News Alert: A PHD in gender studies pays as much as a masters in computer science. Women everywhere shocked and appalled.

Kill_The_Rich · 2011-08-11T16:42:03+00:00

Why don't people ever bother actually reading these studies?

We reproduced the methodology originally used in the 2002 Census report on lifetime earnings. They describe this approach as:

“Synthetic estimates of work-life earnings are created by using the working population’s 1-year annual earnings and summing their age-speciﬁc average earnings for people ages 25 to 64 years. The resulting totals represent what individuals with the same educational level could expect to earn, on average, in today’s dollars, during a hypothetical 40-year working life.”

Speciﬁcally, the Census approach looks at 5-year age groups — 25-29, 30-34, etc. — to get an average for each age group and then sums each of these 5-year averages of a particular demographic and/or educational group to estimate the average 40-year degree for that group.

This approach is an estimate and is not based on real careers of people. In real life, people’s careers are much more volatile -- they change jobs, have wide yearly earnings variations, have periods of time where they are not working, often start working before age 25, and may retire before age 64 or work well past it. Also, by only using earnings levels from 2009 data, these estimates are only approximations of what individuals who are 25 years old today can expect to earn over their lifetime. It is quite probable that productivity growth will lead to higher earnings in the future and therefore the career of today’s young adults will lead to higher lifetime earnings than presented here.

We diﬀer from the Census in that we use median earnings rather than average earnings. As noted in footnote 2, median earnings tend to be more representative of “typical” experiences than average earnings.

To construct medians and the 25th and 75th percentile groups, we combine the medians, 25th, and 75th percentile levels in the diﬀerent 5-year periods rather than the averages.

Since no data source exists with a large number of cases that tracks individuals throughout their careers by earnings, occupation, and hours worked per year, this approach is the only viable one to construct even a rough estimate of lifetime earnings.

[...]

Another important choice in determining lifetime earnings is whether to base these computations on an “ideal” career in which the person works full-time, full-year for each of 40 years from 25 to 64. In reality, only about half of men and a small share of women meet these criteria, since major interruptions, including temporary unemployment, illness, early retirement, and time taken oﬀ to meet family responsibilities, often take people out of the workforce for some period of time. Over a recent 15-year period, Rose and Hartmann (2004) found that 74 percent of men and 26 percent of women were “super attached workers”–working at least 1,750 hours in 12 of 15 years. Following the Census approach, we chose to compute lifetime earnings on the basis of full-time, full-year workers and alert the reader that many workers, especially female workers, don’t meet this standard.

Basically, they took median full-time (i.e. 40 hours worked is considered the same as 60+ hours worked) wages for a year, for different criteria (race, degree, etc.), then extrapolated that, effectively saying "if they all worked the same amount of hours, and they all worked for 40 years, at exactly tha same pace, these are the differences we would see". Several times they mention that their numbers will be a bit fucked when it comes to women, because A) women do not work as many hours as men...by a long-shot, and B) more men than women will work continuously for that 40 year period.

Yet, people don't read through this shit...because they're lazy and it conforms to their prejudices.

Things aren't helped much when the authors of these studies stretch the truth a bit in the very first paragraph (the part most people will actually read):

Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men.

Really? You mean you actually did control for hours worked/etc.? Oh...no, you didn't...and you admit as much on page 21 where you said "Since no data source exists with a large number of cases that tracks individuals throughout their careers by earnings, occupation, and hours worked per year, this approach is the only viable one to construct even a rough estimate of lifetime earnings".

EDIT: My bad, it turns out the fucking census considers anyone who works more than 35 fucking hours to be "full time"...what the fuck

A full-time worker is one who worked 35 hours or more per week during a majority of the weeks worked during the preceding calendar year.

http://www.census.gov/population/www/cps/cpsdef.html

and they don't even have to work for the entire year to be considered "full time"...they just had to have worked 27/52 weeks.

