Features

KevinTheOmnivore · #1

Just a silly blog, but raises an interesting issue. Any thoughts?

http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2007/...r-men-and.html

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Myths on inequality on pay for men and women

Recently, there has been a bit of noise over the so-called "Equal Pay Day" to pay attention to the purported "pay gap" between what men and women earn. Both Clinton and Obama have made this mythical gap a focus of their campaigns. Obama has signed on to a bill to mandate comparable worth compensation so that somehow men and women should be compensated the same for equivalent jobs. Clinton and Obama simply want to ignore the facts behind the statistics showing that the average woman makes less than the average man. Men and women often make different choices about their work and, surprise of surprises, that affects their compensation. Rich Lowry writes,
Different pay for different professions persists, of course. Nurses aides (89 percent female) have more education than truck drivers (97 percent male), but their median earnings are just 57 percent that of truck drivers. This isn’t discrimination, but a reflection that driving cross-country is unpleasant work. Women tend not to want to do it.

That kind of choice is a key factor in the male-female wage differential. Average earnings for male physicians are $170,000, for female physicians $100,000. Bias? No, as Furchtgott-Roth has noted, “many women choose to go into pediatrics, psychiatry, and family practice, all lower-paying fields than surgery, which is more demanding in terms of hours.” Many women choose professions that are compatible with having kids, and when they have children, they tend to take a break from their careers (whereas men actually work more).

“The main source of productivity differences between women and men stems from the lesser amount of time and energy that many women can commit to labor market careers as a result of the division of labor within the family,” O’Neill writes. “Women continue to work part time more than men and to choose work situations such as work in nonprofit institutions and occupations that more easily can be accommodated with home responsibilities.”

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama might wish this fact weren’t so, but there’s no way for them to legislate it out of existence, even with a very bad, dated idea.
One college student, Ashley Herzog, writing in Townhall gets the basic economics that explains these statistics; perhaps Clinton and Obama could learn from her.
First, the belief that employers get away with paying women 77 percent of what men make can only be explained by a lack of understanding of basic economic principles. If it were true, money-grubbing employers would hire only women, since it would lower costs and increase profits. We know that doesn’t happen, so feminists have invented a preposterous explanation: male businessmen care so much about keeping women “in their place” that they’re willing to lose money by hiring men. Is it just me, or do people like Donald Trump seem slightly more concerned with getting rich than maintaining patriarchy? Already, the pay gap theory has serious flaws.

Second, the 77 cents to the dollar figure is calculated by comparing the average salaries of all men to all women. It does not account for occupation, education, the number of hours worked, or the different roles that jobs play in men’s and women’s lives. The average woman earns less because she’s made different choices in life – a fact that feminists, despite all their caterwauling about the importance of “choice,” refuse to accept.

What women’s studies majors who lament about the pay gap don’t realize is that they’re contributing to it. According to economist June O’Neill, a major reason women make less than men is that they often choose college majors in lower-paying “humanities” fields, such as education, journalism, English and social work, while men are more attracted to high-paying fields like business and engineering. If women’s studies majors are so outraged by the pay gap, maybe they should all drop out and enroll in the College of Engineering. That act alone would do much more to close the pay gap than blaming sexism.

derrida · #2

Quote:

Different pay for different professions persists, of course. Nurses aides (89 percent female) have more education than truck drivers (97 percent male), but their median earnings are just 57 percent that of truck drivers. This isn’t discrimination, but a reflection that driving cross-country is unpleasant work. Women tend not to want to do it.

Driving cross country is 43 percent more unpleasant than cleaning up shit piss blood and vomit. Maybe it's just cuz I'm a guy, but I'd rather be a truck driver than a nurses aid.

I think the best explanation for extant disparities is the fact that for the majority the most critical years for ensuring a future of professional success are those between the ages of 25 and 35- these just happen to be the years its most likely for a woman to get knocked up. So, in order to minimize the effects of this confluence we should encourage couples to have kids either before or after this crucial period. To further rectify the penalty that mother nature has so cruelly bestowed upon chicks everywhere, civil society should reclaim the burden imposed on it by antisocial male behavior (vastly higher crime rates, traffic accident rates, etc.) by imposing a masculinity tax.

