I don't think anyone could ask for a better example of systemic entrenched sexist bias than this quote. "It's okay, don't worry about it; they just don't want to be promoted as much as us men."
This is not that much different from the old "women enjoy being in their husband's kitchen and tending to the house, so it's okay most women are there instead of working independently!" Evidence clearly exists that lot of women used to enjoy being in the kitchen, but that doesn't mean women are less suited to work outside the kitchen -- to make an extreme example.
Did you read the source? I was not being sexist, I was stating a factual finding from a peer-reviewed journal... I believe you misinterpreted my statement.
> Evidence clearly exists that lot of women used to enjoy being in the kitchen, but that doesn't mean women are less suited to work outside the kitchen -- to make an extreme example.
Yes, and this is my point! If you read the article I sourced, it said that women found "high-level positions as equally attainable as men do, but less desirable". Evidence clearly exists that a lot of women want to prioritize non-work related factors in their life, which is why you see less women in higher-level positions currently, but that doesn't mean women are less suited to high-level positions.
I don't think "they just don't want the jobs" should be considered the end of the story or any sort of proof that sexism isn't happening. Regardless, even if it were, it isn't actionable information in any way. You can't go from "some women just don't want to be CEOs" to "thus, let's continue to operate the ol' boys club". Somewhere in the middle, a message or two are getting lost.
You'd really have to be living under a rock to think there is not sexism going in the workplace. All this study says is that it doesn't manifest in the particular, limited region surrounding compensation, which is by far not the sum total of the employment experience.
Sure, perhaps. While we are throwing out guesses, perhaps it is because women consider other things in life more of a priority than achieving career power.
When asked to rate their life priorities, women tend to put a lower ratio of work related goals. Cultural influences teach men and women to prioritize different things in their life. That's probably a bigger gender problem worth tackling.
> I don't think "they just don't want the jobs" should be considered the end of the story or any sort of proof that sexism isn't happening.
Definitely, which is why I said "I'm not going to argue that this accounts for it entirely".
> All this study says is that it doesn't manifest in the particular, limited region surrounding compensation, which is by far not the sum total of the employment experience.
Also true for sure, but the original article posted by OP is about compensation, and I never suggested that the study covered the totality of workplace experiences.
Invoking discrimination as the first explanation for any discrepancies is a way to debase the concept of discrimination.
Proper studies of this sort try to isolate variables by, for instance, submitting identical resumes except for the gender.
And yes, there are differences. We could blame it on women for consistently valuating social status higher than pay, or we could blame men for consistently valuating pay higher than social status.
Here is an idea. Lets increase pay for female dominated professions, but lets restrict it to only jobs that has low social status, is risky, and with unfriendly environment. At the same time, lets apply affirmative action to female dominated professions with high social status and low pay, and get a minimum of 40% males.
Those changes would have a almost guarantied effect to eliminate current pay gaps, but would be completely rejected by any feminist group, for the very reason that it would go against the current female and male culture that created the pay gap.
From the abstract: "In studies 5–7, when faced with the possibility of receiving a promotion at their current place of employment or obtaining a high-power position after graduating from college, women and men anticipated similar levels of positive outcomes (e.g., prestige and money), but women anticipated more negative outcomes (e.g., conflict and tradeoffs)."
"In studies 1 and 2, when asked to list their core goals in life, women listed more life goals overall than men, and a smaller proportion of their goals related to achieving power at work."
Some well-intentioned parent is probably telling their daughter right now, "Look at field X, which is male-dominated and pays really well! You should study that." And by the time they've grown up to be of working age, the field is at 60F/40M, and the pay has gone way down.
Ie you don't pay someone the same amount while stifling them during promotion time.
(not affiliated with them. Just a listener)
They go into exactly the point you make and talk about how gender gap still does exists (although no so extreme).
8% is still a lot.
I'd like for companies to just show the data.
Agreed. If anyone in government was serious about this, they would lobby the SEC to require publicly listed companies to disclose this information on a granular enough level that comparisons inside and outside of industry were possible.
Why should SEC be involved in feminist causes? Their charter mentions nothing about it. I mean we can't go around demanding government to promote our pet causes because we feel like it.
I'm short and I wish there was no height discrimination. But I don't think SEC should deal with it :)
If this is something you feel strongly about, shouldn't this be dealt with by the legislature?
- It makes zero sense.
