The gender wage gap
A new study underlines what many of us already knew:
The report was compiled by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and titled “Still A Man’s Labor Market,” because of course. The Atlantic article about the report tries to keep the sexism argument alive, but acknowledges six paragraphs in that the earnings gap is entirely due to women making different choices in their lives than men, and not a “wage” gap from discrimination:
“Comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges, women earn close to what men earn: Women in similar workplaces with similar titles and similar credentials make pretty much what their male peers do, whether they are fast-food employees making close to the minimum wage or corporate executives making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”
Once upon a time, long long ago, the slogan was “Equal pay for equal work.” Sounds reasonable, is reasonable, and at the time most women thought that was the goal. But activist leftist feminists have never had that goal, just as the left generally has bigger fish to fry than it lets on to the public.
So now it’s something like, “Equal pay for whatever work we happen to be doing.” So if the so-called wage gap is a de facto one based on the fact that some women take more time off for various family and personal reasons, and therefore that lowers the amount they earn, we’re supposed to be all angry about that as though some dreadful injustice has occurred despite the fact that there is no de jure gender-based wage gap at all.
It is very similar to the old “equality of opportunity” (the conservative point of view, although it was once also the liberal point of view) versus “equality of outcome” (the current leftist/liberal point of view, because leftist and liberal have increasingly fused).
The American public has been slowly, and then recently more quickly, moving to the latter goal from the former one: outcome vs. mere opportunity. How did this happen? It helps to have had the message delivered by a combination of the educational system plus the constant pounding of the media and the left, so that more and more people consider the first—equality of opportunity—to be racist and/or sexist and/or whatever “ist” happens to be the target du jour, and therefore unacceptable.
It also helps that most people do not understand research and statistics. That’s not so surprising, because both things are somewhat technical and require a certain amount of logic and mathematical sophistication, although one doesn’t have to understand the finer points of statistics at the graduate level to understand the basics. But since the basics also seem to be beyond the grasp of many people, most people are going to rely on interpreters of research—for example, articles in the MSM—to elucidate matters. And since the MSM has its own agenda, and that agenda is political rather than an objective reporting on the facts, way too many readers are going to assume that the MSM’s summary of the meaning of a research finding is reliable.
In other words, propaganda works, and the less a person knows about the actual subject matter, the more likely the propaganda will work for that person.
Somebody once said “If women really made 59 cents for every dollar men made for the same work, no one would ever hire a man.”
Amongst the countless villains propounding the specious arguments of egalitarians for unrealizable equality (the most hopeless of all utopian impulses) is LBJ, one of our very worst presidents, who specifically decreed that equality of opportunity be turned into equality of outcome.
Nothing gets me riled up like the peddling of the wage gap mythology. As MikeK intimated, if there truly were a wage gap, corporate boardrooms and executives would be 90% female. Because, as we all know, corporations are soulless, evil, and greedy.
Neo, as you implied, the economic ignorance among the electorate is appalling. I also get agitated at the *constant* conflation of “equality” with “sameness”. Almost as bad as the near-ubiquitous conflation of “health care” with “health insurance”. These principles and concepts are not identical, but our educational institutions have raised at least two generations of shallow thinkers.
We conservatives long ago abandoned the field and allowed the Gramscian march through the institutions unchecked, and it will most likely prove our ruin. (I hope not, but I am a realist.)
The gender thing was in full effect when I applied to medical school. Women were assumed to practice part time or to quit when they had children and there was a doctor shortage we all read about. As a result, girls were discriminated against as applicants. There were no females in my medical school class, although there were three in the class ahead.
Medical school students are now 60% female and companies that recruit doctors report that female doctors work 27% less than male doctors. So the admissions committees had a point. Another matter is that male doctors work less than we did. Residencies have gotten very interested in work conditions since the Libby Zion case.
In that case, a young woman died in a New York hospital because, allegedly, the residents and interns lacked enough sleep. There was also the fact that she lied about what she had taken in drugs.
