Helpful reader Agranulocytosis sent us this link, a video where Professor Steve Horwitz explains how the fact that women earn 75 % of what men do is our own fault. Thank you Agranulocytosis! I was worried this day was going to be boring.
According to Horwitz, the labour market does in fact not discriminate against women. The income discrepancy is all due to the choices we make. When comparing men and women with equal background working the same jobs, women and men earn the same, he claims. I honestly don’t know if this is true or not, and I’m afraid I don’t have the time or energy to look it up (I’m way too busy making the wrong choices) but if any of you happen to have some data to confirm or deny this that’d be awesome. Anyway, here is the video, although I won’t blame you if you don’t watch it. My commentary below speaks for itself.
So, what are the choices we women make that end up with us earning 25 % less? Well apparently it’s something called “investment in human capital” and is divided into four categories:
Firstly we tend to go into careers like education, psychology and nursing, which obviously only an idiot would do because there are no well-paid jobs in those industries. Men on the other hand go into business and engineering, which have much higher salaries. Well done, men!
Secondly he talks about whether we’re expecting to work full-time our entire life or not. Apparently since women during the 60’s and 70’s didn’t think they’d be working full-time when they were 40, they went into careers with poor salaries. These days young women make smarter choices because we’ve realized that we need to work if we want money. Myup.
Thirdly, women are more likely to choose part-time work than men. And if you work part-time, for some reason it’s super-OK to have a lower salary per hour than if you work full-time. I’m sure there’s good reason for this. And why do we do this? Well, duh! It’s because we still “tend to take on the majority of the responsibility for children and the home”. Because that’s totally always a choice, and it’s never to do with the fact that men tend to bring more money to the household in the first place.
Then of course there is the stupid way we choose to take time off work to have children, which obviously interrupts our career and thus the development of our salaries. If only we would do what men do, and let other people carry our babies to term and then stay home and nurse them for a few months, we would make the same!
Horwitz is doing something very commendable in that he is (or at least claims to be) looking at the facts, which should appeal to skeptics everywhere. But numbers alone does not a good analysis make. While he actually does admit that one might think that the fact that women tend to end up in low-paying jobs is a problem to begin with, his chosen rhetoric of repeating “the choices women make” is disingenuous, and it puts the whole burden to change things for the better on women. Also, the insinuation that “if only you would do what men do, you would earn as much as they do” is frankly offensive. If salaries are any indication, society places higher value on the choices men make. Horwitz clearly has no problem at all with this, and seems to be arguing that women should just suck it up and make better choices.
Basically, I feel like he just punched me in the face with my own hand, going “Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself!”
…
Can I punch him?
..
I like how they simply don’t quote their data or methods and just say “the data says”. Uh-huh.
Secondly their conclusion is shit. Let’s analyze it logically.
Statements made
1. A = Women tend to have different life pressures and invest themselves differently
2. B = Women with equal experience/skills tend to earn the roughly the same
3. C = Discrimination in the work place doesn’t exist
4. D = Women currently earn less
Conclusions
1. If A and B then C
2. If A then D
3. If not A then not D
Logically these conclusions make sense if the statements are true, but the statements are bullshit.
Problems with the Statements
1. Where the fuck are the data & methods stated to draw these conclusions?
2. Conclusion 1 is a big fucking stretch. For instance, what if the woman was never actually offered the same positions as men and never GET the same experience? Or what if they’re let go because they’re pregnant.
Basically, there’s a huge mound of bullshit going behind the scenes that the chosen datasets don’t represent. It therefore is a dishonest fucking conclusions.
Yes, this is the spirit. If you don’t like the data you’re being shown, claim a conspiracy. You’ve learned well from the anti-vaxers.
Institutionalized sexism is not a fucking conspiracy.
Is conspiracy your favorite word or something?
Er … the problem is that no data was actually shown. Just conclusions based on data that supposedly exists but was never presented.
What data? I didn’t see any actual data presented.
And as far as I know, challenging research is called “peer review” not “a conspiracy”.
I know you’re happy to accept the conclusion because it fits your prejudice, but the burden is now on the professor is now to show us his datasets and his methods. He also to explain how correlating women with equal qualifications of men earning close to men and women choosing lower paid jobs somehow proves NO sex based discrimination in the workplace.
So yeah you idiot, call peer review & skepticism conspiracies if you want. However, before you respond, I’d like you to look at this link: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=peer+review+process
As with any kind of social / cultural developments, the picture is ALWAYS more complicated than just “oh if only they’d keep their legs closed & stop popping babies out of their vaginas, then they’d get equal pay”.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/new_research_busts_myths_about.html
I reiterate: Can I hit him?
BeardofPants, there is a principle in critical thinking and analytical philosophy called the principle of reciprocity. According to this principle, when confronted with someone holding a different opinion than ours – even one that appears to be unreasonable or immoral – we should assume goodwill and reasonableness on the part of the person who holds that opinion. There are many reasons for this. For instance, we might be wrong in our judgment that a person’s opinion is wrong or immoral. There may also be justifications (at least in the mind of that person, who may be misinformed or insufficiently informed) that make the opinion reasonable from that viewpoint.
