22 ms·

Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in peer group (2010)

315 points by kristianc 9y ago

1337biz 9y ago
Should have (2010) in the title.
zeth___ 9y ago
>Wednesday, Sept. 01, 2010
ada1981 9y ago
Bummer Time hasn't figured out how to include link preview metadata.
panic 9y ago
I can't seem to find the study itself, but there's another article about this study from 2014 which goes into a little more detail: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/genevieve-wood/what-pay-gap-young-women-out-earn-men-cities-gop-p/ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/...
camelite 9y ago
If we could solve the gender pay gap for working mothers, computer programmers, machine-shop workers, and other jobs where men still earn more, we might finally be able to celebrate equality between the sexes.
- visarga 9y ago
  Even so, there will be few women relative to men taking the programmer career, it's a matter of personal choice. Women have many attractive choices that compete with this one.
  - magduf 9y ago
    Exactly. If a woman is smart enough to be a programmer, she's smart enough for other lucrative professions that are more social and have better advancement potential and job security, such as medicine (doctors, surgeoons), law, finance, etc. A lot of women go into programming because it's been hyped up so much, and then either going into management quickly or leaving the industry because they hate the work and how asocial it frequently is, and also because they feel like they're not really doing anything to help the world (and in the vast majority of programming jobs, it's true, you aren't).
    - icebraining 9y ago
      If a woman is smart enough to be a programmer, she's smart enough for other lucrative professions that are more social and have better advancement potential and job security, such as medicine (doctors, surgeoons), law, finance, etc. Why isn't this true of men?
      - gluelogic 9y ago
        What he is saying is that, generally, given the choice, women will prefer social work to asocial work.
        sudoke 9y ago
        This is the same sexist attitude that got that google employee fired. I suggest you stay off HN and stick to TD with these ideas.
        gluelogic 9y ago
        I didn't present it as my attitude, which any careful reader would note. The person I was responding to seemed confused based on the question they asked. I don't post on Reddit and you should keep your asinine suggestions to yourself. Either you got to this website an hour ago or are you are too much of a coward to stand by your convictions and accusations.
        9y ago
- adrianN 9y ago
  The adjusted gender pay gap is only a couple of percent. Maybe that can simply be explained by different behavior between men and women and is not evidence for discrimination. For example male Uber drivers earn 7% more than female drivers even though the algorithm doesn't distinguish by sex [1]. Should we force Uber to pay women 7% more to adjust for this fact? [1] https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf
  - rectang 9y ago
    > The adjusted gender pay gap is only a couple of percent. This suggests where the best opportunities for improvement lie: equalizing parental leave (so that the parental career penalty is distributed more equitably), decoupling health insurance from employment (to lower costs on business for parental leave), and so on.
    - magduf 9y ago
      >equalizing parental leave (so that the parental career penalty is distributed more equitably) If you mean giving the same amount of leave to both fathers and mothers, isn't that already the norm? Also, offering this is one thing, but getting parents to use it is quite another. Many fathers probably avoid taking so much leave precisely because it does harm their career. How would you fix that? >decoupling health insurance from employment (to lower costs on business for parental leave) This decoupling is a good idea for many reasons, but I don't see how it would decrease costs on businesses for parental leave. Health insurance doesn't compensate businesses for having to pay people for time that they spend away from work, it just covers their medical bills. Most of that paid time is just parents staying at home with their new kid.
      - rectang 9y ago
        > If you mean giving the same amount of leave to both fathers and mothers, isn't that already the norm? The Clinton-era FMLA grants 12 weeks unpaid maternity leave. 25 states expand on that, and 25 do not. > Many fathers probably avoid taking so much leave precisely because it does harm their career. Some will take it. If utilization rates are not equal, that's not a reason to withhold the opportunity. > I don't see how it would decrease costs on businesses for parental leave. Health insurance doesn't compensate businesses for having to pay people for time that they spend away from work The FMLA only provides for unpaid leave. However, businesses continue to pay for health insurance during the leave period.
- zingmars 9y ago
  Do you have actual documentation proving that men in these fields earn more than their female peers in same job function working the same hours?
  - JPGalt 9y ago
    Even if she did, it means nothing. The only way to assess equality is to undertake a complete multiple variable analysis of the topic. Isn't it funny how quickly we throw out the basics of the scientific method when the results are inconvenient or do not conform to the world view we are trying to subscribe to? I am not saying you are doing that just making the observation that it is clearly what is going on when this topic is "researched". It is intellectually dishonest to cherry pick the variables that suit the answer the researcher already prescribed before the analysis even began. The entire premise of these studies is laughable until they are done and published correctly. It is not and should not be acceptable to be dishonest in this way though science has began to allow it more and more in order to not be called names...
- spodek 9y ago
  There are many issues contributing to different pay. These videos of Warren Farrell address many of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb89YALUzL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb89YALUzL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxtu5ZyA048 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxtu5ZyA048 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzEOXePU_Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzEOXePU_Uo
Malarkey73 9y ago
"He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do." It's interesting itself that more women graduate than men. But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. This comparison means nothing to me.
- the_grue 9y ago
  Exactly. The word "peers" in the title implies comparison between people with a similar background (education, industry, etc). But it seems the actual study just compares the average salary of all single, young, childless women vs the average salary of all single, young, childless men across the economy.
  - J-dawg 9y ago
    So it's making exactly the same mistake as studies that compare the average salary of all working-age women with the average salary of all working-age men, and then declare a "gender pay gap" of 20% (or whatever).
    - carlmr 9y ago
      I was thinking the same. The study is stupid, but for the same reason any of the women's pay gap studies in the last few years fall short. Comparing apples and oranges is the new science.
      - crusso 9y ago
        Yep. In a world of such pervasive intellectual dishonesty, what's the best course of action? While I admire the people and arguments that have the most intellectual integrity, it seems that demagoguery just works better when it comes to shaping public policy. At the end of the day, the problem is that most people (voters) wouldn't even begin to understand or appreciate the distinction between demagoguery and intellectual integrity.
nukeop 9y ago
There's no perceptible gap in wages between almost any pair of social groups, provided we compare only similar roles. This has been solved by the market years ago. We still need more wage transparency. Companies should be required to publicly list all wages, because lack of transparency is detrimental to the workers.
- kristianc 9y ago
  In the UK, that is already in progress - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/06/gender-pay-gap-law-could-have-significant-impact-say-experts https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/06/gender-pay-g...
  - nukeop 9y ago
    This is still an incorrect approach looking at incorrect metrics. According to the government document: >The gender pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of men and women, expressed relative to men’s earnings. For example, ‘women earn 15% less than men per hour’. But this is not what should be measured. If there's a mining company that employs 90% men working down in the mine and 10% women doing accountancy, then of course the average wages of men are going to be different than those of women, but that tells us nothing about equal and fair treatment of men and women at this company.
    - jlebrech 9y ago
      let's take the average wage of 100 women working in the care industry and compare them to 100 men working on oil rigs. Lies and statistics.
    - lucozade 9y ago
      > But this is not what should be measured It's a perfectly reasonable thing to measure as long as it's not being used as a proxy for equal pay (which it explicitly isn't in this case). What it can show is systemic bias. Now, unlike unequal pay, it's not necessarily blatantly unfair bias. It might not be unfair at all depending on the detail. But knowing that there's a gap and understanding the reasons for the gap can be beneficial.
throwaway2041 9y ago
Sadly this same article would be unlikely to be published by Time in 2018.
- jmull 9y ago
  Nice, an assertion that can neither be proved nor disproved. A perfect idea faraday cage. Also, as we can all see, it is still being published by time.com in 2018.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    The person did say "unlikely" (which is more a statement of opinion than of a definitive claim), and given the cultural climate of 2018 we can draw reasonable conclusions about what the response to such an article, if first published in 2018, would be, and thus the likelihood that a publication like Time would publish it for the first time now.
vinchuco 9y ago
I'm bothered by the implicit authority given to the word "study" nowadays. Collecting data and drawing conclusions is much easier than contrasting assumptions for the sake of understanding the underlying issues, yet the former seems much more prevalent in public discourse.
- JPGalt 9y ago
  I would further add that the credibility of the person performing the "study" is also no longer analyzed which it should be because implicit bias is a serious factor.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Implicit bias or confirmation bias?
    - JPGalt 9y ago
      I would say it could be either but none the less bias is a relevant variable that should always be considered. For example, studies on say smoking or the health benefits of a pharmaceutical performed by a tobacco company or big pharma respectively are openly and voraciously discredited as bias which they should be. Anything relating to social justice of any sort is swallowed as irrefutable fact without a second thought or an ounce of critical thinking applied. It is then regurgitated argumentum ad nauseam and any statistical (read fair and scientific) analysis of the study and its bias are attacked as anti-something, racist, misogynist etc. It is academically and morally corrupt and cannot and should not be allowed. The academic community should be vocally standing against this practice but being that they are afraid to be called a name or slur they swallow it. People have put their political subscription above everything else and it is sickening.
      - weberc2 9y ago
        > People have put their political subscription above everything else and it is sickening. Agreed.
youdontknowtho 9y ago
