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Actual Data: Are women paid less than men for the same work?

BobbyDropTableUsers

August 2, 2017

9 upvotes

/r/MensRights

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-chart

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Title	Actual Data: Are women paid less than men for the same work?
Author	BobbyDropTableUsers
Upvotes	9
Comments	16
Date	August 2, 2017 2:51 PM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/6r4oe4/actual_data_are_women_paid_less_than_men_for_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/actual-data-are-women-paid-less-than-men-for-the.916666 https://theredarchive.com/post/916666

Comments

[–]EricAllonde 3 points4 points5 points 8 years ago (15 children) | Copy Link

This is the study on which that article is based:

http://www.haygroup.com/en/our-library/whitepapers/gender-pay-gap

It's the only true apples-to-apples study that I've found, which compares men vs women in the same jobs at the same companies.

Result: average wage gape across 33 countries is just 1.6%. Here in Australia it's 1.4% while in the UK it's only 0.8%.

One factor not controlled for is the number of days of vacation time taken per year. Women tend to take more vacation time per year than men, on average, even when they don't have kids. There have only been a couple of studies done on this and they reported widely varying figures. If women took an extra 3 days of vacation time per year, that would account for a gender earnings gap of about 1.5%.

This study really should have been the final nail in the coffin of the gender pay gap myth. The fact that it wasn't suggests that feminists are simply taking the piss now.

[–]BobbyDropTableUsers[S] 2 points3 points4 points 8 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]EricAllonde 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

Vacation days are part of compensation, so it shouldn't matter if you take them or not.

They do affect what you earn.

While you're at work you are earning a salary and also "banking" vacation days to be used later.

While you're on vacation, you are not earning a salary and you are drawing down your "bank" of vacation days. You still get the same amount of money from your employer, but you're going backwards in terms of what you earn.

Think of it like this: let's say you're in a job where you get 2 weeks of vacation time per year.

Option 1) you work for exactly 1 year and then quit. Your company pays you for the 2 weeks of vacation time you've accrued.

Option 2) you work for 50 weeks, then take 2 weeks vacation, then quit exactly 1 year after you started work. You have no vacation time left, so the company pays you nothing.

[–]AnarAchronist 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]fletom 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (11 children) | Copy Link

If you would like to understand an actual feminist's point of view, I can explain.

No, we are not taking the piss. What I call the pay gap is the number at the top of the first graphic, and it's almost 30% in the UK.

But what about the lower numbers that make the pay gap "disappear"? Well that's just a bad and misleading interpretation of the data. When asking yourself whether the labour market is unfair towards women, you can't control for all the things that are actually the symptoms you're looking for. When you do, the resulting numbers are basically saying "Look, women have just as successful careers as men when you control for how successful they are." Which is clearly ridiculous. It's comparing the few women in high-paying jobs and finding that they make (almost) as much as men in high-paying jobs, while completely ignoring the huge disparity between the number of women and men who have been able to get those jobs.

The pay gap does not, in any meaningful way, disappear. A more reasonable and unbiased headline might be "Study finds gender pay gap of 15-30% is likely due to hiring discrimination, not salary discrimination".

If you would like to see "actual data" that directly and indisputably proves that gender discrimination exists in STEM fields, for example, take a look at this study (from Yale) measuring the differences between perceptions of applications submitted by "John" and those submitted by "Jennifer": http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-battle-of-the-sexes/

[–]EricAllonde 1 point2 points3 points 8 years ago* (6 children) | Copy Link

But what about the lower numbers that make the pay gap "disappear"?

We call those "personal choices".

Imagine a boy and a girl finishing high school and deciding what occupations they want to go into.

The girl thinks, "I love kids, so I'm going to go into childcare".

The boy thinks, "It seems that there's strong demand for mining engineers, and that pays very well too. OK sure, the work seems boring to me and I'll have to spend weeks at a time working at remote mine sites. But I want a well-paid career, so I'm going to do it anyway".

The result is a gender pay gap. But it's entirely due to their choice of occupations. If the boy & girl had made the opposite choices, the pay gap would have been reversed.

When asking yourself whether the labour market is unfair towards women, you can't control for all the things that are actually the symptoms you're looking for.

