28 ms·

"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 d

"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.
      - carlmr 9y ago
        The best way around this is to have education. Especially on topics like statistics literacy (not really just statistics, but how to read them), journalism, lobbyism and propaganda. These things should be taught in high school. Taking apart arguments in old propaganda (where there is less political motive) and encouraging people to look out for new propaganda. Of course it doesn't seem the government would be interested in having such an educated populace.
        J-dawg 9y ago
        > The best way around this is to have education I agree completely, but would education really fix the 20% gender pay gap myth? I find it very difficult to believe that most of the people who continually reinforce this myth actually believe it to be true. They simply can't all be that ill-educated and/or stupid. And yet the same articles appear in the media every single year. It's become one of those taboo subjects where dogma trumps facts. The worst part is that it stifles discussion of the earnings gap that actually does exist, and stops us from having meaningful conversations about society's expectations of both men and women.
        ada1981 9y ago
        Trump should just cite the studies that show it's not true, but present it as a NEW DEVELOPMENT and thus #MAGA and take credit for it.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        x220 9y ago
        >I find it very difficult to believe that most of the people who continually reinforce this myth actually believe it to be true. That is totally irrelevant to their decision process. People keep repeating these statistics because it's useful to make others believe that women are discriminated against in the workplace.
        9y ago
    - PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
      It seems in this case we are comparing apples and apples for their ability to be made into orange juice.
- RHSeeger 9y ago
  I would argue that the analysis of wages based on different groupings is worthwhile; as long as you don't try to predetermine what you're going to get out of them. This analysis doesn't show us that woman make more given equal background/education/etc. However, it does provide the interesting information that women (of that age group) are generally better educated. If we take out of it the desire to find out why they're better educated (and ways we can balance it out), we're better off. The same is true of studies that show women are paid less, but then the real reason (behind the results highlighted in that study) is that they tend to take lower paying jobs [1]. Sure, you can't take out of that "employers aren't paying them enough", but you can take out of it "why are women generally in the lower paying jobs?", and look for ways to change that fact. [1] I'm not saying there is or is not a gender gap for equal jobs, just discussing the useful takeaways of studies that ignore the difference in jobs when analyzing the gender gap.
  - fyi1183 9y ago
    So on [1], there is an interesting question of cause and effect. Are women voluntarily taking inherently lower paid jobs on average? Or is it involuntary / due to social pressure? Or are certain jobs lower paid because they're predominantly taken by women? The latter is at least a possibility.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    > If we take out of it the desire to find out why they're better educated (and ways we can balance it out), we're better off. I would argue it is because female-dominated professions tend to have schooling requirements, by law. Male-dominated professions are less apt to. Anecdotally speaking, I was able to start as a software developer, a male-dominated profession, when I was in high school and soon moved into doing it full time after that. As a result, I do not rank well when measured by my schooling. I later started farming and it did not require schooling either. Both jobs only required the desire to do them. In contrast, a female in my cohort interested in nursing, a female-dominated profession, would legally be prevented from doing so until completing many years of post-secondary schooling. And if that person wants to become a teacher, another female dominated career, later in life even more legal schooling requirements are necessary. On the assumption that females have more schooling because they have to, in order to pursue the careers they want to do. Is the correction in easing the legal requirements for these jobs, or is the correction to enforce more stringent legal requirements on male-dominated jobs?
mrweasel 9y ago
Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean. At some point the nurses union in Denmark argued that their education was roughly the same length as that of an engineer, so they should be paid the same on that basic. Completely ignoring that engineers spend five years at the university vs. the 3.5 years for nursing school and that engineers are pay wildly different salaries bases on their field of work. In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation. Many will use the equal pay term to advocate for a pay rise, because they feel that their line of work is underpaid. If someone believe that they should be better compensated, just say that, don't hide it behind "equal pay". One issue of cause it that people don't understand economy, it not necessarily about the hours you work, the responsibility you have, but about the profit you generate for your employer.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  > Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean. Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him, and "equal pay" people or groups will try and convince you that expected pay should be the same over a certain subset of dimensions while ignoring all the others. Invariably they will pick the most beneficial to that particular person or influence group. They will give you arguments from moral, while forgetting to mention that like in any midly complex problem, data bias and confounding variables are of paramount importance. So "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean because try and you may, you will never have a model with the full infinite set of dimensions that the real world has. Having to pick you pick the ones you want, a choice that others will attack.
