this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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My favorite part of this AEI op-ed (look up the fellows of this august think tank institution if you have a minute) is that the author lists no notes, references, or citations for a single claim in the piece. Now that's how you do it! Start a Hudson Institute it Heritage Foundation and once you've got the banner to put behind a panel of prestigious sounding fellows, bam! You've got the patina of credibility! Back it with a couple hundred million in tax-cheat lobbying endowments and you've got a stew going baby!
My favourite part of that list is that a bunch of reasons are implicitly gendered. E.g. 'men are more likely to have had more continuous years of employment...' - gee I sure wonder why that could be - and apparently there's just no problem there at all in their mind. 'women are more likely to work shorter hours to ~~pick up the slack~~ do things like raise children and make sure their habitation isn't a health hazard. Like maybe some of these bullet points aren't so much counter arguments as exactly the kind of thing we should be targeting when considering the pay gap. Why is it culturally acceptable that women should do all a disproportionate amount of household chores? And let's also note that there's also been research that suggests that wages for specialist fields have historically shifted to reflect the balance of men Vs women in the field. Why is teaching so low paid now? Why is software engineering more highly paid. Stupid list, SMH
What are you targeting, exactly? The ability of women to choose? Because that's the only way you're going to equalize the kind of things you mentioned right before that quote--by giving them as little choice in the matter as men have.
If you compare men to childless, never-married women, the gap essentially vanishes. Women who choose to be less 'all in' professionally bring the female average down. You can't fault employers for favoring and paying more to workers who have more continuous experience etc.
There are no 'culture police' coming around to enforce this. This is decided individually within each relationship. And women are more than capable of leaving men who are not willing to do whatever share of those tasks (up to and including 100%) they want their partner to be doing.
I suspect it's similar to the reason vets are very underpaid compared to other medical professions: being passionate about helping kids/animals opens one up to be easier to take advantage of, re wages. In other words, you love animals so you're willing to be paid less than you might deserve, in order to do the job you want to do.
That said, plenty of teachers are paid quite well, there are a lot of factors that determine whether a given teacher gets what we'd generally consider a 'good' wage.
Because it scales much more, especially as technology advances. Even the best nurse on Earth, for example, can only care for so many human beings in one day. But a piece of good software can serve millions, maybe billions of people. And a millions of people paying you one cent each will enrich you much more than 10 people paying that 'ultimate nurse' a large sum each.
It's a fact of the matter that STEM scales up in ways that fields like teaching and nursing simply can't. That's not misogyny, that's just reality. Another fact of the matter is that the skew toward men in engineering, for example, and the skew toward women in nursing, as an opposite example, are HIGHEST in the countries with the best gender equality laws/culture. Fact is, men and women tend to choose different careers in aggregate, when given the agency to choose. Read up on the Nordic Gender Equality Paradox to learn more.
Too much is being blamed on some sinister big plot by The Men to keep The Women down. There is no such barrier in the Western world in 2024.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/a40772953772eb97fe029c113830c178/tumblr_okz4dl6RAH1tcrpblo1_1280.png
The Hay group analyzed 8.7 million employees across 33 countries, the above being on page 8 of their methodology report ~~(which I unfortunately don't have a current link to, since it looks like their website structure changed since I last checked it out, I was only able to find the white paper)~~, to find the real figures behind the ‘headline’ gender pay gap that crudely takes the average of all working women’s salaries and compares it to the average of all working men’s salaries, with no context.
The rightmost column shows the pay gap that remains when you compare only men and women working in the same company, at the same level, with the same title. A 1.6% average gap that takes into account NONE of the 20 bullet points in my previous comment. That's the starting point. Even if we assumed ALL of that gap was caused by sexism, a 1.6% difference isn't exactly the Colossus of Misogyny that's been assumed to exist.
Though this is all actually an attempt to 'prove the negative'. As I mentioned before, this is a God of the Gaps argument on the part of people who see this earnings gap between the sexes and assume sexism is the one and only cause of all of it. It's on the people pushing that narrative to show evidence of that, not to just claim that any unaccounted for gap is to be assumed to be caused by sexism.