EDIT: What I meant to say is men go into different careers than woman and for different reasons. Usually men go after higher paying jobs (investment banking). When people compute the pay gap they dont take this into account, so they compare pay across industries (investment banking to nursing) which is meaningless, and likely is propaganda.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-...
How will the employer react to the sudden surge in applications?
Other fields mentioned either require longer hours or were simply more demanding. We can get into what are reasonable hours or demands in a separate conversation but all things equal, employers are going to pay more for someone who works longer and puts up with more demands.
For everything else, when you introduce half the working population to a field that they were once closed off to, wages are going to drop. I am not pretending that it's the only factor but a huge over supply of labor will cause wages to drop; all things equal.
Whether the preference for fewer hours is innate or learned I don't know.
see: "The problem with controlling for 'all other factors' when looking at pay discrimination" (https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/49k23i/the_pr...)
However, the problem with the 77 cent figure is that it's frequently stated like this: "women get paid only 77% of what men do for the same jobs." Which is entirely false. Yet, if you asked most people about the 77 cents figure they'd think it actually meant women got paid much less to do the same work.
If a conversation begins with a lie, it's going to be tough to address a systematic issue and to work together. Distorting the facts is manipulative and prevents rational discourse.
For example, I've seen people cite the White House page as "fallen to the delusion", when in fact it is quite explicit:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/equal-pay
> In 2014, the typical woman working full-time all year in the United States earned only 79 percent of what the typical man earned working full-time all year. Phrased differently, she earned 79 cents for every dollar that he earned. The pay gap is even greater for African-American and Latina women, with African-American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white non-Hispanic man. Decades of research shows that no matter how you evaluate the data, there remains a pay gap — even after factoring in the kind of work people do, or qualifications such as education and experience — and there is good evidence that discrimination contributes to the persistent pay disparity between men and women. In other words, pay discrimination is a real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange American women and their families.
There is absolutely no lie or imprecision there. It is a common rhetorical trick to tar your entire opposition as idiots. The people claiming that the pay gap is a "myth" are just as just as zealot-like as the people misinterpreting the 77c figure.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that women as a whole get paid less than men and that minority women even more so. What I have an issue with is that by being purposefully vague, proponents are acting like employers somehow just hate women so much that they become blinded by this hatred and throw all business-sense out the window by deciding to pay men a load more than women. It's completely dishonest, proposed "solutions" only serve as a band-aid fix, and distracts from the actual issues at hand.
The "same job" is a subjective distinction, so you can't say it's entirely false; it's really a matter of opinion.
No, it's not. Certainly there are some distinctions at the margins, as you note.
There are, however, some very clear distinctions. Women dominate elementary education, which I hope we can all agree is a very different job than programming (for example).
To reiterate, I don't know whether these preferences are innate or learned. In fact, I suspect it's the latter. But we shouldn't ignore them_if women were in fact paid less for doing the exact same jobs, solution would actually be a lot easier.
> Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.
The 77 cent thing is a myth and the 92cent thing isn't even that massive a gap.
I have a hypothesis: if you could measure the confidence of both men and women and relate them to job type and income, I bet you'd have a stronger coloration than gender.
It's pretty difficult to test because things like confidence are subjective. There's an article in Salon called "The Confidence Gap" that shows women often don't ask for higher paying positions because they lack confidence in their abilities.
I'm under the impression that the 77c figure is related to this "total" disparity, that better accounts for the separate, but related, issue of "predominantly female" fields paying less than male ones.
One is that "to the point of vanishing" is still very nonzero. There's a report by Consad Corporation prepared for the Department of Labor that reaches the figure 5-7% after accounting for differences in jobs (their website is down at the moment), even though it concludes that "there may be nothing to correct." That's also the number Sommers herself writes in her HuffPo article she cites in that Time article: "After controlling for several relevant factors (though some were left out, as we shall see), they found that the wage gap narrowed to only 6.6 cents." So the Cornell claim of 8% is basically the same. I don't think there's an argument to be made that a 23% gender pay gap is a scandal but a 5-8% gap is totally fine.
The other is that occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked is affected by existing wages. I was unemployed by choice for several months last year, learning Rust and working on a few open-source projects, and I became a more valuable job candidate as a result of that. I could not have done that without the savings to take those months off. If my previous job had paid me anywhere from 8% to 23% less, I would probably not have decided to take those months off, and in return I would have been a less competitive candidate and my job would probably have been one of lower position.
This is not supported by the evidence. See, for example, this article by Christina Hoff Sommers (http://time.com/3222543/5-feminist-myths-that-will-not-die/):
"No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing."