Although Christina Hoff Sommers does have a noticeable bias/axe to grind since she's pretty anti-feminism and considers there to be a "war against boys". Also she works for the AEI which is a conservative think tank.
But it's not exactly a "conservative" issue. Plenty of liberals have written about it too:
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/stop-penal...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the...
https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2015/...
This strikes me as "poisoning the well."
My point was that people should base their opinions on CHS' claims on her evidence and arguments, rather than who she associates with.
Edit: I'm not trying to change your approach, I'm just being blunt about my opinions. I appreciate your open mindedness.
How is there not? Literally every modern school system favors activities that disproportionally disadvantage young boys. Boys and young men are dropping out of school at a far larger rate than women, and literally nobody cares. It's a travesty.
This is false.
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-a...
>it's very unpopular to question it.
Also false, it's very popular (and almost cliché) to dismiss it.
>Christina Hoff Summers... has paid a huge price by actually investigating these issues.
And what price would that be? She seems extremely successful.
"$3.27 less per hour than men. The median hourly wage is $15.67 for women and $18.94 for men.
The gender wage gap is a measure of what women are paid relative to men. It is commonly calculated by dividing women’s wages by men’s wages, and this ratio is often expressed as a percent, or in dollar terms. This tells us how much a woman is paid for each dollar paid to a man. This gender pay ratio is often measured for year-round, full-time workers and compares the annual wages (of hourly wage and salaried workers) of the median (“typical”) man with that of the median (“typical”) woman; measured this way, the current gender pay ratio is 0.796, or, expressed as a percent, it is 79.6 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2016). In other words, for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes about 80 cents."
It's meaningless to compare different positions pay to each other. "Typical" men vs "typical" women doesn't tell us anything about potential discrimination.
There's over 12,800 words in the article and 67 citations. It includes sections such as "How do work experience, schedules, and motherhood affect the gender wage gap?", "How do education and job and occupational characteristics affect the gender wage gap?", "Does a woman’s race, age, or pay level affect the gender gap she experiences?", and "What role do 'unobservables' like discrimination and productivity play in the wage gap?" yet you choose to ignore all of it and argue against something from the introduction that's expanded upon further down.
You're arguing on bad faith here.
> You're arguing on bad faith here.
No, I just disagree with you.
> "Women earn less than men at every wage level"
It's utterly useless to compare wage levels across different roles. I read the article, I strongly disagree with it.
Do you really think comparing the pay of people in different roles is useful? It's apples and oranges. I don't expect a nurse and an engineer to make the same amount of money. This is my argument and it's not in bad faith.
There has not been any counterpoint to original disputing of the citation.
>TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
You cannot label an entire outlet conservative or liberal because they bring in people of opposing views to write editorials unless there is an established bias over time (which you have not shown.)
It took me all of twenty seconds to find a liberal leaning editorial: http://time.com/5431836/dna-transgender-history/
Which part of the wage gap article do you disagree with?
My impression (based on 2016 stats [0]) is that as most C-suiters are men, and they can get 100s or 1000s of times the money that ordinary employees get, that in the UK this likely accounts for most of the effect that's not accounted for by career breaks (childcare, for example). To reiterate, this is my _impression_ when looking at the data.
Men who work part-time get lower wages; no one cares, it seems.
0 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
1 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
If the boss gets 3x the median, that's a 4% gap.
I'd like to see analysis which looks at same qualified people and charts their progression with attempts to understand why their wage changed and whether those changes have any discernible sex bias.
Men seem to fall across a wider distribution (both higher and lower paid), as appears in other characteristics.
Could I please see the variance in the data which is a very simple, important and often missing aspect when presenting data? I would also like to see the average amount of work hours (and overtime) per industry and gender, the average amount of flex time and other non-income benefits, and common known sources for wage differences such as how often a person changes job. All this is missing, but again the lowest hanging fruit is the variance which make any dataset completely useless (and I stand by this statement) for any complex dataset.
Note they don't compare like roles here, just same industry sector IIRC.
The largest gap is 95% in favour of female archivists; that must be anomalous.
Might have been true until 2015 but not anymore.
At least they'll have plenty of time to post about it on Facebook :)
I've seen this specific meme a few times; dozens of posts about gender pay gap including from under-30 part-timers who have a good chance - according to the available stats - of being paid more than men in an equivalently skilled role.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyatarr/2018/04/04/by-the-num...
Report referenced: https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report
The more appropriate statistic would be that "on average, women are offered 4% less" which seems to have been produced by integrating an estimation of the probability density, and looking at the non-symmetry of the distribution. It seems most of that difference is concentrated within 10% on the mean.
So (roughly) if you're a man, you had a 50% chance of being offered 4% more than a woman, and maybe a 30% chance of being offered 4% less than a woman.
What if the pay is equal for like-for-like jobs, but for the higher paying jobs one sex is vastly underrepresented? Not saying it is, just that discrimination and bias often runs deeper than some simple comparison.
And if we believed that this was the cause, you'd need to think that Googlers were wildly off the norm in terms of ability. They've got like 90000 employees. They aren't exclusively hiring mega geniuses.
If the data found an actual issue like this, the it would need to be addressed, but at the moment simply claiming that women are paid less doesn't offer any solution apart from paying women an extra 20% across every single job.
What if one sex takes more paternal leave than another so the other sex spends more time in the office improving skills?
It's not just arguing for higher salaries but being trusted to follow through when "the going gets tough".
Display of confidence is hard to distinguish from actual capability. Confidence is often mistaken for "can-do-spirit" or "positive attitude" and therefore always favored.
