable).
His (his wife's) conflict is that socially-defined 'good mothering' (of the 2013 variety) is at odds with professional life, and he (his wife) feels understandably insufficient when she's getting blasted with messages like 'breast is best!'. So their defense is to fight against societal gender expectations which is exactly what the system wants you to do because while everyone is arguing about whether men can breastfeed, nobody is arguing about missing the formative years of their child's life because you can only buy a house with two incomes.
Educated, upper-income Americans acting like they're prehistoric villagers is, in fact, the root of several different fads.
-Breastfed individuals were more likely to be upwardly mobile (http://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2013/04/24/archdischild-201...)
-Breastfeeding improves brain development in infants (http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2013/06/breastfeeding, journal article here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811913...)
-Increased Carrying Reduces Infant Crying (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/77/5/641.abstr...)
-Baby wearing & co-sleeping decreases crying & GORD (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15780481)
That is not to mention the psychological benefits of physical closeness which I assume you don't need cites for.
The bottom-line for my wife and I in making the choice was: is there any improvement in IQ in the long-term? And the answer seems to be no: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/breast-feeding-is-n... (study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633819).
> In an ordinal regression model, markers of neurological development (cognitive test scores) and stress (emotional stress scores) accounted for approximately 36% of the relationship between breast feeding and social mobility.
The second looked at white matter and sub-cortical gray matter volume which you can either find significant or not significant.
Your own article says:
> Of course, breast-feeding is a healthy thing to do. It enhances the baby’s immune system, and builds a bond with mom
which I consider positive things. But it also makes bizarre claims, like:
> Working mothers, already strapped by the expenses of new parenthood, cannot necessarily afford to shell out hundreds of dollars for a breast pump and accessories.
...and how much does formula cost?
Ultimately, you've got to just do what you think is best for your kid, and it sounds like you did. As your article says, there is no One True Way. But if having a career makes you compromise on what you think is best for your kid, that's a problem (with the construct of 'careers'), that's my point.
That quote is referring to the baby's cognitive test scores, not the mother's.
See also: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/07/breastfeeding-and-iq-st....
Also: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10224215 ("Significant relations between breastfeeding and Woodcock Reading Achievement scores at 11 years were also reduced to nonsignificant levels after the inclusion of maternal IQ and the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment.")
No, I think I agree with rayiner. The real problem is that women are expected to raise their children in that peculiar way. We have infrastructure and social constructs that allow mothers to remain professionals but now society is telling mothers that if they want to be good mothers then they cannot take advantage of those things. "Good" mothers don't take advantage of modern convenience but instead do it the prehistoric way that is fundamentally at odds with maintaining a career. That is the problem.
Some offices do reduce the friction with on-premise daycare, breastfeeding/pumping rooms, flexible schedules, work from home, etc. It's not an insurmountable problem.
> society is telling mothers that if they want to be good mothers then they cannot take advantage of those things.
Looking at US society I can't agree with that. Daycare is pervasive. Walking down the halls here I see many women, many of them with pictures of their young children in their cubes. Perhaps it's different here in SV, but I don't think so.
What I do see is a lot of this kind of talk on the part of young professional mothers, and this makes me think it is a defense mechanism -- that the mothers actually would like to spend more time with their kids, maybe not breastfeed or maybe so, but in any case, the current proportion of career and motherhood is not fulfilling to them.
[Since I mentioned the office, I will add the standard disclaimer that this opinion is my own and not that of my employer's. I don't talk about this stuff at work.]
Desired is what we are talking about. It seems you would have women choose between their career and their child. Your attitude towards working mothers is an exemplification of the problem.
Mothers can do all of the things you have said... all of those things except continue their careers as other adults without society judging them for it.
Calls of "Or choose to do only mothering?" are the problem, not the solution.
You have no way of knowing that, and even if you did it's uninteresting to talk about because 'doing what you desire to do' is the universal struggle of humanity. Yawn.
> It seems you would have women choose between their career and their child.
