Paul's Journal Entry on the Gender Pay Gap
From Wiki
I was always curious about that gender gap statistic that you always hear about. You know the one, it says that "women make X cents for every dollar a man makes" where X is some seemingly random number between 50 and 75. I always wondered why there could be such varying reports (even some people who claim that such a gap doesn't exist) when it should be fairly easy to confirm or deny such a claim. After all, shouldn't a simple comparison of hourly wages for the same job suffice? If so, then it would be obvious that such a wage gap would have to be done purposefully by the employer. Quite frankly, I was a bit skeptical that any employer would willingly and knowingly pay a female employee less for doing the same job with the same experience. I could imagine such discrimination happening on a very limited scale, but I couldn't imagine it being as widespread as the feminists were reporting.
I went on a little research mission to answer my questions. The first sites I visited were feminist sites to see what they had to say. Unfortunately, all they did was to restate their facts over and over and to express their outrage and propose their solutions. Nowhere on those sites was there any mention as to how these studies were conducted or how the data was collected. Disappointed, but not discouraged, I went on to visit some sites that claimed to "debunk the gender gap myth", thinking that I could find some answers here. I was right.
It turns out that there have been many studies on this topic and that they were all carried out in vastly different fashions. What I soon discovered was that nearly all of them contained glaring errors in the statistics they used which led to false conclusions. In fact, I was surprised by the sheer number of studies which either tried to compare apples to oranges or completely ignored crucial data which would easily explain the anomaly that is the gender wage gap. Here are a few of the more common errors that existed in these studies.
Most of the studies don't compare hourly rates between men and women, they compare the yearly income that they make at their jobs. This would make sense if the yearly incomes were compared with the average number of hours worked by males and females but they were not. Instead, a straight comparison of yearly incomes for specific jobs was done. The immediate problem that comes to mind is that yearly income is based on two factors: hours worked and hourly wage. On average, men work more hours of the week, more weeks of the year and take less vacation time then women do. It should be fairly obvious that if two people work at the same job and one of them works longer hours that that person would make more money. Many studies, however, ignore this very crucial fact and instead come to the conclusion that women are being discriminated against. It's not women who are being discriminated against here, it's people who don't work as many hours that are being discriminated against. If women want to make the same amount of money as men, then works the same number of hours.
Other studies are even worse, not even comparing similar jobs, just comparing the average female college-graduate full-time worker with the average male college-graduate full-time worker. This comparison is not meaningful at all because statistically speaking, women are more likely to graduate with degrees in the humanities (which are traditionally low paying jobs) and men are more likely to graduate with degrees in technical areas (which traditionally pay more). Simple economics state that in a non-socialist economy, certain jobs are going to be higher-paying then others and it generally follows the law of supply and demand. And it usually (but not always) follows that the degrees that are harder to get have a smaller supply and are in more demand. A small supply and high demand means a higher wage. If women want to make the same amount of money as men, then get better degrees so you can work in higher paying jobs.
Experience is another factor that most studies don't take into account. Since men work hours of the week and more weeks of the year and also switch jobs less often then females (some studies show that on average, men stick to the same job for nearly twice as long as women do), they tend to build up more seniority with a particular company (or experience in a specific field) faster then women do. As we all know, the general trend is to get a raise in salary the longer you work with a company or the more experience you have. Once again, most studies fail to take this into account and instead lump newcomers (who are more likely to be female) together with people who have worked at the same company for years (who are more likely to be male) simply because they technically have the same job even though seniority is vastly different. Once again, you can't join up with a company and expect to earn the same amount of money as somebody who has been with them for years, it just doesn't make sense. If women want to make as much money as men, then they have to build up experience and seniority with a company.
There was a major movement some years ago that was started by feminists that had to do with a concept called Comparable Worth. Feminists were looking at the kind of jobs that women were taking and realizing that on average, jobs that were predominently done by females (nurses, sylists etc) were paid less then jobs that were predominently done by males (engineers, butchers etc). In other words, women were working in lower paying jobs then men. To feminists, the problem was clearly that men were conspiring against women to make the wages for predominently female jobs lower then the wages of predominently male jobs (obviously it has nothing to do with the economy and the supply of workers and the demand of the service they provide).
In order to combat this discrimination, feminists proposed a system where jobs are rated based on amount of work and stress involved, as well as a number of other factors. This rating would then be used by the government as a regulatory aid to ensure that jobs that were given the same rating received the same amount of pay. Think about that for a minute. Assuming you could come up with a logical way to compare such varying jobs as lawyers, secretaries, hair stylists etc, then you are basically saying that these jobs, no matter how varying the demand for them is, should be paid the same. That means if it could be shown that a computer programmer does the same amount of "work" (as defined by their little formula) as a secretary, then they should be paid the same wage, ignoring the fact that computer programmers are much more in demand, require much more schooling and arguably require more knowledge to accomplish their jobs.
The simple fact of the matter is that when a proper comparison is made between a male and a female working the same hours at the same job with the same experience, females make nearly as much money as men do, if not more. In fact, studies have shown that the average woman actually makes more money then the average man in the typically male-dominated areas of Engineering and Economics. The theory of a glass ceiling is also utterly false. Despite making up 46% nation's workforce, women hold roughly half of the management positions in the country. An interesting note is that on average, female managers hold fewer degrees then their male counterparts.
I think it is worth pointing out here that, regardless of pay, men are far more likely to be injured on the job at work then women. 94% of work-related fatalities happen to men, only 4% happen to women. Of the 25 worst jobs, as ranked by the Jobs Related Almanac based on a combination of salary, stress, security, and physical demands, 24 of them are predominantly (95% or above), if not almost entirely, male. If the roles were reversed, this would be considered a major issue and would almost be immediately addressed.
I want to end this entry with a thought. If you still think women are getting paid less then men then I ask you this simple question: Why would any business hire men if women are cheaper labor?
