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I think this data is great and there's a lot to learn from it. It just seems like reporting annual salaries might not be appropriately normalized, though. Hou

I think this data is great and there's a lot to learn from it. It just seems like reporting annual salaries might not be appropriately normalized, though. Hourly wages would be much clearer, IMO. Women are not the same as men, and many women rank their role in family activities higher than their professional development. If they choose to spend less time at work, then they would likely earn a lower annual salary. Since the problem that we want to focus on is whether and when women earn less due to discrimination, that issue is confounded by this data. Though I sympathize that the ACS data that's readily available probably doesn't track that. Maybe it should. EDIT: I thought I was fair in my criticism but I have attracted downvotes. Let's discuss: what do you think about what I said?

nathanaldensr 9y ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Yours is an opinion shared by many folks, and is the most common-sense explanation about career differences between men and women: they want different things. Obviously, things happen to both men and women that either encourage or prevent certain career choices. Obviously, not to the same degrees. We should at least be able to apply Occam's razor to this issue as we do to many other issues.
lambda_lover 9y ago
Seems fair -- if men are working more hours, then they aren't actually paid more per hour, and might even be paid less. The fact that so few men (and so many women) work as K-12 teachers, who often work a fairly limited number of hours with generous vacation time makes me particularly inclined to side with you here. Of course, there's always the argument that the number of hours doesn't actually directly map to the number of hours you spend at work (for instance, many K-12 teachers do a lot of grading/planning in their "off" hours, whereas some other work requires no commitment outside of the 9-5 grind). I think there's another side to this, though, that makes us question exactly why men and women seem to gravitate toward such different career paths. Why, in 2018, do so few men become stay-at-home dads? Why do women seem to favor more personal time outside of work (and why don't more men?)? Some of this is purely biological -- a woman literally develops and feeds a child inside her body for 9 months, which is going to skew leave toward women after a child is born -- but others are more societal: why can't we live in a world where men hold more K-12 teaching positions? Maybe instead of dismissing these problems because of a poor metric [salary vs. hours worked] we should think about how things ought to be, and what we can do to be there. I'm not in favor of 50/50 male/female employment in every career, of course -- I truly believe that there are physical differences that will manifests as different representation in certain jobs. But surely we can do better than the current 95/5 ratio in elementary teaching, or the 20/80 ratio in software development. anything within 20% is a good place to aim in my opinion.

nathanaldensr 9y ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Yours is an opinion shared by many folks, and is the most common-sense explanation about career differences between men and women: they want different things. Obviously, things happen to both men and women that either encourage or prevent certain career choices. Obviously, not to the same degrees. We should at least be able to apply Occam's razor to this issue as we do to many other issues.

lambda_lover 9y ago

Seems fair -- if men are working more hours, then they aren't actually paid more per hour, and might even be paid less. The fact that so few men (and so many women) work as K-12 teachers, who often work a fairly limited number of hours with generous vacation time makes me particularly inclined to side with you here. Of course, there's always the argument that the number of hours doesn't actually directly map to the number of hours you spend at work (for instance, many K-12 teachers do a lot of grading/planning in their "off" hours, whereas some other work requires no commitment outside of the 9-5 grind). I think there's another side to this, though, that makes us question exactly why men and women seem to gravitate toward such different career paths. Why, in 2018, do so few men become stay-at-home dads? Why do women seem to favor more personal time outside of work (and why don't more men?)? Some of this is purely biological -- a woman literally develops and feeds a child inside her body for 9 months, which is going to skew leave toward women after a child is born -- but others are more societal: why can't we live in a world where men hold more K-12 teaching positions? Maybe instead of dismissing these problems because of a poor metric [salary vs. hours worked] we should think about how things ought to be, and what we can do to be there. I'm not in favor of 50/50 male/female employment in every career, of course -- I truly believe that there are physical differences that will manifests as different representation in certain jobs. But surely we can do better than the current 95/5 ratio in elementary teaching, or the 20/80 ratio in software development. anything within 20% is a good place to aim in my opinion.