5 ms·

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this: If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, the

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this: If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity necessarily exists. In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.

throwaway5250 8y ago
It's difficult to get someone to understand something when it's in their interest not to.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. All the juice has been squeezed out of that cliché a long time ago.
  - throwaway5250 8y ago
    Apologies for my lack of originality.
erikig 8y ago
Labor is not easily fungible and is difficult to treat as a commodity.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  I disagree; the whole point of late capitalism has been to make labour more fungible than it was, to the point where it's actually very easy now. Labour-power, at least in the Marxian sense, is a commodity, but labour is not.
koboll 8y ago
I mean, you could have said the same about blacks in the decades between emancipation and the civil rights movement. Certainly, there were some people who took advantage of those arbitrage opportunities to some extent. But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  In fact, when the dial was turned up all the way on prejudice and discrimination, slavery was the result, as an extreme version of this ability to arbitrage the pay gap. As insane and unjust as that was, that really existed. Today, if there is a pay gap it would be exploitable, no? Salaries are typically the by far the most expensive cost for most tech startups. Discrimination against women is illegal and socially shunned today. So what's stopping entrepreneurs from arbitraging this opportunity?
  - warp_factor 8y ago
    Because there is no such opportunity. This whole "0.70$ per 1.00$ from men", doesn't take into account different professions for example.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      According to John Green, the actual gender pay gap is more like 8%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I mean, you could have said the same about blacks in the decades between emancipation and the civil rights movement. I think Jesse Lee Peterson might have something to say with regards to that. I suspect that there were perceptive people who took advantage of societal conditions and hired industrious people for less money. But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time. According to Thomas Sowell, with some kinds of work, some American slaves were paid additional bonuses for certain kinds of work requiring care and attention to detail. Otherwise, the proper level of motivation couldn't be maintained even through torture. Biases certainly can distort market forces, but the market forces will also bend society. Southern bus and train lines were opposing Jim Crow laws quite early on because they didn't want to spend money on extra vehicles/train cars.
manicdee 8y ago
Can you walk me through the acquisition process? I am getting lost at that point between “fire all the men” and “hire women with the appropriate experience.”
- chcknsammich 8y ago
  Let's say you are a small startup owner, and you have enough cash on hand to hire 6 male devs. You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price, all this while still offering more money than their supposed current employer who is underpaying them. If all of this were true the price would shift over time on these margins, and this "gap" would disappear. Why is it that we must constantly slice up society on demographic lines, point out a statistical in-congruency with some ideal (non-extant) world, and then claim some third party is culpable for causing this? If women were malevolently directed away from a field by educators, families, or traditions, why is it now an employer's responsibility to calculate said deficit in interest for a field and allocate resources sub-optimally in one direction or another for the sake of aligning statistics on some dubious spreadsheet? Don't tell women no, encourage them in what they want to do in life, and if in the end they don't choose the path that aligns with your macroeconomic utopia... get over it.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Let's say you are a small startup owner, and you have enough cash on hand to hire 6 male devs. You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price In reality, the likely outcome is that the 7 women would end up working at Google, who can and will gladly way out-compete you on salaries, and you end up hiring 7 quirky men, then firing a few of them.
  - manicdee 8y ago
    Where do you find the 7 equally competent female devs, remembering that retention rate in the market is pretty low thanks to the salary gaps. The women look at the market and see they can get more money for other work, and there’s much less brogrammer culture to contend with, and leave the market.
mattnewton 8y ago