An important point is that in the majority of circumstances (everyone not aspiring to top-level corporate management) women who make the right choices will earn the same as their male counterparts. Most women, however will not, and for resons that are not entirely self-generated. For this reason alone this controversy will not abate any time soon.

Perndog · #3

Driving a truck is more unpleasant because of the lifestyle, not because of the on-the-job conditions. Nurse's aides still get to go home every day and live with their families year-round, and truckers are paid more because they have to sacrifice some of that. The popular consensus is that this is indeed worse than dealing with blood, shit, and piss. Otherwise, as the study says, why aren't there more female truckers?

derrida · #4

I disagree. The reason there aren't more female truckers is the dearth of heterosexual male prostitutes at truck stops.

Ant10708 · #5

Who needs oxygen anyways?

Big Papa Goat · #6

Civil society should reclaim the burden of males by imposing a tax? Don't you mean by aborting male fetuses? Or do you know what civil society means? Or was it just a joke?

I only ask because it's curious why you don't just say, 'the state should... tax', when that's obviously what you mean there. Does the word 'state' sound too conservative or perhaps 'old-left' for you? What makes civil society sound better than state anyway? I mean, we all know what a state is, if we in fact know, but civil society, that's a slippery little sociological concept. A state is an institution that does certain things if certain people (and political scientists more or less know, if they do in fact know, who these certain people are in different types of regimes, but basically their the people we call 'politicians') want it to. So if 'certain people' include 'us', then 'we' can get the state to impose a masculinity tax. Easy and straightforward really, all 'we' have to do with a state is become 'politicians' to get what we want from it. But what about civil society? What does it do, and why does it do it? I mean, it's a weird term, it doesn't refer to anything that a man can point to and say 'that's it, civil society, it employs these and those people and intends to do such and such because this and that person in charge of it want it to for various self or non-self generated reasons'. What can you say about civil society then? It would seem the appeal of it is that it isn't a state, or a corporation, or any other kind of 'hierarchal organization'. Civil society has no rulers, so it can have no subjects, so there can be no subjection from it. And whenever 'it' 'does' anything, it was not because 'certain people' with certain names and interests and political parties wanted it to, but because the illustriously benign 'we' willed it to.

On a related note, who in fact is the 'we' in the 'we should encourage couples to have kids before or after...'? And what is the 'encouragment' that should be given? And to ask the sort of obvious question, what about couples that want to have kids during that period that mother nature (cruelly) says is crucial for reproduction, while 'we' say that it is 'crucial' for 'a future of professional success'? Ah, the whole situation looks kind of like a peculiarly modern tragedy, where people are forced to choose between the demands of nature and the demands of... well, I don't know who or what exactly, I guess the 'us' you referred to when you were talking about that ambiguous 'we' earlier. Although I guess that's just a silly sort of tragedy, since we all know that 'we' are right about these things, and that mother nature was always just a cruel bitch in any case.

"Most women, however will not [make the right decisions], and for resons that are not entirely self-generated. For this reason alone this controversy will not abate any time soon."

I think you hit on a general truth about controversies there. When people claim that their own decisions aren't 'entirely self-generated', contreversy will probably never abate. Could such a contreversy really be resolved? What would have to happen? The elimination of non-self-reason-generators? Perhaps, but if people continue to fail to make the right decisions, what's to stop them from continuing the contreversy by claiming that not all the non-self-reason-generators were eliminated, i.e by making new claims about what constitutes such a non-self-reason-generator? I mean, they might just be making stuff up at that point, but that wouldn't stop them from continuing the contreversy. It's easy to make up ideas to continue a contreversy, especially in an issue such as income disparity where you've got real people with real money on the line. Unless of course, one fine day, when 'we' have succesfully eliminated all the real non-self-reason-generators people actually stop failing to make the 'right' decisions.