From what I know, women weren't employed not only because sure--they had to take care of the children and they could hardly "escape" that role, but also because before tampons and pain killers were invented menstruations would make it really hard for them to work.
As for equal pay/pay gap, as far as I know it's a myth and 0 economists are working on this problem because it just doesn't exist. Women work different jobs that pay less and are not as willing to devote their whole life to working like some men do.
The article seems to have a slight tone of criticism, as to remind us that back then women got paid the same, while nowadays they aren't (which of course isn't true). Maybe it's just me, though.
This denialism is not compatible with the facts. While part of the gender pay gap can be explained by the factors you describe, not all of it can. This unexplained part is often assumed to be (largely) due to discrimination. This unexplained part has also been shrinking over time, indicating that discrimination has decreased. (See
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13524-014-0320-... )
Here are journal articles on the topics, showing that economic researchers are covering the topic:
From Wikipedia I read: "a substantial portion of the pay gap (12%) remained unexplained.". Pretty small, and a lot smaller than what feminists claim the gap to be.
Then, at the end of the same section you linked: "In 2018, economists at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, working with Uber analyzing the gender pay gap of Uber drivers demonstrated an average 7% pay gap in a context where gender discrimination was not possible and pay was not negotiated, showing the difference entirely explainable as the difference in average productivity between men and women".
Am I mistaken in interpreting this to mean that only 5% is unexplained, and that "unexplained" does not mean evil patriarchy?
Any group of people will be discriminated by 5%. For instance, I'm Italian. Are you telling me that in the States I won't find 5% (or even 12% or more) of people that think I'm dishonest, mafioso, lazy, etc..?
I believe you are willfully misconstruing my position instead of trying to engage in the most charitable interpretation.
You original comment which has now been flagged suggested that 0 economists took the issue of the gender gap serious. By "denialism" I meant to refer to your position of denying that this is an issue at all. That it is an issue treated by serious economists is a fact. You have since reneged from that denial, which I consider a step forward. What you are now questioning is how big an issue it is.
Nowhere in my comment do I refer to any "evial patriarchy", although I do consider such an issue grave. If around half of the working population is discriminated against by 5% that would be a pretty huge issue overall. That other instances of discrimination exist, for example discrimination against people of Italian descent does not change that.
I am afraid you are also incorrect in picking out the end of the Wikipedia section I linked to. As this section I linked to points out, the Uber setting is very special because the pay is set via the Uber company without hiring the drivers in the usual sense.
> I believe you are willfully misconstruing my position instead of trying to engage in the most charitable interpretation.
I don't believe so.
> You original comment which has now been flagged suggested that 0 economists took the issue of the gender gap serious. By "denialism" I meant to refer to your position of denying that this is an issue at all. That it is an issue treated by serious economists is a fact. You have since reneged from that denial, which I consider a step forward. What you are now questioning is how big an issue it is.
I have no idea why it was flagged because it was a normal comment, and not even a very controversial position to hold. You're saying "has now been flagged" like I called for all women to be killed while swearing and offending people (perhaps to discredit me/my opinions?).
As for changing my mind (or even "reneging from that denial"), I think you're overestimating yourself: you didn't present anything that made me change my mind. 10% of unaccounted "discrimination" would be proof that this is an issue? Even if it was (which we don't know), like I said you can find 10% of people that will discriminate against anything: Italians, women, attractive vs. unattractive people, blacks, blond people, fat people, skinny people.
This whole thing is overblown. There are certain people that want to see injustice everywhere and will use the 10% pay gap that is unaccounted for to prove that there is a problem of women being oppressed, while either there is no problem, or it's so little to be negligible and most importantly similar to other biases.
> I am afraid you are also incorrect in picking out the end of the Wikipedia section I linked to. As this section I linked to points out, the Uber setting is very special because the pay is set via the Uber company without hiring the drivers in the usual sense.
I think it's a perfect example. Even taking away human bias--so, removing the hiring process, men and women perform differently. That's why it doesn't make sense to compare men and women like they're exactly the same, or why when you do you'll get a 10% discrepancy.
You know what we could agree on? That we are human and will naturally be 10% biased towards anything. Not only women, but all groups of people I mentioned and more. Sometimes it's women, sometimes it's Italians, sometimes it's attractive vs. unattractive people. This obsession with equality of outcome creates a lot more problems than that 10%, considering that while you may lose 10% on your workplace because of bias/opinion X, you might gain 10% in other aspects of your life and at the end it just averages out. In first-world and second-world western countries people have equality of opportunity, which is what really counts.