Wild speculation follows: So there could be two kinds of employers each competing in their own pool: one pool that believes gender (directly or indirectly) is a significant factor, and the other that does not think it is a significant factor to job performance. Because pool 1 believes that gender is not a significant factor, they know that wage discrimination on the basis of that factor would be illegal and open them up to lawsuits. Pool 2 does think gender is significant, maybe indirectly laundered through other things like personality assessments, and they therefore think they can and should act on that information. Critically it doesn’t matter if the sexist pool is openly sexist or using factors more strongly correlated with sex than job performance (like whether or not the employee looks the mental model of the part). The result is the same, they believe they are justified in paying women less. The arbitrage opportunity would never occur to them because they don’t think the labour is worth more. But if you see the arbitrage opportunity, that puts you in Pool 1 by definition. And so those who are aware of the opportunity know that it would be illegal since the gender isn’t relevant to their position.
- BeeOnRope 8y ago
  The group 1 group, which wishes to hire more women to "exploit" this gap, doesn't have to engage in wage discrimination though, do they? They just have to hire at the "going rate" for women, which to the extent that a wage gap exists means they would be hiring mostly women. If they did hire any men, they just need to ensure they are paid the same as their existing workforce. So you don't need to engage in wage discrimination to hire women, since that is evaluated within a company, not in relation to a sector has a whole. That is, if McDonald's pays all their employees $10 an hour and they are mostly women, and Burger King pays all their employees $15 an hour for approximately the same work and they are mostly men, I don't think there is any (legal) claim for discrimination?
  - mattnewton 8y ago
    No, group 2 must be doing wage discrimination per the definition: they are paying women less solely because of their gender, that’s the only way the arbitrage works. If they set wages at $10/hr hoping to capture all the women turned away, they will also fail to capture male employees worth $15/hr. That puts them in the same pool as Burger King. There isn’t an arbitrage opportunity based on gender here. Assuming that Mcdonald’s and Burger King are the only employers, this also doesn’t get rid of the pricing gap. Women are paid less on average because they are turned away from the higher paying Burger King disproportionately. Burger King thinks what they are doing is not discrimination. Mcdonald’s must also think what they are doing is not discrimination, or they have a vast conspiracy to violate the law. They are both Group 2 companies.
jldugger 8y ago
This is the Greenspan argument. In his own words: > I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better-quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women. But in order to arbitrage this, you have to be willing to pay women and men differently. It's not impossible to see a market where everyone internally values work equally, but believes the market does not, and thus all lower their offers made to women.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  I think that hit the nail on the head: once you see the arbitrage opportunity, to exercise it you must knowingly discriminate against women, which is unethical and likely illegal.
  - euyyn 8y ago
    No, you really don't. The following isn't true: > But in order to arbitrage this, you have to be willing to pay women and men differently. A very simple way to arbitrage it without discriminating is to set your wages somewhere between what others pay men and women. Women will flock to you, as you pay better than elsewhere, while men will tend to leave to the discriminating jobs. You pay everyone the same, but the result is your cost in wages is lower than your competitors'.
    - mattnewton 8y ago
      So you are banking on there being enough women who leave discriminating employer in your field to fill all available positions. In that case there is just a lot of labour - I don’t see why employer 1 isn’t lowering their wages of new recruits anyways. Also, the discriminating employer is presumably not discriminating openly, or they will be sued. So there is limited information on your part to find the right pricing for just women. Wages are also sticky, it is hard in many industries to blanket cut them across the board without a real cost to morale and the quality of the labour you attract. In practice I cant imagine a real firm that could execute on this strategy.
tbrownaw 8y ago
The market is not efficient. Even if there really was a pay gap of that magnitude, it could still persist in the short run (compare to, "in the long run we are all dead"). The wonderful thing about high-prestige fields is that nobody really knows how to measure productivity. There's also the possibility of bias in school or training programs, which would lead to differences that the labor market is not responsible for because they exist earlier in the pipeline.
viraptor 8y ago
It's probably hard to replace people this way in existing companies. But the incentive is definitely there in many cases. There are for example companies staffed with mostly disabled people getting extra tax subsidy. But the biggest issue with that is: you basically wrote "if there is systemic sexism, there's profit in exploiting that". Why would anyone want to work for you in that case? You're not improving the situation, and benefit from it continuing - that's what's wrong with the idea.
TheCoreh 8y ago