Women are more honest than man about their abilities in the workplace. They are more honest about previous experience in a job interview, and more reluctant to "fake it until they make it":
Excessive confidence displayed by men regarding their ability to follow through even their chances of success are equal to women, leads later to the assumption that the man knew what they were doing (and knew in advance that they will succeed) and hence men are seen as having been in full control the whole time. But actually it's hindsihgt-bias.
>I want to see some actual numbers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517651...
If it does exist, that's a very serious problem, because if Google can't and/or hasn't attained pay parity that would satisfy the people writing this, then pack it in; there's no way it's ever going to happen. Google is just about the best possible environment for parity to happen in, with an almost uniform culture that would support it from top to bottom and enough money that it can pursue almost any parity policy it wants without a serious problem, and a long time frame in which this all should have been true.
If there is still systematic, unsatisfactory bias at Google, what hope is there for these ideas in the rest of the world?
I suspect that if Google wanted to remove pay differences between men and women, they would need to start making strong offers to all their candidates - not just those who obtain competing offers and try to negotiate.
Like many people replying to the OP, I'd like to see some data that looks at it from different perspectives, tho, instead of just picking a side and arguing for it - "there's a wage-gap" vs "look, there actually isn't".
Src:
https://mobile.twitter.com/GoogleWalkout/status/105780420389...
The TLDR, if I remember correctly, is: Yes, there is a wage gap between genders. It is smaller than most headlines claim, but real. Lots of factors go into this, but it is probably a mix of: companies _can_ pay women less, so they will, and women tend to value some things greater than salary. However, there is no smoking gun we can point to as a definitive root cause.
[0] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
[1] - http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about...
I used to fully believe what you said, on the grounds that willingness and ability to negotiate have no bearing on how valuable the employee will be (at least for engineering jobs - it could be different for something like sales where dealmaking ability actually matters).
However, one counterpoint I've come to realize is that if an employee doesn't value higher salary that much, it's a waste of money to pay them more. Thus, by only paying higher salaries that put time and effort into arguing for higher salaries, you make sure to only spend that money on the employees that will actually value all the extra money you're throwing at them.
In any case, this does not constitute an excuse for paying women less.
There really aren't any differences. Just do a simple mental exercise.
Imagine if the gender gap is real. Male programmers demand $100K while female programmers demand $77K for the same exact quality of work. What would this mean? It would mean all tech companies would only hire females.
For comparison look at seasonal farm work. Imagine if migrant workers deman $7.70 per hour while citizens demand $10 per hour for the same quality of work. What do you think the composition of the labor foce on farms would be? I'd imagine it would be mostly migrants. Right?
If the wage gap truly existed, clever feminists would start companies exclusively composed of women and would be putting everyone out of business because they have a 23% profit margin built in.
The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value. Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech, where compensation packages are routinely so large and supported by large VC funds that those of us who do hire can see those salary differences as negligible. And, even if I were sensitive to those differences, I would not hesitate to pay 30-50k in order to get the right person for the role.
The question here is: are we doing a good job of finding the right person for the role? That is why the Google women are demanding "opportunity equity." Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
I have interviewed for jobs and have interviewed others for positions on my team. Both startup and traditional 9-5 tech jobs.
> The decision to hire someone in a high-skilled job has extraordinarily little to do with their compensation and much more to do with their perceived value.
It's a bit of both.
> Society has conditioned us to view a certain kind of masculinity as inherent value. Men are rewarded for their aggression and confidence, whereas women are criticized for ego and emotionality.
Is it society or nature? Also, society socializes males to be less aggressive. So I don't agree with your claim.
> Perhaps this argument has credence in the low-skilled labor market, but it is not applicable to tech,
Because in the tech world, aggression is what is sought?
> Because the system I just described above is prone to failure thanks to unconscious bias.
If that is the case, why don't these women create companies and hire only women ( who are supposedly doing the same job for 77% pay of their male counterpart )?
Maybe in construction work or farm work, male traits are highly preferred. But in programming and tech world, it's pretty much what you can do.
You really didn't address my point. If what you are claiming is true, why don't you start a search engine company and hire only women? You would put google out of business in a few short years given your built in 23% profit margin.
Do you realize how significant a naturally embedded profit margin of 23% is?
So I'll ask again. What is preventing you or any other person from starting companies and hiring women if women truly make 77% of a man's wage for the same exact work?
See also Dan Luu's discussion of this argument: https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
We know already that "pay inequality" is fictitious at this point.
So by elimination, that leaves opportunity - however as anyone who has ever worked in a large company knows, it is very difficult, except in a very regimented corporate culture like the military, to have equivalent opportunity spread around evenly. I somehow think Google has a corporate culture that is not very regimented.
If I interpret "pay inequality" as "the average pay for women ages 20-60 is less than it is for men 20-60 in the US in 2018" then I've seen data suggesting it is real.
In some instances, such as Hooters waitresses and associate lawyers, women earn slightly more.
You can search for "pay inequality myth" and figure out which argument makes the most sense. Both sides are presented in the search engine I used.
Myself, I think that the issue that pay varies specifically because of the choices that are made is very valid.
This just isn't true, but I think the problem here is a semantic one. It is true that the more finely tuned your analysis is, the less reasonable it is to conclude that sexism or so called "patriarchy" plays any kind of role.
I'd like to see the actual data behind this constant inequality claim. I would be genuinely interested to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
I've heard speculation that women don't argue for higher salaries as much as men, I've also heard that the data is never accurate because it doesn't compare the same jobs. I want to see some actual numbers so people can figure out where the issue actually lies.