The what pay gap?
Nobel Prize in economics goes to a woman. Guess what her field is.
This year’s Nobel economics prize has been awarded to Claudia Goldin, an American economic historian, for her work on women’s employment and pay.
Prof Goldin’s research uncovered key drivers behind the gender pay gap, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
By “gender pay gap” the BBC means the fact that women earn less than men. Funny that it’s so taken for granted they don’t feel a need to spell it out.
And then the punchline:
She is only the third woman to receive the prize, and the first to not share the award with male colleagues.
Gender prize gap innit.
Isn’t it interesting that this kind of thing just goes on and on and on being the case, yet we’re told to consider men who pretend to be women “the most vulnerable” people on the planet? I think it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting that mainstream institutions like the BBC and Parliament and the police and the CPS take it for granted that women are paid less and given prizes less, but jump up and down in hysterics over the supposed agonies of men who pretend to be women.
As an aside, I’ve had countless arguments with MRA-types who claim that the pay discrepancy doesn’t exist, and when presented with solid economic data demonstrating the reality of it, will then claim that it’s the fault of women themselves. They do love to pivot. Those MRA guys are notorious for casting themselves as the only true victims in any situation. Sort of sounds familiar, doesn’t it.
Why yes, it does.
How has the spectrum pay gap not been invented yet?
Uber saw the pay gap among its drivers: the men made more than the women.
Uber gets high-resolution data about what its driver do: every pick-up, every drop-off, every fare paid, GPS coordinates, everything. They analyzed the data looking for the cause. They found three things
– Uber drivers earn more money as they gain experience, and the men had longer average tenure than the women: 9 months vs. 6 months
– The men were better at getting themselves out on the road during surge pricing, when fares are higher
– The men drove faster than the women
Isn’t it pretty well established that these days the “gender pay gap” is not a result a of women being paid less for the same work (something that is now illegal in most Western countries), but is a result of men tending to prioritise work and career, and women tending to prioritise family and work/life balance?
Indeed, the BBC’s article says: “Prof Goldin found that the current earnings gap was now largely due to the impact of having children”. If this means that couples tend to decide that the man goes to work and the woman looks after the children, then why is this a problem? Should they be forced to do it the other way round?
Men and women are biologically different (we’re surely past the feminism of a few decades ago that wanted to regard men and women as identical in every way), so why would we expect that they (on average) tend to make the same life choices and thus have the same outcomes in all things?
I suspect that the “gender pay gap” is “so taken for granted” nowadays because people don’t see anything wrong with it. (Unlike the past situation of unequal pay for the same work, which was indeed wrong.)
Steven: did the data disclose any negative externalities from faster driving?
That’s one way of putting it, but another way is “women tending to be stuck with much more than half the childcare duties.” It’s complicated, of course, but I think it’s well known that the choice is often a forced one.
Coel, I put a high priority on my work. At a job I worked, the men were paid more than the women. We all did substantially the same work, we had substantially the same education, and in fact, the women were given crap jobs that no one else wanted to do, not because they were easier and not challenging, but because they were harder and dangerous.
One thing I noticed, though. The men were more prone to lie on their resumes.
Alan #6, that’s all I remember from the news report.
There are also the cases like the soccer USWNT where the women negotiated for their own priorities (i.e., guaranteed pay, benefits, etc.), made more money than the men on a per game basis and overall, and still claimed pay discrimination on the grounds that they would have made more money under the men’s contract agreement. (When the men would have made more under the women’s.)
It’s this sort of thing that feeds skepticism about pay gap claims.
Some time back I posted a link to an NZ Government study into the pay gap. It concluded that there was a several percentage point difference that could not be explained by career breaks and part-time work when child raising. I’ve also mentioned before that sectors of engineering and law that were previously male dominated and are now female dominated appear to be slipping in pay parity. NZ is a pretty typical western liberal democracy. We get used as a test bed for other western markets. I really doubt that we’re atypical.
Rob, that fits with one study I read (don’t remember exactly where, sorry) that discovered jobs that were slipping in prestige opened up to women. They found the slip in pay/prestige happened first, then the women started becoming frequent in that field. Teaching is one example, but there are many others. This individual used brewing in the medieval period as her basis, and sort of moved from there.
Another thing about my making less money than my cohorts in that job. When I said something about it, I was told he needed the money to support a family. This was a ridiculous statement. (1) His fiance made very good money. (2) He had no family. (3) I was a single mother raising a teenager.