I've thought about this too, because understanding why this doesn't seem to happen more often is part of figuring out how to address the underlying pay gap issue. My guess is that even assuming a perfectly rational employer (with no unconscious bias), the viability of this sort of arbitrage would depend on women _costing_ $0.70 to the dollar to their employers when compared to men, not on women _earning_ $0.70 to the dollar. I'm not at all knowledgeable about how this is usually handled in the US, but what I've heard from entrepreneurs in Brazil (where I live) is that despite the fact that maternity leave here is paid for by our social security system, it still ends up incurring in additional costs to the employer, mainly because they need to hire/train a temporary replacement. (Who will most likely be less effective/productive than the more experienced person who took the leave) Even if the law got updated to grant both genders the same parental leave time (or to allow a shared amount of months to be split by the parents in however way they prefer) it would still require a significant cultural shift to have men actually _choose_ to take the leave. (Anecdotal evidence: I've talked to several local male peers and most of them said they would not bother taking paternal leave even if available, and would rather stay at work) This sort of market/cost-driven decision making is obviously not good from a moral perspective, and is especially unfair with women that don't want or can't have children, or would rather have children but take a shorter or no leave. However, I also understand that a lot of businesses have very thin margins and fierce competitors, so taking the actuarial calculation approach to estimating how much an employee will 'cost' you might be something they perceive as their only take on surviving. I'm not sure on what is the best way to (re)align the incentives so that this doesn't happen anymore and the gap is closed for good. EDIT: what other commenters have pointed out also makes a lot of sense: exercising this sort of arbitrage in the first place would likely require the use of immoral and probably illegal discriminatory practices
- stcredzero 8y ago
  (Anecdotal evidence: I've talked to several local male peers and most of them said they would not bother taking paternal leave even if available, and would rather stay at work) Anecdotal: I have a coworker campaigning to have the company let him take paternal leave.
throwaway7312 8y ago
My experience hiring women for our company has been 1.) they often don't want the job, 2.) when they get the job, they often balk at how demanding it is, then 3.) if they do stick around, regardless how much training we give them we end up having to let them go. This is not all female hires; we have women in customer service roles, for example, who outperformed our male hires; the females kept the job, the males did not. But for more technical roles, they have consistently either balked at the workload or underperformed and been quickly fired (we fire male workers who underperform just as quickly). I would love to hire female employees who are every bit as driven, thorough, methodical, and accountable as our best male employees (the ones we don't fire), who are also cheaper. But they do not seem to exist. The rare female prospective hires who are available and seem good are often priced so high I assume their rates are the result of Fortune 500 companies competing over them to have an effective female on the team. Good for them, but until effective females become cheaper than effective males it doesn't make sense for us to hire them from a value perspective (we don't need the social signaling points).
- dragonsngoblins 8y ago
  What field is your company in? Given that this is HN and going off of a few things you said I am going to assume it is Tech, but I know that is still a pretty big assumption. However if it is Tech or some similarly male dominated field then of course competent women can charge more because they are more in demand. But that is in those specific fields and doesn't explain away the lack arbitrage opportunity from hiring women in general if they are indeed paid less in general.
nearbuy 8y ago
You seem to be ignoring the linked study, which found that female bus and train operators earned less because they took more time off and worked less overtime. Pay gaps due to reasons like these don't create arbitrage opportunities. You want people to work overtime when you ask for overtime. In general, the pay gap due to discrimination is much smaller than the total pay gap. It's also not universal: it varies by city and occupation. If you're evaluating two employees who seem about equally qualified and one asks for a 30% lower salary, it's easy to see the arbitrage opportunity. But if the employee is only asking 5% less? It's less obvious. You may have felt from the interview that the other candidate was 6% better overall. Then consider that discriminatory employers may not be evenly dispersed. In towns without much discrimination, there may be no arbitrage opportunity. In towns with heavy discrimination, there may not be enough non-discriminatory employers to hire all the undervalued workers.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor. The trouble is that the difference starts earlier than that. Say you buy a tech company with 90% male software developers, aiming to balance it out. Turns out qualified female software developers get paid the same amount, but there aren't as many women with computer science degrees or relevant experience. You could go round up some lower-paid women with no qualifications and train them to be software developers, but you could also do the same thing with lower-paid individuals with no qualifications who are of any gender. The problem in both cases is that once they're qualified for the higher paid work, you have to pay the higher salary or they can quit and go work for someone who does.

