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How about option 3: men choose to work on jobs that pay more but are more stressful while women chose to work on more social jobs that pay less and value other

by raducu 8y ago

How about option 3: men choose to work on jobs that pay more but are more stressful while women chose to work on more social jobs that pay less and value other things more than just pay.

lm28469 8y ago
You'll have to be a bit more precise because right now it's hard to tell if you're trolling or trying to make a point. In any case, the pay gap isn't a thing that can be addressed with a single sentence such as yours. It's a really simplistic point of view to say social jobs are valued other than with a salary. And I'm fairly certain that social workers, teachers and nurses get their share of stress. If anything the "men do manly jobs and women do social jobs" is another symptom of the underlying causes. Sure you can say "that's the way it is" and move on, but if you want to take part in the debate you have to show a minimum of intellectual honesty. Plus it doesn't work for people having the same position in the same company.
- raducu 8y ago
  Yes it is a very simplistic explanation to why genders tend to gravitate to one job or another. And yes, I'm saying that most, but not all of the disparities are biological and while it's a great idea to encourage women to pick higher paying jobs, we're at a point in time where we'll see diminishing returns in those attempts. For the same position with the same experience, in roughly the same location, I'd be very much surprised if the AVERAGE/MEAN pay gap is more than a single digit percent across an industry. By all means go after those X% numbers, teach women to negotiate more, assert themselves and so on, but I think you'll end up with numbers similar to the ones in this study -- a couple percent improvement. What I'm trying to say is there's no conspiracy against women earning more in the western world.
- raducu 8y ago
  I agree stress was a bad metric, I'm sure there are other metrics some sociologists would be able to enumerate, I can just speculate based on my experience: In my country when I started studying computer science -- which was a niche area, I had 90% male colleagues; after 15 years with all the media coverage of high salary in the industry, the proportion shifted to 60-40, because the profession has become main-stream. So another factor could be risk -- women are more risk averse than men; hence they choose more established professions where the pay is less. Then, there's the drive and single-mindedness some high paying jobs require -- men are built that way, women are less likely to have obsessions on obscure-technical hobbies; heck, most men aren't built that way, it just happens that for those people that have such drive and single-mindedness, most of them are men. And that's the way it is -- unless there's some moat protecting your job, due to the laws of supply and demand the higher paying jobs are the ones nobody wants to do because of risk, discomfort and so on, and those that most people cannot do because of the dedication and single-mindedness they require, and for both categories men are the likely candidates.

by raducu 8y ago

How about option 3: men choose to work on jobs that pay more but are more stressful while women chose to work on more social jobs that pay less and value other things more than just pay.

lm28469 8y ago

You'll have to be a bit more precise because right now it's hard to tell if you're trolling or trying to make a point. In any case, the pay gap isn't a thing that can be addressed with a single sentence such as yours. It's a really simplistic point of view to say social jobs are valued other than with a salary. And I'm fairly certain that social workers, teachers and nurses get their share of stress. If anything the "men do manly jobs and women do social jobs" is another symptom of the underlying causes. Sure you can say "that's the way it is" and move on, but if you want to take part in the debate you have to show a minimum of intellectual honesty. Plus it doesn't work for people having the same position in the same company.

raducu 8y ago
Yes it is a very simplistic explanation to why genders tend to gravitate to one job or another. And yes, I'm saying that most, but not all of the disparities are biological and while it's a great idea to encourage women to pick higher paying jobs, we're at a point in time where we'll see diminishing returns in those attempts. For the same position with the same experience, in roughly the same location, I'd be very much surprised if the AVERAGE/MEAN pay gap is more than a single digit percent across an industry. By all means go after those X% numbers, teach women to negotiate more, assert themselves and so on, but I think you'll end up with numbers similar to the ones in this study -- a couple percent improvement. What I'm trying to say is there's no conspiracy against women earning more in the western world.
raducu 8y ago
I agree stress was a bad metric, I'm sure there are other metrics some sociologists would be able to enumerate, I can just speculate based on my experience: In my country when I started studying computer science -- which was a niche area, I had 90% male colleagues; after 15 years with all the media coverage of high salary in the industry, the proportion shifted to 60-40, because the profession has become main-stream. So another factor could be risk -- women are more risk averse than men; hence they choose more established professions where the pay is less. Then, there's the drive and single-mindedness some high paying jobs require -- men are built that way, women are less likely to have obsessions on obscure-technical hobbies; heck, most men aren't built that way, it just happens that for those people that have such drive and single-mindedness, most of them are men. And that's the way it is -- unless there's some moat protecting your job, due to the laws of supply and demand the higher paying jobs are the ones nobody wants to do because of risk, discomfort and so on, and those that most people cannot do because of the dedication and single-mindedness they require, and for both categories men are the likely candidates.