Oh no! A single study invalidates the entire theory of equal pay for equal work. Women must have been lying the whole time. It would be better if you all were just honest. You think that women shouldn't be paid as much as men because they don't deserve it. Just speak up, already. We all know that we've chosen sides. Let's stop pretending. I support equal pay for equal work. I support family leave for men and women. I support a social safety net that doesn't make you choose career vs personal life. That's me. That's the side I'm on. How about you?
cm2187 9y ago
From what I gather from the article, the study doesn't seem to account for the profession, which would make it as meaningless as other gender gap studies I have seen so far. A banker or lawyer is paid significantly more than a professor or a nurse. So at the end all you are measuring is the difference in salaries between professions rather than the actual gender gap between people with the same qualification and profession.
- verbify 9y ago
  If men or women are choosing different career paths, that too is notable and worth reporting. Papers can report the gap without going into underlying causes.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Except that most newspaper are jumping to conclusions, saying that there are discriminations, women not getting the same chances, etc. That might be the case but these studies do not allow to establish that.
    - cdmcmahon 9y ago
      If women aren’t having the same access to more lucrative positions or fields that men are, then that is discrimination — in education or the workplace or both. Unless you believe that something about women drives them away from such positions/fields or makes them less qualified in such positions/fields, in which case you are in the Damore camp.
      - chemochemo 9y ago
        Agreed -- if they aren't having the same _access_, it is discrimination. But once again, nothing in the study points to that. Do you believe men don't have access to jobs in the field of nursing? On average, women outnumber men 9.5 to 1 in nursing in the US. [0] [0] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/human-capital-and-risk/gender-ratio-of-nurses-across-50-states.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/human-capital-and-risk...
crispyporkbites 9y ago
As other commenters have pointed out, these comparisons are confusing, especially when reported as headline figures. There is clear envidence for a “gender pay gap” - in that women get paid on average less than men. Whether that is a bad thing which we need to do something about is a different question, which heavily depends on your overall gender role opinions.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  >There is clear envidence for a “gender pay gap” - in that women get paid on average less than men. If you control for education, years of experience, and skills there is no such gap.
  - crispyporkbites 9y ago
    Indeed if you control for these there’s no gap in the outcome variable (pay) but there is a huge gap in the n variable (number of women). The question to ask then is why does that happen? Are the reasons for that valid? Are equal opportunities available? Do we even want equal opportunities as a society or an individual?
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      >The question to ask then is why does that happen? Because women, more typically than men, raise children as their full time job.
      - sudoke 9y ago
        Are women not better equipped to raise children than men? Clearly yes.
        crispyporkbites 9y ago
        How so?
ShadowFaxSam 9y ago
"Applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities" This is a trend that I have personally witnessed since joining the corporate workforce as a recent college graduate living in a major city. In general I saw my female colleagues getting promoted faster and moving up faster than their male counterparts. In no way do I think it was favouritism, I just believe our senior management thought these young women were better prepared and organised than their male counterpart in their 20's. Whether or not this trend continues to higher levels of management remains to be seen.
- PunchTornado 9y ago
  I don't think you can justify your position "these young women were better prepared and organised than their male counterpart in their 20's". You say that women in their 20s are better at something than men in their 20s. I believe you know this is indefensible and if you would say the reverse you would get kicked out of your job.
  - adventured 9y ago
    If it is true, it implies we need help programs for the young men who are being systematically discrminated against or otherwise oppressed by society. That includes new assistance programs to boost the rate of college graduation, since young men are so badly falling behind there (with projections for it to get much worse yet). Victim blaming would be a common response, to proclaim that it's the fault of these young men. The real question we must ask is: what is society doing to these young men to leave them so unprepared and falling behind, and how can society correct that injustice?
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Peg Tyre wrote the classic book on this 10 years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educators/dp/0307381293 https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ... It hasn't gotten a huge amount of follow-up traction in schools though. Also The New Jim Crow for a racial perspective that hits black men's employment prospects pretty hard. https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431 https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblind... BTW for folks who are concerned that feminist or women don't care about boys and men, these two leasing books are books written by women about the abuse boys and men face.
lowken10 9y ago
You can't post this! This goes against the liberal narrative that all women are repressed by the patriarchy. You will be tarred and feathered for speaking the truth.
- moate 9y ago