Although regulatory and civil proceedings found conflicting evidence about Zion’s death,[3] today her death is widely believed to have been caused by serotonin syndrome from the drug interaction between the phenelzine she was taking prior to her hospital visit, and the pethidine administered by a resident physician.[4] The lawsuits and regulatory investigations following her death, and their implications for working conditions and supervision of interns and residents were highly publicized in both lay media and medical journals.
As a result, there are strict limits on work hours whereas I often worked 36 hours without sleep. I worked longer hours as a surgeon in practice and the changes result in far less productivity for both sexes.
Powerline’s piece on Bush talks about a book written by 2 Philly inquirer reporters about who pays taxes.In that books they talked about the Bush’s million dollar income and theirsmall tax payment. But that million plus income was a one-year thing because of Barbara’s book on her dog Milly. Most of the money was donated to charity. Scott and John wrote a rebuttal article for NR, and Bush sent them a thank you letter.
Lefties can’t get over lying about wages and money, especially if they have a lot themselves. I don’t understand why salary is more important than everything else in your life. In understand that lots of people work for low wages, but I bet a lot of them in areas like retail would prefer better working hours, especially during the holiday season.
Oh, I should point this out. My wife has a masters in biomedical engineering, with her electrical engineering bachelors from the University of Michigan. She was one of the very few females in the entire program, and she graduated in the early 00s. I asked her if she ever felt weird or out of place. She said no, but then again, she is the youngest child with four older brothers. She grew up with male nonsense, so it doesn’t bother her in the slightest.
She was one of the very few females in the entire program, and she graduated in the early 00s<
My high school girlfriend went to Purdue and got a BS in Chemical Engineering in 1960. A lot was culture rather than barriers.
Looking at the summary they’ve prepared for the media, the complaint appears to be that collective behavior is incongruent with their various shticks, ergo we need social engineering.
My high school girlfriend went to Purdue and got a BS in Chemical Engineering in 1960. A lot was culture rather than barriers.
Engineering students and the population of working engineers remains overwhelmingly male. It doesn’t matter how much they’re pestered by Heidi Hartman and Stephen Rose, the women who could handle the preparation for this sort of work (which is quite math-intensive) by and large do not want these jobs. And when they embark on careers in this line of work, they are disproportionately likely to abandon them because engineering doesn’t fit well into the whole tapestry of a woman’s life. Computer programming has more of a feminine contingent, but the same observation applies. The share of computer science degrees awarded to women (now around 22%) saw its peak in 1984 (at which time it was 37%). In some wage-earning trades, the feminine contingent is under 5%. If Dr. Hartman fancies this originates in ‘discrimination in the labor market’, she ought to pay a visit to the HR departments of randomly selected commercial companies and identify all the men she sees scheming to keep women from getting jobs as millwrights (well, first, she should see if she can find any men at all working in HR).
MikeK, I agree with you. Culture is king. I would even go further and argue, per Damore and his marshaling of the social science evidence, that it’s deeper and more intrinsic that culture. I’m married to a woman who loves and values math, science and deeply analytic structures. Most women just aren’t into those topics, much to the consternation and chagrin of the social justice warriors.
Women, if they can pass the training, make better fighter pilots, though.
Women, if they can pass the training, make better fighter pilots, though.
Sez who?
N.B. that the share of bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded to women has equaled or exceeded their share of the young adult population every year since 1979. Someone completing their post-secondary schooling in 1979 would have been born in 1956, more often than not. As we speak, about 11% of the working population has passed their 62d birthday. Which is to say that nearly 90% of the working population has entered the workforce since certain coarse credentials became more common among women than among men among young workers. (Women constituted 41.5% of the working population in 1979 and constitute 47% today).
With that in mind, cannot help but note that 94% of all civilian pilots are male.
Women do better with spatial cognition and utilizing the HUD controls in the cockpit. It’s just one metric, though. And as I noted, most women don’t get through the rigorous barriers needed *prior* to becoming a fighter pilot.