throwaway5250 8y ago

It's difficult to get someone to understand something when it's in their interest not to.

dang 8y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. All the juice has been squeezed out of that cliché a long time ago.
- throwaway5250 8y ago
  Apologies for my lack of originality.

erikig 8y ago

Labor is not easily fungible and is difficult to treat as a commodity.

claudiawerner 8y ago
I disagree; the whole point of late capitalism has been to make labour more fungible than it was, to the point where it's actually very easy now. Labour-power, at least in the Marxian sense, is a commodity, but labour is not.

koboll 8y ago

I mean, you could have said the same about blacks in the decades between emancipation and the civil rights movement. Certainly, there were some people who took advantage of those arbitrage opportunities to some extent. But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time.

wallace_f 8y ago
In fact, when the dial was turned up all the way on prejudice and discrimination, slavery was the result, as an extreme version of this ability to arbitrage the pay gap. As insane and unjust as that was, that really existed. Today, if there is a pay gap it would be exploitable, no? Salaries are typically the by far the most expensive cost for most tech startups. Discrimination against women is illegal and socially shunned today. So what's stopping entrepreneurs from arbitraging this opportunity?
- warp_factor 8y ago
  Because there is no such opportunity. This whole "0.70$ per 1.00$ from men", doesn't take into account different professions for example.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    According to John Green, the actual gender pay gap is more like 8%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI
stcredzero 8y ago
I mean, you could have said the same about blacks in the decades between emancipation and the civil rights movement. I think Jesse Lee Peterson might have something to say with regards to that. I suspect that there were perceptive people who took advantage of societal conditions and hired industrious people for less money. But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time. According to Thomas Sowell, with some kinds of work, some American slaves were paid additional bonuses for certain kinds of work requiring care and attention to detail. Otherwise, the proper level of motivation couldn't be maintained even through torture. Biases certainly can distort market forces, but the market forces will also bend society. Southern bus and train lines were opposing Jim Crow laws quite early on because they didn't want to spend money on extra vehicles/train cars.

manicdee 8y ago

Can you walk me through the acquisition process? I am getting lost at that point between “fire all the men” and “hire women with the appropriate experience.”

chcknsammich 8y ago
Let's say you are a small startup owner, and you have enough cash on hand to hire 6 male devs. You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price, all this while still offering more money than their supposed current employer who is underpaying them. If all of this were true the price would shift over time on these margins, and this "gap" would disappear. Why is it that we must constantly slice up society on demographic lines, point out a statistical in-congruency with some ideal (non-extant) world, and then claim some third party is culpable for causing this? If women were malevolently directed away from a field by educators, families, or traditions, why is it now an employer's responsibility to calculate said deficit in interest for a field and allocate resources sub-optimally in one direction or another for the sake of aligning statistics on some dubious spreadsheet? Don't tell women no, encourage them in what they want to do in life, and if in the end they don't choose the path that aligns with your macroeconomic utopia... get over it.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Let's say you are a small startup owner, and you have enough cash on hand to hire 6 male devs. You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price In reality, the likely outcome is that the 7 women would end up working at Google, who can and will gladly way out-compete you on salaries, and you end up hiring 7 quirky men, then firing a few of them.
- manicdee 8y ago
  Where do you find the 7 equally competent female devs, remembering that retention rate in the market is pretty low thanks to the salary gaps. The women look at the market and see they can get more money for other work, and there’s much less brogrammer culture to contend with, and leave the market.

mattnewton 8y ago

Wild speculation follows: So there could be two kinds of employers each competing in their own pool: one pool that believes gender (directly or indirectly) is a significant factor, and the other that does not think it is a significant factor to job performance. Because pool 1 believes that gender is not a significant factor, they know that wage discrimination on the basis of that factor would be illegal and open them up to lawsuits. Pool 2 does think gender is significant, maybe indirectly laundered through other things like personality assessments, and they therefore think they can and should act on that information. Critically it doesn’t matter if the sexist pool is openly sexist or using factors more strongly correlated with sex than job performance (like whether or not the employee looks the mental model of the part). The result is the same, they believe they are justified in paying women less. The arbitrage opportunity would never occur to them because they don’t think the labour is worth more. But if you see the arbitrage opportunity, that puts you in Pool 1 by definition. And so those who are aware of the opportunity know that it would be illegal since the gender isn’t relevant to their position.

