The Futurist: The Misandry Bubble

[archerships]

It is true that women, on average, earn less per year than men do.  It is also true that 22-year-olds earn less, on average, than 40-year-olds.  Why is the latter not an example of age discrimination, while the former is seized upon as an example of gender discrimination? 

If women truly did earn less for doing exactly the same job as a man, any non-sexist CEO could thrash his competition by hiring only women, thus saving 25% on employee salaries relative to his competitors.  Are we to believe that every major CEO and Board of Directors is so sexist as to sacrifice billions of dollars of profit?  When the 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' of a nun congregation wrote to TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, that his company should have more women in its Board of Directors, Rodgers replied with a letter explaining why the pursuit of profit could not accommodate such political correctness.

via singularity2050.com

Posted via web from crasch's posterous

Comments

[litch.livejournal.com]

We all know that board membership is not based on performance, it is all about who is friends with whom, who went to the right schools and the right frats, who they need to suck-up to and who need to be placated.

[ersigh.livejournal.com]

That's a terrible comparison. A 40 year old worker generally gets paid more because salary is often based on experience.

I used to get paid 1/2 what my co-workers did and I trained the lead tech. I was also asked to leave several sites who did not want a female working on their computers.

[mary919.livejournal.com]

Also because we are all (hopefully) both the 22-year-old and the 40-year-old someday and so are benefitted or shafted alike. But most of us (not ALL of us, but most of us) stay the same gender.

[ersigh.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

The point is that disparities in average wage rates by themselves tell us nothing about whether discrimination exists. As you point out, the young make much less because they are less experienced, not because employers discriminate against them merely because they are ageist.

Likewise, it could be that systematic disparities in wage rates exist because women are irrationally discriminated against. However, aren't women much more likely make raising children a higher priority than their career? For example, aren't women much more likely to take years long absences from the workforce, work part-time jobs, and adhere to strict 9-5 schedules in order to have time for their kids? As a result, when they do work, would they not have less experience, less skill, and fewer (work-related) accomplishments than similarly aged men? If your employer paid you the same as someone who had less experience, skills, and accomplishments as you did, would you not regard that as unfair? Therefore, if employers pay fairly, wouldn't we expect women, on average to be paid less than men?

I don't doubt that some people do discriminate irrationally against women. However, as the article points out, there are strong economic incentives to _not_ discriminate irrationally based on mere gender. Companies that do discriminate irrationally must pay more for less skill than employers who don't. Therefore, they are going to be less competitive in the marketplace than the companies which don't discriminate irrationally.

[ersigh.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously not all wage differences are going to be based on discrimination. I would think that's a given.

I only have one friend who did not go back to work within a month of having her children. I worked through my pregnancy and continued doing so after my son's birth. I can't identify with or speak for the experiences of women who have the option to be professional mothers but I have found that trying to find a job after being out of the market for a year in a half due to an injury set me back a bit (I'm making $10/hr less than I was).

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Also, they're much more likely to be expected by their employers not to do these things - workplace expectations shape people's willingness to do these things, so the companies can't just get off the hook by blaming things on intrinsically different preferences of people of different genders.

[radiantsun.livejournal.com]

I think some of it is also that women are less likely to negotiate as well for higher salaries or raises.

[azalynn.livejournal.com]

"there are strong economic incentives to _not_ discriminate irrationally based on mere gender."

Yes, but who said humans were always going to behave rationally? That is sort of the whole reason it's important to address things like discrimination, because they ARE irrational and irrationality hurts everyone, economically as well as in other areas.

[lds.livejournal.com]

From the article you linked:

Electing people to corporate boards based on racial preferences is demeaning to the very board members placed under such conditions, and unfair to people who are qualified. A prominent friend of mine hired a partner who is a brilliant, black Ph.D. from Berkeley. The woman is constantly insulted by being asked if she got her job because of preferences; the system that creates that institutionalized insult is fundamentally wrong.

OMG U R SO SEXIST 4 NOT LETTING WOMYN MEET A DIFFERNT STANDARD!

[istar.livejournal.com]

If these two things are the same, then there should be a convention in place where women's earning power increases as they grow more and more masculine over time (just as my earning power increases as my experience, skills, and career-specific knowledge increase over time).

