Millennial women have seriously narrowed the wage gap with men | Hacker News Reader

Millennial women have seriously narrowed the wage gap with men

theweek.com

38 pointsjoelle48 comments

One obvious reason is that Millennial women (especially professionals) have not had babies yet.

The effect of taking time of work for children is not immediate, it creates a pay gap for the rest of somebody's career.

If we imagine somebody's pay over their career as an upward sloping line eg.

year 1 40k

year 2 42k

year 3 44k

etc...

When a woman takes 6-24 months of work to have a kid or two then that pauses their pay increases for that time and they are 1-4k worse off than somebody who didn't take time off at all when they get back. Add to that that women do more of the school runs and other caring when they DO return to work...

Who really sticks to a linear pay schedule like that their entire career though? Honestly you would have be rather unmotivated.

> Who really sticks to a linear pay schedule like that their entire career though?

People with passions that don't pay well (or at all), so they keep a steady job and pursue said passion outside of work.

If your passions don't pay well, you're probably not making something people want.

This is possibly the most misguided comment I've read on HN.

What are some passions that people have, which other people greatly desire, that are not paid well? I am genuinely curious.

If nothing else, he kind of slipped in the 'people desire'. Why is that a requirement for a passion? As in, why is the requirement that one should be making it for other people? E.g. what if you are really into scuba diving?

Because that is the premise in pdog's comment which you were refuting as misguided.

You are free to do whatever you want (and not what other people desire) if you are self sufficient enough to not need anything from others (highly unlikely).

So if I like to go scuba diving, which doesn't pay me well at all, I must therefore not be making something people want?

Probably not while you are scuba diving. Unless you are an instructor and someone wants lessons from you.

Music. You can have hundreds of thousands of fans and still not be able to quit your day job.

What is a fan? Someone who gave your music a thumbs up? Or something willing to pay for the music you produced because they desire it so much? I have a feeling if you have hundreds of thousands of the latter you'd be in good shape.

Academia/research. I was making more than some of my world class professors a few years into my career, where I was using research they developed and improved upon.

A thousand times this. Markets automatically value knowledge and discoveries at nothing because you typically have to possess knowledge (sometimes for 100 years) before you can estimate its value. If the development of a new industry goes through stages "A B C D ... X Y Z," where A-M are academic discoveries, the market awards 100% of the profit to N-Z and maybe a percent or two to M if they got lucky with patents, even though A-M required significant capital expenditure to carry out.

Everything we care about has been touched by uncompensated academics in some way (uncompensated = rewarded with <1% of the produced value for the purposes of argument). Much of the Nitrogen in your body comes from the Haber process. The air you breathe has benefited from emission reduction chemistry figured out by academics. The basis for the chemistry that produced the plastics around you was all figured out by academics (albeit tested, refined, and implemented by better paid engineers). Academic physicists made semiconductor models that formed the basis of simulations that made the industry practical. If you're not on Windows, academics wrote a healthy chunk of the OS on your computer. Physicists figured out the details of nuclear energy (in the US, 20% of the energy you are using right now) and built models that are used to a significant degree in the engineering of all of the others. Scientists are going to be responsible for pulling our collective asses out of the fire wrt global warming. The more I write the more I realize (and hopefully you realize) just how silly this train of thought is. As for mathematics, where would engineers be without linear algebra or calculus? How much less efficient would industry be without linear programming (programming = schedule making in this context)? It's impossible to even formulate these thoughts correctly because everything is interrelated.

I challenge you (great?-grandparent libertarian) to find an industry that does not inextricably depend upon some kind of model or fact produced by uncompensated academics (as defined above -- use any threshold for value capture you deem appropriate).

Whatever the market rewards people for, it is not value creation. It is value creation multiplied by a long list of factors which often go to 0 for arbitrary reasons (your customers are too poor, your product is not excludable, etc.)

---------

Fortunately, people are not rational actors wrt accumulating money. Here's what future career paths very roughly look like for new grads (based on my own perceptions, not glassdoor):

Helping the poor: $0 (maybe $12k if you count a fellowship)

Trying to Cure Cancer: $25k/yr, bump to $40k after 6 years

Engineering Medical Devices, Airplanes, etc: $60k/yr

Trying to Build the Next Twitter: $100k/yr-$150k/yr

Helping Rich People Game the System to Get Richer: $150k/yr, $300k/yr after a few years if successful

What disturbs me is that if I were to prioritize this list based on benefit to humanity, it would take the exact opposite ordering. There was <1% chance of that happening randomly.

I can't tell how serious the question is, but: how about anything that serves the poor, such as providing warm clothing for the homeless in the winter? Providing dental care for drug addicts?

Commercial pilot.

Pays well once you've invested your life in it. Starting out, though, you're looking at $50k+ to get the required ratings, while being paid $25k/yr to start.

That is simply because no one desires an inexperienced pilot (ATP requires 1500 hours). I went to Embry Riddle and many of my friends are pilots. I understand how rough it is.

Caring for family.

The linear pay schedule is just an example. The point is that whatever pay schedule you happen to be on, you have to put it on hold to take care of a newborn child, so you will fall behind what you could have had. In economic terms, the opportunity cost of having a child is compounded over the rest of your wage-earning career.

