Yeah, they need to hang onto them more tightly.
Bindings full of women.
How does this pay gap work in practice? Say I need to hire a person in my business for a particular skill set. The market wage for any man in this hypothetical skill set is $100k per year. Say that every man I interview asks for a similar amount.
Does this pay gap suggest that I can go out and find a woman with the same experience, skills, degree, etc. and pay her only $77,000 per year?
It would seem that if this is true, there wouldn’t be an employable male in the entire country. But this obviously isn’t the way it works for that reason.
How, specifically, does this pay gap work in real world situations?
I always thought it meant that the higher-paying jobs were closed (or at least less-open) to women, and that gender-sorting was happening early on, i.e. women were steered toward lower-paying jobs like:
- Women become nurses; men become doctors.
- Women teach at the high- and elementary-school level; men teach at the university level.
Unfair, of course, since any of those positions could be adequately filled by someone of either gender.
That would be an entirely different argument than a “pay gap” or “wage gap.” It’s certainly concerning if those professions are closed to women or that women are steered towards them (which I certainly see no evidence of) and steps should be taken to resolve that.
Maybe forty years ago women were steered in that direction and we are seeing residual effects of it, but that problem will be self correcting.
But this problem wouldn’t be couched in terms of unequal pay. Nobody thinks it desirable that nurses be paid the same as doctors. Well, except nurses. 
Here’s one way it might work:
Ann and Bob work for Chris. They were both hired out of university with the same level of qualification in the same field. They started on the same salary and have been doing similar work for a year.
At the year’s end, Bob walks into Chris’s office and says he deserves a raise. Chris likes this assertive behaviour and as he’s happy with Bob’s work, agrees to bump his pay up. The next day Ann walks into Chris’s office and asks for a raise. Chris finds this directness abrasive and, while he can’t fault Ann’s work, considers that she’s not really acting like a team player. He explains to Ann that if she wants to get ahead, she’s got to show that she can work with others.
Or:
Ann and Bob work for Chris. They were both hired out of university with the same level of qualification in the same field. They started on the same salary and are working to the same job description. However, over time it becomes apparent that they form different relationships with their (mostly male) clients. Even thought they’re equal in status, clients in a meeting with both will spend most of their time talking to Bob - even if they’re replying to a question Ann asked. When Bob makes a point, clients listen - even if they ignored the same point when Ann made it five minutes ago. Over time, this pattern means that Bob tends to take the lead in dealing with clients while Ann is often asked to do back-office tasks. Reviewing performance at the end of the year, Chris asks some clients for feedback. They have good things to say about Bob, but find they can’t really comment on Ann. Bob gets a raise.
The point being, the wage gap isn’t attributable to any one mechanism.
Another common mechanism is:
Ann and Bob work for Chris. They were both hired out of university with the same level of qualification in the same field. They started on the same salary and are working to the same job description. Ann marries Bob and they have a kid. They are both out for two weeks following the birth of their first child. But Ann takes maternity leave while Bob goes back to work because Ann gets three months paid leave and Bob doesn’t, and because there is no private space for her to pump breast milk. That three-month gap (and the fear of future gaps) cause her to miss out on participating in an important project or meeting an important client, etc.
Or she takes a couple of years off to have two kids, because of all the mechanisms in place that make that easier for women (including the pay gap, natch). She then has to re-enter the workforce with a gap in her resume and a couple of years behind in raises and promotions.
One more anecdote:
I used to be one of those people who could say that in my field my female peers made the same salary as me. We all knew everyone’s salary because we all had the same salary in the same job, with increases in lockstep.
But once the women started having kids, that all changed. Maybe a quarter of the women I still know from my law school class now have less-than-fulltime arrangements at law firms, or are off the payscale because of time they took out, or are no longer on the partnership track because of family obligations. I know of one guy for whom that’s true.
Many other women chose lower-paying, more flexible jobs in large part because of family obligations.
And still others are having trouble breaking into equity partnership because a lot of those personal relationships are built based the Old Boys Network. Frat brothers who went and started businesses or squash partners. That network is a LOT more open to women now, of course. But there are still gender barriers there.
Another way:
Let’s say Ann and Bob aren’t recent university grads. They both had 2 years of work experience before they started working for Chris.
Let’s say that Ann was underpaid at her old job because her boss was a sexist pig. And now she’s working for Chris, who’s not a sexist pig.
But there are HR rules. Chris can’t offer anyone more than 5% of their previous salary. So Bob, who wasn’t discriminated against at his old job, will start off with a higher salary than Ann will. And he will always have that edge over her unless Ann gets promoted over him.
If these anecdotal stories are true, I should be able to get a hell of a bargain on my hypothetical new hire, right? Of all these men demanding $100k, I should be able to find “Ann” out there who will jump at an offer of $85k (an $8,000 raise above what she would get elsewhere according to the 77% figure) and she will do just as good of a job as any man I would hire.
A win/win for both of us.
That’s not true even assuming wage was the only factor, you had complete control over it, the market was completely frictionless, and you didn’t care about the actual impediments on women doing the job because of sexism–factors which aren’t likely to align anyway. In many of the scenarios the woman who started out equal in qualifications was made less-qualified by the circumstances (e.g., got less experience because she was out on maternity leave instead of her husband).
So what exactly is the problem we are trying to solve?
Sexism in the population? The biological fact that women will bear children? Market failures? A business environment which fails to give hiring managers proper discretion on wages to pay?
Until we define the actual problem, we cannot have a solution (and some things, like the fact that women bear children have no solution) and it is unfair for the President and others to imply that employers are sexist pigs refusing to pay women what they are worth.