Women do better with spatial cognition
It’s just never manifest to any of us watching one of them trying to puzzle out a map.
On women in physics: My department has been exceptional in that we average between 35-40% female majors. It even caught the attention of the American Institute of Physics as they inquired as to what we were doing to yield such results. The answer is “nothing”; we treat them the same as anyone else.
What’s been interesting is their choices after graduation.The vast majority (>95%) went into related fields such as doing masters in engineering. Only a very few went on in physics, or a physics related job. I’ve asked them why. The answer is that while they really enjoy physics, they see other careers paths as both more lucrative and more accommodating to their whole life style choices.
Meanwhile the SJWs from outside the department are banging at our door, claiming we are actively discriminating, etc etc. And here I thought all that feminism in the late 60s was all about giving women choice. I guess that meant they had to make the “right” choice.
BTW, the AIP Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, this past spring identified the leak in the pipeline. In high school, physics enrollment is 50%. enrollment in the FRESHMAN year in college averages 20%, and remains at that level through the PhD. Women are making the choice in the senior year of high school. Yet, somehow, it’s all us evil old white men in the college physics departments holding those poor women down.
Oh, one other factoid: at my school the female faculty are paid and average of 56% compared to the men according to our latest data from this fall.
There was a good letter to the WSJ on this topic a few days ago. The writer and his wife were both airline pilots for the same airline. Since this is a highly structured job for both hours and pay scales it is easy to compare. He notes that he makes more than his wife since she bids for flights giving her more at home time. He notes that some women pass up chances to be the pilot as co-pilot slots give you more choices for family friendly schedules.
Meanwhile the SJWs from outside the department are banging at our door, claiming we are actively discriminating, etc etc. And here I thought all that feminism in the late 60s was all about giving women choice. I guess that meant they had to make the “right” choice.
When Erin O’Connor was still on the English literature faculty at Penn, she noted that 90% of their graduate students were female and no one in the department seemed to think it odd.
And, of course, Nancy Hopkins doesn’t give a rip that 85% of those in special ed classes are male. She doesn’t merit being taken seriously for 10 seconds.
The post immediately made me think of this hypothetical from an econ. prof. at George Mason U. Sorry it is a bit longer than I remembered.
If one already has some economics familiarity, Boudreaux’s collection book “Hypocrites and Half-Wits” is recommended. It is a collection of his letters to the editors of newspapers that publish economically stupid articles. I bought it years ago for $5 in the Kindle format that oddly is now not available.
“My high school girlfriend went to Purdue and got a BS in Chemical Engineering in 1960. A lot was culture rather than barriers.”
I’m an electrical engineer and started college in 1960. The Civil engineers enrolled a good looking coed and we were upset. We were asking what was the matter with the EE department? Why couldn’t they find a good looking coed that wanted to be an electrical engineer. Were they incompetent? If a female wanted to be an engineer we would be saying enroll her.
We had a theory that, like babysitters, the preference was for homely girls. The homelier the female applicant, the more likely she was to be admitted. The theory was, of course, just like homely Catholic babysitters, the woman was less likely to get married and more likely to work full time all her career. The homely Catholic babysitter was in great demand as she would probably be available to sit on Saturday nights.
Once upon a time, long long ago, the slogan was “Equal pay for equal work.” Sounds reasonable, is reasonable, and at the time most women thought that was the goal. But activist leftist feminists have never had that goal, just as the left generally has bigger fish to fry than it lets on to the public.