I thought you were getting it and now I see the point has missed you completely. Listen carefully, this is important: women should be free to choose the proportions they desire, whether that's 90% work 10% mothering, 70/30, 50/50, 0/100, x/y. But they can't, because while you can be a 10% mother fairly successfully by using daycare and public school, you can't be a 20% "career woman". Your choices are either to be full-bore into your career at the expense of everything else, part-time somewhere in which case your paycheck doesn't cover daycare so why bother (oh and now you can't afford a house, sorry), or abandon your career aspirations altogether. Actually, some women manage to get pretty close to 90/90, but if you can show me someone who's done that for 18 years I'll be impressed, I can't find any. Having extended family around helps.
> Calls of "Or choose to do only mothering?" are the problem, not the solution.
Completely wrong, but you might have misunderstood what I said above which was that women should feel free to choose only mothering, if that's what they want to do. Surely advocating that women be able to do as they choose isn't the problem?
Note that this doesn't apply exclusively to women, men have the same battle but it's of course socially acceptable (expected) for men to sacrifice family for career, sorry champ, not gonna make it to the big game, daddy's got to bring home the bacon. We did it to ourselves, though. If you still don't get it reread my comment and substitute "women" with "everyone".
My wife and I (~30, educated professionals) have a 8-month old. My wife as zero interest in staying at home. But from the minute she got pregnant the pressure started. My mom and her mom (both of whom work/ed) suggested that may she should stay at home for a few years when the baby was young. She's constantly bombarded by parenting fads that tell her she's a bad mom if she doesn't breastfeed/wear her baby around in a sling/etc. Those fads are never very compatible with professional working life.
And the moment we start talking about married women, the wider discussion of the pay gap (assuming it is only due to working less) becomes less of an apples to apples comparison. Your spouse, at least by law, shares your income (as you do hers), and has alimony in the event of a divorce.
I don't know if you were thinking at all about the wider discussion (tangents are of course ok to have), but I thought I should just mention it since it didn't seem to have gotten much mention in this thread.
> Meanwhile, nobody has any expectations of me. Nobody wonders why I don't take a few years off to raise the kid. None of the parenting fads are aimed at me. Heck, my own mother gets nervous whenever I have responsibility for the kid.
I like how you say that nobody has any expectations of you, and then contradict yourself in the last sentence. Clearly your mother has the expectation that you will have less responsibility for your child than your spouse. That is still an expectation. And people in general are probably expecting that you won't take time off for work to look after your child. That kind of expectation a blessing for somebody, and a burden for others. Maybe you have less expectations in the sense that you aren't expected to do more paid labour than your wife, but I doubt it.
What is more controversial: a stay-at-home dad or a mother who works full time? In some ways the expectations put on women are more flexible, or shall I say optional, than the ones put on men.
Not anywhere on the east coast (all separate property states). In any case, that's besides the point. I'm as eligible for any property division in case of divorce as she is, but I don't get bombarded from all angles with pressure to be the one to downshift my career to stay at home.
> I like how you say that nobody has any expectations of you.
You're arguing semantics. I'm just saying they don't expect me to sacrifice my career to raise the kid.
> That kind of expectation a blessing for somebody, and a burden for others.
Perhaps, but one thing is much less fuzzy: the things that women are pressured to do are much less financially lucrative. And in a country where money is everything, that's a critically important distinction.
I would bet that ~100% of the women with small children who stay at home sometimes get inappropriate suggestions that they are choosing to waste their potential.
I would bet that ~100% of the women with small children who work full time sometimes get inappropriate suggestions that they are choosing to be an inferior mother.
Both sting. And there is no polite response.
FWIW, the biological mother as the default primary care giver for very small children seems to be a cultural universal. (That is not to suggest that the default should be assumed to be automatically superior.)
It's a default that made sense back when men had to go hunt an elk to feed the family.
There was some period of time when our daughter wanted her mother more than me, but at 8 months she seems neutral as between us. It helps that she's bottle fed and I do the night feedings, so we've bonded over that.
This is all something that makes much more sense in 2013 when I don't have to go elk hunting.
