THANK YOU.

Coal mining is not high paying. Neither is fire fighting. Neither is police work. Construction is not bad at all, but it’s hardly high. The military is known for its low pay. None of these jobs pay better than advanced secretarial positions requiring a B.A. or a few years’ experience.

So, yeah, clearly not the reason for the wage gap.

And while it’s sexist that men are more likely to work these jobs and suffer for it, the larger point is that these jobs do not pay what they should when you consider the likelihood of injuries - including injuries that could force you to change careers in mid-life or go on disability.

Only a bunch of rich white guys who earn money sitting on their ass could dream up the insulting idea that men earn more for risking their lives - they’re the ones exploiting (mostly male) workers who are desperate enough to take this crap or committed enough to serving the community that they would choose these jobs no matter the salary. It’s wrong and it sucks, like you said, but it’s a bullshit propaganda effort by the very people pushing men to take these jobs.

One additional factor that pisses me off: the risks in most of these jobs can be minimized if companies follow safety regulations. They don’t. Who owns the companies and says, “Screw the safety regs - the workers can be replaced!” Fat cat white guys who’ve never done an ounce of manual labor.

Rachel, sounds like a Baby Gap to me. Perhaps this is enough evidence that women should get a bigger tax break. Just to be equal. I understand men are big on that, or is that only when it directly benefits them?

It’s funny isn’t it? Children are the future, but the work from half of the population who must sacrifice to bring them to fruition is not valued at all. Maybe we should stop having babies, since they’re obviously a liability.

Or seriously, let the dad take several years off from work to care for it, and the woman takes no time. Then in twenty years all the boys can complain how their daddies didn’t wuv them enough, and in the meantime child care will become Entitlement City.

The issue is actually not the Wage Gap, but what I call the Wealth Gap, in which women face at least eight barriers that men don’t that cause them to end up less wealthy than men in general. The wage, leadership, gender role, credit report, resume, education, credibility and retirement gaps collectively converge to keep women upset with men while men scratch their heads as to why. Most of these issues are direct consequences of childbirth and the biases around bearing and raising kids.

The author of this piece did not make this mistake, however s/he did fail to (in my mind) correctly weight the riskiness of a particular job based upon skillset, which would highlight the job riskiness premium (if there is one).

My two cents: I agree that the wage gap is not strictly a result of danger-premium, but I disagree that there is some sort of overarching discrimination at the root either. Looking at merely one facet in a multi-faceted concept such as a wage does not provide a clear picture.

It has been shown through several studies, for example, that men take more job risk (read: not riskier jobs) than women, meaning they are more willing to jump ship and join a new company, fight for a promotion, or move to an undesirable area. This, obviously, gets rewarded with higher wages. Avoiding this risk does not receive the same reward.

There are also many studies that show that the average woman favors time at home with lower wage above less time at home with a higher wage. This is the reverse for most men. Now, I know this doesn’t prove anything in the slightest, but it does show the propensity for the average woman to make career choices that increase their likelihood of spending more time at home.

Also, it is inappropriate to compare the “gross” riskiness of different positions to determine if there is a pay premium attributable to risk. I would argue that this riskiness needs to be weighted by the skillset required for the job; for example, even though mining is very risky, it carries low training costs, which increases the applicant pool and consequently decreases the going wage. In this instance, it would be appropriate to compare mining to a job requiring a similar skillset (lumberjack or janitor, for instance) and see if miners receive higher pay as compared to the jobs requiring a similar skillset. If they do, then this increase can be safely (but not totally) attributable to a risk pay premium. It is worth noting that I have no idea if miners do or do not receive a pay premium as compared to lumberjacks or janitors, but I would most definitely be interested to know.

I’m not citing anything here, so you’ll have to forgive me for sounding general. I did a basic write-up on the topic on my own blog which does include citations, and can be found here:
http://inserttitleblog.com/?p=72

I look forward to your comments!

PS - This is totally unrelated, but I would be interested to hear your views on the concept of equality. It gets thrown around so much these days that I tend to think that people do not put a whole lot of thought into what it actually means. Can and should wages be equal across gender? I’m sure you would say yes, and so would I. What about race? Yes again. Class? Maybe. Education level? Probably not. Where is the line and who draws it? Can two different people every be truly equal? If so, how?

