Oh, and I found a really cool site:
http://genderstats.worldbank.org/home.asp

They’ve got it all.

This in a country that according to all the official sources is one of the very most equal on earth.

I truly belive that it must be even worse in the US.

Maybe that is in fact the case and many more men than women are unemployed and underemployed as a result? The statistcs only take stock of the people who are working.

Very good set of articles, by the way.

If everybody in your industries (and every industry in which workers are exploited) suddenly refused to work under those conditions, we’d have something. If everybody who wanted their politicians to work for them and not the companies who line their campaign pockets, stopped voting for those or similar politicians, we’d have something. Unfortunately the system doesn’t facilitate either option. And the fact that it’s a competitive job market makes it worse. A company which desperately needs help might agree to a potential employee’s demand of 8-hour days or else overtime, but nowadays every potential employee would have to demand it, or it wouldn’t work. More’s the pity.

And Rogue, you said

The pay gap would go away if Congress passed a law that forced men to work less. So why don’t we work toward that?

Because if we do, there will be a lot of bitter men complaining that women are taking men’s jobs, same as in the Great Depression (people said that if women went back to their homes and kitchens and gave their jobs back to men, the economy would go back to normal), the end of World War 2 (when millions of women were laid off because there were now men to do those jobs), and various other incidents where women started doing what was seen as “men’s work.”

This will create lots of male hostility to women’s rights and women’s equality.

By the way, here’s some pay-discrimination for you: some time in the past, before women entered the work force in any significant numbers, clerical work (secretary-type stuff) was done by men, and—get this—it was a good jumping-off point for a successful, lucrative career! But once the job became largely female, all of a sudden it became a low-paid, low-status, dead-end job. If anybody’s still reading this, Amp, you might write another piece for your wage-gap series on how various professions dropped in pay and prestiege and advancement opportunities as they switched from “male” professions to “female” professions. Secretaries are one such profession; teachers are another. There are more, but I can’t think of them just now.

Yes, I’m single now. I was happily married at the time of my first post so if the tone of my posts has changed you know why.

Well golly lolly Kavius, aren’t you lucky to have a wife whose job has the flexibility that yours does not?

So in short, congratulations. I’m very happy you have a family situation where you have the luxury of working your software salaried job and your partner is able to support what your job demands of you.

Infact, my job has more flexibility. My employers are more inclined to give me a day off when needed than hers are. She is expected to be in her desk from 8:00-4:30 regardless of what is going on in her life. When we purchased a house together, I was required to go to all of the meetings with the seller because I can skip out of the office for a morning for personal reasons, if I need to. That is the primary perk of working 12 hour days when needed.

In the case that she was required to put in some overtime hours, and she was being payed overtime for it, she quit. Sure, we both agreed that she was being groomed for a promotion (after which she would have been making signifigantly more than me), but overtime is unacceptable.

In short, I worked harder than my wife at home and the office. I was rewarded at the office for working harder with a larger paycheck, and more flexible hours.

Just to head off the next attack: no I did not critisize her decision not to work around the house, nor her decision not to work as hard at the office.

It is true that men work more hours than women, on average (at paid jobs, anyhow - but keep in mind women work many more unpaid hours at home).

Perhaps true, (Not in my situation but I can’t speak for the rest of society) but we aren’t discussing unpaid hours. We are discussing the wage gap; employers paying females less than males. The most extreme example of this would be a housewife or househusband. In this case it is obvious that the contribution of the individual is to do the housework while the other’s is to raise the capital for the family.

ignores the fact that more hours worked may well lead to higher-paying positions

This is my original point. I work more hours than my wife did. I never received bonusses or overtime. What I have received is a bigger paycheck, and more promotions. My wife, who refused to work the longer hours, did not get the promotion and raise she was being groomed for.

Now watch some ifem show up and dutifully trot out Secretary Chao. While I’m eating lunch, no less. Ick. :(

If women, or minorities, were forced by some unseen conspiracy to accept lower wages for doing equal work then a smart business owner would hire an all female work force, pay them less than their competitors and reap the financial rewards. The reason this doesn’t happen is because the pay gap is in fact a myth.

Have you actually read any of Amp’s posts? All of which respond to the position piece (not study) that you link to? Not that the NCPA doesn’t have any biases or anything. Just wondering.

This has a big logical fallacy in it.

If women and minorities aren’t getting paid as much at other jobs, a smart business owner would hire a staff of women and minorities and pay them less than what they’re making at other jobs and “reap the financial rewards.” How would this not result in women and minorities making less than white men at other jobs? Would that not create or encourage a pay gap?

And what financial rewards, exactly, are you referring to?