AT LEAST THE SOVIETS KNEW THEY WERE SOVIETS, YOU DONT…
you dont get what it was, is or so on… confused like racism is about skin not culture
sheesh…
Equal pay for equal work for equal work is a SOVIET IDEAL (again)
but since you dont study anyt of that, your like a dodo meeting sailors
‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’: Women’s Wages in Soviet Russia
The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union pp 101-115
This chapter examines the impact of the Bolshevik policy of ‘equal pay for equal work’ on women’s wages in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. It takes a close look at the findings of a number of detailed investigations into industrial wage rates conducted in the Soviet Union in the interwar period to determine the extent to which the policy of ‘equal pay’ was pursued in practice. A wage gap undoubtedly existed and this chapter asks if Soviet women earned less because they were less skilled, worked fewer hours and did not produce as much as men or if women’s lower wages can be accounted for by more structural factors evident in the labour force in general and in the grading system for the payment of wages and salaries in particular.
more here: Gender, wages and discrimination in the USSR: a study of a Russian industrial town
Katarina Katz / Cambridge Journal of Economics / Vol. 21, No. 4 (July 1997), pp. 431-452
gievn the truth, almost everything said of it is a lie you dont know is a lie
keep talking about nothing, getting it wrong, etc
the point is that your not going to act on such things
so there is no way to win, only lose, and how fast
probably think your smarter than the germans, but the truth is they never saw this before in history, you did, that makes you guys dozens of points dumber (go ahead, get angry at the truth or me… beating up people dont make smarter either)
You think intentions matter, but in this came its your lack of intention is the only thing that matters, everything else negates success… you lack the intention to stop it, so all other intentions are your excuses
Soviet Union Information Bureau
WOMEN IN U.S.S.R.
Marxists.org
IN the Soviet State women have the same rights and privileges as men in all social and political matters, in respect to property rights and in respect to equal pay for equal work.
Gender gap in pay in the Russian Federation: Twenty years later still a concern
http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/worldb2014/posadas_j6007.pdf
For some authors, the high gender gap is also part of the legacy of the Soviet era, where the ‘Equal Pay For Equal Work’ legislation was interpreted in terms of productivity disfavoring women in occupations where men have a physical comparative advantage (Reza and Lau 1999).
One American woman’s life in revolutionary Russia
https://theconversation.com/one-american-womans-life-in-revolutionary-russia-86976
Yet, revolutionary Russia, at least in theory, offered what many women yearned for – an equal role in public life, equal pay for equal work, access to birth control and abortion, affordable childcare and romantic partnerships based solely on mutual affection. This at a time when American women could not even vote.
[actually they could… in 16 states… not only that they could go to college at one of the 7 sisters, and more… most of the points the ladies believe and full of hate are not truths… just as neo points out the pay disparity has always been due to choices, never anything else this equity in pay and work even screwed up the dems desire to disenfranchise blacks with minumum wage… ]
To some, talk of the revolution in Russia was thrilling. Strong wrote: “We heard of women’s freedom, of the equality of backward races, of children rationed first when supplies were scant; these things strengthened our enthusiasm.”
[did she hear truth?]
On the advice of Lincoln Steffens, a reporter who famously declared upon his return from Soviet Russia, “I have seen the future and it works,”
-=-=-
Strong raised thousands of dollars to support the John Reed colony on the Volga, of which she was nominal “chief.” Strong’s papers at the University of Washington reveal that she eventually figured out that nearly all the money she’d raised was being siphoned off by Russian bureaucrats, who then tried to extort even more money from her. She also started Russia’s first English language newspaper, the Moscow News. Although it was published continuously until shut down by Putin in 2014, it was never the witty, independent paper she’d wanted it to be.
-=-=-
wait till the ladies figure out like all the past peoples they been used to destroy their childrens future
under the idea of their own selfish wants…
if the ladies were half as good as they believed they are, this stuff would never work…
@ art deco – men and women tend to have different wiring spatially, but each is valuable. Men (my estimate is about 80% of men, though only 3 of my 5 sons does this) tend to prefer overhead view and/or cardinal direction navigation. Women tend to prefer landmark navigation. Smart people can learn to use the other strategy, but we all have our preferences. The research into Wayfinding tends to bear this out. GPS apps use the “birdseye” view, which combines the two. Ingenious. My wife and I both learned years ago that if giving or receiving directions, we both prefer to deal with our own sex.
If you want a deep dive into wayfinding, I did a whole series on it years ago, which I just recently brought forward. https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2018/03/wayfinding-series.html