A year-round worker is one who worked for 50 weeks or more during the preceding calendar year. A full-time, year-round worker is a person who worked full time (35 or more hours per week) and 50 or more weeks during the previous calendar year.

EDIT 2: You know what, to show just how asinine this is, we're going to do some math.

Okay, so you have two people, who both earn $40/hr, both have the same degree, and both are "full time" workers.

Person A works 35 hours per week, 27 weeks a year. Person B works 60 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.

So, extrapolated over 40 years (as they've done), we see that Person A has worked 37,800 hours, and earned $1,512,000. Person B, on the other hand, has worked 120,000 hours, and earned a whopping $4,800,000. OMG PERSON A IS BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST!!!!! THEY ONLY EARN 31 CENTS FOR EVERY DOLLAR THAT PERSON A EARNS!!!!!! CONSEQUENCES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!!!!!

DaNiceguy · 2011-08-11T16:19:43+00:00

[permanently deleted]

plugButt · 2011-08-11T16:57:56+00:00

Over a recent 15-year period, Rose and Hartmann (2004) found that 74 percent of men and 26 percent of women were “super attached workers”–working at least 1,750 hours in 12 of 15 years. Following the Census approach, we chose to compute lifetime earnings on the basis of full-time, full-year workers and alert the reader that many workers, especially female workers, don’t meet this standard.

Seems that they're saying only a quarter of women work a 35 hour week, but they've gone ahead and pretended that all women work that many hours anyway. In other words, this is not even about equal work.

But, would "Women paid less for less work and possibly more useless degrees" attract press attention?

Kuonji · 2011-08-11T16:27:33+00:00

I'm so sick of people spouting this pay gap bullshit. It's really starting to grate on me.

"I'm so depressed after seeing this graph, why does society value men over women? It's so unfair!!!!"

solinv · 2011-08-11T18:00:53+00:00

I'd like to see where they compare apples to apples instead of apples to oranges. How about what a man with a MS in EE makes compared to a woman with an MS in EE.

This really seems like a clear case of Simpsons paradox but I don't have enough data to be sure.

Whisper · 2011-08-11T21:55:58+00:00

If a PhD in "gender studies" really made as much as a master's in CS, then I would be shocked and appalled.

ConfirmedCynic · 2011-08-11T19:32:51+00:00

Obviously something to do with markets and demand.

thingsarebad · 2011-08-11T18:06:49+00:00

A PhD in gender studies should make as much as a McDonald's burger flipper.

Lothrazar · 2011-08-12T00:46:36+00:00

Yes, this really should be split up based on what the degree was in.

LaPetiteM0rt · 2011-08-12T09:54:50+00:00

You can't compare data if the Ph.D is in another subject than the BA. It would only make sense to compare if they were the same major because then the remaining difference would be gender-based, not major and gender-based. Of course computer science majors on average make more than gender studies grads, there's higher market demand for them and it's a technical skill.

GeorgeOlduvai · 2011-08-11T15:41:46+00:00

I'd like to see that statistic, but where they removed the women that have children.

Rockytriton · 2011-08-11T23:07:30+00:00

I didn't see anything about gender studies and computer science on that page.

caitlinbc · 2011-08-11T17:13:02+00:00

I'd love to see the look on their faces.lol

If I were to earn a Ph.D, it certainly wouldn't be in gender studies.

SharkSpider · 2011-08-12T11:58:19+00:00

Feminist academia at its worst.

Use the horribly flawed gross income calculation used to establish the "pay gap" and now separate by level of education for new and improved misleading statistic.

Title	News Alert: A PHD in gender studies pays as much as a masters in computer science. Women everywhere shocked and appalled.
Author	bigbadbyte
Upvotes	56
Comments	48
Date	August 11, 2011 3:26 PM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/jfrac/news_alert_a_phd_in_gender_studies_pays_as_much/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/news-alert-a-phd-in-gender-studies-pays-as-much-as.1036024 https://theredarchive.com/post/1036024

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