There was an episode of The L Word where a butch female character applied for an IT job and was immediately rejected, but when she reapplied for the job as "Max", he landed the job. It was dealt with in a trite and soap-opera-y way (and I recognize that there's little evidence that this sort of thing would happen in real life), but there was a strong implication in the whole story arc that Max was primarily frustrated with being female due to a lack of ability to advance in her career.

[pasquin.livejournal.com]

When you control for all variables, men and women are paid the same. Some women, to accommodate their life choices, choose to earn less for flexibility's sake.

I can't believe this myth persists.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

Prove your assertion, if you can. Also, your analysis fails to consider all the men who choose to earn less to accommodate their life choices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disparity_in_the_United_States

"For example, in 2004 the median income of FTYR male workers was $40,798, compared to $31,223 for FTYR female workers (DeNavas-Walt et al., 2005)."

FTYR = Full Time Year Round

[pasquin.livejournal.com]

There’s this analysis. And this.

And this excellent article from the Independent Women’s Forum citing the government’s own finding of equal pay.

I could go on and on. The trick is to look inside the numbers. Arguing that women ALWAYS make less is a political argument for vote getting, not a well-reasoned analysis.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

No one claims that women ALWAYS make less than men. But these articles you cite don't really address the main points. They attack the straw-man argument that claims that the only reason the median income for women is less than that of men is because of different pay for equal work - but I don't think anyone claims that that is the only issue.

One bigger issue is that men and women don't tend to be working in the same employment situations - as the articles you cite point out, women are more likely to work part-time, to take some years off, and to work in care-taking type jobs rather than risk-taking type jobs. However, the articles you cite just suggest that this is due to perfectly reasonable differences in preferences by rational individuals. In actuality, I suspect that at least some of these differences are due to employer, workplace, and family pressures that expect women to take time off for childcare and men not to; and that encourage men to ask for promotions but then call women "bitches" if they do the same thing; and that keep perfectly qualified women out of the fire and police forces and so on because they just didn't "seem quite like what we want" at the interview.

Also, that article from IWF didn't cite a government finding - it cited a study run by someone who was once a director of the CBO. It doesn't explain how the controlling for various variables was done, and whether this was a study that accurately represents most sectors and industries, or whether it was more restricted. And finally, even that study found a 2% wage gap after controlling for everything. I don't want to claim too much for that, because I don't know how big the study was and thus whether or not that difference is actually a statistically significant one, but it's certainly a meaningful one for many people. It suggests that even if you ignore all the confounding factors that I suggest may actually be part of the problem (but your articles treat as perfectly benign) it seems that there's still problematic discrimination going on.

But of course, the case of Lilly Ledbetter made that clear. Everyone in that case (Goodyear, Lilly Ledbetter, and the Supreme Court) agreed that Ledbetter's lower pay was illegally discriminatory, but Goodyear argued (successfully) that only the initial act of offering her a lower salary back in the '60s was illegal, and that everything else was just a result of standardized raises starting from a lower base, and that the statute of limitations was up on that initial act. But of course it's clear to everyone that just because you paid person A less in the past than you paid person B, that doesn't mean that it is now fair to pay person A less than person B for equal work. So cases like this clearly exist, and presumably occur far more often than they are discovered by the person involved, and then brought to court, and then pushed through the process rather than being settled out of court.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Based on the discussions above, it seems like the relevant figure isn't so much 25% as something more like 2% or 5% or something. And I think it's very plausible that lots of corporations are throwing away 3% of all sorts of things that they could be saving money on, especially when it comes to things that are very hard to measure, like effectiveness of advertising, productivity of professionals, and goodwill from the public.

And of course, no one thinks that the most economically effective policy would be to hire only women. The best policy would be to hire only people that are undervalued by the market. The claim of discrimination is that women are more likely to be undervalued by the market than men are, whether it's because their talents are less likely to be noticed (whether because people ignore them, or encourage them to do things that don't exercise their talents, or because the same behavior seen as good in a man can be seen as threatening in a woman) or because they are likelier to have talents that are less effectively monetized by the current economic system. Many women will be undervalued by the market, but so are some men (see Moneyball), but everyone admits that there will be some women whose market salaries are fair or even over-valued. The hard part is figuring out which is which.