BeeOnRope 8y ago
The group 1 group, which wishes to hire more women to "exploit" this gap, doesn't have to engage in wage discrimination though, do they? They just have to hire at the "going rate" for women, which to the extent that a wage gap exists means they would be hiring mostly women. If they did hire any men, they just need to ensure they are paid the same as their existing workforce. So you don't need to engage in wage discrimination to hire women, since that is evaluated within a company, not in relation to a sector has a whole. That is, if McDonald's pays all their employees $10 an hour and they are mostly women, and Burger King pays all their employees $15 an hour for approximately the same work and they are mostly men, I don't think there is any (legal) claim for discrimination?
- mattnewton 8y ago
  No, group 2 must be doing wage discrimination per the definition: they are paying women less solely because of their gender, that’s the only way the arbitrage works. If they set wages at $10/hr hoping to capture all the women turned away, they will also fail to capture male employees worth $15/hr. That puts them in the same pool as Burger King. There isn’t an arbitrage opportunity based on gender here. Assuming that Mcdonald’s and Burger King are the only employers, this also doesn’t get rid of the pricing gap. Women are paid less on average because they are turned away from the higher paying Burger King disproportionately. Burger King thinks what they are doing is not discrimination. Mcdonald’s must also think what they are doing is not discrimination, or they have a vast conspiracy to violate the law. They are both Group 2 companies.

jldugger 8y ago

This is the Greenspan argument. In his own words: > I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better-quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women. But in order to arbitrage this, you have to be willing to pay women and men differently. It's not impossible to see a market where everyone internally values work equally, but believes the market does not, and thus all lower their offers made to women.

mattnewton 8y ago
I think that hit the nail on the head: once you see the arbitrage opportunity, to exercise it you must knowingly discriminate against women, which is unethical and likely illegal.
- euyyn 8y ago
  No, you really don't. The following isn't true: > But in order to arbitrage this, you have to be willing to pay women and men differently. A very simple way to arbitrage it without discriminating is to set your wages somewhere between what others pay men and women. Women will flock to you, as you pay better than elsewhere, while men will tend to leave to the discriminating jobs. You pay everyone the same, but the result is your cost in wages is lower than your competitors'.
  - mattnewton 8y ago
    So you are banking on there being enough women who leave discriminating employer in your field to fill all available positions. In that case there is just a lot of labour - I don’t see why employer 1 isn’t lowering their wages of new recruits anyways. Also, the discriminating employer is presumably not discriminating openly, or they will be sued. So there is limited information on your part to find the right pricing for just women. Wages are also sticky, it is hard in many industries to blanket cut them across the board without a real cost to morale and the quality of the labour you attract. In practice I cant imagine a real firm that could execute on this strategy.

tbrownaw 8y ago

The market is not efficient. Even if there really was a pay gap of that magnitude, it could still persist in the short run (compare to, "in the long run we are all dead"). The wonderful thing about high-prestige fields is that nobody really knows how to measure productivity. There's also the possibility of bias in school or training programs, which would lead to differences that the labor market is not responsible for because they exist earlier in the pipeline.

viraptor 8y ago

It's probably hard to replace people this way in existing companies. But the incentive is definitely there in many cases. There are for example companies staffed with mostly disabled people getting extra tax subsidy. But the biggest issue with that is: you basically wrote "if there is systemic sexism, there's profit in exploiting that". Why would anyone want to work for you in that case? You're not improving the situation, and benefit from it continuing - that's what's wrong with the idea.

