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The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this.

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap is a problem has a solution. They are pushing equality of outcome. They want everyone to be paid exactly the same. That's the problem that they have. They don't care that they are comparing apples to oranges. They want pay to be exactly the same.

crooked-v 8y ago
Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.
- smokeyj 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
  - bandrami 8y ago
    Nope, not that, either: the supply of doctors, for instance, is deliberately restricted by the American Medical Association; whereas the supply of elementary teachers is not restricted by the CAEP. Supply and demand are still second-order effects here.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      If the supply of doctors is restricted, then you'd expect them to get higher pay, and vice versa with teachers. I agree it is a secondary effect. The cost of training/education required to perform the job is bigger, though it ultimately has the same effect of reducing supply.
      - bandrami 8y ago
        Were we to, say, stop the cap on H1-Bs in the medical profession, doctors' pay might migrate down towards teachers' and the OECD average (and US healthcare might be affordable).
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/teacher-shortage-us-education/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/teacher-shortage-us...
- briandear 8y ago
  The “underpay” of teachers is due to supply and demand.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  >Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society. When you take all factors into account the gender wage gap virtually vanishes. Comparing secondary school teachers to post-secondary professors is hilarious at best. High school teachers should be paid much less than university professors. Now tell me, how about men vs women at secondary schools. Oh right their unions make sure they are paid identically. How about professors? They are paid the same. If you think that secondary school teachers should be paid the same as university professors; you're a communist. That's perfectly acceptable to be a communist, but you don't live in a communist society.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    > High school teachers should be paid much less than university professors. Why?
    - dgzl 8y ago
      I imagine you want to make the point that primary School education is more important than secondary School education (which may be true) and thus should be paid better. I disagree with this in general, because I don't feel like the skills and knowledge needed to be a successful primary School educator are as difficult or unique as those needed to be a secondary School educator. My reasoning is that a good percentage of the value that comes from primary School education is based around behavioural education, such as learning how to interact and behave with peers and teams. It also is a place where students learn authority and social heptarchy, and punishment and consequence. In addition to learning the foundations of school subjects. In secondary education, it's assumed that the student has learned all that, and their attention will be focused on difficult study of each of their subjects. The professor should be an embodiment of that subject, with understanding beyond primary School educators. Likewise it's arguably more difficult to keep the attention of University students than primary students. On the other hand (as in not in general), if someone was a truly exceptional primary educator / early life coach / babysitter, what have you, then the private sector would be a better place for them I imagine.
bandrami 8y ago
It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?
- insickness 8y ago
  Is this really a question? It takes more dedicated study to become an anesthesiologist than an elementary school teacher.
  - bandrami 8y ago
    Does it? Both require professional degrees and a practical internship.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      I know of no jurisdiction where becoming an elementary school teacher requires a professional degree or practical internship.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  >It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing? Because of education level? A university professor has a PHD. An elementary teacher has a bachelors degree. If you think a PHD and a bachelors degree should be paid the same. That's perfectly fine, that's called communism. It's perfectly fine to be a communist.
  - ALittleLight 8y ago
    This isn't quite right. People are paid such that the amount is enough to attract needed workers and less than the value those workers provide. Education isn't a critical factor except that it enables people to be more productive and therefore more desirable to employers. As an example: a middle school dropout who self learned machine learning, became a master, published papers, worked at a successful startup etc, will likely be better paid than your average History PhD.
LiquidSky 8y ago
>The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Korea most assuredly is not a country with "the most equality in the workplace". It routinely ranks as having the worst gender inequality of any developed nation, and one of the worst in the world generally. It came in 115th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2018 Global Gender Gap Report* and has hovered around that number for years. *http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  We have exchanged sources. Thank you. Your assertion is that Japan and Korea are highly discriminatory against women? That's certainly interesting and I'm not sure I can defend against that position. Perhaps women in japan and korea are extremely oppressed. This is certainly not what I thought after reading for example or just seeing what's portrayed in the media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_South_Korea Meanwhile your source has Rwanda as #6 most equal. I'm