Sorry for all the questions and hypotheticals; I’m kicking around a new article and would be interested in some thoughts.

Not in the same way that women often have to, but this is still worth talking about.

I agree - but the point I was making is that in general, no-one asks men how they intend to balance a career and family and don’t make sweeping statements like ‘the only way to free men is to make sure they never bear children’ such as made in post 8 about women.

Having said that, I did read this article: Is being a good dad ruining your career? earlier today…in the Observer Woman. **sigh**

After all, men don’t make a choice between career or family do they?

Not in the same way that women often have to, but this is still worth talking about.

For example; I have a lot of specialized and valuable knowledge in network management. If I set myself up as a consultant, or worked for a consulting company, I could make twice what I make now. But then I’d be doing a great deal of travelling. I would not have been able to have been my son’s Cubmaster and Scoutmaster. I would not have been able to attend my daughter’s softball and hockey games. I wouldn’t have been around to help with homework, or do the 1000 other things a parent does.

Men do have to make choices regarding work vs. family. The difference is that men are expected to choose work over family quite often. If they don’t, it impacts their income levels, make no mistake.

The basic assumption in many workplaces still is that childcare is the woman’s job, and if she can’t bend her family life around her job, then she needs to go elsewhere.

I’d recommend your friends (and you, if you like) read Scott Turow’s book Ultimate Punishment. The race issue, as with so much about the death penalty, is not nearly so clear.

“All women” as viewed as a statistical class by an employer who is considering a business model and who is doing his or her best to estimate empirical costs.

Problem is that you run into the self-fulfilling prophecy. If women realize that the employer doesn’t want to hire them, doesn’t trust them, and expects they will just get knocked up and take maternity leave, how motivated will they be to put much effort into being present, productive employees?

I’m very impressed by the intellectual honesty it takes to post those last two posts; thank you for posting them. Thanks as well for the link to Dorman and Hagstrom’s paper (which I hadn’t known was available online); I’ve edited my post to include the link.

And I agree that my explanation wasn’ t complete; in my own defense, I was trying to sum up for blog readers a moderately technical 18-page paper in just a couple of paragraphs. But that isn’t to say that I couldn’t have done a better job.

Ampersand raised some issues about the paper I found on differences in risk aversion. So I emailed the the lead author (Black), and got back this response:

“Actually, we stopped working on that paper because I didn’t think we could make a strong case for the idea that it is differences in risk aversion.”

To me, this brings up one of the most interesting and frustrating biases in the social science literature. In theory, “we can’t make a strong case for X” should be just as interesting and important a finding as “we can make a strong case for X.” In practice, however - and speaking only in general - such papers carry less prestige and are less likely to be published. This can create a bias in the published literature towards finding that relationships exist, even when they don’t.

While I don’t think your explanation was complete, I am sorry I missed the reference to the above paper in it. I can only apologise for my intemperate remarks.

“Actually, we stopped working on that paper because I didn’t think we could make a strong case for the idea that it is differences in risk aversion.”

Just thought you would like to know.

No, pregnancy does not necessarily have to be fraught with medical issues. But it can be. And pregnancy must be treated (as it should be) the same way every other medical condition is. Even if the pregnancy is perfect and right-on-time, there is still a physical recovery period. There is a reason its called “labor”. Interestingly enough, when employee records are examined over the course of a career, of those who have not taken furloughs, women actually take off less time than men! So, any employer resistance to women, because “she’ll just get pregnant” is bogus. More women stay in their careers than leave, both for financial and personal reasons.

But pregnancy and childbirth continue to be viewed with hostility by employers and colleagues. I was the talk of the contractors’ association for a while, as the first pregnant electrician in the Local. I was shocked that it was assumed by all of them that I would be leaving the trade! Apparently, my over a decade of being an electrician, of continuing my electrical education, and tireless work in the Local union meant nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. I was one of the more ruthless overtime hounds. I was always first to volunteer for odd shifts, or “portability” (on-the-road) jobs. Yet one pregnancy erased all that hard work, all those obstacles I jumped over in order to prove my dedication. White male apprentices who don’t quit in the first year are assumed to be there for life.