  - stdbrouw 9y ago
    A heuristic in which you refuse to undertake any action without complete information of perfect reliability is always biased towards the status quo. Heck, it's straight from the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual. So in the guise of "first needing to understand the complexities of the problem", you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.
vonmoltke 9y ago
> But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. Not according to the UK government: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/gender-pay-gap-reporting-overview https://www.gov.uk/guidance/gender-pay-gap-reporting-overvie...
coldtea 9y ago
>But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. You can have equal or better qualifications than someone else with less or no degrees. Just not formal qualifications...
jrs95 9y ago
Might be related to the fact that white women have benefitted more from affirmative action than any other group. At least, that could explain part of the disparity in education.
PunchTornado 9y ago
Aren't all gender pay studies like this? When they say women earn 80% less than men they don't take into account qualifications or jobs.
- arkh 9y ago
  They don't. They usually take the average of all working men and average of all working women. Some go with not just working but "of working age".
  - laylao 9y ago
    Do they usually use average instead of median? That terribly skews the numbers with the top 0.2% being weighted much more highly than the bottom 99.8%. The gender distribution for the top 0.2% doesn't matter since most men and women will never reach that income.
- Reedx 9y ago
  Right, they generally fail to take numerous factors into account. Once you start controlling for things (like choice) the gap quickly shrinks.
nerdymanchild 9y ago
It's incredible to me that so many Americans don't understand at a basic level how the free market works. They substitute logic and reason with a superficial version of compassion.
- cdblades 9y ago
  Writing off people you disagree with as ignorant doesn't really help anything. And even if you're right, I'm not interested in a society devoid of compassion.
  - crusso 9y ago
    I'm not interested in a society devoid of compassion That's a straw man, right? That's not what the poster to whom you were responding said.
  - nerdymanchild 9y ago
    I don't want to help anything. People that don't understand how their system works will learn the hard way regardless of what I say or what you claim to be interested in.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  It's incredible to me that so many people think that free markets actually exist.
  - nerdymanchild 9y ago
    It does... Look at the website you're on. Ycombinator is an entrepreneurer's forum
    - Mononokay 9y ago
      America doesn't have a free market - there are too many regulations and laws around it for it to be so. Look at Bell for an example of how it absolutely isn't a free market.
madshiva 9y ago
What I don't agree is study. I mean that you should be paid for the work done, regardless of your college or degree that you have done. You can be at a real high degree and are not good at your work and you can have low degree and rocks. College don't mean you are good at work.
kareemsabri 9y ago
It should probably mean something to you that women are collecting advanced degrees at a rate significantly higher than that of men. However, given the "women earn ~70 cents for every dollar a man earns" rhetoric we traditionally hear about unequal pay, which compares female earnings to male earnings outright without controlling for education, qualifications, or the "same job"[1], it would seem this comparison is done in the same spirit. 1. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/29/barack-obama/barack-obama-state-union-says-women-make-77-cents-/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/...
BeetleB 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." If you're comparing degreed vs non-degreed folks, how is the comparison in the peer group?
x220 9y ago
>But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. This is a wonderful example of a double standard: when a study finds that men earn more than women, people say it doesn't matter that they aren't working in the same jobs because (as they say) discrimination keeps women from getting those jobs, but when women earn more then men, it's fine and dandy because they aren't working in the same jobs or experience levels, so no discrimination exists.
jtolmar 9y ago
Both definitions are useful. Different pay for the same work is obviously unjust at the surface because it affects individuals. But a different mixture of jobs that leads to unequal pay, while it doesn't involve anything so easy as pointing at an individual to blame, still hints at a structural problem in our society.
- the_grue 9y ago
  Not necessarily. It can point to different distribution of priorities between sexes. E.g. if women prefer to dedicate their energy to family and house, while men prefer to work more, it makes sense that men would earn more. If we quit assuming we all want the same thing and actually ask people what they want, we may actually learn something. There are studies that do ask this kind of questions and get interesting answers, and my complaint is that this study is not actually one of those, it only appears to be that on the surface.
  - belorn 9y ago
    Not an disagreement, but a rather large detail is that it isn't the distribution of wants and needs that determine the distribution of priorities but rather the strategies employed to reach those wants and needs. If the strategies diverge then so do the priorities.

