Freakonomics author takes on the wage gap. Saw this on /r/equalrights. Thought it should be here, too.

Kuonji · 2010-02-19T14:01:00+00:00

So they did find that women in general earn 12% less than their "observationally equivalent" male counterparts. Feminists have been right all along!

That difference, moreover, was mainly because they were employed by smaller firms, and disproportionately in the non-profit sector.

Ah. So once again the fact that wage disparities are mainly caused by personal lifestyle choices and not systematic gender discrimination rears its unwelcome head in scientific studies.

Ladies, newsflash: if you want to be a top-earning professional, work in top-earning fields and companies.

Also, I found these interesting:

Q: If an employer puts you on the “mommy track” simply for being female, and pays you less or doesn’t promote you as often, perhaps when you do have a child, the fact that you’re already being paid less gives you less incentive to return to work.

A: We do not find evidence that women are placed on a “mommy track” from the start, or that there is a major pay gap before job interruptions for whatever reason.

Then…

Q: I wonder if women have more difficulty negotiating a salary, because asking for a lot of money might seem aggressive or self-aggrandizing, or because an interviewer (male or female) might not believe that a woman is worth as much as a man.

A: …new MBAs who negotiate rather than accept their offered salary raise their pay by around 7%, and that MBA men negotiate eight times as often as MBA women. … women shy away from competitive situations, losing income in the process

Watch how plausible-sounding feminist musings fail to have actual evidence on their side. It always reminds me of this quote by HL Mencken:

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

The thing to note there is that women are the ones limiting themselves.

They are the ones who enter a job thinking they've been "mommy-tracked" because of their gender. They are the ones who shy away from negotiating salaries because they assume the interviewer will think they are worth less because of their gender. When men are victims of violence, it's a casualty. When women are victims of violence, on the other hand, they usually explain it in terms of being because of their gender. It's one of the leading sales pitches of the VAWA, for instance.

Why, I ask? What makes these women think that everything that happens to them happens because of their gender?

Could it be because the feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach? More and more it starts to look that way.

If they want to be truly equal, women need to liberate themselves from feminism.

Title	Freakonomics author takes on the wage gap. Saw this on /r/equalrights. Thought it should be here, too.
Author	huntwhales
Upvotes	8
Comments	2
Date	February 19, 2010 12:39 AM UTC (16 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/b3trq/freakonomics_author_takes_on_the_wage_gap_saw/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/freakonomics-author-takes-on-the-wage-gap-saw-this.1050720 https://theredarchive.com/post/1050720

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