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The gender wage gap is a well-documented, persistent, and worldwide phenomenon wherein women earn, on average, an estimated 9 to 18 percent less than men who ha

• RodericDay 13y ago
  how would you be more efficient? you would be just as efficient. unless you paid them 18% less. in which case you'd be exploiting their situation.
  • Goronmon 13y ago
    >unless you paid them 18% less. in which case you'd be exploiting their situation. Well, yes, but the point is, ethics aside, if it was as simple as just hiring from an entire subset of potential employees who are cheaper than others, why wouldn't you do it in order to have a more profitable business?
    • dylandrop 13y ago
      > why wouldn't you do it in order to have a more profitable business? > ethics aside You wouldn't do it because it would be unethical. That's like saying "besides the fact that eating a cheese burger is terrible for you, why wouldn't you eat a cheese burger?"
      • papsosouid 13y ago
        Businesses do things that are unethical to gain a competitive advantage all the time. Constantly. Every day. The fact that none of them are exploiting this "wage gap" is pretty strong support for the fact that the gap isn't actually real.
        • dylandrop 13y ago
          See my post to mike_ash. It's hard to say that it's "pretty strong support for the fact that the age gap isn't actually real" without also noting that there's a lack of confidence in female workers' performance (so they wouldn't be hired in the first place).
          • papsosouid 13y ago
            But that is just an assumption, and a rather bold one at that. If there were evidence that there is a prevailing assumption that women are 18% less capable then you would have a point. But just making a baseless assertion like that doesn't work.
            • dylandrop 13y ago
              Women are definitely assumed less capable, or at the very least, unhirable for some reason. See this link ("http://qz.com/103453/i-understood-gender-discrimination-after-i-added-mr-to-my-resume-and-landed-a-job/" http://qz.com/103453/i-understood-gender-discrimination-afte...). I might not have a link to a study for you, but it's certainly not a baseless assertion.
              • papsosouid 13y ago
                Yes, that is a baseless assertion. I saw that when it was posted. I even commented on it. About how my wife had the exact same experience in reverse. A single personal anecdote is entirely meaningless.
                • dylandrop 13y ago
                  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109 Happy? Besides, you've made quite a baseless assertion when assuming that there exist employers willing to exploit the fact that women are paid 18% less.
      • rglullis 13y ago
        Sigh. Is it really hard to try to see the point, instead of just arguing from the default position? This makes for a really boring discussion forum... Let's try again. The argument here is, basically: if it's true that men and women are interchangeable as resources of labor, then the wage gap can be seen as an opportunity for arbitrage. Any capitalist would just hire women (because the information the market has is based on the assumption that a woman can provide the same work as a man for a lesser cost), market forces would bring women's pay up, the wage gap would diminish until we reached an equilibrium. The argument is far from perfect (it ignores social and cultural aspects), but it is pretty reasonable as a way to see that if there is a difference in pay, there is a difference in aggregate output. What are the causes of this difference in output is subject to another topic, one I can't say I have an explanation or consolidated opinion. About the ethics of it: there is nothing unethical about choosing who to hire based on cost, if the quality of the final product is the same (and if the contracted parties are not doing anything unethical themselves). Let's remove the sex factor out of the equation... if a woman living in NY asks for $100k for some work, and another woman with "comparable education and experience" living in Poland asks for $30k, is it unethical to hire the Polish one?
  • tomp 13y ago
    You wouldn't pay them less. You would simply put up a job ad that had salary 17% less than the market rate for men. Then, men wouldn't apply for the job, but equally efficient women would. It's a thought experiment that suggests that the wage gap doesn't exist.
• papsosouid 13y ago
  Yeah, the "wage gap" myth has been debunked many times over, it really destroys someone's credibility when they pretend it exists. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/the-biggest-myth-about-the-gender-wage-gap/276367/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/the-bigg...
  • king_jester 13y ago
    This doesn't debunk the wage gap, only that the wage gap is not caused by differences in pay between men and women doing similar work in similar roles. The wage gap has always been structural: women tend to be prevalent in lower wage jobs or are penalized more for default expectations about raising children or domestic work. Also, men are more common the higher in company/corporate structures you go, so naturally women do not make as much because they are not as represented in those higher salary roles.
    • smsm42 13y ago
      >>> only that the wage gap is not caused by differences in pay between men and women doing similar work in similar roles. That's pretty much what is common understanding of the wage gap. If you understand by "wage gap" that less paid positions paid less, it's meaningless. If you understand by it that women more often work in positions that pay less, then it's not a wage gap - it is a position gap or promotion gap or whatever else gap. So calling it "wage gap" is misleading, as the wage is not the variable that changes between men and women - the position on which they get the wage is.
