It’s very tough to measure actual value, at least in the world I work in which is enterprise business software (development, implementing, PMing, etc.). Each person has their own profile of things they are great at, good at, neutral at, bad at, etc.
People can save and cost the business many many dollars due to their decisions, but it’s all too complex and interconnected to be able to assign a net effect to any given action and measure it against others.
My gut feel on this topic is that men have more testosterone and are more willing to negotiate selfishly and to jump ship/move on to other opportunities.
All of those things affect productivity (except maybe for the ‘entrenched attitudes’). But women complain that they are being paid less for the SAME job, even though being less productive means they are not doing the same job. My point is that if they are taking time off, for whatever reason, then they are not as productive.
If I understand your argument, it is that women may appear to be less productive due to increased absence or whatever, but that it in fact is impossible to measure.
Of course it is possible to measure it. Bottom line: if two companies making the same widget, one staffed by all men, the other by all women, which one will be more profitable?
Do men also get offered or ordered into those jobs in greater amounts (proportionally to available pool)? IME yes. At one point we were talking about that specific issue: the men in the team had never been asked if they were interested in working abroad/away from home; the main reason one of the women had for not getting married officially was that she knew (and the boss had to admit it was true) that the instant she did she’d stop being given projects involving travel time. This was bad for the women, but also for those men who would have preferred to stay close to home (specially common for those who had small children or ailing parents).
There have been a couple of papers were the results indicated that sometimes, if women showed that self-confidence and tried to negotiate raises and promotions, they got treated worse than men. So even if they are acting similar to men, they are not being treated equally.
Solving this problem is difficult as there are multiple reasons women are paid less. Some is sexism, some isn’t.
I only have a couple of anecdotes.
I once had to survey (over the phone) payroll managers in the United Kingdom. (I lie in Canada, so this must have been an expensive survey!) It seemed that virtually every time the job title was “manager” the person I talked to was female and every time the job title was “director” the person I talked to was male. I’m sure the director position requires more work and so more pay, but I’m also sure that a lot of managers aren’t being promoted to director simply because they’re female. One has to separate what is sexism (women not getting promoted due to sex) and what isn’t (directors work harder and should be paid more). I’m pretty sure the lion’s share of the problem there is sexism.
I now work at a government job where everyone gets paid the same amount per hour if they’re at the same level (except for seniority bonuses). Chances of getting promoted are based on tests and statistics, same for whether you work part-time vs full-time.
On my current team, literally all the guys, myself included, ask for overtime. So do two thirds of the women. Because of the small sample size, I couldn’t find any factors that point out why some of the women aren’t doing overtime. It’s probably something personal that’s none of my business. The woman who sits in front of me has more seniority (so more pay per hour) but probably get less pay per year because she refuses to do overtime. The sample size is too small to really draw real conclusions, but the trend is consistent across teams I’ve been on.
Team members ask for more overtime shifts than are available, so the manager must equitably divide the shifts among the askers. (If that division isn’t equitable, the union would be involved. Being government, it’s really politically correct, so they will avoid anything that appears to be sexist, racist, etc.) In other words a sexist manager would have to be really clever (and a jerk) to deliberately reduce the amount of overtime female workers get while getting away with it.
If someone did an analysis of the yearly pay of female vs male employees at my office, they’d probably find the males get paid more, despite sexism not being an issue (or at least not much of an issue) in determining yearly pay.
Obviously people making minimum wage get paid the same.
Where I am (Kentucky) teacher’s pay is based on education level and experience, not sex, so I don’t understand how male teachers would get paid more or less than female teachers (not talking about college professors here. IDK anything about that.)
So I’ve thought a lot about where this pay discrepancy is coming from, and I’m just going to throw this out there: Let’s say you need to hire a VP to implement an ~18 month project. You whittle the candidates down to your two best choices, one male and one female. They have equal resumes: 30 years old with MBA’s from Harvard and 8 years of equally impressive management experience. Which one do you hire?
If you picked the female, you need to remember that there’s an equally high chance that either one will decide that it’s time to start a family. If you hire the female, she’ll be out for 2 - 6 weeks, and might not come back at all, but decide to focus on being a mother for a few years. If you hire the male, he’ll be out 2 - 6 days. So you hire the male, and the female takes a lower-paying job somewhere else.