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.
    - carlmr 9y ago
      The best way around this is to have education. Especially on topics like statistics literacy (not really just statistics, but how to read them), journalism, lobbyism and propaganda. These things should be taught in high school. Taking apart arguments in old propaganda (where there is less political motive) and encouraging people to look out for new propaganda. Of course it doesn't seem the government would be interested in having such an educated populace.
      - J-dawg 9y ago
        > The best way around this is to have education I agree completely, but would education really fix the 20% gender pay gap myth? I find it very difficult to believe that most of the people who continually reinforce this myth actually believe it to be true. They simply can't all be that ill-educated and/or stupid. And yet the same articles appear in the media every single year. It's become one of those taboo subjects where dogma trumps facts. The worst part is that it stifles discussion of the earnings gap that actually does exist, and stops us from having meaningful conversations about society's expectations of both men and women.
        ada1981 9y ago
        Trump should just cite the studies that show it's not true, but present it as a NEW DEVELOPMENT and thus #MAGA and take credit for it.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        x220 9y ago
        >I find it very difficult to believe that most of the people who continually reinforce this myth actually believe it to be true. That is totally irrelevant to their decision process. People keep repeating these statistics because it's useful to make others believe that women are discriminated against in the workplace.
      - 9y ago
  - PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
    It seems in this case we are comparing apples and apples for their ability to be made into orange juice.
RHSeeger 9y ago
I would argue that the analysis of wages based on different groupings is worthwhile; as long as you don't try to predetermine what you're going to get out of them. This analysis doesn't show us that woman make more given equal background/education/etc. However, it does provide the interesting information that women (of that age group) are generally better educated. If we take out of it the desire to find out why they're better educated (and ways we can balance it out), we're better off. The same is true of studies that show women are paid less, but then the real reason (behind the results highlighted in that study) is that they tend to take lower paying jobs [1]. Sure, you can't take out of that "employers aren't paying them enough", but you can take out of it "why are women generally in the lower paying jobs?", and look for ways to change that fact. [1] I'm not saying there is or is not a gender gap for equal jobs, just discussing the useful takeaways of studies that ignore the difference in jobs when analyzing the gender gap.
- fyi1183 9y ago
  So on [1], there is an interesting question of cause and effect. Are women voluntarily taking inherently lower paid jobs on average? Or is it involuntary / due to social pressure? Or are certain jobs lower paid because they're predominantly taken by women? The latter is at least a possibility.
- randomdata 9y ago
  > If we take out of it the desire to find out why they're better educated (and ways we can balance it out), we're better off. I would argue it is because female-dominated professions tend to have schooling requirements, by law. Male-dominated professions are less apt to. Anecdotally speaking, I was able to start as a software developer, a male-dominated profession, when I was in high school and soon moved into doing it full time after that. As a result, I do not rank well when measured by my schooling. I later started farming and it did not require schooling either. Both jobs only required the desire to do them. In contrast, a female in my cohort interested in nursing, a female-dominated profession, would legally be prevented from doing so until completing many years of post-secondary schooling. And if that person wants to become a teacher, another female dominated career, later in life even more legal schooling requirements are necessary. On the assumption that females have more schooling because they have to, in order to pursue the careers they want to do. Is the correction in easing the legal requirements for these jobs, or is the correction to enforce more stringent legal requirements on male-dominated jobs?

mrweasel 9y ago

Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean. At some point the nurses union in Denmark argued that their education was roughly the same length as that of an engineer, so they should be paid the same on that basic. Completely ignoring that engineers spend five years at the university vs. the 3.5 years for nursing school and that engineers are pay wildly different salaries bases on their field of work. In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation. Many will use the equal pay term to advocate for a pay rise, because they feel that their line of work is underpaid. If someone believe that they should be better compensated, just say that, don't hide it behind "equal pay". One issue of cause it that people don't understand economy, it not necessarily about the hours you work, the responsibility you have, but about the profit you generate for your employer.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
> Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean. Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him, and "equal pay" people or groups will try and convince you that expected pay should be the same over a certain subset of dimensions while ignoring all the others. Invariably they will pick the most beneficial to that particular person or influence group. They will give you arguments from moral, while forgetting to mention that like in any midly complex problem, data bias and confounding variables are of paramount importance. So "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean because try and you may, you will never have a model with the full infinite set of dimensions that the real world has. Having to pick you pick the ones you want, a choice that others will attack.
- stdbrouw 9y ago
  A heuristic in which you refuse to undertake any action without complete information of perfect reliability is always biased towards the status quo. Heck, it's straight from the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual. So in the guise of "first needing to understand the complexities of the problem", you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.