  You didn't actually read the article did you? It doesn't really support your "point". If you're problem with other studies about the pay gap is that "this doesn't compare individuals across the same field and isolate solely for gender" then this study doesn't really help your point. If your point is just that you're a dude and you're being reverse discriminated against, why not cite an 8 year old article as your best evidence! About as sound as anything else you're gonna pull out.
  - kiriakasis 9y ago
    This is not actually an answer to his comment, but to your projection of the politics behind that comment
  - ShadowFaxSam 9y ago
    Not sure if you're referring to me or the comment above, but the article does support my personal experience that female colleagues seemed better prepared for corporate life right out college. I never said I was being reverse discriminated, and in each case I personally observed, the coworker fully deserved their raise/promotion. Again, as the article also suggests, it remains to be seen whether or not these trends will continue as the population ages and higher-level management jobs become available to both sexes. "This generation [of women] has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the American economy better than their older predecessors or male peers," says Chung. While the economic advantage of women sometimes evaporates as they age and have families, Chung believes that women now may have enough leverage that their financial gains may not be completely erased as they get older.
stevespang 9y ago
Prove to us this higher pay is not merely due to corporations offering these women more $$$ in order to grab them, mainly to meet hiring diversity quotas, popular in hi tech . . . .
wemdyjreichert 9y ago
This would not be any better than women being payed less. The entire premise of "equal pay" is that both genders paid roughly the same for the same job.
- throwaway309112 9y ago
  Haha joke's on you! It's equal pay until we go past equal, then it's "women are better and deserve to get paid more, shut up troglodyte!" It even says so in the article. Cities where women get paid more are modern globalized places, but where the reverse is true, Silicon Valley is "gender gap gully." The title of the article is even "Women finally on top." The mask is off.
logfromblammo 9y ago
Real life stubbornly resists all attempts to make it more fair. An 8% difference in either direction is acceptable to me. It's good enough to tolerate until it's worth revisiting for further improvements. So now that we have the gender pay gap (almost) sorted out, perhaps we should tackle a problem more likely to cause societal problems: the increasing measures of wealth inequality.
- peterhadlaw 9y ago
  Would you be able to explain why wealth inequality is a societal problem and not actually a feature? I've long heard this but never was convinced
  - maneesh 9y ago
    Because at our heart we are monkeys and we're trained to feel 'that's not fair!!' when someone else is doing better than us. But I agree with you that, for the most part, the rising tide of wealth has raised all ships. Inequality is a natural outgrowth of the massive influx of wealth.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Wealth inequality is not a problem. The change in the amount of wealth inequality is a problem, in that it seems to be moving further away from the optimal amount of wealth inequality, which is not zero. In other words, the proportion of rich to poor is skewing further away from optimal, which could be measured by a curve showing the wealth one has as a proportion of the next-wealthiest person, or by a graph showing the percentage of global wealth owned by a given equal-sized fraction of all people (i.e. the top 1% owns X%, the next 1% owns Y%). A perfectly flat graph indicates perfect communism. A sharply inflected curve indicates oligarchic plutocracy. An unspecified (and likely undiscovered) shape would be optimal economic conditions for civilization as a whole. My concern is that we are moving further away from that presumed optimum in the direction of oligarchic plutocracy, which historically has resulted in violent rebellion, every time it has been observed.
- sudoke 9y ago
fipple 9y ago
After having a kid I think I can see what creates the gender gap and the same effect is happening to me. Now, if there’s a conference call at 5:30 at work, I skip it. If there’s a new project that’s going to make me work extra hours I decline it. Overall I am willing to sacrifice a lot of my career for time with my kid and most women take the majority of childcare responsibility. For people without children I wouldn’t expect there to be much of a gender gap.
- _o_ 9y ago
  And it is ok, that you skip it, the difference on pay gap is men having far worse life for those few extra bucks. It is not everything about the money and your path is correct. We (men) are doing it wrong and we are the idiots. The extra money is just not worth it, but we are pushed into craving for social status (which in most cases equals to income, car, house,...) due to the fact that potential mates (females) are searching for such mans (statistically womans are marrying to mens with ~30% higher income than they have) . And idiotically as it sounds, the "equality" will just make both genders work harder, spending life at workplace. Working for "8%" less money than you will get for your peak capabilities and you will have far better life. It is just not worth it. Money is NOT everything.
  - ada1981 9y ago
    Interesting theory. So you think if women make more, than men will try to increase the wealth inequality in other ways? I'm curious about that. Alternately, they could also just learn how to validate and be with women's emotions (and their own).
    - klipt 9y ago
      Or the pool of dateable men shrinks as women earn more (for those who insist on dating men who earn more than them). Eventually such women can earn too much to have a good chance of finding a man whose salary satisfies them. The same happens with college degrees. More women than men go to college. But many women with college degrees want a man with a college degree too. Cue articles complaining about the shortage of marriageable men.
camdenlock 9y ago
Careful. This doesn’t fit The Narrative, and could cost you your job.