very confused about what the data is saying. It's certainly feeling more like a checkbox list. So let's look at Canada. Both my data and your data have them with poor performance. Mind you my data is just looking at wage gap. Women in Canada for ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION AND OPPORTUNITY is 27th place behind Brunai and Ghana. This seems quite incorrect. Women have completely the same economic opportunity as men in Canada. So this is a debateable number. Women are educated BETTER than men and certainly work. So I'm not sure how this data was determined. The actual number should be showing discrimination against me. Women in Canada are 1.0 for education. That's good. Like I just said https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008001/article/10561-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008001/article... Women outnumber men. So this is actually false information. They capped the number wrongly at 1.0. Women in Canada for HEALTH AND SURVIVAL aren't in the list? USA is in 71st place. I happen to know this statistic. Women live longer than men. So they cherry picked and removed this data? https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2011001/article/11427-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2011001/article... This another number completely false. Women in Canada for POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT are 21st place behind india and nambia. Except we live in a democratic society with no barriers. Women can run for politics. So this should be a 1.0. So I guess in conclusion I find your study to be biased, false, and wrong. Let me explain to you what's happening. Women have the CHOICE. They choose careers that they get paid less in. This is a good thing. They have the freedom. The gap is not a problem.
rdtsc 8y ago
> The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Yeah, I am not sure what to think of the data. It's not what I would expect. How is US, Canada, Austria having such a large gender wage gap, followed by Canada. Then Greece, Bulgaria and Romania are all the way on the left. Having lived in Eastern Europe, I would not consider it overall a bastion of women's equality and rights, not according to the West European standards at least. Granted though, during the Soviet times women and girls were studying math and science just as well as the boys even if not better and it was never specifically promoted or pushed via a "women in STEM" or such similar programs I have seen here, it just happened. Perhaps there is a remnant of that mentality and maybe there is something to be learned from there.
- Gpetrium 8y ago
  I think it is worth noting that the quality of the data can vary a lot from country to country. On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate. Of course, it doesn't mean there are no truths to the data, it just needs to be taken with a grain of salt even if it is the OECD.
  - rdtsc 8y ago
    > On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate. Great point. Yeah I can see that happening.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  The explanation is simple. When you provide women the opportunity to become anything they want. They choose the careers that they choose. Which tend to me more social related careers. Teaching or nursing for example does not scale well; therefore salaries are limited. Whereas men pick more "stuff" categories. It's men who work in STEM creating things. A car or an iphone is going to be generally speaking men who design it. These scale very well and salaries can be larger. By these modern approaches that allow women to go into whatever they want to do. This is what creates the gender wage gap.
peruvian 8y ago
> Women in Korea are not treated poorly. Do you know this for sure? Developed East Asian countries are some of the worst in terms of work equality for women, particularly if they want to have children. Not a good example to use.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  I admittedly do not know this. I just replied to another person who provided a source which asserts that Korea is the worst country for equality. Which if true would explain why Korea has a large wage gap. I'm not defending this at all however. I'm perfectly happy to believe that South Korea is worse than Saudi Arabia toward treatment of women.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Japan and Korea are 'very gendered' countries. Technically, everything could be equal, but men and women have much stronger gender roles there, it's very deeply ingrained into culture.
dgzl 8y ago
> The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap is a problem has a solution. They are pushing equality of outcome. That's not a solution, that's another problem.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  Exactly my point. The mcdonalds cashier should not be compensated the same as someone like a neuroscientist. If we get replicators invented and everyone can have whatever they please like in star trek. We still don't need communism. Capitalism will still work, stuff will just be free but if you want a PERSON to do something you still would need to pay.
Udik 8y ago
Actually I find that table a bit suspicious. The sequence of countries ordered by pay gap (lowest to highest) is the following: Romania, Costa Rica, Luxembourg, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Malta, Hungary, Poland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Lithuania, Cyprus, Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States, Chile, Latvia, Israel, Japan, Estonia, Korea. See the pattern there? Neither do I. Usually there is some correlation by continent, cultural area, GDP, HDI, etc. In this case there seems to be nothing. Romania and Costa Rica and Luxembourg are the countries with the smallest wage gap; Netherlands, UK and US are way up there, in company of Chile, Canada and Estonia. Turkey is wedged right in between Denmark and Norway. Netherlands' pay gap is 4 times that of neighbouring Belgium. Mexico and Ireland are the same. Lithuania's gap is half that of Estonia and Latvia. Strange.