EDIT: HN doesn't allow me to reply to your comment below (thread too deep), but it's not worth it anyway.
Here is a case in which I think you do not engage in the most charitable interpretation: 'You're saying "has now been flagged" like I called for all women to be killed'
A more charitable interpretation would have been that I wanted to make clear that what I responded to can no longer be seen. I ask you to please interpret me as charitably as possible. I will try to do the same.
You said 0 economists study the issue. I showed you that multiple economists study it. You now also assert that I didn't make you change your mind. Do you still hold that 0 economists study the issue? If you do not, you have changed your mind. If you do still hold that opinion, then I am not sure how to proceed as that would indicate that you are impervious to argumentation.
You are using the number of 10% in two ways:
1.) About 10% of the gender pay gap are unaccounted for and therefore likely to be the result of direct discrimination.
2.) Every group is discriminated against by other people by around 10% of the population.
But these are very different issues. If every group was discriminated against by 10% of the population, the resulting pay differences would (more or less) even out. The does not, which suggests that this a widespread and systematic phenomenon. For some people, although perhaps not you and I grant that it would need to be debated, this might make the problem appear more severe.
Much of your posts just questions the importance of the issue. That is a normative question, which I consider separate from the issue whether the gender pay gap can be partially traced back to discrimination. Here is what I hold in regard to that normative question: I do not want to tell other people that they should not care about the discrimination they experience when I am on the end that profits or at least does not suffer it. It is up to people subjected to this treatment to decide how big of an issue they want to make out of it. I suggest it is a good normative heuristic that one should be wary to question the severity of the problem if one is on the side who is not affected by it. If you are fine discounting discrimination you experience, then that is all well but I would suggest you should not extend that to other people so easily.
(I edited this post to more adequately reflect the position of the previous poster.)
Wikipedia do mention the distinction between unadjusted versus adjusted pay gap in the Gender pay gap article, but sadly the article is very sparse on details.
It is the adjusted pay gap that is disputed. No one is really disputing unadjusted pay gap, through some consider that unadjusted pay gap should include everyone including those unemployed. The problem with unadjusted pay gap is that it ignore context.
With context we get a very large variation in the data sets, and large variation in control variables. There is no standard in what variable to use with adjusted pay gap.
Variables commonly cited when comparing full time employed men and women is that men work almost an hour longer per day than women for the same job. Women also use about 50% more sick days, and if I remember right from a study from Norway, about 200% more likely to have children compared to men. Those that have children are then also more likely to stay at home to take care of them, which is a related issue but not the same as pay gap. Overtime is an other factor which correlates with pay raise, as is moving work location and changing employer.
A good sign when I look at such studies is if they can use the same data to predict whom will get a pay raise within the same gender group. The better they can do that the better they can account for those factors when comparing the gender groups to each other. Sadly very few studies does this.
The point of linking these studies was that economists study these issues. As I am not an economist myself, I do not want to weigh in on the specific final conclusion the literature arrives at. All I can say, that multiple studies seem to find an unexplained part which is taken to be due to discrimination.
> The point of linking these studies was that economists study these issues
The sentence I said that triggered you was "0 economists are working on this problem", referring obviously to the pay gap caused by discrimination.
You have linked to inaccurate (as per comment above) studies that study whether there is a pay gap or not, and are inconclusive.
Since the pay gap as a problem--therefore not as a hard-to-measure occurrence but as a problem caused by discrimination--has not been proven, there are 0 economist working on this problem.
It's not been proven to be an actual problem that exists, and that's why no economist is working on fixing it.
I doubt your assessment of the literature. Since we do not seem to agree on this, I would defer to the opinion of specialists in this case. An independent panel of economists would thus have to settle the issue.
But your other argumentation is quite interesting. Do you also hold that 0 physicist ever worked on the theory of phlogiston? Or on ether? Neither of those to exist. Because your argumentation would also imply that. I would reject that suggestion. So even if I were to grant that this problem does not exist, which I do not, I would disagree with the conclusion of your post.
> But your other argumentation is quite interesting. Do you also hold that 0 physicist ever worked on the theory of phlogiston? Or on ether?
The pay gap as caused by discrimination has not been proven to be a problem. That's why there aren't people working on solving it.
