patrick.net

If women actually did the same exact job for 20-25 cents an hour less, Men wouldn't be employed except as a last resort.

thunderlips11 says

20-25 cents

20-25 cents
1 cent

That's all it takes for the owner class and the penny pinchers.

The pay gap is a complete and total myth. That - and the female orgasm. As Al Franken once famously said (I'm paraphrasing here)

"I'm here to discuss the myth of the female orgasm. How do I know it's a myth? Because I've slept with hundreds of women and not one of them every had an orgasm."

You can use useless statistics to prove or disprove any point. It doesn't make it so.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the gender pay gap is widely exaggerated, but not zero. Employers will get away with paying people as little as possible. In the article that Dan cites, there were several things that indicated that women are not motivated as much by money as men. For example, female run businesses made less money and women chose sub-specialties that didn't pay as high. They also don't work as many hours. All of these were used in the article as arguments that women are not as motivated by money. If that is the case, they also probably don't fight as hard for pay raises. Why would we think that employers would not try to take advantage of this when they do get a hard working woman on board. Small businesses also worry about how committed women will be when they start to have a family. So, these businesses might not be as willing to invest in those women. I've seen both of these things happen second hand.

I think that the best way to tackle the issue is to study it, publicize it, and encourage women to demand high pay and shop around for a better job if their employer doesn't offer a competitive salary. If a simple solution is at hand, more complicated bureaucratic ones are probably a hindrance. The market should be able to solve this issue.

Men are simply more aggressive than women about moving up. Probably just testosterone, and pressure from wives, lol!

resistance says

Men are simply more aggressive than women about moving up. Probably just testosterone, and pressure from wives, lol!

You probably mean, wives are more aggressive about their husbands working more and harder than the wives are working. That's what is really going on. It is the usual: Women complaining loudly that that they are not treated equally, while in reality it is them, the women, that ALWAYS demand that men must be better than they are. Otherwise the men are deemed not good enough.

YesYNot says

In the article that Dan cites, there were several things that indicated that women are not motivated as much by money as men.

That is an odd way of describing women. They are VERY motivated by money and wealth. Men's money and wealth, that is.

Jane Austen was great at propaganda.

YesYNot says

Employers will get away with paying people as little as possible. In the article that Dan cites, there were several things that indicated that women are not motivated as much by money as men. For example, female run businesses made less money and women chose sub-specialties that didn't pay as high.

That's a good reason to be very upset with women. If women are not negotiating their pay, then they are hurting everybody's pay by lowering the market rate. That's bad for all workers and for the economy as a whole as it generates a race to the bottom.

resistance says

Men are simply more aggressive than women about moving up. Probably just testosterone, and pressure from wives, lol!

For women, a career is a choice and often done for "self-fulfillment". For men, a career is a necessity.

How many men would marry a woman with zero job prospects and who is not employable, but is a good mate in all other aspects? About 100%.

How many women would marry a man with zero job prospects and who is not employable, but is a good mate in all other aspects? About 0%.

There's your motivation right there.

Dan8267 says

That's a good reason to be very upset with women. If women are not negotiating their pay, then they are hurting everybody's pay by lowering the market rate. That's bad for all workers and for the economy as a whole as it generates a race to the bottom.

While I don't see the point in focusing on blame, we probably agree on the solution that I proposed - at least the part about encouraging women to negotiate, demand a good salary, and be prepared to go elsewhere.

I work with very low income people - and the pay gap is very noticeable in the lower-income bracket scenario. It isn't uncommon for a man to make over a dollar more an hour in this income bracket, men seem to work their way up faster. My daughter was an assistant manager of a local liquor store and her male counterparts made $15/hr to her $12.50 to start. One of the men had no experience, but they had a baby and their supervisor gave him preferential treatment - even told my daughter that she should get married if she needed more money.

Many professional jobs don't have quite the gender pay gap, but non-professional jobs certainly do.

And rightfully so. Many employers will let a single mother get more time off and expect less physical activity than a single father in the exact same economic and employment circumstances.

Also, the death and injury rate for Males on the job is multiple times that of Females. So they are getting a risk premium.

The dirty, dangerous jobs in this country : Coal Miner, Taxi Driver, Oil Roustabout, Sewer Worker, etc. are overwhelmingly male.