315 points by kristianc 9y ago

1337biz 9y ago

Should have (2010) in the title.

zeth___ 9y ago

>Wednesday, Sept. 01, 2010

ada1981 9y ago

Bummer Time hasn't figured out how to include link preview metadata.

panic 9y ago

I can't seem to find the study itself, but there's another article about this study from 2014 which goes into a little more detail: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/genevieve-wood/what-pay-gap-young-women-out-earn-men-cities-gop-p/ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/...

camelite 9y ago

If we could solve the gender pay gap for working mothers, computer programmers, machine-shop workers, and other jobs where men still earn more, we might finally be able to celebrate equality between the sexes.

visarga 9y ago
Even so, there will be few women relative to men taking the programmer career, it's a matter of personal choice. Women have many attractive choices that compete with this one.
- magduf 9y ago
  Exactly. If a woman is smart enough to be a programmer, she's smart enough for other lucrative professions that are more social and have better advancement potential and job security, such as medicine (doctors, surgeoons), law, finance, etc. A lot of women go into programming because it's been hyped up so much, and then either going into management quickly or leaving the industry because they hate the work and how asocial it frequently is, and also because they feel like they're not really doing anything to help the world (and in the vast majority of programming jobs, it's true, you aren't).
  - icebraining 9y ago
    If a woman is smart enough to be a programmer, she's smart enough for other lucrative professions that are more social and have better advancement potential and job security, such as medicine (doctors, surgeoons), law, finance, etc. Why isn't this true of men?
    - gluelogic 9y ago
      What he is saying is that, generally, given the choice, women will prefer social work to asocial work.
      - sudoke 9y ago
        This is the same sexist attitude that got that google employee fired. I suggest you stay off HN and stick to TD with these ideas.
        gluelogic 9y ago
        I didn't present it as my attitude, which any careful reader would note. The person I was responding to seemed confused based on the question they asked. I don't post on Reddit and you should keep your asinine suggestions to yourself. Either you got to this website an hour ago or are you are too much of a coward to stand by your convictions and accusations.
        9y ago
adrianN 9y ago
The adjusted gender pay gap is only a couple of percent. Maybe that can simply be explained by different behavior between men and women and is not evidence for discrimination. For example male Uber drivers earn 7% more than female drivers even though the algorithm doesn't distinguish by sex [1]. Should we force Uber to pay women 7% more to adjust for this fact? [1] https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf
- rectang 9y ago
  > The adjusted gender pay gap is only a couple of percent. This suggests where the best opportunities for improvement lie: equalizing parental leave (so that the parental career penalty is distributed more equitably), decoupling health insurance from employment (to lower costs on business for parental leave), and so on.
  - magduf 9y ago
    >equalizing parental leave (so that the parental career penalty is distributed more equitably) If you mean giving the same amount of leave to both fathers and mothers, isn't that already the norm? Also, offering this is one thing, but getting parents to use it is quite another. Many fathers probably avoid taking so much leave precisely because it does harm their career. How would you fix that? >decoupling health insurance from employment (to lower costs on business for parental leave) This decoupling is a good idea for many reasons, but I don't see how it would decrease costs on businesses for parental leave. Health insurance doesn't compensate businesses for having to pay people for time that they spend away from work, it just covers their medical bills. Most of that paid time is just parents staying at home with their new kid.
    - rectang 9y ago
      > If you mean giving the same amount of leave to both fathers and mothers, isn't that already the norm? The Clinton-era FMLA grants 12 weeks unpaid maternity leave. 25 states expand on that, and 25 do not. > Many fathers probably avoid taking so much leave precisely because it does harm their career. Some will take it. If utilization rates are not equal, that's not a reason to withhold the opportunity. > I don't see how it would decrease costs on businesses for parental leave. Health insurance doesn't compensate businesses for having to pay people for time that they spend away from work The FMLA only provides for unpaid leave. However, businesses continue to pay for health insurance during the leave period.
zingmars 9y ago
Do you have actual documentation proving that men in these fields earn more than their female peers in same job function working the same hours?
- JPGalt 9y ago
  Even if she did, it means nothing. The only way to assess equality is to undertake a complete multiple variable analysis of the topic. Isn't it funny how quickly we throw out the basics of the scientific method when the results are inconvenient or do not conform to the world view we are trying to subscribe to? I am not saying you are doing that just making the observation that it is clearly what is going on when this topic is "researched". It is intellectually dishonest to cherry pick the variables that suit the answer the researcher already prescribed before the analysis even began. The entire premise of these studies is laughable until they are done and published correctly. It is not and should not be acceptable to be dishonest in this way though science has began to allow it more and more in order to not be called names...
spodek 9y ago
There are many issues contributing to different pay. These videos of Warren Farrell address many of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb89YALUzL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb89YALUzL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxtu5ZyA048 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxtu5ZyA048 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzEOXePU_Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzEOXePU_Uo