Yea, that's the major factor. Staying home to take care of babies not only holds up your pay scale, but takes you off the track for more competitive positions very quickly. Women find it very difficult to jump back in on their previous career trajectory when they do return. It's to be avoided at all costs if you're an ambitious women.

Ideally, people having kids wouldn't cause the wage gap to grow. But the push for women to downshift is really brutal, and most of it comes from other women (mother in laws and sanctimommies).

Ideally, people having kids wouldn't cause the wage gap to grow. But the push for women to downshift is really brutal

I'm not particularly inclined to believe that neglecting your kids for the sake of your career is the answer.

You can tell the same thing to the fathers, then.

I'm with you there. Although it does play out a tad differently, considering only one parent actually carries the child.

Do you have children? The relationship between a mother and young child is different than that of the child's relationship with their father.

People have their priorities, but what's often missing from modern parenting is any semblance of cost benefit analysis. A key example is breastfeeding. The long-term medical benefits of breastfeeding, unless you're in the third world and lack access to clean water, are quite tenuous. But the practical benefit of bottle feeding is real: feeding can be totally delegated to the father. For my wife and I, this has been a huge boon to equitable division of child care between the two of us. I'm the nighttime parent, the "I'm hungry" parent, the "I need comfort" parent. My wife is the "roughhouse with the kid after work" parent. If I were totally dependent on my wife to pump, and if she had breastfed, I doubt I could have established that told with our daughter. Yet, my wife gets a lot of snide comments from other women in her mommy circles who have their kid strapped to themselves 24/7.

Women are pressured with these parenting fads, but taking them on basically concedes to taking on the role of primary caregiver.

Wage gap, not total pay gap. The article is talking about what women make per hour versus men. This means that a woman starting off in her 20s, without a child, would (on average) earn 93 cents for every dollar a man makes.

I'm not sure how you're disagreeing with the post you replied to.

All they did was divide earnings for the year over hours supposedly worked. So yes, it is a pay gap.

True - but that doesn't take into account that the starting line is not the same... But it's getting closer.

Remember this next time you hear the "77 cents to the dollar" lament by young feminists in college with a degree in "women's studies". They are not likely to be disadvantaged, just more likely than men to want to have babies and/or a more flexible job when they turn 30+.

Also, interestingly enough, white women have been typically been better off than black or Hispanic men as regards wage gap with respect to white men (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882775.html) -- something that is often conveniently swept under the carpet by white feminists.

Most feminists I know don't hesitate to mention the wage gap between white people and black / hispanic people.

Guess it's a matter of personal experience then (Note that I intended to refer to young feminists in college in the second paragraph as well).

Most of the ones I know tend to be from a pretty decent-earning group themselves (white, upper middle class, college-educated) and almost never mention the race-based earning gap, but constantly mention the gender-based one.

It sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder.

So what if he does?

It's a classic feminist shaming tactic to try to make men look "angry" when they dare disagree. How about we don't do that and debate actual points like adults? You know, instead of the "tone" of things.

Check out the absolute pay numbers in the Pew Research article: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/on-pay-gap-millenn...

While women's wages have dropped slightly in recent years, men's wages have dropped much more. The OP article is misleading, or uninteresting at best -- both men and women are worse off in terms of wages.

I think the OP relies on the notion that the overall drop affected people equally independent of gender.

The question remains: are men uniquely worse off?

I don't think there's any question about that, actually. Women tend to cluster in government, academia, and health care, which have been the most resilient sectors in this recession.

Well, I came to this article half expecting to read that the pay gap had narrowed because both sexes were equally unemployed, and I guess I wasn't too far off.

The employment picture for millennials is supposedly bleak, from what I've heard. If a lot of men in this age bracket are now taking sub-optimal jobs as an alternative to being completely unemployed, that could also explain a narrowing in the gap. There's a lot more wage parity in hourly service-sector jobs.

Other than the note that has already been made about the difference in the age women first have children, I don't think this is a huge surprise to most "millennials." In most circles, as well as in most pop culture, an ideal expectation of equality is the well-accepted default.

Now an expectation of equality and the practice thereof are two very different things, but it seems like we're making progress, and I can only hope we continue to do so.

How much of this is that most millennial women have not yet had children (and have not temporarily or permanently exited the workforce)?

not sure how you would compute a pay gap between those who are working and those who have exited the work force. Isn't it like dividing by NULL?

Woman A works January 1 to March 31, has baby, quits work. On her $100,000 salary, she only makes 3 months' worth, meaning she _earned_ ~$25k, while her male counterpart makes $100k.

Woman B works January 1 to March 31, has baby, takes 6 weeks off paid, and another 8 weeks off unpaid, makes only $84k while her male counterpart makes $100k.

This article has some possible explanations: http://theweek.com/article/index/249955/why-is-the-gender-wa...

Great, so it's time to get rid of affirmative action, right?

Does not compute. Millennial "women" are 12 or 13.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

"There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends. Commentators use beginning birth years from the early 1980s to the early 2000s"

Millenials are basically those 30 years old and under at the moment.

That makes no sense at all. Generation X/Y/Z, sure (except does it roll over after Z and would that be AA or just A?). But millennial? The name implies turn-of-the-millennium, not before as that would be a premillennial. Back in the day, there were reports of people trying to plan a "millennium baby" to be born in the first week of the year 2000 so it would make sense to call them millennials as they're not exactly babies any more.

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