Women also enjoy:
* Longer lifespans
* Longer and healthier retirements
* More Social Security Benefits
* Women in their 20s outearn males
* The lion's share of custody and child support - the latter has no tracking mechanism to insure it is spent on the child with any surplus amount rebated or put in a savings account for the Child.

* The lions share of Section 8 and TANF and government assistance.

Dan8267 says

The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth

I pretty much agree with this. OR at least that it's greatly exaggerated.

As for this ?

Dan8267 says

How many men would marry a woman with zero job prospects and who is not employable, but is a good mate in all other aspects? About 100%.

Hell no. Women aren't the only ones that take economics in to consideration. There are plenty of men that would prefer (or even require) to be with a woman that makes a good income. And not just for the obvious economic benefits. It makes them more like equals in the relationship, and makes what she is in it for different, than the stay at home housewife. And it means she likely has an interesting life, with interesting challenges, outside of being your husband.

Also, one of the things you aren't taking in to account is how high the cost of living is in some urban areas. Way higher than where you are in Florida. Realistically it takes two incomes these days to have a decent home and family, even if you aren't in an expensive urban area.

I've heard a guy say, "I'm not gonna think about getting married (again) to a woman that doesn't make as much or more than I do. " This is not unusual at all.

elliemae says

My daughter was an assistant manager of a local liquor store and her male counterparts made $15/hr to her $12.50 to start

Did she negotiate. When I started consulting, I didn't know head or tails and took what was offered. it took me a while , a few gigs before I figured it out, the market, demand, my skills and what I brought to the table, conenctions etc, before I got what I wanted. I am not a woman-just saying.

Hey folks - when encountering this PRATT, here is a helpful 15 second film.
www.youtube.com/embed/wjWBXbGVyQU

Really Cool Chick, by the way.

elliemae says

I work with very low income people - and the pay gap is very noticeable in the lower-income bracket scenario. It isn't uncommon for a man to make over a dollar more an hour in this income bracket, men seem to work their way up faster. My daughter was an assistant manager of a local liquor store and her male counterparts made $15/hr to her $12.50 to start.

I'll tell you a story. When I was 12 years old, I managed to get a much coveted job as a stock boy at a local grocery store. The job started out at 50 cents per hour. It slowly increased over the next five years to something like $1.50 an hour. That year, the store owner hired a classmate of mine, a very pretty young girl, as a cashier. She got paid $2/hr right off the bat. After a while I was asked also to be a cashier, on Saturdays, that being the main shopping day, and I got paid the same wage, increasing to about $3 after a while, whether I was doing stock/warehouse work or doing cashiering. This was in the 1970s, I guess inflation was high. But the point remains that a young woman would automatically get paid more than me, and she had zero experience. I did not think much about it at the time, but in retrospect it was illustrative.

In case anyone wonders, this was in a different country, one that had no minimum wage requirement.

PS: Need I mention that being a stock boy was much more demanding, physically, and also much more dangerous than tapping on a cash register. I did both so I should know.

marcus says

There are plenty of men that would prefer (or even require) to be with a woman that makes a good income.

No man is going to turn down Scarlett Johansson because she doesn't want a job.

Sorry baby, you don't have a job. So I'll go with this.

Not happening.

Here's the thing about wage comparisons. No one EVER shows any data. It would be trivial to post the data in a zip file of CVS files. The data could even be anonymized. Do that and I can write the SQL queries that will tell you exactly which companies and jobs, if any, are discriminating against who and by how much. Showing the data would not only prove the problem, it would also quantify the problem and reveal the solutions to the problem. There is no downside to showing the data, so the fact that it is impossible to get the data that allegedly caused various organizations to claim a wage gap is a huge red flag.

I have no problem fixing a wage gap if one exists, but the only way to fix the wage gap is with the same damn data that would show the wage gap. And clearly nobody has such data or it would have been published by now.

Everything is subject to the scientific method. If you come to my office proposing a theory, you better have some data or you're wasting my time. Conjectures without evidence are worthless. It's not a really high bar to demand the data.

thunderlips11 says

If women actually did the same exact job for 20-25 cents an hour less, Men wouldn't be employed except as a last resort.