Interesting indeed, do you have any other source for it than the 3 year old report? Perhaps it was an artifact of the crisis... manufacturing imploded and with it men's jobs were hit the hardest.
"...he found that the cities where women earned more than men had at least one of three characteristics. Some, like New York City or Los Angeles, had primary local industries that were knowledge-based. Others were manufacturing towns whose industries had shrunk, especially smaller ones like Erie, Pa., or Terre Haute, Ind. Still others, like Miami or Monroe, La., had a majority minority population. (Hispanic and black women are twice as likely to graduate from college as their male peers.)"
A hypothesis: all three characteristics seem to rest on a skills difference. Many men prefer non- or semi-skilled jobs and would find limited employment in those situations.
For anyone reading along who is checking facts:
* The number from the "report" is actually 8%, not 10-20%.
* This is not a peer reviewed finding, it is a report by a company called Reach Advisors.
* The report, according to Time, says that in 147 of the 150 largest cities in the U.S the median income is 8% higher for women. That might mean that the differential is lower than 8% in those other 3 cities, or it might mean they filtered out 3 outlier cities, we don't know.
* That's 70 million people, about 22% of the population (I added up the numbers here: http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/uscities_100.html)
* Women age 20-30 comprise about a quarter of the working age women in this country (20-60) ballparked from here: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
* So when people say "young women in urban areas" we're talking about maybe 5-10% of women.
* And the numbers also only apply to childless women, but I have no way to find out what the child-having rates are amongst 20-something women in those cities. Looking at this map, I'd expect a strong majority of those women to be childless: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5419a5.htm Regardless, any effect of discrimination-based-on-pregnancy-history would be hidden in this population.
* The report in question does not appear to control for educational experience, jobs, etc. So for all we know there are simply more college-educated women in cities than college educated men.
8% is the average for the 147 cities studied. The number was 17% for New York ("But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively.")
> So when people say "young women in urban areas" we're talking about maybe 5-10% of women.
Right. I noted the qualifiers up front ("single, childless, under 30, in urban areas.") The intent was to look at a sub-set of the population where women do earn more and analyze the implications of the characteristics of the subset to the whole population. Specifically, young single women in cities out-earn men, but their earning power erodes as they get older. That's a very relevant and telling observation.
Not necessarily -- you're comparing two different generations. These young women may well continue to out-earn men as they get older.
Due to a larger ratio of white women : minority women compared to white men : minority women, it skews the "Women's earnings" up.
There are many reasons why various groups make 'more' or 'less' but it is kinda disingenuous what people try to 'prove' with this report.
In the midst of all that fact-checking and debunking, you throw out this wholly unsupported and claim with an invented number?
The hard data:
Employee Wages
F M
Has firstborn sons: +0.8% -0.5%
Has firstborn daughters: +1.1% +0.6%
I'd personally interpret this as men becoming more respectful of women when they witness their wives undergoing childbirth. However, the more drastic effect of child gender can be seen on male employee wages. I suppose the CEO might be channeling frustration in child-rearing a boy on his male employees.
More of a "My wife gave birth and that helped me gain respect/comprehension towards women" than a "I have a daughter and I'm realizing she'll grow up in biased world, time to fix that beside me".
Not that it is a better or worse conclusion, but quite different IMO.
It's things like this that made me wish that as a society, we were better at putting ourselves in the other persons shoes and having our viewpoint be based on something other than our thoughtless, engrained "morality".
Putting ourselves in the other persons shoes is the critical skill for creating a better society.
Too often we promote assholes at work, and ideologues to public office. Anyone that changes their mind due to facts is guilty of a "flip-flop".
We need to start promoting leaders that have a track record of empathy for people that are unlike them.
Talking to eg. abortion opponents, I usually get the impression that they have done a few thought experiments. They, if you'll allow the straw man, assume/imagine that faced with the same tough decision they would never themselves decide to eg. have an abortion. They're appalled that others (in practice) would choose to do what they (in principle) decide against or vice versa.