I honestly don't know what the things you mentioned are, but I fail to see how physics are related to this topic. However, if you really have to use examples a better one would be that I'm saying that there weren't a lot of scientists working on curing AIDS before AIDS appeared.
I think a good comparison is to look at global warming studies. They too have a lot of unexplained data which are unaccounted for which could be due to natural phenomenon, but their conclusion is that global warming is man made and those unexplained parts are just unaccounted variables.
A scientific method to address the mix of unexplained data is to use prediction models on the assumption that the theory is correct and see if it works to explain the data. In the case of global warming we know that the prediction model does not work and the measured data is significant outside of what a natural phenomenon would look like. scientists has thus mostly discarded the theory of natural phenomenon and instead looked to combine the multiple studies and find man made explanations for unexplained data.
The same thing was done with gender pay. If we assume gender discrimination is causing the gender pay gap then a more gender equal nation should predictable have a lower gender pay gap. What we get instead is the opposite, the so called gender-equality paradox, where the more gender equal a nation is the higher the gender pay gap becomes. We really should follow the same scientific standard as global warming scientists and discard the theory of discrimination as the cause of gender pay gap, but we don't. Instead we see "half" of people trying to explain the failed predictions with the injection that the more gender equal nations is in reality less gender equal, and the other half arguing that it doesn't matter that the prediction model do not explain the data.
This is where I think most contention lies in the discussions around gender pay gap.
> This unexplained part is often assumed to be (largely) due to discrimination
This is literally the part that is controversial, and you're asserting it as a given. Controlling for almost any confounding variable so far has reduced the wage gap, the majority of which was/is often put forward as primarily having been the consequence of discrimination to begin with.
There are things that are also simply very difficult to control for, but are certainly at play. Are you sure that productivity is being measured outside of hours worked? Aggressiveness in salary negotiation? Actual hours worked vs. full-time time presumption as all members being 40 hour week? I often see one study attempt to control for one factor and fail on another. Cartoonish discrimination strikes me personally as among the least likely defacto explanations for the remaining gap.
The most important IMHO is salary negotiation. Women are less prone to challenge what they're given. That's the reason why a razor for women that is identical but painted a different color is more expensive--women will buy it without challenging the price. Following the same pattern, women are less prone to both negotiate a better salary when hired and ask for a raise.
It's also true that women value people more than objects and work jobs where they take care of people instead of fiddling with objects, which pays less and is less scalable. Finally, less women get satisfaction from "being the best", so while there are a lot of women CEOs and in particular women politicians, most women are not attracted by the prospect of sacrificing everything to get to the top.
There are people that have been taught that there is discrimination, and will see it everywhere. With the pay gap--which would normally be explained by a variety of naturally-occurring things--they just jump to the conclusion that of course it MUST be caused by patriarchy and discrimination. Since it's a very hard thing to measure, you might even be able to find studies that "prove" this theory.
Those women lose however, because if they spent as much time working on the skills that would help them get more money (in particular negotiating skills) as much as they spend complaining about oppression or commiserating themselves, they would make the same if not more than men.
The most powerful people in Europe are women (Merkel, May, etc.). Either there is no powerful oppressive male patriarchy, or we really suck at it. Either way, women get become as successful as they are willing to work for, in western countries.
Women have always been paid the same as men for the same work. Why on earth would they not be?
This seems completely unremarkable to me. It's almost as if the female author was looking to find evidence of a gender-based imbalance and couldn't, so decided it must have been "trail-blazing" women. Digging dirt for money is trail-blazing. Right.
I just don't understand how any thinking person can argue this. If women were actually taking less money for the same output then why would anyone hire a man? Discrimination surely exists, but do you really think that not one single company ever would take advantage of this fact to become successful?
Why do comments here suggesting that there are compelling arguments concluding that adjusted wages are nearly identical get flagged and down-voted? There is certainly a debate to be had, silencing the other side suggests weakness of one's own position. I have never seen a good rebuttal against the adjusted wages are very nearly equal position. Things always get shut down, shouted down or otherwise silenced in some way. I would love to see direct claim-rebuttal positions taken with opposing reasoning and data.
As far as I can see, the comments did not (just) assert that adjusted wages were nearly identical. They asserted:
1) That this is not a serious issue and 0 economists study it.
2) That at no point in history was the adjusted wage different between men and women. (This was asserted and not argued for.)
