Are they?
From what I have seen the consensus is:
An overall small 3-6% wage gap after accounting for basic life choices.
Women under 30 + childless women significantly out-earning women with children + older women.
Women under 30 + childless women have almost no wage gap and in many industries are out-earning their male peers.
Life is rough for the bottom 50% of earners - male and female.
What exactly do you think the stats show?
> and the jobs that are heavily weighted towards women do not pay nearly as much.
Why are you talking about women like they are objects without agency?
My friends in game design work harder than I do and earn half what I earn.
They made a trade-off and work in a more interesting and rewarding job that pays less.
They certainly aren't oppressed and discriminated against.
Now this isn't really true at the bottom end of the scale. But it is for the middle class and up.
I do consider 3-6% damning.
If you only compare women to other women, of course you won't see a wage gap; you can blame it all on the individual.
It's this willingness to value personal views of the world to minimize the facts that allows the gap to continue. Do you really think you can reason about systemic discrimination by looking at the individual? That's as ineffable as wondering why some people win the lotto; individuals are dominated by noise, and you only see the disparity in aggregate.
Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
You do realise the gap is just the "unexplained by standard corrections" and not "% due to sexism" right?
> Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
I care that you are using misleading statistics to push an agenda.
At no point did I state I thought the wage gap is entirely due to sexism. although, I do argue it is evident sexism; I believe that still requires argument on your part that it's clearly not.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with different life choices leading to different outcomes, since the same is true within genders! That is, there's nothing sexist about that fact.
The truth is the people advocating for equalizing pay when the sexes make different choices are arguing for sexism, not against sexism.
If it's not baseless, presumably you have something to offer.
However, without evidence, you are most likely wrong. Does that wrongness amount to sexism? Hard to say; my inclination says yes since you're referring to shuffling hundreds of dimensions defining employment into "life choices". Yes, that is probably a factor; culture is a powerful force. But it's also probably not the only factor; there are likely myriad explanations. Are you blind to that, or just dismissive?
A difference on that magnitude can easily be something about aggregate behavior correlated to sex, an uncontrolled for variable, or just random chance.
So let me ask you: do you have any evidence that 3-6% gap is the result of sexism instead of merely being a fact correlated to sex? (Particularly if we were to confine the data to people under 40, to control for historical biases that take time to age out.)
However, there is abundant evidence that there's a systemic divide in opportunities. This is easy to see in the aggregate and particular. That is the interesting thing in itself: if we could be assured that the gap could sexist solely for life choices, this wouldn't be an interesting topic. That's a devilishly hard thing to argue for, however, so id prefer to move forward as a society assuming that we can do more to expose opportunities to everyone, assure that people are protected in their right to follow opportunities, and that we can demonstrate the effect of the policies at moving toward an ideal of equal pay.
If we can't move towards that, perhaps our ideal, well, isn't what society wants. I doubt that we've even approached that level of confidence in our support of communities subject to subtle bias difficult to divorce from "life choices".
That being said, I think we should generally imrpove sexist behavior and systems, which hurt both sexes (albeit, in different ways).
I just think the "wage gap" is one of the least sexist fascets of modern society (if at 3-6%), and mostly represents people perpetuating a misunderstanding of statistics. So in that way, I feel like people are over-solving a mostly solved problem, which seems likely to lead to more sexism, not less.
I think that effort spent on fixing the larger issues are also likely to stabilize remaining issues with wages, and we would all be better served focusing on the large gaps in other statistics instead of the small one here.
That said, Im always happy to see new statistics that tell me Im full of shit, so if you find what you're looking for, please post it.
Otherwise, have a good night! :)
Also, starving people of hours is just as effective at reducing costs as lowering the hourly. I don't think it's in your favor to argue that's something that should be controlled.