> claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender?
Probably not, the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts at the NYTimes, so they have some experience with sociology data.
> Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?
As explained in the article, the data analysts union mad this claim, it's even explicitly linked!
> Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc
No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
Anyway, here's a big stats heavy quote about how there is solid evidence for a pay gap, from the stats nerds at the census bureau (I link only the executive summary https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/media/An%20Evaluat..., link to the full thing can be found in the summary)
"""In both decomposition models, the portion of the gender wage gap that could not be explained by differences in men’s and women’s work histories, work hours, industry and occupation distribution, and job characteristics was between 68 and 70 percent, yielding an unexplained wage gap of 14 to 15 percent. That is, of an estimated wage gap of 21 percent, statistical models explain between 6 and 7 percentage points of the gap, leaving 14 to 15 percentage points unexplained, similar to other major studies on this topic.
Differences in the sorting of men and women between occupations do not fully explain the gender wage gap; men and women are paid differently within occupations as well. The size of the gender wage gap varies significantly by occupation even as men earn more than women in nearly all occupations. While wages are at parity in some occupations, gaps are as large as 45 percent in others. Across the 316 occupations in this study, occupations in finance and sales had the largest gender wage gaps""
>a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
I think it can be true that we should make those jobs safer and that it makes sense to pay dangerous jobs more.
I really am curious what the people that disagree with me think. Do you think that danger shouldn’t be compensated?
Of course someone did. The clear and obvious interpretation is saying that “making the jobs safer” is an alternative to “a group does more dangerous jobs and dangerous jobs should be paid more”
I had a friend who worked on the ramp at SFO. Saw him real shook up after work, said he saw a coworker drive one of their carts under a plane while looking elsewhere- and got his head cut off.
It's a very physical job with a lot of powerful machines.
The fallacy (...ish) in these conversations is that men and women always work the same types of jobs. Which you pretty much just admit isn't really the case, which your "teaching and nursing" comment.
Ultimately, it turns out, men have a combination of typically choosing higher-paid careers and also being more demanding in terms of compensation. At the end of the day I can't hold a gun to women's heads and make them become engineers. If they want to be teachers, then so be it.
But wait! That doesn't mean that there isn't discrimination at play. Because typically jobs that are predominantly women are lower paid. It's complex, because:
1. Typically, there ARE some value/toughness differences in the job. Being a nurse is "easier" than being a doctor. But how much? Are we certain we're dividing the pay equitably?
2. While men have these higher paying jobs more, men aren't more educated. At least, not anymore. What could be the factors leading women to receive education in fields that are less economically viable?
Also, while there is a pay gap, this isn't the only gender gap. Clearly, job distribution across gender is very complicated. For example, men make up 97% of workplace deaths. Why do men choose these jobs more? Is it biological, social, economic, or all three?
> No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?
That the full argument amounted had this weird structure where women should be excluded from some jobs without complaint because of the danger, but simultaneously there was no interest in making the jobs safer!
So that men work more in dangerous jobs wasn't a problem, instead that was a proper, "of course men should die more" sort of thing because it motivated the pay gap.
So the argument becomes that men should die so the pay gap is sustained, which doesn't seem like a great thing to declare triumphantly?
Weird that jobs with performance bonuses are the largest gap — but that perhaps suggests that the cause isnt sexism in the workplace, but yet more confounders they didn’t account for.
Who gets handed the best leads to the biggest fish? The people perceived as the best deal closers. Perceived. This is where you can hide the most sexism, along with other confounders, yes.
sales is literally you-eat-what-you-kill. you get paid % commission on sales regardless of your gender.
There are so many sales people nobody would actually bother creating a separate pay grade for women and separate for men (and it would be highly unethical and illegal ofc)
I think the orthodox Left response to this would be that the unseen hand of the patriarchy and general internalised gender roles cause women to hustle less/advocate for recognition of their performance less than men, or for men to overlook their contributions.
because it DOES NOT control for hours worked nor experience, and lumps up narrow specialties with wide specialties together in a single "finance".
There is a huge difference in finance as a "bank teller" and finance as a "investment banker at Wall St".
This is a problem of large scale population level wage research, it misses very important confounding variables and lumps up everything they failed to explain as some magical gender pay gap.
This is the epitome of how low replicability social sciences research is done: download dataset from JSTOR, load it in Stata/Matlab, run some regressions and call it a day.
I agree about the diversity of finance as a sector. I know many people that work ”in finance” and that varies from glorified interior decorating for corporate real estate to running macros on spreadsheets to check loans to defining investment portfolios
It is a quote from a summary, they don't write out the full list of jobs that fall under the heading to keep it short.
Examples of jobs in that category given in full report reads: "securities, commodities, and financial services
sales agents (0.55), financial managers (0.66), and personal financial advisors (0.68)."
> the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts
You seem to believe a union in a negotiation would care about carefully drawing conclusions from data analysis.
The goal is to construct a political wedge which makes their employer look bad for not giving into their demands. The only mindset about data is “how can we use this to argue for what we want”.
Probably not, the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts at the NYTimes, so they have some experience with sociology data.
> Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?
As explained in the article, the data analysts union mad this claim, it's even explicitly linked!
> Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc
No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
Anyway, here's a big stats heavy quote about how there is solid evidence for a pay gap, from the stats nerds at the census bureau (I link only the executive summary https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/media/An%20Evaluat..., link to the full thing can be found in the summary)
"""In both decomposition models, the portion of the gender wage gap that could not be explained by differences in men’s and women’s work histories, work hours, industry and occupation distribution, and job characteristics was between 68 and 70 percent, yielding an unexplained wage gap of 14 to 15 percent. That is, of an estimated wage gap of 21 percent, statistical models explain between 6 and 7 percentage points of the gap, leaving 14 to 15 percentage points unexplained, similar to other major studies on this topic.
Differences in the sorting of men and women between occupations do not fully explain the gender wage gap; men and women are paid differently within occupations as well. The size of the gender wage gap varies significantly by occupation even as men earn more than women in nearly all occupations. While wages are at parity in some occupations, gaps are as large as 45 percent in others. Across the 316 occupations in this study, occupations in finance and sales had the largest gender wage gaps""