Comments which just asserted that adjusted wages might be nearly identical can still be seen. I agree that this might be debated. The other two opinions appear more extrem and much less plausible, as far as I am concerned.
I still feel that silencing someone is unhelpful. Why not let their claim stand? if outrageous - let it be handily refuted with logic and data and them made to look foolish. This is far more effective then silencing someone who then becomes a martyr. I also find it interesting that people on the far opposing side, those who come in with raw pay gap numbers whilst shouting "discrimination", they seem to always get a pass? Pay inequality has been well known since WW1, but all except a tiny portion of actual discrimination has been repeatedly dis-proven since the 1980s. Still huge numbers of people still parade the societal discrimination mantra proudly. People and parties run elections on it. Classes in prominent universities are taught preaching it (based on a few personal accounts, court cases and raw un-ajusted statistics). It is almost a religions justice objective for many to fix the unprovable wrongs of a system. Those are the people I often see shouting down the logical thinkers and data analysts.
Wait, so you're simply declaring that my comments aren't true despite the fact I'm merely arguing the null hypothesis due to insufficient evidence of any alternative? Why is the burden of proof on me? Because you say so?
Can you please just keep snark and flamebait off this site? If you really don't understand what flamebait is, start with this: don't post provocations on divisive topics. More explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19348774.
What a cess pit of bigoted bullshit the comments are.
HN is the only place I have encountered in the modern world that still tries to argue against gender equality along with weak justifications for disparity. Arguments I haven't heard expressed at all in the UK since the 1970s or 80s. No one still asserts in good faith that the world is flat, pay inequality is not a serious issue, or reinvents the timeline of actual history or even thinks that there is still debate to be had. It's basically a settled issue, and I see no evidence that any UK or European men are pushing against it.
America on the other hand, and I assume it's mostly the US nature of HN that causes this, seems to be still firmly stuck with the views of the 1950s. Still resenting the unfairness 60 years after equal pay laws? get real.
FWIW I managed to read the article with interest, without a single thought it was a myth. Or screaming unfair from my wealthy white male, privileged perspective.
People aren't arguing that women and men should be paid differently on the basis of their sex. The argument is simply that it doesn't make any sense to look at two disparate figures and assume they differ primarily due to discrimination.
The pushback so far has actually proven that this is sensible, as the more confounding variables are accounted for, the more the gap decreases. You'll notice that up until a few years ago, and sometimes to this day, pundits, professors, politicians, presidents and the public at large were completely comfortable stating that "women make 77 cents on a man's dollar." People were prepared to legislate for "equality" on the basis of this fact alone. But some people correctly stop and say, "Wait, but why? You're prepared to legislate, but you're just assuming that they're paid differently because of sexism you're attempting to correct."
Well, it turns out that the 77 cents on a dollar was arrived at by literally just comparing what women at large make vs men at large. But do men and women do the same jobs? Do they even work in the same fields? Depending on profession, the answer is a resounding no. So then the question becomes "do women doctors at this hospital who see the same amount of patients and work the same amount of hours and have the same track record and went to the same school and have the same seniority etc etc make less than the respective men." The more that is controlled for, the more the gap disappears.
What you are saying is that you can't believe sexist Americans stuck in the 1950s aren't prepared to legislate to remedy this issue, and that the pushback offered in this thread is evidence of people uninterested in gender equality. That's just not even close to the conversation that's being had, and I'm personally glad, whatever the topic, to have as much nuance brought forward as possible. Nobody is arguing against equality, it's just that you're mistaken in your assumption that this is what _you_ are arguing for.
Also, regarding the UK, please note Carl Benjamin, Paul Joseph Watson, Nigel Farage, Helen Pluckrose, among others, if you insist on the assertion that pushback is limited to those outside your country.
35 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 94.2 ms ] threadAs for equal pay/pay gap, as far as I know it's a myth and 0 economists are working on this problem because it just doesn't exist. Women work different jobs that pay less and are not as willing to devote their whole life to working like some men do.
The article seems to have a slight tone of criticism, as to remind us that back then women got paid the same, while nowadays they aren't (which of course isn't true). Maybe it's just me, though.
Here are journal articles on the topics, showing that economic researchers are covering the topic:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/209845
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0077995020954435...
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMP.2007.24286161
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/073088848601300...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001979390606000...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/344125
You can find more publications here: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=di...