And when my internship was up, I had to leave because they hadn’t hired a woman full time in more than a decade (since the current administration arrived). There was a job open, but they closed the posting so they didn’t have to consider me for the job. When the man who made more than I did ended his internship, there were no jobs available for full time. They created one for him. He was widely known as a screw up, but they created a job for him.
iknklast, a few years ago I had an older male friend say, quite seriously, that the reason average wage rates had declined over the decades was the fault of woman’s lib. That because there were more women working, employers didn’t have to pay people (men really in his context) as much in order for a family to earn sufficient to live.
In a similar vein to that last anecdote of yours, I recall back when I was in my first job I was friends with a woman who was a few years older. She was a senior scientist, had two late teen kids, and rented her house. I asked one day why she hadn’t bought a house and she replied that the bank wouldn’t lend her the money because she had dual citizenship and was single. I was flabbergasted. She said they were quite upfront at saying that as a woman alone, they wanted to know there was a second person to pick up the payments. This was a responsible early 40’s woman with near adult kids, with a well paying secure government job. No man would have faced that hurdle at that time in NZ. Thankfully banks have become somewhat more reasonable since then, but still.
Rob:
That’s not a prima facie ridiculous hypothesis. If demand for labor doesn’t increase proportionally with the increase in supply, the price of labor will decrease. Casting the phenomenon as fault, however, if meant normatively, is ridiculous, as is suggesting that increased female participation in the work force is the only significant factor in declining wages.
Another helpful way to look at the ‘pay gap’ situation is comparing job roles/titles that require equivalent levels of expertise, education and experience – considering wages as the return on an employee’s investment in education and years of on-the-job learning. Why, hypothetically, for example, would a preschool assistant, a job that requires some specialised training, a certain level of education, and some degree of experience, make less money than a car park attendant, which requires less of all of these?
guest, that’s it exactly. Why do teachers, especially those in academia who are required to have advanced degrees, make less than a computer tech with only a bachelors…or maybe only an associates?
Some people also talk about the value of the work. The jobs filled predominantly by women are quite valuable, and people wouldn’t want to be without the nurses, cashiers, custodians, teachers, day care workers, etc that are dominated by women. But they feel free to pay us much less than they would pay someone doing a “man’s” job, especially if said person was a man.
@Iknklast:
Market forces. You have to pay a lot to hire a competent computer guy because other people want to hire them and will pay a lot.
Whereas lots of people want to be academics and are willing to put up with a bad deal (e.g. adjunct professorships) to be so.
Academics might have a higher degree, but having written a PhD on Ulysses doesn’t have commerical value the same way being able to make computers run does.
It’s not a conspiracy against women.
They could hire a competent computer gal and pay her the same amount (including all the same benefits) they would have paid the guy.
iknklast @16
I think those jobs should be paid considerably more than they are. Considering the importance of the work and the responsibilities of the jobs (especially eg day care, grade & high scool teachers). Then there’s all the crap cashiers and hotel housekeeping workers have to deal with.
It is nearly impossible to make reasonable salary comparisons across fields, it seems to me. CEOs and other top executives make obscene amounts of money in major corporations, far in excess of what the engineers or designers or assembly workers make, and it’s justified based on “market forces” for obtaining top executives. The most highly paid public sector employee in nearly all US states is a coach, usually football or basketball, and it’s justified similarly based on “market forces” for obtaining coaches. It’s impossible to compare the value of a coach with the value of the head of the health department or the head of the disaster response team, let alone the front line workers in those fields. I share the feeling that these exorbitant salaries are wrong, that society values the wrong things, but I have very little confidence in any suggested means of quantifying that feeling.
For those interested in digging into the weeds, here are three links to relevant bits of The NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment website
https://www.employment.govt.nz/hours-and-wages/pay/pay-equity/
https://www.employment.govt.nz/hours-and-wages/pay/pay-equity/gender-pay-gap/
https://www.employment.govt.nz/hours-and-wages/pay/pay-equity/pay-equity/
Each has links to other information including studies done by , or commissioned by, the NZ Government.
The pay equity process is interesting because, as Sackbut notes, making cross industry comparisons is very fraught. NZ has now had three Pay Equity agreements ratified*, with a fourth on the way. They are slow, difficult, fraught processes. There is allowance for mediation and support for all participating parties to ensure as fair a result as possible. The results so far have been very significant boosts in income for people in then affected industries (regardless of sex) as the bulk of employees are women it has been shown that that has depressed average earnings,
*https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/government-shows-further-commitment-pay-equity-healthcare-workers#:~:text=This%20is%20the%20third%20pay,reached%20over%20the%20next%20fortnight.