Malarkey73 9y ago

"He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do." It's interesting itself that more women graduate than men. But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. This comparison means nothing to me.

the_grue 9y ago
Exactly. The word "peers" in the title implies comparison between people with a similar background (education, industry, etc). But it seems the actual study just compares the average salary of all single, young, childless women vs the average salary of all single, young, childless men across the economy.
- J-dawg 9y ago
  So it's making exactly the same mistake as studies that compare the average salary of all working-age women with the average salary of all working-age men, and then declare a "gender pay gap" of 20% (or whatever).
  - carlmr 9y ago
    I was thinking the same. The study is stupid, but for the same reason any of the women's pay gap studies in the last few years fall short. Comparing apples and oranges is the new science.
    - crusso 9y ago
      Yep. In a world of such pervasive intellectual dishonesty, what's the best course of action? While I admire the people and arguments that have the most intellectual integrity, it seems that demagoguery just works better when it comes to shaping public policy. At the end of the day, the problem is that most people (voters) wouldn't even begin to understand or appreciate the distinction between demagoguery and intellectual integrity.

nukeop 9y ago

There's no perceptible gap in wages between almost any pair of social groups, provided we compare only similar roles. This has been solved by the market years ago. We still need more wage transparency. Companies should be required to publicly list all wages, because lack of transparency is detrimental to the workers.

kristianc 9y ago
In the UK, that is already in progress - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/06/gender-pay-gap-law-could-have-significant-impact-say-experts https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/06/gender-pay-g...
- nukeop 9y ago
  This is still an incorrect approach looking at incorrect metrics. According to the government document: >The gender pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of men and women, expressed relative to men’s earnings. For example, ‘women earn 15% less than men per hour’. But this is not what should be measured. If there's a mining company that employs 90% men working down in the mine and 10% women doing accountancy, then of course the average wages of men are going to be different than those of women, but that tells us nothing about equal and fair treatment of men and women at this company.
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    let's take the average wage of 100 women working in the care industry and compare them to 100 men working on oil rigs. Lies and statistics.
  - lucozade 9y ago
    > But this is not what should be measured It's a perfectly reasonable thing to measure as long as it's not being used as a proxy for equal pay (which it explicitly isn't in this case). What it can show is systemic bias. Now, unlike unequal pay, it's not necessarily blatantly unfair bias. It might not be unfair at all depending on the detail. But knowing that there's a gap and understanding the reasons for the gap can be beneficial.

throwaway2041 9y ago

Sadly this same article would be unlikely to be published by Time in 2018.

jmull 9y ago
Nice, an assertion that can neither be proved nor disproved. A perfect idea faraday cage. Also, as we can all see, it is still being published by time.com in 2018.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  The person did say "unlikely" (which is more a statement of opinion than of a definitive claim), and given the cultural climate of 2018 we can draw reasonable conclusions about what the response to such an article, if first published in 2018, would be, and thus the likelihood that a publication like Time would publish it for the first time now.

vinchuco 9y ago

I'm bothered by the implicit authority given to the word "study" nowadays. Collecting data and drawing conclusions is much easier than contrasting assumptions for the sake of understanding the underlying issues, yet the former seems much more prevalent in public discourse.

JPGalt 9y ago
I would further add that the credibility of the person performing the "study" is also no longer analyzed which it should be because implicit bias is a serious factor.
- weberc2 9y ago
  Implicit bias or confirmation bias?
  - JPGalt 9y ago
    I would say it could be either but none the less bias is a relevant variable that should always be considered. For example, studies on say smoking or the health benefits of a pharmaceutical performed by a tobacco company or big pharma respectively are openly and voraciously discredited as bias which they should be. Anything relating to social justice of any sort is swallowed as irrefutable fact without a second thought or an ounce of critical thinking applied. It is then regurgitated argumentum ad nauseam and any statistical (read fair and scientific) analysis of the study and its bias are attacked as anti-something, racist, misogynist etc. It is academically and morally corrupt and cannot and should not be allowed. The academic community should be vocally standing against this practice but being that they are afraid to be called a name or slur they swallow it. People have put their political subscription above everything else and it is sickening.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      > People have put their political subscription above everything else and it is sickening. Agreed.