For a start, the Wikipedia article unifies many sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...
From Wikipedia I read: "a substantial portion of the pay gap (12%) remained unexplained.". Pretty small, and a lot smaller than what feminists claim the gap to be.
Then, at the end of the same section you linked: "In 2018, economists at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, working with Uber analyzing the gender pay gap of Uber drivers demonstrated an average 7% pay gap in a context where gender discrimination was not possible and pay was not negotiated, showing the difference entirely explainable as the difference in average productivity between men and women".
Am I mistaken in interpreting this to mean that only 5% is unexplained, and that "unexplained" does not mean evil patriarchy?
Any group of people will be discriminated by 5%. For instance, I'm Italian. Are you telling me that in the States I won't find 5% (or even 12% or more) of people that think I'm dishonest, mafioso, lazy, etc..?
Give me a break.
You original comment which has now been flagged suggested that 0 economists took the issue of the gender gap serious. By "denialism" I meant to refer to your position of denying that this is an issue at all. That it is an issue treated by serious economists is a fact. You have since reneged from that denial, which I consider a step forward. What you are now questioning is how big an issue it is.
Nowhere in my comment do I refer to any "evial patriarchy", although I do consider such an issue grave. If around half of the working population is discriminated against by 5% that would be a pretty huge issue overall. That other instances of discrimination exist, for example discrimination against people of Italian descent does not change that.
I am afraid you are also incorrect in picking out the end of the Wikipedia section I linked to. As this section I linked to points out, the Uber setting is very special because the pay is set via the Uber company without hiring the drivers in the usual sense.
I don't believe so.
> You original comment which has now been flagged suggested that 0 economists took the issue of the gender gap serious. By "denialism" I meant to refer to your position of denying that this is an issue at all. That it is an issue treated by serious economists is a fact. You have since reneged from that denial, which I consider a step forward. What you are now questioning is how big an issue it is.
I have no idea why it was flagged because it was a normal comment, and not even a very controversial position to hold. You're saying "has now been flagged" like I called for all women to be killed while swearing and offending people (perhaps to discredit me/my opinions?).
As for changing my mind (or even "reneging from that denial"), I think you're overestimating yourself: you didn't present anything that made me change my mind. 10% of unaccounted "discrimination" would be proof that this is an issue? Even if it was (which we don't know), like I said you can find 10% of people that will discriminate against anything: Italians, women, attractive vs. unattractive people, blacks, blond people, fat people, skinny people.
This whole thing is overblown. There are certain people that want to see injustice everywhere and will use the 10% pay gap that is unaccounted for to prove that there is a problem of women being oppressed, while either there is no problem, or it's so little to be negligible and most importantly similar to other biases.
> I am afraid you are also incorrect in picking out the end of the Wikipedia section I linked to. As this section I linked to points out, the Uber setting is very special because the pay is set via the Uber company without hiring the drivers in the usual sense.
I think it's a perfect example. Even taking away human bias--so, removing the hiring process, men and women perform differently. That's why it doesn't make sense to compare men and women like they're exactly the same, or why when you do you'll get a 10% discrepancy.
You know what we could agree on? That we are human and will naturally be 10% biased towards anything. Not only women, but all groups of people I mentioned and more. Sometimes it's women, sometimes it's Italians, sometimes it's attractive vs. unattractive people. This obsession with equality of outcome creates a lot more problems than that 10%, considering that while you may lose 10% on your workplace because of bias/opinion X, you might gain 10% in other aspects of your life and at the end it just averages out. In first-world and second-world western countries people have equality of opportunity, which is what really counts.
EDIT: HN doesn't allow me to reply to your comment below (thread too deep), but it's not worth it anyway.
You said 0 economists study the issue. I showed you that multiple economists study it. You now also assert that I didn't make you change your mind. Do you still hold that 0 economists study the issue? If you do not, you have changed your mind. If you do still hold that opinion, then I am not sure how to proceed as that would indicate that you are impervious to argumentation.
You are using the number of 10% in two ways: 1.) About 10% of the gender pay gap are unaccounted for and therefore likely to be the result of direct discrimination. 2.) Every group is discriminated against by other people by around 10% of the population. But these are very different issues. If every group was discriminated against by 10% of the population, the resulting pay differences would (more or less) even out. The does not, which suggests that this a widespread and systematic phenomenon. For some people, although perhaps not you and I grant that it would need to be debated, this might make the problem appear more severe.
