Ok then.
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I didn’t say inherently.
It’s possible that a society that expects women to be passive leads to women that are unwilling to take a tough stand in negotiations to avoid being labelled.
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Or its possible we live in a society that values men more than women and thus pay them higher.
Why is it that theory so easily dismissed and your theory of women being passive is valid? Do you know many professional women? Are they passive? Are they meek?
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That’s not even sort of statistically significant. Look at this, linked by several others here (including you?) that shows the unexplainable gap is in the single digits.
And to your point about nurses and engineers. How about we pay nurses more than engineers? Frankly I need them more than I need engineers. We have way too many engineers these days, re-train them all as nurses I say!
I assume you’re being sarcastic? Like I said, if you want to fight capitalism, I’m with you, but I don’t see what gender has to do with it.
Ok. So what is an acceptable margin of error to you?
I have not dismissed your theory. In fact, I agreed that you had good data to support it just above. I don’t know that it’s conclusive nor that there might be other factors that impact the problem. I’m deferring to better statisticians than I who have said that there isn’t enough data to conclusively show that it’s discrimination.
If the gender gap could be explained by “margin of error” then we’d also be seeing a number of studies showing that women were making more than men. Why would every single error show a nonexistent gap for the same gender?
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That’s not true; so long as it’s women bear children, usually near the beginning of their career, we should expect some small gap to form.
But even ignoring that, what percent gap do you find acceptable? Surely you don’t expect a reading of zero on something as complex as that?
You’re the one that brought up nurses and engineers.
So lets look at those careers shall we?
In 2011 in the USA 9% of Registered Nurses were men, 91% were female.
https://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupations.pdf
In 2015 17% of newly registered engineers in Canada were women, 87% were male.
So, you keep saying you don’t see what gender has to do with it, and yet you picked two careers seemingly out of a hat that are traditionally gendered. Nurses = female, and Engineers = male. And then you ask why they aren’t paid the same. So sure, nurses and engineers are different, but its very interesting to me that you pick two “random” gendered careers to discuss the wage gap. Interesting, and perhaps an unconscious bias? Because whether you meant it or not (or will admit it) when you say “Nurse” people hear “woman” and when you say “Engineer” people hear “men”. So what are you really saying when you imply that engineers should be paid more than nurses? Interesting no?
I still maintain that Engineers should not be paid more than nurses. Nurses are super heroes and should be paid appropriately.
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Which in itself is very much affected by how little boys are taught to negotiate, and praised when they do it well, whereas little girls are taught it’s not ladylike and shamed when they do it.
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I didn’t realize you meant it that way. Thanks for clarifying. I totally agree, obviously.
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What businesses have discovered, however, is that mothers make much better employees. They know how to prioritize and multi-task, and remain steadfastly loyal to their company if they’ve been treated fairly while taking a reasonable amount of time as needed around the birth of their children. In the long run, they are a better value for the HR dollar.
Over the course of 50 years of a (paid) working life, the amount of time lost on the job to care for one or two or even three babies just isn’t that much. One car accident could keep an employee away longer, but no one gets held back in their career for the rest of their lives just because they had a medical problem in their 20s. Unless, of course, the medical problem involves pregnancy.
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I would accept a gender wage gap that truly did fall within the margin of error for any given study’s sample size. Meaning that if a number of studies were conducted which controlled for all factors other than gender, we’d find just as many studies showing women out-earning their male counterparts as studies showing men out-earning their female counterparts.
Until we live in that world we have an ethical duty to keep fighting this problem.
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Er, no, that was rather the point. Women don’t seem to choose high value careers as much as men do, so it’s not surprising that while when we compare like to like there isn’t any significant wage gap, but there is in the population as a whole.
I mean, really, what do you seriously want to do about that? It’s easy, and lazy, to say that someone with a community college course in nursing should earn as much as someone who’s spent the better part of a decade training to be an engineer, but come on.
Like I said, if you want to raise the hammer and sickle, I’m there with you, but it seems you want the result without putting in the effort and making the hard choices to get it.
Kind of like someone who chooses to go into nursing rather than engineering, rather.
You ignored the question. How close is close enough? Is a 1.4% gap really worth fighting over?
I mean, I’m not trying to be combative here
I’m really starting to doubt this statement.
Let’s discuss “choice” for a moment, since that is a word you seem to like to throw around.
The 1.4% gap you choose to focus on above, is in an industry that has very low female representation. You turning around and saying women choose not to go into such fields, is an arbitrary statement, not based on evidence. You are basically picking and choosing what facts are worth discussing, and which should be ignored.
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I mean, ok? How do they not choose not to go into those fields? Who is stopping them?
It’s ok if they just don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with that. Capitalism really kind of sucks as a wealth distribution mechanism, but, well, there it is. If you’ve got a better idea, I’d love to hear it, but just throwing a tantrum while refusing to roll up your sleeves and put in the work to fix it is just childish.