As you say, these principles are poor predictors of what people will choose to do in personal, life-or-death reality. Things like the fundamental attribution error make policies based on what-I-would-do-in-a-hypothetical-situation just as impractical as static, by-the-book morality. Perhaps there's a third option.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Verdiens...
No, this cannot be easily dismissed, yes they corrected for all the obvious stuff, no they don't have an agenda. This is a report by the official statistics bureau for Germany. Maybe the data for other countries is not as good, but why do so many people here immediately snap into backlash mode without considering the possibility that this could actually be an existing pay bias?
<sarcasm>
Because sexism and bigotry are properties of evil, despicable people, who aren't anything like us.
We're cool progressive techno-optimists. We're so smart we couldn't possibly be bigoted. We're the new establishment.
</sarcasm>
Among my colleagues, I'm that one guy who, in his private life, is friends with "regular" people, who chooses to live in a rural area and who speaks with his native hillbilly accent.
I'm aware that everybody has biases and preconceptions. I was taught to be aware of mine, which I think I am (and boy, they're something). But nonetheless, the dismissive tone of (some parts of) the conversation disappointed me and I think, given the standards to which HN holds itself, rightfully so.
Add to that the additional issues that women have due to the bodily changes they go through and you have a serious incentive to avoid hiring women. This is of course made worse by the implicit assumption that women usually do all the taking care of children, thus becoming even worse "performers" after having them.
On a side note: I was incredibly lucky to have a supportive employer that gave me the space necessary to take care of a child without getting completely derailed at work.
And please don't use the biology excuse. In Slovenia and Poland, the pay gap is much less than in Germany[1], probably due to a different child care culture.
The perverse thing about this is that many young women believe that their chances are the same as ours (you know, now that we have equal rights and everything). In reality, they are not treated as our equals.
On a side note: A woman gets paid less even if she will never have children. This is discrimination.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/gender-pay-gap/s...
If you think about "women having to take care of the children" you also probably think about them missing out on fulfilling fancy careers as journalists, advertisers, scientists and what not. The reality is that most women making that "sacrifice" of their career choose taking care of their children instead of working at the checkout of the supermarket or as a sales person in a fashion store.
Personally I can't think of that many professions that are really better than taking care of your own children. Not saying people shouldn't have free choice in that, but frankly I think women already do have that choice. If you are a female software developer, for example, people will be falling over themselves to hire you.
The whole "wage" comparison is just ideology anyway, they picked one arbitrary thing to measure which makes women look to be victims. If you measured "time spent with family" instead, you'd find a "time spent with family gap" for men - I think that's serious, given that many people work so they can afford to take holidays together with their families. And women are not the poorer for it, because they actually all earn exactly the same as their husbands, at least in Germany: income is split 50:50 between married partners. Curiously, that latter fact is also never mentioned in the wage gap articles.
As for your link, I briefly looked at it and immediately it is clear that they use the dishonest pay gap number. It is 22% in Germany only if you don't take into account different career choices. Within equal professions the pay gap is only 4 to 8% (even less in office jobs). Therefore I am sorry but I can't take that article seriously.
Another article was mentioned in this discussion which showed single childless mothers to earn more than their male counterparts in cities at least.
Edit: another thing, you are also a dad, so you probably witnessed pregnancy and birth. Do you really think it should be the normal thing for women to exclaim "OK, that's done, where is my job please? I want to get back to work" right afterwards? As I said, everybody should have free choice, but on average I think it would be weird to dismiss something you invested so much energy into (pregnancy/childbirth/breast feeding...). It's not that women shouldn't have a choice (as long as the kids are OK), but I am not surprised that many choose to spend as much time with their kids as possible.
Edit 2: Slovakia and Poland could have lots of reason for different wage gaps. Perhaps they are still on communist wage levels where everybody earns the same (next to nothing). Or career choices are not as diverse (ie most people could be peasants or whatever). Another fun part of wage comparisons: one person, like Bill Gates, can actually earn so much more than other persons that they skew the whole statistics (if you use averages). So perhaps there are simply some very rich men in Germany and not in Poland. Or whatver - it is all just guessing, just as you did. In any case, as I said, that article didn't use honest statistics anyway.