Much of your posts just questions the importance of the issue. That is a normative question, which I consider separate from the issue whether the gender pay gap can be partially traced back to discrimination. Here is what I hold in regard to that normative question: I do not want to tell other people that they should not care about the discrimination they experience when I am on the end that profits or at least does not suffer it. It is up to people subjected to this treatment to decide how big of an issue they want to make out of it. I suggest it is a good normative heuristic that one should be wary to question the severity of the problem if one is on the side who is not affected by it. If you are fine discounting discrimination you experience, then that is all well but I would suggest you should not extend that to other people so easily.
(I edited this post to more adequately reflect the position of the previous poster.)
It is the adjusted pay gap that is disputed. No one is really disputing unadjusted pay gap, through some consider that unadjusted pay gap should include everyone including those unemployed. The problem with unadjusted pay gap is that it ignore context.
With context we get a very large variation in the data sets, and large variation in control variables. There is no standard in what variable to use with adjusted pay gap.
Variables commonly cited when comparing full time employed men and women is that men work almost an hour longer per day than women for the same job. Women also use about 50% more sick days, and if I remember right from a study from Norway, about 200% more likely to have children compared to men. Those that have children are then also more likely to stay at home to take care of them, which is a related issue but not the same as pay gap. Overtime is an other factor which correlates with pay raise, as is moving work location and changing employer.
A good sign when I look at such studies is if they can use the same data to predict whom will get a pay raise within the same gender group. The better they can do that the better they can account for those factors when comparing the gender groups to each other. Sadly very few studies does this.
The ones that do don't see a problem. OP had to link the ones that don't to prove his point.
The sentence I said that triggered you was "0 economists are working on this problem", referring obviously to the pay gap caused by discrimination.
You have linked to inaccurate (as per comment above) studies that study whether there is a pay gap or not, and are inconclusive.
Since the pay gap as a problem--therefore not as a hard-to-measure occurrence but as a problem caused by discrimination--has not been proven, there are 0 economist working on this problem.
It's not been proven to be an actual problem that exists, and that's why no economist is working on fixing it.
But your other argumentation is quite interesting. Do you also hold that 0 physicist ever worked on the theory of phlogiston? Or on ether? Neither of those to exist. Because your argumentation would also imply that. I would reject that suggestion. So even if I were to grant that this problem does not exist, which I do not, I would disagree with the conclusion of your post.
The pay gap as caused by discrimination has not been proven to be a problem. That's why there aren't people working on solving it.
I honestly don't know what the things you mentioned are, but I fail to see how physics are related to this topic. However, if you really have to use examples a better one would be that I'm saying that there weren't a lot of scientists working on curing AIDS before AIDS appeared.
A scientific method to address the mix of unexplained data is to use prediction models on the assumption that the theory is correct and see if it works to explain the data. In the case of global warming we know that the prediction model does not work and the measured data is significant outside of what a natural phenomenon would look like. scientists has thus mostly discarded the theory of natural phenomenon and instead looked to combine the multiple studies and find man made explanations for unexplained data.
The same thing was done with gender pay. If we assume gender discrimination is causing the gender pay gap then a more gender equal nation should predictable have a lower gender pay gap. What we get instead is the opposite, the so called gender-equality paradox, where the more gender equal a nation is the higher the gender pay gap becomes. We really should follow the same scientific standard as global warming scientists and discard the theory of discrimination as the cause of gender pay gap, but we don't. Instead we see "half" of people trying to explain the failed predictions with the injection that the more gender equal nations is in reality less gender equal, and the other half arguing that it doesn't matter that the prediction model do not explain the data.
This is where I think most contention lies in the discussions around gender pay gap.
This is literally the part that is controversial, and you're asserting it as a given. Controlling for almost any confounding variable so far has reduced the wage gap, the majority of which was/is often put forward as primarily having been the consequence of discrimination to begin with.
There are things that are also simply very difficult to control for, but are certainly at play. Are you sure that productivity is being measured outside of hours worked? Aggressiveness in salary negotiation? Actual hours worked vs. full-time time presumption as all members being 40 hour week? I often see one study attempt to control for one factor and fail on another. Cartoonish discrimination strikes me personally as among the least likely defacto explanations for the remaining gap.