To assume we are so right about a person’s unreasonableness or immorality that we can treat them disrespectfully (e.g., ask if we can hit them) is to be guilty of intellectual arrogance, which should be abhorrent to a critical thinker.
All those big words went over my head. Now I have to go play with my princess dolls & my pink smart phone.
Did the guy say something wrong?
Did the guy discussed in the article above insult or denigrate women in any way? I’m not seeing a justification for your reaction here. Perhaps you can explain what it is that your upset about.
You obviously don’t owe any explanations to me, of course. If you don’t choose to, then don’t. I was merely curious.
No, he didn’t say anything wrong.
He just used a string of 5-dollar words to essentially call @BeardofPants arrogant for
holding an opinion different from hisreacting in a different way from himdoing something he didn’t like.Nothing wrong with that at all.
We should all thank him for his help in understanding basic skepticism. *bow* Thank you my leige.
I didn’t read that at all, but to each their own I guess.
It seems there are a lot of nasty reactions arising when someone voices an opinion different from one’s own. Just look at the initial reaction to Mr. Horowitz’s study in the first place. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
….You do realize that her “Can I hit him?” comment was in reference to the title of this post, and also not serious, right? ….Right?
LOL, at least someone got it.
You really know how to build a strawman.
“But numbers alone does not a good analysis make. While he actually does admit that one might think that the fact that women tend to end up in low-paying jobs is a problem to begin with, his chosen rhetoric of repeating “the choices women make” is disingenuous, and it puts the whole burden to change things for the better on women.”
I think you might have missed a couple of points in his conclusion. Specifically he thought part of the solution would be to encourage men to make a more of an investment in home and family. He also mentioned that part of the problem might be that women are encouraged to make these choices that are bad from an economic point of view early on and we could change this.
I did concede that he covered this angle in my penultimate paragraph. I maintain that it doesn’t help. The overall message I get from the video is still “it’s your own goddamn fault for being so stupid”.
I <3 the word "penultimate." That is all.
Me too! I was stoked to get a chance to use it! :3
“The overall message I get from the video is still “it’s your own goddamn fault for being so stupid”
He certainly didn’t use the word stupid nor did I get the sense it was implied. I know people who choose to be musicians. I think they are courageous, not stupid, but it’s not an easy path to economic stability.
I think we have a difference in opinion of the tone of the whole video. I’m happy to leave it at that, unless there is something more specific you want to call attention to.
My issue is that, as some said, he really does put the onus on women for making bad choices. Yes, he does comment that ‘men should be encouraged to take on more at home’, but that is an extremely weak touch on the subject. ‘Encouraging’ isn’t anywhere NEAR enough. Expecting. Demanding. Not punishing women when they don’t. Those are stronger observations.
As things are, the inverse of ‘women take on all the home responsibility’ is NOT equality. It is NOT a case that women just have to do less at home and it will magically get better. The inverse of women not taking on as much at home is the women are punished by the male either leaving for someone who WILL (Thus, the women gets even more burden) or more often, things just don’t get done at all. And when you are talking about things like child raising, things not getting done then punishes the child.
He puts NO significant responsibility on MEN to make things better. They should be ‘encouraged’ to do so, sure, but that is not the men’s fault, and the end result of it just being dumped on the women if men aren’t ‘encouraged’ is still shown as the women’s fault, not the men’s.
Also, it entirely ignores the realities of life outside decisions. Not everything IS a decision, for one thing, and another is you can’t decide on something you have no choice in.
Take the scenario of an unplanned pregnancy. Suddenly, there is a child to raise and, thus, a very large amount of Work and Responsibility to be done.
Impact to the man: He is encouraged to pay for his ‘half’ of the child. No work impact, no social impact, as long as he pays support, his life goes on with a small quality of living decrease.
Impact to woman: 9+ months pregnant. Constalt lost work due to doctor’s appointments, morning sickness, everything else associated with pregnancy. A significant chance that she will have to sacrifice her job and income to raise the child once it IS born. Even with ‘maternity leave’, she loses 6-12 months of professional development, has a reduced wage, and loses all of her free time, social time, and work time to raising the child. Still expected to PAY for half of it, on top of the fact that she will lose significant ability to do so. 18 years of school meetings, doctor’s visits, soccer practice, etc, etc.
That is, of course, the woman’s ‘decision’ for having a child. Regardless that it takes two. Men should, of course, be ‘encouraged’ to take some of that on. Of course, if they ignore that encouragement, don’t get enough of it, etc… Well, their life goes on as is and it all falls back onto… The woman.
And even THAT doesn’t touch on the fact that because a woman /might/ get pregnant at any time, they are professionally considered unreliable and a higher risk for roles of responsibility. So they don’t get offered them in the first place in favor of a man, who isn’t going to suddenly get knocked up and have to take 6-12 months away from their job.
But, y’know. It was the woman’s choice. She shouldn’t have had sex if she wasn’t ready for the consequences. I mean, the man chose too, but we all know that men can’t help themselves and just like sex too darned much to say no, while women hate it and thus should be penalized for the decision, right?