vonmoltke 9y ago

> But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. Not according to the UK government: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/gender-pay-gap-reporting-overview https://www.gov.uk/guidance/gender-pay-gap-reporting-overvie...

coldtea 9y ago

>But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. You can have equal or better qualifications than someone else with less or no degrees. Just not formal qualifications...

jrs95 9y ago

Might be related to the fact that white women have benefitted more from affirmative action than any other group. At least, that could explain part of the disparity in education.

PunchTornado 9y ago

Aren't all gender pay studies like this? When they say women earn 80% less than men they don't take into account qualifications or jobs.

arkh 9y ago
They don't. They usually take the average of all working men and average of all working women. Some go with not just working but "of working age".
- laylao 9y ago
  Do they usually use average instead of median? That terribly skews the numbers with the top 0.2% being weighted much more highly than the bottom 99.8%. The gender distribution for the top 0.2% doesn't matter since most men and women will never reach that income.
Reedx 9y ago
Right, they generally fail to take numerous factors into account. Once you start controlling for things (like choice) the gap quickly shrinks.

nerdymanchild 9y ago

It's incredible to me that so many Americans don't understand at a basic level how the free market works. They substitute logic and reason with a superficial version of compassion.

cdblades 9y ago
Writing off people you disagree with as ignorant doesn't really help anything. And even if you're right, I'm not interested in a society devoid of compassion.
- crusso 9y ago
  I'm not interested in a society devoid of compassion That's a straw man, right? That's not what the poster to whom you were responding said.
- nerdymanchild 9y ago
  I don't want to help anything. People that don't understand how their system works will learn the hard way regardless of what I say or what you claim to be interested in.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
It's incredible to me that so many people think that free markets actually exist.
- nerdymanchild 9y ago
  It does... Look at the website you're on. Ycombinator is an entrepreneurer's forum
  - Mononokay 9y ago
    America doesn't have a free market - there are too many regulations and laws around it for it to be so. Look at Bell for an example of how it absolutely isn't a free market.

madshiva 9y ago

What I don't agree is study. I mean that you should be paid for the work done, regardless of your college or degree that you have done. You can be at a real high degree and are not good at your work and you can have low degree and rocks. College don't mean you are good at work.

kareemsabri 9y ago

It should probably mean something to you that women are collecting advanced degrees at a rate significantly higher than that of men. However, given the "women earn ~70 cents for every dollar a man earns" rhetoric we traditionally hear about unequal pay, which compares female earnings to male earnings outright without controlling for education, qualifications, or the "same job"[1], it would seem this comparison is done in the same spirit. 1. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/29/barack-obama/barack-obama-state-union-says-women-make-77-cents-/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/...

BeetleB 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." If you're comparing degreed vs non-degreed folks, how is the comparison in the peer group?

x220 9y ago

>But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. This is a wonderful example of a double standard: when a study finds that men earn more than women, people say it doesn't matter that they aren't working in the same jobs because (as they say) discrimination keeps women from getting those jobs, but when women earn more then men, it's fine and dandy because they aren't working in the same jobs or experience levels, so no discrimination exists.

jtolmar 9y ago

Both definitions are useful. Different pay for the same work is obviously unjust at the surface because it affects individuals. But a different mixture of jobs that leads to unequal pay, while it doesn't involve anything so easy as pointing at an individual to blame, still hints at a structural problem in our society.

the_grue 9y ago
Not necessarily. It can point to different distribution of priorities between sexes. E.g. if women prefer to dedicate their energy to family and house, while men prefer to work more, it makes sense that men would earn more. If we quit assuming we all want the same thing and actually ask people what they want, we may actually learn something. There are studies that do ask this kind of questions and get interesting answers, and my complaint is that this study is not actually one of those, it only appears to be that on the surface.
- belorn 9y ago
  Not an disagreement, but a rather large detail is that it isn't the distribution of wants and needs that determine the distribution of priorities but rather the strategies employed to reach those wants and needs. If the strategies diverge then so do the priorities.