Wage Stagnation

Re:Wage Stagnation by mbell on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @12:43PM (#19256501)

The general claim about 'Real Wage' stagnation is based on the median of full time workers. There is data for this in your link:

Men: 51,885 (1970) => 55,834 (2017), a 7.6% increase

Women: 30,733 (1970) => 44,379 (2017), a 41% increase

Also note that this data is using CPI-U-RS adjustment instead of CPI which is what is normally used for 'Real Wages'. There is some debate over the accuracy of CPI-U-RS, but it's worth noting that it's not directly calculated prior to 1978 so becomes more questionable. Comparing to 1978 your numbers are basically equal to 2017 income for men. For women there is still significant growth but I think it's hard to draw any conclusions since a very large number of women entered the full time workforce and took on higher level positions between 1970 and 2017.

I'm assuming you are getting 'doubled' by reading the per capita income data which is not a particularly accurate way to look at this. That is just taking the sum of the total income and dividing by the US population, i.e. it's a mean not a median. It's going to be skewed by high income individuals and also by the nature of labor force participation.

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Re:Wage Stagnation by belorn on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @06:11PM (#19259298)

It would be interesting to see a graph over median wage similar to the one in the article, but with separate lines per gender.

> very large number of women entered the full time workforce and took on higher level positions between 1970 and 2017

If we look at US numbers that actually not the case. As I wrote in an other comment, between 1940 and 1970 it doubled from around 25% to around 50%, but from 1970 to 2017 it only went up to current 55%. It actually went down from 2000 which topped at 59%.

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Re:Wage Stagnation by mbell on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @06:52PM (#19259563)

> If we look at US numbers that actually not the case. As I wrote in an other comment, between 1940 and 1970 it doubled from around 25% to around 50%, but from 1970 to 2017 it only went up to current 55%. It actually went down from 2000 which topped at 59%.

Using the data source provided from the post I replied to (table P-36) the number of full time, year-round workers looks like this:

Men: 36.1M (1970) => 66.4M (2017) increase of 84%

Women: 15.5M (1970) => 44.4M (2017) increase of 186%

So within this group we went from ~30% female to ~40% female and I would venture that the types of employment accessible to women in this time frame has also expanded quite a bit, though I have no immediate data handy to back this up.

Without digging into your numbers, I suspect they may come from total labor force participation which is a notably different metric.

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Re:Wage Stagnation by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @04:17PM (#19258372)

Interesting. So, if women entered the workforce in greater numbers after 1970, and the median wage for women was lower, wouldn't that drag down the median for all workers? That is, if you took a population of the same percentage of women workers as you had in 1970, what would happen to the median wage in 2017?

Note well: This is not a plea for keeping women out of the workforce, or even out of the statistics. This is not an excuse for paying women less than men. This is merely noting that, in one respect, the comparison of 2017 to 1970 is not apples to apples.

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