The Pitters' Place

In developed countries the Pay Gap is largely a myth. There are certainly issues with people not getting selected for roles/promotions/opportunities - but that's a different issue. But once they're in a role, if they have the same experience/qualifications/etc it's fairly uncommon to find a difference in salaries between men and women.

The problem is that men and women often don't apply for the same types of jobs. Men are much more likely to take higher risk jobs, jobs that have unpleasant working conditions or jobs that require them to work away from home for long periods - all of which tend to pay better. And (because of biology) women sometimes have babies which stop them earning money for periods of time and even if they do decide to go back to work, their male "equivalents" will have gained more experience during that time potentially increasing their value.

Two much better comparisons to look at are:

"women that have never had children" vs "men" and "are doing the same job" - where you invariably see no difference
"women that have never had children" vs "women that have had children" - where you will see a significant difference

If there is an appetite to resolve the "Pay Gap" then more should be done to provide free child care, but even that won't resolve it. Because not all women want to put their children in child care and it still won't resolve the issue of men being more likely to take higher risk/more unpleasant jobs... So then you end up needing to go down the line of mandating what everyone gets paid until an oil rig worker ends up getting paid the same as a receptionist at an elementary school... But that's never going to happen, is it?

Your argument amounts to, "The pay gap doesn't exist because we can identify the causes of the pay gap."

Dork is right. But it's partly the fault of bad argumentation on the feminism side. Things like "equal pay for equal work" misrepresent what the actual problem is. The actual wage gap, the fact that men on average earn more than women in average, is absolutely real.

Banned for promoting communism.

the_dork_lord wrote:Your argument amounts to, "The pay gap doesn't exist because we can identify the causes of the pay gap."

It seems like he's saying the gap doesn't exist when you compare apples to apples instead of apples to oranges.

That's very much what I was saying. It bugs the shit out of me when I keep seeing people bandying around stats like "women get paid 82c for every $1 a man gets paid" which sound good for the camera but don't actually mean anything and they don't make any attempt to explain the statistics or to make them comparable. Another commonly used mis-direction is that they use annual earnings for their calculations and make no allowances the fact that many people (generally women) have deliberately chosen to take part-time jobs which obviously reduces their earnings.

So rather than just spouting misleading statistics and implying that society is out to mis-treat women (which I generally don't think it is) they should suggest some realistic solutions. Because I don't think there are any. There's even a Women's Equality Party here in the UK (it's a fringe party admittedly) that campaigns on issues like this and they say that they would give free child care to everyone so that women could get straight back to work... but not all mothers want to go straight back to work - some of them want to spend a year or two with their babies. So unless you're going to force women to leave their children just to try to close the Pay Gap there's always going to be a Pay Gap...

When you control for all this stuff, there is still discrimination.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/~jga22/website ... 0blank.pdf

http://www.amanet.org/training/articles ... y-Gap.aspx

http://www.uta.edu/faculty/crowder/data ... 996%29.pdf

http://davideharrington.com/wp-content/ ... n%20false;

That's interesting reading. Some of it's a little dated now and obviously has a bias, but still interesting. BTW - the last link doesn't seem to work.

I absolutely agree that there is still the wider issue of people (female/black/whatever) not get offered the same opportunities in the first place, which certainly feeds into the average money earned as a totality. But there's only one reference in your documents to people doing the same sort of jobs and getting paid less and it's a bit vague as to how specific the groups are...

Also, maybe men are more likely to take those high risk jobs that pay more because society says those are manly jobs, and maybe women work part time and take more time off to be with their babies because society says that's a woman's responsibility, not a man's. If that contributes to the pay gap, is that not a problem? Is there nothing society can do to change that?

BruceSmith78 wrote:Also, maybe men are more likely to take those high risk jobs that pay more because society says those are manly jobs, and maybe women work part time and take more time off to be with their babies because society says that's a woman's responsibility, not a man's. If that contributes to the pay gap, is that not a problem? Is there nothing society can do to change that?

This is a big part of it. Just because women can legally work any job a man can doesn't many that our society doesn't encourage otherwise. The fight for income equality isn't asking for laws banning wage discrimination based on sex (those already exist). It's pointing out that large imbalances exist in our society.