youdontknowtho 9y ago

Oh no! A single study invalidates the entire theory of equal pay for equal work. Women must have been lying the whole time. It would be better if you all were just honest. You think that women shouldn't be paid as much as men because they don't deserve it. Just speak up, already. We all know that we've chosen sides. Let's stop pretending. I support equal pay for equal work. I support family leave for men and women. I support a social safety net that doesn't make you choose career vs personal life. That's me. That's the side I'm on. How about you?

cm2187 9y ago

From what I gather from the article, the study doesn't seem to account for the profession, which would make it as meaningless as other gender gap studies I have seen so far. A banker or lawyer is paid significantly more than a professor or a nurse. So at the end all you are measuring is the difference in salaries between professions rather than the actual gender gap between people with the same qualification and profession.

verbify 9y ago
If men or women are choosing different career paths, that too is notable and worth reporting. Papers can report the gap without going into underlying causes.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Except that most newspaper are jumping to conclusions, saying that there are discriminations, women not getting the same chances, etc. That might be the case but these studies do not allow to establish that.
  - cdmcmahon 9y ago
    If women aren’t having the same access to more lucrative positions or fields that men are, then that is discrimination — in education or the workplace or both. Unless you believe that something about women drives them away from such positions/fields or makes them less qualified in such positions/fields, in which case you are in the Damore camp.
    - chemochemo 9y ago
      Agreed -- if they aren't having the same _access_, it is discrimination. But once again, nothing in the study points to that. Do you believe men don't have access to jobs in the field of nursing? On average, women outnumber men 9.5 to 1 in nursing in the US. [0] [0] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/human-capital-and-risk/gender-ratio-of-nurses-across-50-states.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/human-capital-and-risk...

crispyporkbites 9y ago

As other commenters have pointed out, these comparisons are confusing, especially when reported as headline figures. There is clear envidence for a “gender pay gap” - in that women get paid on average less than men. Whether that is a bad thing which we need to do something about is a different question, which heavily depends on your overall gender role opinions.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>There is clear envidence for a “gender pay gap” - in that women get paid on average less than men. If you control for education, years of experience, and skills there is no such gap.
- crispyporkbites 9y ago
  Indeed if you control for these there’s no gap in the outcome variable (pay) but there is a huge gap in the n variable (number of women). The question to ask then is why does that happen? Are the reasons for that valid? Are equal opportunities available? Do we even want equal opportunities as a society or an individual?
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    >The question to ask then is why does that happen? Because women, more typically than men, raise children as their full time job.
    - sudoke 9y ago
      Are women not better equipped to raise children than men? Clearly yes.
      - crispyporkbites 9y ago
        How so?

ShadowFaxSam 9y ago

"Applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities" This is a trend that I have personally witnessed since joining the corporate workforce as a recent college graduate living in a major city. In general I saw my female colleagues getting promoted faster and moving up faster than their male counterparts. In no way do I think it was favouritism, I just believe our senior management thought these young women were better prepared and organised than their male counterpart in their 20's. Whether or not this trend continues to higher levels of management remains to be seen.

PunchTornado 9y ago
I don't think you can justify your position "these young women were better prepared and organised than their male counterpart in their 20's". You say that women in their 20s are better at something than men in their 20s. I believe you know this is indefensible and if you would say the reverse you would get kicked out of your job.
- adventured 9y ago
  If it is true, it implies we need help programs for the young men who are being systematically discrminated against or otherwise oppressed by society. That includes new assistance programs to boost the rate of college graduation, since young men are so badly falling behind there (with projections for it to get much worse yet). Victim blaming would be a common response, to proclaim that it's the fault of these young men. The real question we must ask is: what is society doing to these young men to leave them so unprepared and falling behind, and how can society correct that injustice?
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Peg Tyre wrote the classic book on this 10 years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educators/dp/0307381293 https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ... It hasn't gotten a huge amount of follow-up traction in schools though. Also The New Jim Crow for a racial perspective that hits black men's employment prospects pretty hard. https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431 https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblind... BTW for folks who are concerned that feminist or women don't care about boys and men, these two leasing books are books written by women about the abuse boys and men face.

lowken10 9y ago

You can't post this! This goes against the liberal narrative that all women are repressed by the patriarchy. You will be tarred and feathered for speaking the truth.