TheCoreh 8y ago

I've thought about this too, because understanding why this doesn't seem to happen more often is part of figuring out how to address the underlying pay gap issue. My guess is that even assuming a perfectly rational employer (with no unconscious bias), the viability of this sort of arbitrage would depend on women _costing_ $0.70 to the dollar to their employers when compared to men, not on women _earning_ $0.70 to the dollar. I'm not at all knowledgeable about how this is usually handled in the US, but what I've heard from entrepreneurs in Brazil (where I live) is that despite the fact that maternity leave here is paid for by our social security system, it still ends up incurring in additional costs to the employer, mainly because they need to hire/train a temporary replacement. (Who will most likely be less effective/productive than the more experienced person who took the leave) Even if the law got updated to grant both genders the same parental leave time (or to allow a shared amount of months to be split by the parents in however way they prefer) it would still require a significant cultural shift to have men actually _choose_ to take the leave. (Anecdotal evidence: I've talked to several local male peers and most of them said they would not bother taking paternal leave even if available, and would rather stay at work) This sort of market/cost-driven decision making is obviously not good from a moral perspective, and is especially unfair with women that don't want or can't have children, or would rather have children but take a shorter or no leave. However, I also understand that a lot of businesses have very thin margins and fierce competitors, so taking the actuarial calculation approach to estimating how much an employee will 'cost' you might be something they perceive as their only take on surviving. I'm not sure on what is the best way to (re)align the incentives so that this doesn't happen anymore and the gap is closed for good. EDIT: what other commenters have pointed out also makes a lot of sense: exercising this sort of arbitrage in the first place would likely require the use of immoral and probably illegal discriminatory practices

stcredzero 8y ago
(Anecdotal evidence: I've talked to several local male peers and most of them said they would not bother taking paternal leave even if available, and would rather stay at work) Anecdotal: I have a coworker campaigning to have the company let him take paternal leave.

throwaway7312 8y ago

My experience hiring women for our company has been 1.) they often don't want the job, 2.) when they get the job, they often balk at how demanding it is, then 3.) if they do stick around, regardless how much training we give them we end up having to let them go. This is not all female hires; we have women in customer service roles, for example, who outperformed our male hires; the females kept the job, the males did not. But for more technical roles, they have consistently either balked at the workload or underperformed and been quickly fired (we fire male workers who underperform just as quickly). I would love to hire female employees who are every bit as driven, thorough, methodical, and accountable as our best male employees (the ones we don't fire), who are also cheaper. But they do not seem to exist. The rare female prospective hires who are available and seem good are often priced so high I assume their rates are the result of Fortune 500 companies competing over them to have an effective female on the team. Good for them, but until effective females become cheaper than effective males it doesn't make sense for us to hire them from a value perspective (we don't need the social signaling points).

dragonsngoblins 8y ago
What field is your company in? Given that this is HN and going off of a few things you said I am going to assume it is Tech, but I know that is still a pretty big assumption. However if it is Tech or some similarly male dominated field then of course competent women can charge more because they are more in demand. But that is in those specific fields and doesn't explain away the lack arbitrage opportunity from hiring women in general if they are indeed paid less in general.

nearbuy 8y ago

You seem to be ignoring the linked study, which found that female bus and train operators earned less because they took more time off and worked less overtime. Pay gaps due to reasons like these don't create arbitrage opportunities. You want people to work overtime when you ask for overtime. In general, the pay gap due to discrimination is much smaller than the total pay gap. It's also not universal: it varies by city and occupation. If you're evaluating two employees who seem about equally qualified and one asks for a 30% lower salary, it's easy to see the arbitrage opportunity. But if the employee is only asking 5% less? It's less obvious. You may have felt from the interview that the other candidate was 6% better overall. Then consider that discriminatory employers may not be evenly dispersed. In towns without much discrimination, there may be no arbitrage opportunity. In towns with heavy discrimination, there may not be enough non-discriminatory employers to hire all the undervalued workers.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor. The trouble is that the difference starts earlier than that. Say you buy a tech company with 90% male software developers, aiming to balance it out. Turns out qualified female software developers get paid the same amount, but there aren't as many women with computer science degrees or relevant experience. You could go round up some lower-paid women with no qualifications and train them to be software developers, but you could also do the same thing with lower-paid individuals with no qualifications who are of any gender. The problem in both cases is that once they're qualified for the higher paid work, you have to pay the higher salary or they can quit and go work for someone who does.