I have found on Reddit and here that the top comments are almost always against the original article if there is any way to view the conclusion differently.
I do not believe it is a systematic problem, it allows you to quickly get a hold of two conflicting viewpoints quickly.
I took the top comment to be "It is extremely difficult to mitigate factors when it comes to the gender gap, especially lost work time due to child care", he then quoted a study where a differential comparison saw at least one example of the opposite gender inequality.
Additionally the gender gap is rooted in cultural reasons, so comparing different countries is different. Specifically the existence of a certain gender gap in Germany does not mean such a gap exists in the US.
However, I'd like to point out that my criticism was not aimed at the top comment but at many of the comments here in "the middle". What shocked me was not so much that people hold a view opposed to mine, but the dismissive tone of some posts.
In the media I have seen worse offenses, for example the claim that female teachers earn less than male teachers, without mentioning that there are different kinds of schools (more women tend to work at elementary schools vs men working at high schools) - most teachers get a fixed salary determined by the government, so gender discrimination is next to impossible (there certainly is no government rule that female teachers earn less than male teachers). Or physicians, without mentioning that there are different branches of medicine and surgeons might have a harder job than pediatricians.
What strikes me is that none of those wage gap studies ever seems to question why the wage gap exists. For example they could ask employers or even the employees themselves. It seems they just want to prove discrimination and stop once they have favorable data.
But why not be careful in blindingly accepting it? Alot of it is based on questionable application of statistics. Why not let the data speak for itself rather than providing creative interpretations?
For example, the early talking points were based on taking an average without even matching by job type. Ofcourse the part-time nanny doesn't earn as much as an overtime coal miner. That doesn't show a wage-gap.
Fair enough; data set might be too small.
"while female CEOs would presumably already be attuned to possible gender wage inequity, consciously or not, by virtue of being women."
But this is not a reasonable conclusion. One hopes it's the reporter interpolating; otherwise the investigators have a rather rosy view of the world. Gender discrimination, to the extent it exists, seems to be rather strong in women as well.
They may be measuring a certain effect, but leaving out some interesting data.
Some evidence emerging that this isn't true: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130710182941.ht...
People that tend to have more female babies: nurses. People that tend to have more male babies: CEOs.
Could low testosterone (or low "fitness," per article) in a CEO cause him to have more daughters? Could it also cause relative pay for women to go up in their company? Why would that be?
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
As a father of three boys before I had my daughter, I really, truly desired to have a daughter in part to improve the "consciousness-raising" environment in my home both for myself and for my three boys. Perhaps I really have had a little bit of "male chauvinist pig" thinking on my own part counteracted by observing my daughter grow up at home. (My wife, on her part, grew up with four older brothers and only one (older) sister in her birth family, and she finds it very easy to take the male point of view.)
What exactly could be done about this from the public policy point of view? Family sizes are smaller than ever--which means that some CEOs have only daughters, and no sons, but other CEOs who have children have only sons, and will not go out of their way to have daughters just to balance their parenting experience. Other than differences in family structure, which thus far are usually haphazard more than planned, it's not completely clear what life experiences can be provided to the current generation of business leaders or the next generation of young people growing up to make sure that they have a balanced view (and what would that be?) about the roles of men and women in the society of the future.
One option could be to seek out education on the topic? I'm thinking of in-house seminars where speakers are invited to address the topic and provide coaching, particularly for executives. Of course, that assumes that the executives are interested and recognize the issue in the first place.
Usually that's HRs job. Sure budgets are set high-up, but I think it's ridiculous to say that CEOs have a big impact in salaries.
> The researchers also found that these effects were strongest at firms with 50 or fewer employees, which they attribute to the fact that CEOs at smaller firms are typically more directly involved in making decisions that affect the pay of individual workers than CEOs at much larger firms.
That is a fairly blanket statement that could use some backing up.
Or rather that the discrimination is cultural and leads to life choices that make the wage gap structural.