See, the thing of it is, the pay gap isn’t something that’s set in stone, or set in law, and, as such, a company that hired women and minorities exclusively wouldn’t be able to pay them less than other companies doing the same jobs because the women and minorities expect standard entry-level pay. The wage gap actually develops over time as men are promoted instead of women.

Let me explain it another way… Entry level pay is about eight bucks, so let’s say that a company decided to hire only women and minorities and decided to pay them seven-fifty because of the wage gap. Now, those other companies that pay eight bucks and hour are still hiring women and minorities, so not very many people would want to take a job that pays fifty cents less. The problem, the wage gap, develops over time as the men are promoted over the women (for various reasons, as Jake did, I refer you to Amp’s previous posts on the subject).

Thus, your idea of a hypothetical company that makes a profit off of hiring exclusively women and minorities wouldn’t turn a profit because the wage gap is not nearly as prevalent at the entry level.

Once you’ve got a full-time job, whether you work 41 or 45 hours a week is as much up to your employer as it is up to you - and it’s quite possible for the hours assigned to be affected by discrimination.

If you compare two equally qualified people in the same position and one is sent home early a disproportionate amount then this would be discrimination…and there are legal remedies for it. But is it a widespread phenomenon that incrementally adds to the pay gap?

What about the studies that show ugly men are paid 10 percent less than handsome men while ugly women are paid only 5 percent less than pretty women?

“…if you’re a seriously overweight white woman, losing 65 pounds is likely to be as lucrative as an extra year of college or three extra years of work experience.”

What remedies do we suggest for discrimination like this?

(Really, it’s astonishing: people who disagree with a study’s methodology when they disagree with its results seem to have no trouble at all accepting the same premises and basic approach when the results are something they agree with.)

You’re absolutely correct. As someone who has come out on the short end of the stick vis-a-vis heightism, I have seen this in practice. All the people above me in the hierarchy have been taller than me throughout my career, while the people below me have been both taller & shorter than me. But, really, what it comes down to is that I, and others of my relatively diminutive stature, have made the choice not to work as hard as taller people generally choose to do.

Deities, that gave me a bigger reading laugh than I’ve had in ages.

Danke

Also, re: hours worked and discrimination,
isn’t it possible that blue collar physical
labor which must skew towards male employment
has more overtime demands than more white
collar office labor (e.g. secretarial) might?
If so, that’s not descrimination, them’s just
the breaks.

I know that to be true in regards to my own
work history (my assembly line job lo these
many years ago had mandatory overtime that
never was part of my stint as an assistant
in the purchasing department, and I never
felt discriminated against by my ability to
go home at quitting time in the latter job).

And what about interrupted employment? What
about seniority, careerism, and any number
of non-discrimination factors that differ
at least on the margin by gender and could
affect the gap?

And what about “the average full-time year-
round woman worked?” That’s a mouthful, and
screams What Was Left Out Here?

Duane brings up an argument used by early students of economics. (For those who didn’t understand the argument, it goes like this: if women were paid less than men, employers would hire women since they would cost less. This would drive up the wages of female workers and the discrimination would vanish.)

There are at least two reasons why this is not true. The first is that the labor market is not the same as the market for–say–milled sugar. Discrimination by gender may occur inadvertantly because employers use it to reduce “search” costs, which reflects network externalities to hiring male employees. This is a standard problem in labor markets, which are notoriously inefficient. Not only that, but consider the cultural obstacles of a woman in a job search. Women are barred in nearly all cultures (including ours) from being aggressive in certain situations, yet aggressiveness is usually a decisive factor in selling one’s labor.

The other reason the argument doesn’t work is that labor markets are segmented. In theory, a market where laborers have unlimited movement between markets for which they are qualified, and where good information exists about prices, etc. would not be segmented. Competing firms would have every reason to hire workers from a “global pool” which included women. Discrimination would only harm the discrimator.

But in the world where we live, segmented labor markets can benefit the entrepreneur (in the sense that not discriminating against workers is not part of a Nash Equilibrium). The reason for this is that in most labor markets there is an oligopoly in each sector (e.g., there are only two department stores in my neighborhood) and an oligopsony in each labor market (i.e., there are at most only three plausible employers for a given worker at a given time). Now, because the firm is an oligopoloid firm it will produce at a point where its marginal cost curve intersects its marginal revenue curve. And because it is a monopsony in the labor market, it will hire more workers where the marginal revenue product of new workers is equal to the marginal expense of labor. (The marginal expense of labor is more than the marginal cost because a monopsonoid firm–yes, I spelled that correctly–is increasing the cost of labor as it hires more workers, just as a monopoloid firm lowers the price of its product by producing more).

Both attributes allow employers to make more profits in a segmented labor market than a non-segmented one. And as a result of game theory, which requires more explanation than I want to go into here, it is highly likely that in a realistic labor market discrimination will occur if it is the cultural norm.