moate 9y ago
You didn't actually read the article did you? It doesn't really support your "point". If you're problem with other studies about the pay gap is that "this doesn't compare individuals across the same field and isolate solely for gender" then this study doesn't really help your point. If your point is just that you're a dude and you're being reverse discriminated against, why not cite an 8 year old article as your best evidence! About as sound as anything else you're gonna pull out.
- kiriakasis 9y ago
  This is not actually an answer to his comment, but to your projection of the politics behind that comment
- ShadowFaxSam 9y ago
  Not sure if you're referring to me or the comment above, but the article does support my personal experience that female colleagues seemed better prepared for corporate life right out college. I never said I was being reverse discriminated, and in each case I personally observed, the coworker fully deserved their raise/promotion. Again, as the article also suggests, it remains to be seen whether or not these trends will continue as the population ages and higher-level management jobs become available to both sexes. "This generation [of women] has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the American economy better than their older predecessors or male peers," says Chung. While the economic advantage of women sometimes evaporates as they age and have families, Chung believes that women now may have enough leverage that their financial gains may not be completely erased as they get older.

stevespang 9y ago

Prove to us this higher pay is not merely due to corporations offering these women more $$$ in order to grab them, mainly to meet hiring diversity quotas, popular in hi tech . . . .

wemdyjreichert 9y ago

This would not be any better than women being payed less. The entire premise of "equal pay" is that both genders paid roughly the same for the same job.

throwaway309112 9y ago
Haha joke's on you! It's equal pay until we go past equal, then it's "women are better and deserve to get paid more, shut up troglodyte!" It even says so in the article. Cities where women get paid more are modern globalized places, but where the reverse is true, Silicon Valley is "gender gap gully." The title of the article is even "Women finally on top." The mask is off.

logfromblammo 9y ago

Real life stubbornly resists all attempts to make it more fair. An 8% difference in either direction is acceptable to me. It's good enough to tolerate until it's worth revisiting for further improvements. So now that we have the gender pay gap (almost) sorted out, perhaps we should tackle a problem more likely to cause societal problems: the increasing measures of wealth inequality.

peterhadlaw 9y ago
Would you be able to explain why wealth inequality is a societal problem and not actually a feature? I've long heard this but never was convinced
- maneesh 9y ago
  Because at our heart we are monkeys and we're trained to feel 'that's not fair!!' when someone else is doing better than us. But I agree with you that, for the most part, the rising tide of wealth has raised all ships. Inequality is a natural outgrowth of the massive influx of wealth.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Wealth inequality is not a problem. The change in the amount of wealth inequality is a problem, in that it seems to be moving further away from the optimal amount of wealth inequality, which is not zero. In other words, the proportion of rich to poor is skewing further away from optimal, which could be measured by a curve showing the wealth one has as a proportion of the next-wealthiest person, or by a graph showing the percentage of global wealth owned by a given equal-sized fraction of all people (i.e. the top 1% owns X%, the next 1% owns Y%). A perfectly flat graph indicates perfect communism. A sharply inflected curve indicates oligarchic plutocracy. An unspecified (and likely undiscovered) shape would be optimal economic conditions for civilization as a whole. My concern is that we are moving further away from that presumed optimum in the direction of oligarchic plutocracy, which historically has resulted in violent rebellion, every time it has been observed.
sudoke 9y ago

fipple 9y ago

After having a kid I think I can see what creates the gender gap and the same effect is happening to me. Now, if there’s a conference call at 5:30 at work, I skip it. If there’s a new project that’s going to make me work extra hours I decline it. Overall I am willing to sacrifice a lot of my career for time with my kid and most women take the majority of childcare responsibility. For people without children I wouldn’t expect there to be much of a gender gap.

_o_ 9y ago
And it is ok, that you skip it, the difference on pay gap is men having far worse life for those few extra bucks. It is not everything about the money and your path is correct. We (men) are doing it wrong and we are the idiots. The extra money is just not worth it, but we are pushed into craving for social status (which in most cases equals to income, car, house,...) due to the fact that potential mates (females) are searching for such mans (statistically womans are marrying to mens with ~30% higher income than they have) . And idiotically as it sounds, the "equality" will just make both genders work harder, spending life at workplace. Working for "8%" less money than you will get for your peak capabilities and you will have far better life. It is just not worth it. Money is NOT everything.
- ada1981 9y ago
  Interesting theory. So you think if women make more, than men will try to increase the wealth inequality in other ways? I'm curious about that. Alternately, they could also just learn how to validate and be with women's emotions (and their own).
  - klipt 9y ago
    Or the pool of dateable men shrinks as women earn more (for those who insist on dating men who earn more than them). Eventually such women can earn too much to have a good chance of finding a man whose salary satisfies them. The same happens with college degrees. More women than men go to college. But many women with college degrees want a man with a college degree too. Cue articles complaining about the shortage of marriageable men.

camdenlock 9y ago

Careful. This doesn’t fit The Narrative, and could cost you your job.