In my world, that “special treatment” you deride extends to males, but not for females. The next woman to get pregnant in the Local worked for the same shop I did. She was treated by-the-book for her that pregnancy. That pregnancy was “approved” because she was recently remarried, and while she had a daughter already, her husband wanted a child too. So, that met with everyone’s “approval”. She got pregnant again unexpectedly. That pregnancy did not meet with everyone’s approval. How could she? She did not have the required number of hours to qualify for FMLA this time (as she had taken her 12 weeks during that year), so she was laid off for the second pregnancy. This contractor does have a history of making exceptions for white males.

Another sister in a neighboring Local adopted two boys. She had biological children of her own from before she entered the trade, and they were ready to attend college. She told her contractor she would be using FMLA to help the boys adjust to their new home, and that was met with gritted teeth. There were words about “making up your mind what you want to do with your life”. This is a woman in her late forties, who had well over twenty years of experience under her belt. She is a knowledgeable, repected journeyman who taught journey-level courses in her Local. Yet she was told she needed to “make up her mind” if she wanted to be a mother or an electrician.

I have yet to meet a man, in any field, who has had a similar experience.

And as for academe being a high-pressure career, gimme a break. The most grueling part of it is the tenure process itself. University professors generally have a small teaching load, in order to allow them time to publish. And they have graduate assistants to do the grunt work. No, the “high-pressure” comes from the attitudes of the administration and the politics of academe, not the work. The work itself—the teaching, the research, the publication—is easily managed by a married, professional mother of three kids. You wanna talk about high pressure? Go talk to a mother of three who is juggling two part-time service industry jobs because she hasn’t been able to find a professional job since the last downsizing. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me that Sarah’s professor wouldn’t have been able to do her job because she had three children.

Women in nontraditional fields are vilified for having children. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done to get where we are. It doesn’t matter how much education we have. How many years of work experience and dedication under our belts. We can move the earth, sun and stars, and it doesn’t matter. It. Doesn’t. Matter. Those barriers have not been broken yet, and those attitudes are amplified in the midwest. And every time another article comes out about some female executive with more money than God deciding to “leave the rat race”, the rest of us have that much more baggage piled on top. We have to do that much more to prove that we aren’t going anywhere.

And I don’t apologize for my illustration of the hostile attitude. I have heard that commentary about my own pregnancy, and I have heard that said about other women and their pregnancies. That’s actually one of the more mild versions of the typical Neanderthal rant. Behind a woman’s back, they are usually more vulgar, more graphic, and contain various animal analogies. Wonder what a fly on the wall would have heard about the tenure candidate when the white men were talking amongst themselves?

“All women” as viewed as a statistical class by an employer who is considering a business model and who is doing his or her best to estimate empirical costs. Not “all women” in the purely nominative sense, as in “every single woman”. But realistically, I know that every identifiable demographic has a particular risk profile. The costs are going to vary. I have no idea whether “women” or “women of childbearing age” have particularly high or particularly low costs. (Further, the costs are multiple and independently variable on an employer-by-employer basis. For example, an employee who needs time off occasionally may not burden one employer much, but may be a deal-killer to a different employer with a different business.)

Unless white men who are similarly terrible at their jobs, show up drunk, etc. are not summarily fired by that company. Then the picture changes a little bit (I assume you are familiar with the term ‘pretext’ as it applies to employment discrimination).

Yes, I quite agree that there must be formal equality in terms of the rules that are followed.

(My usual response to friends’ arguments that the death penalty is wrong because the system treats white people better is that to the extent that is true, fine, we should treat white people worse and kill more of them.)

Assuming that all women become pregnant and that men have no similar offsets. Because I know you’re not stupid enough to claim that if some women are debilitated by pregnancy, all women are de facto ‘less capable’ than all men.

He wasn’t fired for being black, he was fired for being terrible at his job

Unless white men who are similarly terrible at their jobs, show up drunk, etc. are not summarily fired by that company. Then the picture changes a little bit (I assume you are familiar with the term ‘pretext’ as it applies to employment discrimination).