The most important IMHO is salary negotiation. Women are less prone to challenge what they're given. That's the reason why a razor for women that is identical but painted a different color is more expensive--women will buy it without challenging the price. Following the same pattern, women are less prone to both negotiate a better salary when hired and ask for a raise.
It's also true that women value people more than objects and work jobs where they take care of people instead of fiddling with objects, which pays less and is less scalable. Finally, less women get satisfaction from "being the best", so while there are a lot of women CEOs and in particular women politicians, most women are not attracted by the prospect of sacrificing everything to get to the top.
There are people that have been taught that there is discrimination, and will see it everywhere. With the pay gap--which would normally be explained by a variety of naturally-occurring things--they just jump to the conclusion that of course it MUST be caused by patriarchy and discrimination. Since it's a very hard thing to measure, you might even be able to find studies that "prove" this theory.
Those women lose however, because if they spent as much time working on the skills that would help them get more money (in particular negotiating skills) as much as they spend complaining about oppression or commiserating themselves, they would make the same if not more than men.
The most powerful people in Europe are women (Merkel, May, etc.). Either there is no powerful oppressive male patriarchy, or we really suck at it. Either way, women get become as successful as they are willing to work for, in western countries.
This seems completely unremarkable to me. It's almost as if the female author was looking to find evidence of a gender-based imbalance and couldn't, so decided it must have been "trail-blazing" women. Digging dirt for money is trail-blazing. Right.
As the article argues, the reduction is largely due to a reduction in the "unexplained part", which is usually attributed to discrimination.
You can also find other sources on Wikipedia suggesting your claim is wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male–female_income_disparity_i...
The mob has flagged all dissident comments. It's over.
1) That this is not a serious issue and 0 economists study it.
2) That at no point in history was the adjusted wage different between men and women. (This was asserted and not argued for.)
Comments which just asserted that adjusted wages might be nearly identical can still be seen. I agree that this might be debated. The other two opinions appear more extrem and much less plausible, as far as I am concerned.
I guess HN is one-sided. Certain opinions are now allowed.
Here's a repeat request: please stop posting flamebait so we don't have to ban you again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10368209
Can you please just keep snark and flamebait off this site? If you really don't understand what flamebait is, start with this: don't post provocations on divisive topics. More explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19348774.
HN is the only place I have encountered in the modern world that still tries to argue against gender equality along with weak justifications for disparity. Arguments I haven't heard expressed at all in the UK since the 1970s or 80s. No one still asserts in good faith that the world is flat, pay inequality is not a serious issue, or reinvents the timeline of actual history or even thinks that there is still debate to be had. It's basically a settled issue, and I see no evidence that any UK or European men are pushing against it.
America on the other hand, and I assume it's mostly the US nature of HN that causes this, seems to be still firmly stuck with the views of the 1950s. Still resenting the unfairness 60 years after equal pay laws? get real.
FWIW I managed to read the article with interest, without a single thought it was a myth. Or screaming unfair from my wealthy white male, privileged perspective.
The pushback so far has actually proven that this is sensible, as the more confounding variables are accounted for, the more the gap decreases. You'll notice that up until a few years ago, and sometimes to this day, pundits, professors, politicians, presidents and the public at large were completely comfortable stating that "women make 77 cents on a man's dollar." People were prepared to legislate for "equality" on the basis of this fact alone. But some people correctly stop and say, "Wait, but why? You're prepared to legislate, but you're just assuming that they're paid differently because of sexism you're attempting to correct."
Well, it turns out that the 77 cents on a dollar was arrived at by literally just comparing what women at large make vs men at large. But do men and women do the same jobs? Do they even work in the same fields? Depending on profession, the answer is a resounding no. So then the question becomes "do women doctors at this hospital who see the same amount of patients and work the same amount of hours and have the same track record and went to the same school and have the same seniority etc etc make less than the respective men." The more that is controlled for, the more the gap disappears.
What you are saying is that you can't believe sexist Americans stuck in the 1950s aren't prepared to legislate to remedy this issue, and that the pushback offered in this thread is evidence of people uninterested in gender equality. That's just not even close to the conversation that's being had, and I'm personally glad, whatever the topic, to have as much nuance brought forward as possible. Nobody is arguing against equality, it's just that you're mistaken in your assumption that this is what _you_ are arguing for.
Also, regarding the UK, please note Carl Benjamin, Paul Joseph Watson, Nigel Farage, Helen Pluckrose, among others, if you insist on the assertion that pushback is limited to those outside your country.