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Even Beyonce is spreading the 77% myth

mrloree

January 15, 2014

22 upvotes

/r/MensRights

http://pitchfork.com/news/53563-read-beyonces-essay-on-gender-equality/

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Post Information

Title	Even Beyonce is spreading the 77% myth
Author	mrloree
Upvotes	22
Comments	21
Date	January 15, 2014 2:24 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1v8rpt/even_beyonce_is_spreading_the_77_myth/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/even-beyonce-is-spreading-the-77-myth.1004863 https://theredarchive.com/post/1004863

Comments

[–]Captaincastle 12 points13 points14 points 12 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

[–]IS44 7 points8 points9 points 12 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

[–]Zeddikus 1 point2 points3 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]seenloitering -3 points-2 points-1 points 12 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]IS44 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

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[–]ManPretty22 1 point2 points3 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

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[–]TracyMorganFreeman 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (8 children) | Copy Link

[–]Riktrat 2 points3 points4 points 12 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]TracyMorganFreeman 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]Riktrat 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]TracyMorganFreeman 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]FrostytheSnowColt 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago* (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]meldyr -1 points0 points1 point 12 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

Averages have a couple of disadvantages.

Outliers Bill gates has an income of 6 billion dollars per year. (I find a couple of contradicting sources but just watch the magnitude). This increases the average income of an American man with approximately 18$ per year.

The sum average is highly unfair for incomes, (which are allways positive). A person who has 0 income and lives by eating rats has a much smaller effect. So for income only the positive outliers have a great effect. Suppose that man just have a greater income spread would increase the average income of man.

Solving outliers using medians What FrostyTheSnowColt suggested seems a good idea. But take a look at the value (see value as happiness points). A 1000$ increase on an average income, or a 1000$ increase on bill gates income would have a great difference in happiness value.

This implies that if your income decreases with 100$ the pain would be greater than the joy you had if your income increased with 100$. So even if the median is the same, an income distribution with a lower spread seems more desirable.

Geometric average It seems that the value (in happiness points) is not proportinate to the value in dollar. It seems a good assumption to say that if your income is multiplied with 1.10 you would win an amount of happiness points which is equal to the amount of happiness points you would lose if i divide your income with 1.10.

The amount of happiness points is proportionate to the logarithm of your dollar income. If we would compare the incomes by comparing the average of the amount of happiness that could be fair. This is equivalent to taking the geometric mean.

But if you take a look at the skewness and conclude that the geometric mean is probably better.

Declared income is not correct

You look happy at yourself and think the geometric mean is good enough. But suddenly you realize that the list of incomes you acquired might not be totally correct. A lot of man work in construction, and extra-hours are often not declared. The problem with this is that the undeclared income or other noise factors, are mostly positive, and as a consequence most incomes are underestimated.

Open a book on statistics and you will see that this becomes gruesome to get something useful from the data.

Same work

It seems that man and woman don't do the same work. More man work in construction and more woman work in health-care. Suppose we want to normalize this to get an answer. Finding people who do exactly the same work is almost impossible. So it becomes really hard to answer this if you want to compare the wage of man and woman who do the same work.

Non-arbitrage argument

Most MRA's just state, it can't be true that man earn more for the same work. If man would earn more for the same work anyone could become incredibly rich by just starting a company and hire only woman.

The problem is that this argument isn't entirely valid either. Suppose that of all man 20% of the man are ambitious and 80% just want to get their work done. And assume 5% of the woman are ambitious while 95% just want to get their work done.

Suppose you are a HR-manager of a bank. You would offer an ambitious person 3000$/month and an unambitious person 2000$/month.

But you don't know who is ambitious and who is not after just a job interview. Knowing that man are more likely to be ambitious you offer the man a higher wage than the woman. However they will do exactly the same job.

TL:DR; It is hard to compare the distribution of incomes fairly. Didn't finish my argument but if you would balance complexity versus fairness I would stick with comparing the geometric means. Given that nobody has perfect income records and that man and woman do not do the same job it becomes impossible. A lot of MRA's refute all claims about income using a non-arbitrage argument bit this argument isn't entirely flawless either.

[–]autowikibot 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

Here's a bit from linked Wikipedia article about Geometric average :

In mathematics, the geometric mean is a type of mean or average, which indicates the central tendency or typical value of a set of numbers by using the product of their values (as opposed to the arithmetic mean which uses their sum). The geometric mean is defined as the nth root (where n is the count of numbers) of the product of the numbers.

For instance, the geometric mean of two numbers, say 2 and 8, is just the square root of their product; that is . As another example, the geometric mean of the three numbers 4, 1, and 1/32 is the cube root of their product (1/8), which is 1/2; that is .

A geometric mean is often used when comparing different items – finding a single "figure of merit" for these items – when each item has multiple properties that have different numeric ranges. For example, the geometric mean can give a meaningful "average" to compare two companies which are each rated at 0 to 5 for their environmental sustainability, and are rated at 0 to 100 for their fi ... (Truncated at 1000 characters)

^about ^| ^{/u/meldyr can reply with 'delete'. Will also delete if comment's score is -1 or less.} ^| ^{To summon: wikibot, what is something?} ^| ^{flag for glitch}

[–]FrostytheSnowColt 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]AlexDSSF 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]NorthernSpectre 0 points1 point2 points 12 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link