We're not controlling for "symptoms", we're controlling for personal choices. We want to see if there's any actual discrimination against women, so we have to take the result of personal choices out of the picture.

Your occupation is a personal choice.
Having a baby or not is a personal choice.
Working full time or part time is a personal choice.
Staying at work or taking a lengthy time out of the workforce is a personal choice.

When you do, the resulting numbers are basically saying "Look, women have just as successful careers as men when you control for how successful they are."

No, the resulting numbers are saying, "Look, women earn just as much as men when they make the same personal choices as men".

The pay gap does not, in any meaningful way, disappear.

Yes, it does. I'm going to go with the consensus of economists and hard data here, rather than your reckons which are warped by feminist victimhood bias.

take a look at this study (from Yale) measuring the differences between perceptions of applications submitted by "John" and those submitted by "Jennifer"

A small hypothetical study: no one was actually hired, people were asked to report their subjective impressions.

Contrast that with this much larger study from the Australian public service which showed that when gender-blind recruiting was implemented fewer women were hired. That showed managers in the public service are discriminating in favour of women and against men in hiring.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/public-servants-more-likely-to-hire-women-shock-study-results-20170629-gx1pqg.html

In our very feminist, politically correct society, the social justice warriors have had great success shaming and guilt-tripping companies into discriminating in favour of women during hiring, as a number of studies have shown. Skilled & qualified men, especially straight, white men, are often being passed over in favour of mediocre women in order to meet diversity quotas.

The fact that feminists are still complaining, despite being more pampered, privileged and advantaged than any group in history simply shows the futility of trying to make feminists happy. We should dump all the affirmative action & social justice nonsense and just go back to hiring & promoting based on merit alone.

[–]fletom 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

We call those "personal choices".

The girl thinks, "I love kids, so I'm going to go into childcare".

The result is a gender pay gap. But it's entirely due to their choice of occupations.

[citation needed]

You can't just take your pet theory about why the pay gap exists and tell a cute story about a girl who loves kids and a guy who wants a high-paying job, and use that as a real argument.

We're not controlling for "symptoms", we're controlling for personal choices.

Look how twisted your logic is. You're conflating two completely different things. The article doesn't mention anything about controlling for parental leave or hours worked, you just made that up. Company, seniority, and job title are not personal choices. They are dependent on being hired and/or promoted by other people, who may or may not have strong biases. Once you control for those things, your study no longer has anything meaningful to say about whether or not women are discriminated against in the labour market.

A small hypothetical study...

It was a randomized double-blind study (n = 127) with statistically significant results published in actual research papers. I don't know what you mean by a "hypothetical" study but they confirmed the real, non-hypothetical existence of bias among actual professors at dozens of universities.

Contrast that with this much larger study from the Australian public service...

Sure, let's take a look. Oh, according to your article blind recruitment ended up "doubling the proportion of female bosses at the Australian Bureau of Statistics", nice! Here is a real example where people were actually hired. I'm glad those women got hired after being given a fair chance.

The study you're actually referring to was done by asking people to "assess applications for a hypothetical senior role", which makes your criticism that the Yale study was hypothetical pretty weird.

They found that "participants were 2.9 per cent more likely to shortlist female", but this is a study at a single government organization in Australia that sounds politically feminist-leaning and happens to be 59% women. Anyone scientifically-minded will tell you that's extremely far from being a meaningful representative sample.

Skilled & qualified men, especially straight, white men, are often being passed over in favour of mediocre women in order to meet diversity quotas.

This is opinion on both our parts, not science, but what I see is that women and minorities are routinely passed over in favour of mediocre white men, and have been for all of recent history. Diversity quotas are actually quite rare, and women still only make up tiny percentages of high-ranking positions at major companies. Minority percentages are even lower.

[–]bufedad 3 points4 points5 points 8 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]EricAllonde 1 point2 points3 points 8 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

You can't just take your pet theory about why the pay gap exists and tell a cute story about a girl who loves kids and a guy who wants a high-paying job, and use that as a real argument.

Even today, I often hear feminists spout nonsense like, "Women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for the exact same work". I'm sure they wouldn't deliberately lie, so I presume they are simply ignorant. It's because of them that I sometimes fall into walking through the concepts in extremely simple terms.