crooked-v 8y ago

Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.

smokeyj 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
- bandrami 8y ago
  Nope, not that, either: the supply of doctors, for instance, is deliberately restricted by the American Medical Association; whereas the supply of elementary teachers is not restricted by the CAEP. Supply and demand are still second-order effects here.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    If the supply of doctors is restricted, then you'd expect them to get higher pay, and vice versa with teachers. I agree it is a secondary effect. The cost of training/education required to perform the job is bigger, though it ultimately has the same effect of reducing supply.
    - bandrami 8y ago
      Were we to, say, stop the cap on H1-Bs in the medical profession, doctors' pay might migrate down towards teachers' and the OECD average (and US healthcare might be affordable).
- crooked-v 8y ago
  https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/teacher-shortage-us-education/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/teacher-shortage-us...
briandear 8y ago
The “underpay” of teachers is due to supply and demand.
sleepysysadmin 8y ago
>Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society. When you take all factors into account the gender wage gap virtually vanishes. Comparing secondary school teachers to post-secondary professors is hilarious at best. High school teachers should be paid much less than university professors. Now tell me, how about men vs women at secondary schools. Oh right their unions make sure they are paid identically. How about professors? They are paid the same. If you think that secondary school teachers should be paid the same as university professors; you're a communist. That's perfectly acceptable to be a communist, but you don't live in a communist society.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > High school teachers should be paid much less than university professors. Why?
  - dgzl 8y ago
    I imagine you want to make the point that primary School education is more important than secondary School education (which may be true) and thus should be paid better. I disagree with this in general, because I don't feel like the skills and knowledge needed to be a successful primary School educator are as difficult or unique as those needed to be a secondary School educator. My reasoning is that a good percentage of the value that comes from primary School education is based around behavioural education, such as learning how to interact and behave with peers and teams. It also is a place where students learn authority and social heptarchy, and punishment and consequence. In addition to learning the foundations of school subjects. In secondary education, it's assumed that the student has learned all that, and their attention will be focused on difficult study of each of their subjects. The professor should be an embodiment of that subject, with understanding beyond primary School educators. Likewise it's arguably more difficult to keep the attention of University students than primary students. On the other hand (as in not in general), if someone was a truly exceptional primary educator / early life coach / babysitter, what have you, then the private sector would be a better place for them I imagine.

bandrami 8y ago

It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?

insickness 8y ago
Is this really a question? It takes more dedicated study to become an anesthesiologist than an elementary school teacher.
- bandrami 8y ago
  Does it? Both require professional degrees and a practical internship.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    I know of no jurisdiction where becoming an elementary school teacher requires a professional degree or practical internship.
sleepysysadmin 8y ago
>It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing? Because of education level? A university professor has a PHD. An elementary teacher has a bachelors degree. If you think a PHD and a bachelors degree should be paid the same. That's perfectly fine, that's called communism. It's perfectly fine to be a communist.
- ALittleLight 8y ago
  This isn't quite right. People are paid such that the amount is enough to attract needed workers and less than the value those workers provide. Education isn't a critical factor except that it enables people to be more productive and therefore more desirable to employers. As an example: a middle school dropout who self learned machine learning, became a master, published papers, worked at a successful startup etc, will likely be better paid than your average History PhD.

LiquidSky 8y ago

>The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Korea most assuredly is not a country with "the most equality in the workplace". It routinely ranks as having the worst gender inequality of any developed nation, and one of the worst in the world generally. It came in 115th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2018 Global Gender Gap Report* and has hovered around that number for years. *http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf

sleepysysadmin 8y ago
We have exchanged sources. Thank you. Your assertion is that Japan and Korea are highly discriminatory against women? That's certainly interesting and I'm not sure I can defend against that position. Perhaps women in japan and korea are extremely oppressed. This is certainly not what I thought after reading for example or just seeing what's portrayed in the media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_South_Korea Meanwhile your source has Rwanda as #6 most equal. I'm very confused about what the data is saying. It's certainly feeling more like a checkbox list. So let's look at Canada. Both my data and your data have them with poor performance. Mind you my data is just looking at wage gap. Women in Canada for ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION AND OPPORTUNITY is 27th place behind Brunai and Ghana. This seems quite incorrect. Women have completely the same economic opportunity as men in Canada. So this is a debateable number. Women are educated BETTER than men and certainly work. So I'm not sure how this data was determined. The actual number should be showing discrimination against me. Women in Canada are 1.0 for education. That's good. Like I just said https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008001/article/10561-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008001/article... Women outnumber men. So this is actually false information. They capped the number wrongly at 1.0. Women in Canada for HEALTH AND SURVIVAL aren't in the list? USA is in 71st place. I happen to know this statistic. Women live longer than men. So they cherry picked and removed this data? https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2011001/article/11427-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2011001/article... This another number completely false. Women in Canada for POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT are 21st place behind india and nambia. Except we live in a democratic society with no barriers. Women can run for politics. So this should be a 1.0. So I guess in conclusion I find your study to be biased, false, and wrong. Let me explain to you what's happening. Women have the CHOICE. They choose careers that they get paid less in. This is a good thing. They have the freedom. The gap is not a problem.

rdtsc 8y ago

> The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Yeah, I am not sure what to think of the data. It's not what I would expect. How is US, Canada, Austria having such a large gender wage gap, followed by Canada. Then Greece, Bulgaria and Romania are all the way on the left. Having lived in Eastern Europe, I would not consider it overall a bastion of women's equality and rights, not according to the West European standards at least. Granted though, during the Soviet times women and girls were studying math and science just as well as the boys even if not better and it was never specifically promoted or pushed via a "women in STEM" or such similar programs I have seen here, it just happened. Perhaps there is a remnant of that mentality and maybe there is something to be learned from there.

Gpetrium 8y ago
I think it is worth noting that the quality of the data can vary a lot from country to country. On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate. Of course, it doesn't mean there are no truths to the data, it just needs to be taken with a grain of salt even if it is the OECD.
- rdtsc 8y ago
  > On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate. Great point. Yeah I can see that happening.
sleepysysadmin 8y ago
The explanation is simple. When you provide women the opportunity to become anything they want. They choose the careers that they choose. Which tend to me more social related careers. Teaching or nursing for example does not scale well; therefore salaries are limited. Whereas men pick more "stuff" categories. It's men who work in STEM creating things. A car or an iphone is going to be generally speaking men who design it. These scale very well and salaries can be larger. By these modern approaches that allow women to go into whatever they want to do. This is what creates the gender wage gap.

peruvian 8y ago

> Women in Korea are not treated poorly. Do you know this for sure? Developed East Asian countries are some of the worst in terms of work equality for women, particularly if they want to have children. Not a good example to use.

sleepysysadmin 8y ago
I admittedly do not know this. I just replied to another person who provided a source which asserts that Korea is the worst country for equality. Which if true would explain why Korea has a large wage gap. I'm not defending this at all however. I'm perfectly happy to believe that South Korea is worse than Saudi Arabia toward treatment of women.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Japan and Korea are 'very gendered' countries. Technically, everything could be equal, but men and women have much stronger gender roles there, it's very deeply ingrained into culture.

dgzl 8y ago

> The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap is a problem has a solution. They are pushing equality of outcome. That's not a solution, that's another problem.

sleepysysadmin 8y ago
Exactly my point. The mcdonalds cashier should not be compensated the same as someone like a neuroscientist. If we get replicators invented and everyone can have whatever they please like in star trek. We still don't need communism. Capitalism will still work, stuff will just be free but if you want a PERSON to do something you still would need to pay.

Udik 8y ago

Actually I find that table a bit suspicious. The sequence of countries ordered by pay gap (lowest to highest) is the following: Romania, Costa Rica, Luxembourg, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Malta, Hungary, Poland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Lithuania, Cyprus, Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States, Chile, Latvia, Israel, Japan, Estonia, Korea. See the pattern there? Neither do I. Usually there is some correlation by continent, cultural area, GDP, HDI, etc. In this case there seems to be nothing. Romania and Costa Rica and Luxembourg are the countries with the smallest wage gap; Netherlands, UK and US are way up there, in company of Chile, Canada and Estonia. Turkey is wedged right in between Denmark and Norway. Netherlands' pay gap is 4 times that of neighbouring Belgium. Mexico and Ireland are the same. Lithuania's gap is half that of Estonia and Latvia. Strange.