And the childbearing example is a refutation of a “wage gap.” If a woman take a couple of years off to have children, then she specifically is not similarly situated to a male who has a couple of years more experience. A non gender related reason exists for her lower pay: less experience.
The different mechanisms creating the gap have different solutions. It’s a complex problem. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem.
After the time taken off to recover from giving birth, whether a man or woman takes time off work is very much influenced by government and company policies and social standards.
There’s no reason, for example, to provide three months paid leave to women but not men.
Yes. Let’s try fixing the things that are fixable, and then see where we are.
That may well be true, but I’d bet there are similar studies out there on acceptance rates at universities…which show the opposite.
But ultimately even if we accept this premise, it’s not a discriminatory action by the companies hiring them.
That is one many possible causes. However, saying that men are more likely to go into more STEM-types of graduate degrees than women doesn’t imply necessarily imply that it is because men are “smarter” than women.
The most obvious explanation may be that women simply aren’t attracted to that sort of work. And we see this in application numbers: i.e. before they get accepted to universities. We can see where women apply to the most, relative to men.
There aren’t many women applying to PhD programs in Computer Science. The reason is besides the point.
“Old boy network” is essentially people you hang out with the most because you spend 80 hours/week in the office together. Of course that’s going to make a difference, but that’s life.
How many women want to do that sort of a job in the first place? Surveys show that most women tend to not want to do that sort of life (and frankly neither do I, which is why I left and went to academia).
At some level, life ain’t fair. At some level, those who work hardest get ahead further. But that’s not discrimination.
Absolutely not the case. Read any labor economics textbook. They’ll have a whole chapter on “discrimination” and the evidence for or against it. And the conclusion is pretty much always that if there is, it is of a very small and insignificant scale.
There are numerous scientific studies on this topic, since it’s a topic that has been studies for decades. The results are similar.
No this isn’t about “getting more data”. In fact, the more data you get, the more significant something becomes, so that if we had the entire US population in a data-set, for sure “gender” would be a statistically significant contributor to pay variance. But it would explain only a tiny part of the variance.
This is about explanatory power. Meaning, what percentage of the difference does gender actually explain.
My logic isn’t flawed here in the least bit. This is how a scientific examination of this question is done. If you want to answer the question…WHAT causes the difference in pay between men and women?..you have to do it this way. There’s no other way.
The way I explained it is very basic; it’s just a simple regression. More complicated ways have been done as well, as I mentioned, cohort analysis where you look at individuals in the same stage of their careers. Longitudinal tracking of individuals would be best, but again it’s a matter of having to use BLS data which isn’t very good.
Divergence gets wider with age for everybody. The people you gradated with were very similar to you 1 year after graduation. 10 years later, they are very different from you.
The question is always…WHY.
I gave an explanation in my earlier post. In the tech industry (specifically in Silicon Valley), there is much larger differences what people with different skills get paid. $250k starting salaries for PhD in Computer Science, for example, vs. $70k starting salaries for MS in Math in that same industry. That’s a ~360% difference right there. Such wide pay variance isn’t found in any other industry (except maybe finance).
The argument that “women are being x less than men for the same job” is not a valid argument, even we accept that there may be discrimination in hiring.
Of course, one has to find evidence for discrimination in hiring first.
That’s exactly the point. There is no company that is going to explicitly pay a woman less than a man for the same job
Experience, job seniority, title etc aren’t “unfair” explanations for why someone might end up getting paid more later in their career than someone else. I.e., those are precisely the opposite of “discrimination”.
Addressing that is a separate question from recognizing that that does lead to greater divergence in pay between men and women, and that it isn’t discrimination.
That is by definition, not discrimination.
Right, first of all, it’s not 18%.
It’s 6.6% which remains.
Second, simply because 6.6% remains…given what they’ve put in the model…doesn’t mean that the 6.6% is the result of “discrimination”.
What variables they can measure and use is a function of the questionnaire they used. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t more variables which explain even more of that remaining 6.6%. For example, what they didn’t control for job title, firm, industry.
I’ll guarantee you that the vast majority of what remains is explainable simply by one variable…firm. Which is a variable studies on individual pay almost never can get.
These are all important contributors to the pay differences that accumulate over time. These are also not…discrimination.
It isn’t discrimination. It’s not even remotely discrimination.
No one forces a women to take more months off for maternity leave then men. They’re asking for more maternity leave!
So “conservatives” are sexists because they give women more maternity leave then men, and they are also sexist because they give women even more maternity leave.
Asking for more maternity leave in no way contradicts the argument that parental leave ought to be non-gendered.
And you’re correct that no one forces women to take maternity leave in the sense of threatening them with loss of employment or something. We just set up our rules in a thousand different ways to strongly encourage many women to do so. We could set the rules up in a different way. The reason we don’t is largely inertia and sexism.
This comes across less as intellectual argument and more as personal defensiveness about being labeled a sexist. And part of that is that your mental model of discrimination involves conscious bigotry. But it need not. Perpetuating a system known to lead to disparate results without good reason for keeping the system that way is also discrimination.
Do you really think that if everything were set up to be gender neutral that there would be anything like a 50/50 split between men and women taking the maternity leave option? Or are you just arguing that things might be marginally better?
The latter. I’m saying a big part of the current disproportionate divide is because of policies we set up and cultural standards.
It may turn out that if we make all the relevant policy changes that women would still prefer to stay home over men because of some hormonal difference or something. I would not attribute that remaining portion to sexism. But I suspect many conservatives think that proportion is much larger than it really is because they have traditional views of gender roles that they conflate with biological determinism.
Huh? Women want more maternity leave. Case closed.
Right, so “liberals” define “discrimination” as: anything that leads to a different outcome.
However, that is not how anyone else in the world defines discrimination. So you’re free to call whatever you want discrimination. It won’t make it so, however.