How 'bout movie stars? Is that comparing “like to like” when we compare the paychecks of male and female movie stars? I mean, we’ve been paying actresses in Western culture for slightly longer than we’ve been making movies, and the training and educational qualifications for the gig are pretty identical no matter the gender of the actor in general. Female actors don’t work shorter hours; male ones don’t do any more heavy lifting. Why wouldn’t they get paid more or less the same?
Sexism. Ashton Kutcher made three times what Natalie Portman made on No Strings Attached. Was he three times as entertaining? Is he three times as skilled? Does he sell three times the tickets? Nope. Sexism.
American Hustle. Jennifer Lawrence got paid 77% of what Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper were paid. (And then proceeded to blame herself for not negotiating better.)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-pay-hollywood-idUSKBN14W286
Look at what Forbes had to say:
Almost universally, a gender pay gap persists. The world’s highest-paid actress, Jennifer Lawrence ($46 million), earned 71% of [Dwayne] Johnson’s $64.5 million. That ratio is a little lower than the 79 cents a white woman is typically paid to every dollar a white man makes, but better than the pay disparity Hispanic or Black women typically face.
Here’s a stat that surprised me:
There are simply more big budget roles for men that pay the high fees and cut of profits needed to score multimillion take-homes. In fact, there are more roles for men, period: Male characters comprise an overwhelming 71% of all speaking roles in movies, according to a recent study. To wit, eighteen actors banked over $20 million in our scoring period, compared with just four actresses.
Really? Are male characters just that much more fascinating? Why, in a world wherein most of the humans aren’t male, are so very many of the speaking roles in movies male? Sexism.
Combined, the world’s 20 highest-paid actors earned a whopping $703.5 million between June 1, 2015 and June 1, 2016, before management fees and taxes. That’s more than three times the $205 million tallied by the top 10 highest-paid actresses in the same time frame.
That’s 20 male actors vs only 10 female ones, but still, on average, those top male stars are pulling down a whopping 70% more than the female ones.
And here’s another related depressing function of our cultural sexism in Hollywood:
Men in movies can also have longer careers than the top-earning women: 95% of the highest-paid actors are over 40, compared with half of the actresses. The same study found that men fill nearly three quarters of all roles for characters over 40. In our rankings, all of the highest-paid actresses are under 50, while 45% of the actors are 50-plus. In fact, two of the actors on the list, [Harrison] Ford and Amitabh Bachchan, are even in their seventies.
I’m a dude, and I’m a terrible negotiator on my own behalf. I’m good at my job, I’ve been doing it a long time, and yet I make a fraction of what many of my colleagues do. There are those that might consider my reticence and reluctance to toot my own horn “feminine” characteristics. Whatever. But I do recognize that, as a white fella, I have it awfully easy in my industry. People naturally assume I know what I’m doing. (Fortunately, I do.) I don’t generally need to put a lot of extra effort into convincing people that hiring me would be a safe bet, that they needn’t worry that doing so might be remotely risky to either the bottom line or the workplace culture, or that I can’t handle the pressure or the long hours, or that my cute butt might distract someone into something actionable. I know that my own pay disparity compared to my former boss isn’t a sexist issue (he’s a dude, and a loudmouth too), but that does nothing to imply that I myself am definitely not getting paid more than most women in my line of work. I hope I’m not, but I bet I am.
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Girls are told, from very young, to be nice, to please. Boys to be firm.
Baby girls and baby boys do not look very different. It’s quite shocking what happens if you dress (that existing alone, is a thing) a girl like a boy, or a boy like a girl. People assume a, in this case, wrong gender and comfort the “girl” when for example crying, and the “boy” not. Compliment “girl” when “sweet”, “boy” not. This behavior, from the start on, has a big influence on how the world is viewed and felt.
Later on, schooling. Girls are not motivated to be interested in science, or math, even when doing good at such topics. In bad cases, even demotivated. Like boys are not per definition motivated, probably demotivated, even when interested, to do health or caring stuff.
So to answer your first question. And I generalized, and short cornered here, of course. There is a long history, in growing up, why and how girls and boys choose what they are going to do.
The being competitive, learn how to negotiate, just do the math classes you like (quite handy if you want to go the engineering path), fight, is from early age discouraged. The small group of women who choose to go in this fields you are talking about. Had, by luck, a different upbringing. Or are just very good in these things. That good, or bad in other things, or that interested in such subjects, its is the only way to go.
Same goes for boys who want to be nurses, care takers, dancers, and such.
And we are talking about (very) young people from which you can’t expect the will and knowledge to swim against the stream.
So, why do they not choose to go in such fields? Because it’s still awful hard to have a honest choice.
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Okay. this is clearly your hobby horse. You’ve hinted at it in the entire thread. You’re ignoring any other issues, to rail on capitalism. While it may be worthwhile to debate it’s efficacy, or even outright condemn it, it doesn’t invalidate the topic of wealth disparity with women, which you are making every attempt to turn the topic away from.
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