For example: We live in a culture that devalues young girls who excel in math, leading to lower achievement in this area[1]. By the time they go to college they choose differently than men and "work in different industries"
[1] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2096370?uid=3739856&ui... for one example
[1] http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2411/are-women-paid...
I'm assuming the study conductors were competent statisticians, so there's a real effect and it pretty-much has to be causality as indicated.
It would be interesting to see if the data holds elsewhere.
Is there any data on how CEOs and their partners share childcare responsibilities? I'd guess that most of the load is shouldered by their other half, given the kind of hours CEOs tend to work (especially in early stage companies).
---
In my experiences, I believe women are brought in under equal pay but in small teams and companies they are relied on to handle more responsibilities; perhaps even sometimes being considered "senior" when they aren't promoted to that level.
I can't think of a single person who would be dumb enough to consider someone's genitalia when determining pay rate.
For example, President Ford was probably the most athletic President in the 1900's (he played LB). He is "known" more as clumsy and un-athletic from a set of comedy sketches[1].
1) the real lesson is shoe choice is important as a politician
So really, it just shows what a terrible human being he is. He always played a position that was politically convenient... until it wasn't.
If women were 18% more effective then men, then this is a surefire way to get rich:
Step 1: Start a business and employ only women
Step 2: Crush your competitors by being 18% more efficient
Heck, even if you could find a way to cut costs by 1% in an industry, that's huge.
unless you paid them 18% less. in which case you'd be exploiting their situation.
Well, yes, but the point is, ethics aside, if it was as simple as just hiring from an entire subset of potential employees who are cheaper than others, why wouldn't you do it in order to have a more profitable business?
You wouldn't do it because it would be unethical. That's like saying "besides the fact that eating a cheese burger is terrible for you, why wouldn't you eat a cheese burger?"
Happy? Besides, you've made quite a baseless assertion when assuming that there exist employers willing to exploit the fact that women are paid 18% less.
Let's try again. The argument here is, basically: if it's true that men and women are interchangeable as resources of labor, then the wage gap can be seen as an opportunity for arbitrage. Any capitalist would just hire women (because the information the market has is based on the assumption that a woman can provide the same work as a man for a lesser cost), market forces would bring women's pay up, the wage gap would diminish until we reached an equilibrium.
The argument is far from perfect (it ignores social and cultural aspects), but it is pretty reasonable as a way to see that if there is a difference in pay, there is a difference in aggregate output. What are the causes of this difference in output is subject to another topic, one I can't say I have an explanation or consolidated opinion.
About the ethics of it: there is nothing unethical about choosing who to hire based on cost, if the quality of the final product is the same (and if the contracted parties are not doing anything unethical themselves). Let's remove the sex factor out of the equation... if a woman living in NY asks for $100k for some work, and another woman with "comparable education and experience" living in Poland asks for $30k, is it unethical to hire the Polish one?
It's a thought experiment that suggests that the wage gap doesn't exist.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/the-bigg...
http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-wage-gap/job-di...
It shows that men make more than women in 11/12 common professions and women make more than men in 0/12. Again, this is the opposite of the text of your link (and of your assertion).
Did I miss something?
Yes. The image doesn't show the opposite information as the text. As the text explains, the average of all men's wages increases more than the average of all women's wages. The average of all men and all women's wages is not how you show there is a wage gap. The average of all women work fewer hours than the average of all men, and have less experience.
The text of your link says that "the gender wage gap disappears for most positions". How is that not the opposite of the graph and the data?
For others who have made it this far down into the thread: the "study" that papsosouid linked to controls for years experience and also probably hours worked, but still concluded that there's a wage gap.
http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-wage-gap/women-...
>Also, men are more common the higher in company/corporate structures you go
They are also more common the lower you go. Men are more common at both extremes, and ignoring the bottom part is a really common fallacy used to push a particular agenda.
> People overwhelmingly believe the lie that women get paid less for the same work, that would be a wage gap. Policy decisions are made based on that lie. Politicians now repeat that lie. This is a problem, and needs to be addressed.