Following that logic, companies would hire children instead of adults if it were legal because they could pay children less. But you never hear of that -- oh wait, the entire 19th century. Damn you historical facts!

thunderlips11 says

If women actually did the same exact job for 20-25 cents an hour less, Men wouldn't be employed except as a last resort.

Well child labor is illegal today and you can't get away with it inside the U.S. In other countries we often hear of child labor even when its illegal.

In the U.S., companies hire illegal aliens, both male and female, because they can pay them less since they have no bargaining power and are under constant fear or deportation.

H1B visas and outsourcing also demonstrate this principle. Every company will gladly hire a male or female H1B visa instead of a male or female domestic worker because it's cheaper. If they can outsource and get it even cheaper than that, they do. There's way too much money on the line for even a 5% difference, nonetheless the 25-40% difference often quoted. You see this principle at work every day in IT. Somehow I doubt that the executives in other industries are any less greedy.

YesYNot says

http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/oct/30/women-pay-get-thin-study

And no, it has nothing to do with a woman’s likely level of education. “I controlled for education in my study,” says Shinall. “What is going on is being driven by the employer side of the equation; by employer preferences.”

Does Shinall control for all lurking variables including discipline and determination? If so, how? A correlation is not a causality.

Dan8267 says

Does Shinall control for all lurking variables including discipline and determination?

I have no idea how accurate this particular piece of science was, but the general trend has been reproduced in many studies. I seem to read headlines to this effect every year or two.

Dan8267 says

A correlation is not a causality.

That is obviously true, and it is very hard to get irrefutable proof from observational data. If there have been other methods to test this, I'd be interested to see them.

However, the mechanism that would allow biases to produce imperfect hiring choices is clear. The biases of a companies clients could produce real benefits to hiring fit and good looking people, particularly men. That seems like a perfectly good mechanism to create pay disparities - in other words, market inefficiencies.

YesYNot says

That is obviously true, and it is very hard to get irrefutable proof from observational data.

The way to prove something is to find the reason. If using statistics, that means you have to eliminate all lurking variables. And if you have a peer-review study, then the data should be public record even if its anonymized.

I want to see the data because as someone who knows how to data mine, I know that you can also fake summaries to say whatever you want to say by introducing subtle mistakes into the query. There is no evidence without transparency. And no evidence means no confidence.

justme says

The job started out at 50 cents per hour.

How old are you? Minimum wage was like $.75/hour in 1950. If you were old enough to work when it was legal to pay a person $.50/hour that would make you like 82 years old.

http://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/chart1

Minimum wage in 1968 was the equivalent of $10.34/hour in 2012 dollars. We've come down so far so fast. Sex discrimination is a distraction. Minimum wage for everyone is worth significantly less now than it was almost 50 years ago. We should focus more on that little factoid.

turtledove says

justme says

The job started out at 50 cents per hour.

How old are you? Minimum wage was like $.75/hour in 1950.

He said he was 12 when he got that job for 50 cents/hr. I don't think the minimum wage rules even apply below age 16. Certainly not at 12. He was making $3 a few years later, so it was probably the 70s.

turtledove says

justme says

The job started out at 50 cents per hour.

How old are you? Minimum wage was like $.75/hour in 1950. If you were old enough to work when it was legal to pay a person $.50/hour that would make you like 82 years old.

You must have missed the part where I wrote this was not in the US and sometime in the 1970s. But when this happened was not the point. The point was that an attractive young female just cruised in and got a cushy job that paid more than my gruntwork, and this was after I had been there for 5 years already.

Dan8267 says

If using statistics, that means you have to eliminate all lurking variables. And if you have a peer-review study, then the data should be public record even if its anonymized

Effectively eliminating all lurking variables is the hard part, especially when those variables are not in the original data. Also, teasing out what the appropriate relationship is can also be difficult. It is not always linear within a variable and there may be covariance between the independent variables. The news piece you focused on was for a paper that is under review at the moment I think. The other news item I linked to had the original article cited, which you can find here:

http://www.timothy-judge.com/Judge%20and%20Cable%20(JAP%202010).pdf

There was another study I read a synopsis of yesterday that looked at the difference between siblings of different weights as a means of removing variables. Anyway, it's a complicated subject. If you think you can do a much better job at the analysis, I think some of the data sources are publicly available.