      • papsosouid 13y ago
        >That's pretty much what is common understanding of the wage gap No it isn't. If that were the common understanding, then people would not say they are fighting for "equal pay for equal work". The very existence of the phrase "equal pay for equal work" demonstrates that people do believe (incorrectly) that women are paid less than men for the same work.
        • 13y ago
• rayiner 13y ago
  I remember reading an article, in the Economist or maybe the Atlantic, describing a South Korean company's initiative to take advantage of the country's large pool of highly-educated married women who are marginalized in the workforce.
• dylandrop 13y ago
  So you're proposing that because women given 18% less in wages that we should take advantage of that fact, underpay them, and contribute more to gender inequality in the workplace? I'd love to see what your female coworkers think of this post.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • benmanns 13y ago
    eeky is suggesting that, if there is a gap between male worker output/male worker pay and female worker output/female worker pay (which I'm unqualified to make a comment on), someone would arbitrage this gap to make an enormously profitable company until the gap closes. There is no way to "hire all the females" without salaries rising.
  • mikeash 13y ago
    He is proposing that it could be done, and thus anyone who doesn't care about the ethical implications and wants to get rich would be doing it. That nobody is doing it, despite no shortage of unethical people who want to get rich, suggests that it is not true.
    • dylandrop 13y ago
      >suggests that it is not true I doubt this. See the HN post from a few days ago ("I put Mr. on my CV and got a job"). It would seem that employers not only pay their females employees less, but have little faith in them to get the job done, thus they wouldn't hire them in the first place.
      • zowch 13y ago
        This is the link, for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033567
      • mikeash 13y ago
        There's no room for doubt, really. It does suggest that. It does not prove, so you can certainly doubt the conclusion, of course. There really doesn't seem to be any alternative besides these three: - Women are not underpaid or more efficient. - There is not a noticeable number of unethical people seeking to get rich. - People are getting rich by hiring lots of women and outcompeting everybody else who prefers men. The last two don't look true to me, which suggests that the first one is true. I certainly could be wrong about the assumptions or conclusion, but it does suggest that.
• darkarmani 13y ago
  I can't find a reference right now, but didn't Warren Buffet do this when he was starting out? I could be wrong, but i feel like he realized that women could be hired at a much lower salary way back when they were be blatantly discriminated against.
  • gwern 13y ago
    I believe Alan Greenspan did exactly that (vaguely remember reading it in his autobio); perhaps you're thinking of him
    • darkarmani 13y ago
      Yes, you are right. That's who i am thinking of.
  • s_baby 13y ago
    You're probably thinking of Warren Farrell. He was writing a piece for the NYT on the wage gap when he thought "If workers can be bought for 75cents to the dollar then surely someone in the market would have taken advantage of this." The lack of case studies on any such companies is a telling sign that the "wage-gap" is more nuanced than just discrimination.
• mistercow 13y ago
  There are a couple of big errors in your reasoning: 1. You're attacking the top of the range. If you want to reason effectively, you can't give the side you agree with an advantage by picking the easiest opposing argument to knock down. You should be considering the bottom end of the estimate range. 2. You fail to account for Amdahl's law and assume that an X% improvement for one factor will lead to an X% improvement overall. In fact, this will only apply to skilled¹ labor wages of employees directly working for you. Yes, there are industries like advertising and software development where that is a huge chunk of total expenses, but they don't tend to be ones where wages are tightly calibrated. 3. You assume that the gender gap would have to be homogeneous. It is possible that in situations where skilled labor is a big enough chunk of expenses (see #2) to make this a strong strategy, the gender gap is much smaller. 4. Most people do not think they are sexist. They believe that they can look at resumes and evenly weigh different applicants without letting gender color their perceptions. Most of those people are wrong. But if you truly believe this about yourself, then the "hire only women" strategy is less optimal than the "hire the best candidates for the money" strategy. If you do think you are sexist, you can probably come up with a better strategy to counteract your bias than hiring only women. 4. You assume that markets are efficient. There are a number of practical factors getting in the way of this strategy being implemented. Take the intersection of people who believe there is a large enough gender gap to make this work and people who believe that they are too sexist to weigh applicants fairly. Intersect that with people who can't research effective ways to counteract gender bias. Intersect that with people who wouldn't have a problem exploiting the gender gap. Intersect that with people with the savvy necessary to start a successful business (I think we may be down to about twelve people). Intersect that with people with expertise in an industry where the strategy will work. Now take that tiny set of people and filter out the ones who just get unlucky. The remainder still have to manage to maintain the policy once the company grows to the point that they don't have total control over it. ¹ Unskilled labor gets outsourced, and in the Chinese manufacturing industry, the gender gap is exploited heavily.