Wouldn't addressing the lie include an acknowledgement of wage disparity outside of 'different pay for the same work'? Often I see this issue framed in terms of comparable work and work loads due to the difference in types of jobs and representation in certain fields.
I find those to be in the minority myself. And those are of course never presented by feminist proponents of the wage gap myth, as those demonstrate that it is a myth.
>Wouldn't addressing the lie include an acknowledgement of wage disparity
It isn't wage disparity, that is the point. It is job disparity. If you want to make a case that women aren't able to get the jobs they want due to sexism, feel free to do so. But don't expect me to do it for you simply because you made a totally unrelated claim.
Those things should make you question why women not men are expected to take time out of their career to raise children, why women on average end up in lower paying jobs.
Ultimately the effect is gap in average income between men and women. So yes you sort of are splitting hairs, while ignoring real systemic issues that affect everyone, not just women.
No, those things should make the feminists spouting this nonsense ask those questions. Instead, the continue to spew deliberately misleading nonsense, knowing that people are sympathetic to "women get paid less for the same work", but are much less sympathetic to "women choose to work fewer hours".
Minorities also have an income gap and statistically speaking work fewer hours. Are you saying that's a choice too?
You seem to acknowledge that an income gap exists for women. You also asserted that it was because they choose to work less. I'd like to know if there's anything to back up your assertions other than your opinion.
Does you opinion hold for other groups that have an income gap and on average work less? If so can you see how that would be problematic?
A 'wage gap' implies getting paid less for the same job. No good. An 'income gap' implies someone earns less than someone else. That seems perfectly acceptable.
I switched to the term income gap because others were arguing about the gap in aggregate.
Does it not follow that men are equally impacted by the "wage gap".
And if so, how would that influence your usage of the term?
Where exactly is this misinformation being spewed, I can't seem to find it? What I can seem to find is plenty of sites calling the wage gap a myth, and in fact when you start typing "wage gap" in Google the first suggestion is "wage gap myth." So in fact it seems the exact opposite of what you say is true.
That's pretty much what is common understanding of the wage gap. If you understand by "wage gap" that less paid positions paid less, it's meaningless. If you understand by it that women more often work in positions that pay less, then it's not a wage gap - it is a position gap or promotion gap or whatever else gap. So calling it "wage gap" is misleading, as the wage is not the variable that changes between men and women - the position on which they get the wage is.
No it isn't. If that were the common understanding, then people would not say they are fighting for "equal pay for equal work". The very existence of the phrase "equal pay for equal work" demonstrates that people do believe (incorrectly) that women are paid less than men for the same work.
"Of the 534 occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earn more than men in exactly seven professions. Together, these seven occupations account for about 1.5 million working women, or about 3 percent of the full-time female labor force. The remaining 97 percent of full-time working women work in occupations where they earn less than their male counterparts."
Property, real estate, and community association managers. Women's earnings as a percentage of men's: 60.6%; percentage of women in the occupation: 57.4%
Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks. Women's earnings as a percentage of men's: 100.3%; percentage of women in the occupation: 87.0% (One of the seven occupations where women earn more than men.)
Occupation: Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks. Women's earnings as a percentage of men's: 100.3%; percentage of women in the occupation: 87.0%
If you're a woman that runs into this discrimination, your only choices are to lower your standards for a job, and accept one that is lower paying, or to not work at all. All of a sudden the argument that women doing the same job get the same pay seems rather weak, because it's far from clear that women have the same opportunity to get the same job in the first place. All of a sudden, the lower remuneration of women is once again caused by discrimination, just not salary discrimination.
All available evidence supports that notion. Women are more likely to value other things more than they value financial motives. I am also not suggesting that is the sole cause. Women work fewer hours on average, they avoid dangerous jobs, jobs with long and/or odd hours, and they are more likely to take time off which leads to them having on average less experience.
>If you're a woman that runs into this discrimination, your only choices are to lower your standards for a job, and accept one that is lower paying, or to not work at all.
Or to do the same thing the author did and put "Ms." on your resume if your name is ambiguous.
>because it's far from clear that women have the same opportunity to get the same job in the first place.