My apologies, we've established you are not one of those ignoramuses.

So you accept that the personal choice of occupation affects subsequent earnings and this is one of the contributing factors of the "gender pay gap", correct?

And I'll assume that you're not one of those "Women have no agency and are brainwashed into choosing lower paying occupations by the patriarchy" feminists, correct?

Then all we're left with is possible sex discrimination in hiring and promotion, I presume? Something that you have a hunch is an issue but have no good evidence to prove and which KPMG estimates may cause a pay gap of up to 4%.

[–]fletom 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

Even today, I often hear feminists spout nonsense like, "Women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for the exact same work".

I think when feminists say that, they don't literally mean that if Tim Cook were a woman then Apple's board of directors would have decided to pay him 23% less when he became CEO. What they're referring to is the barriers that women trying to have a successful career face even though they're working just as hard. The same work can be literally the exact same day to day job and responsibilities, or it can mean putting the same effort into a career.

Here are a few examples of the kind of thing I mean from the startup/tech world in the last month alone:

http://observer.com/2017/06/justin-caldbeck-binary-capital-sexual-assault-harssment/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entrepreneurs-speak-out-sexual-harassment.html

And I'll assume that you're not one of those "Women have no agency and are brainwashed into choosing lower paying occupations by the patriarchy" feminists

I don't believe that women are brainwashed, but I do believe that women and men are strongly socialized from a young age to be a certain way that matches historical gender roles. Little girls are more likely to be given barbies and doll houses and toy babies and watch princess movies that tell them they're going to grow up and marry an important man someday. Boys are given toy trucks and lego and watch movies about men who have exciting and successful careers and adventures. This is fortunately becoming less true over time, of course, but remember that the people who could be CEOs today grew up in the 50s-80s.

So yes, those things have a huge affect on people's view of themselves, their choices, and what they see as their place in the world, and I think it is a primary contributing factor to the gender pay gap. Whether or not that is "patriarchy" is just semantics, but that's what I would personally call it.

[–]EricAllonde 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]InstaPiggyBacon 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

Imagine there are two jobs available and 2 applicants, Jennifer and John, for both the jobs.

Job 1 pays $100,000/year, requires an average 55 hour work week (with mandatory weekends), provides 6 holidays per year, and 10 vacation days per year. Health insurance is offered, but it's high deductible with low benefits and it costs $500/month for single coverage.

Job 2 pays $80,000/year, requires an average 40 hour work week, observes all federal holidays and offers 20 vacation days per year. Health insurance with a $1,000 deductible and minimal copays is offered to employees at no cost, and dependents can be added with the company picking up 75% of the additional premium.

Jennifer and John are equally qualified and offers are extended to both of them for both Job 1 and Job 2. John values income and doesn't really take much vacation time, so he accepts the $100,000 from Job 1. Jennifer values free time and has 2 kids she can add to the health insurance plan at minimal cost. Plus, her husband already makes $120,000/year, so income isn't as important to her. Accordingly, she accepts Job 2 with it's $80,000 salary.

In this scenario, is it John or Jennifer who has been discriminated against and oppressed?

[–]bufedad 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]fletom 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]bufedad 2 points3 points4 points 8 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

One measure of a person's career success is the company they work for

Alright.

Do you have anything indicating that women are being denied access to those jobs?

and their job title

Do you have any data that indicates women are being denied access to those job titles?

http://www.businessinsider.com/women-want-work-life-balance-more-than-a-big-paycheck-2013-9

Women work fewer hours than men do at full time. Why? Because evil managers are making them go home? No. Because they choose to. They can work fewer hours.

Men are more likely to go to work sick. They are more likely to be in the office. You can't complain about men succeeding more, when they are putting in more work.

Full time men work an extra 8.4 hours per week compared to full time women.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/time-spent-working-by-full-and-part-time-status-gender-and-location-in-2014.htm

They take fewer holidays. (although that trend is changing with millenial women... who are paid more than their male counterparts).

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2013/04/25/vacation-travel-study/2110505/

I mean, you can't be as successful as someone else, if you don't work as hard as they do. Wanting anything else... is wanting special treatment.

[–]thrway_1000 0 points1 point2 points 8 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link