Hiring rates don't support your hypothesis.
Your citations for your assertions that feminists are liars and women like to be paid less are awfully thin.
I'd love to see what your female coworkers think of this post.
I doubt this. See the HN post from a few days ago ("I put Mr. on my CV and got a job"). It would seem that employers not only pay their females employees less, but have little faith in them to get the job done, thus they wouldn't hire them in the first place.
There really doesn't seem to be any alternative besides these three:
- Women are not underpaid or more efficient.
- There is not a noticeable number of unethical people seeking to get rich.
- People are getting rich by hiring lots of women and outcompeting everybody else who prefers men.
The last two don't look true to me, which suggests that the first one is true. I certainly could be wrong about the assumptions or conclusion, but it does suggest that.
But many of them did...
Which is exactly what happened over the past 30 or so years.
I'm not saying that this is the case, just pointing out that you missed options that would allow the hypothesised discrimination to exist.
Thus, we have two possibilities: either nobody in the world is both aware of the potential for arbitrage and unethical enough to exploit the situation, or the wage gap is smaller than these estimates suggest.
In fact, many new-economy juggernauts like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook do precisely this. Their employee marketing aggressively recruits women. Are they doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they see an economic opportunity? Ultimately it doesn't really matter - the effect is that more women get employed in positions of power. But it's quite possible that the economic arbitrage that people are pointing out is happening in practice, right now, you just don't hear about it because most arbitragers are not dumb enough to let you know what they're doing. And the effect, over a long time scale, is that businesses run by bigots are replaced by businesses with a more accurate perception of personal productivity, which leads to a more equitable world for everyone.
> “[Alan] Greenspan explains his gender bias with the free market pragmatism that has become has hallmark. “I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economist where cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: it gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women.”
However, the employer has greater leverage because he can report the illegal to USCIS, whereas the illegal worker presumably has a precarious financial and social situation in the country and has to "take what he can get". Hence, there's a downward pressure on wages.
There's no pure, efficient, "labor market" but instead lots of small, loosely connected "labor markets" with a variety of inefficiencies - lock-in, friction, imperfect information.
An employer can exploit illegal immigrant labor because it tends to be concentrated in lower-skilled, relatively interchangeable jobs, and because illegal immigrants are in a difficult spot.
1. You're attacking the top of the range. If you want to reason effectively, you can't give the side you agree with an advantage by picking the easiest opposing argument to knock down. You should be considering the bottom end of the estimate range.
2. You fail to account for Amdahl's law and assume that an X% improvement for one factor will lead to an X% improvement overall. In fact, this will only apply to skilled¹ labor wages of employees directly working for you. Yes, there are industries like advertising and software development where that is a huge chunk of total expenses, but they don't tend to be ones where wages are tightly calibrated.
3. You assume that the gender gap would have to be homogeneous. It is possible that in situations where skilled labor is a big enough chunk of expenses (see #2) to make this a strong strategy, the gender gap is much smaller.
4. Most people do not think they are sexist. They believe that they can look at resumes and evenly weigh different applicants without letting gender color their perceptions. Most of those people are wrong. But if you truly believe this about yourself, then the "hire only women" strategy is less optimal than the "hire the best candidates for the money" strategy. If you do think you are sexist, you can probably come up with a better strategy to counteract your bias than hiring only women.
4. You assume that markets are efficient. There are a number of practical factors getting in the way of this strategy being implemented. Take the intersection of people who believe there is a large enough gender gap to make this work and people who believe that they are too sexist to weigh applicants fairly. Intersect that with people who can't research effective ways to counteract gender bias. Intersect that with people who wouldn't have a problem exploiting the gender gap. Intersect that with people with the savvy necessary to start a successful business (I think we may be down to about twelve people). Intersect that with people with expertise in an industry where the strategy will work. Now take that tiny set of people and filter out the ones who just get unlucky. The remainder still have to manage to maintain the policy once the company grows to the point that they don't have total control over it.
¹ Unskilled labor gets outsourced, and in the Chinese manufacturing industry, the gender gap is exploited heavily.