I don’t think he did put the onus on women. He essentially said the problem could very well be at the front end, in the way boys and girls are raised and channeled into different areas of study and lines of work, which results in men tending to make certain choices that have certain consequences and women tending to make certain other choices that have certain other consequences.
Felicia, just because that is the message you got from the video doesn’t mean it’s the message Steve intended to convey. Your claim that he is putting the burden of change all on women is inconsistent with his pointing out that part of the solution is to encourage men to take on more of the home/family burden, as davew pointed out, as well as that we could/should change the way women are encouraged from an early age to make these choices. Your claim that “Horwitz clearly has no problem with this” [with “society placing a higher value on the choices men make”] is similarly inconsistent with what Steve says in the video. Seriously, I think you are reading things into the video that he is not saying or intending to imply.
Oh, I’m sure Steve’s a perfectly nice guy. All he’s trying to do in his video is show how the labour market isn’t to blame for sexism in society. However, good intentions isn’t everything. I am of the opinion that videos such as this one merely contributes to the problem and does nothing to alleviate it. Throwing in a bit of “we could encourage men to seek out typically female professions” at the end really just amounts to him covering his ass. But some of us still spy a crack.
How does Steve’s video, in your opinion, contribute to the income disparity between genders? Did he say something false? If so, what? If nothing, then how can the statement of true facts contribute to income disparity?
You have a preconceived notion, which Mr. Horowitz challenged. You apparently don’t care if his facts are correct. You just want to make sure that what you thought was true is accepted as true, no matter what. Truth be damned.
I think you are merely projecting your own perceptions on this video. I found his conclusions to be perfectly accurate if his data is accurate (which I don’t know for certain). This appears to me to be one of those cases when you are choosing to be insulted by something that is basically just facts and conclusions.
“I think you are merely projecting your own perceptions on this video.”
And you aren’t?
He’s essentially simplifying a complex social issue and effectively contributing to the misconception that there really isn’t a problem and status quo is just fine.
It is quite a typical for well educated white me to do this. Known as “mansplaining” away the problem.
There was supposed to say: “It is quite typical for well educated white men to do this.”
Note to self: Proofread.
I’m hopeless …
ME:“I think you are merely projecting your own perceptions on this video.”
Veronica: And you aren’t?
No. I’m merely stating that his conclusions fit the data he displayed. There was no additional insults or accusations as some of the women here seem to believe.
>>He’s essentially simplifying a complex social issue and effectively contributing to the misconception that there really isn’t a problem and status quo is just fine.<>It is quite a typical for well educated white me to do this. Known as “mansplaining” away the problem.<<
It's quite typical for a conspiratorial person to do this: deny the facts and attack the messenger. You are not applying skeptical skills toward this issue, which appears to me to be emotional for you.
“You are not applying skeptical skills toward this issue, which appears to me to be emotional for you.”
Is this where I say: “I rest my case”?
You rest your case? What case? You haven’t provided anything contrary to the conclusions provided in the video.
Unless your case is to try and prove you have no case, and in that case…
Hi troll …
“You rest your case? What case? You haven’t provided anything contrary to the conclusions provided in the video.”
I have provided several links around these comments.
My point was when people pull the “you’re just emotional”-card, they have already lost the case. Next step, the Chewbacca defence.
Why is the recognition that women “tend” (statistically) to enter lower paying careers or industries constitute the accusation that they are “stupid?” Should the facts be ignored in favor of a “there there” shoulder-rub, and comforting statements that “it’s o.k.- women are just oppressed, and there’s nothing you can do about it?”
Wait… I thought there was evidence out there that women in the same type of job with the same level of education made less than their male counterparts. Is that true? If so by how much? Such evidence would completely blow up Steve’s assertions.
Yeah, I’d love to know as well. But even if he IS correct, that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems with sexism in society in general and the labour market in particular. For instance he doesn’t adress how many women are asked whether they plan on having children during job interviews, a positive answer affecting them negatively…
Just because there is sexism in the world doesn’t mean that everything must be ascribed to sexism or one is making the assertion that sexism doesn’t exist. I mean, holy crow, the guy not only didn’t say that sexism doesn’t exist or isn’t a problem, he expressly said exactly the opposite.
And, if a woman is asked if she plans to have children in a job interview, I hope she calls the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Employers may not base hiring decisions on the familial status or intentions of potential employees, men or women. So, my guess is that that such a question is rarely asked explicitly. It’d be the basis of a discrimination claim if they asked “are you married?” Do you have kids? How’s your health? and were not hired. The EEOC and every State equivalent agency would be quite interested, as would a lot of employment discrimination lawyers.
P.Z. wrote about this in April. I haven’t been able to find the actual study, but here’s a link to P.Z.’s piece. It essentially says that, even when you correct for all those differences, there is still about a 7% wage gap (at least in academia).
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/enlightened_professions_perpet.php
Well, doesn’t he actually concede a 2 cent wage gap in the end with all the controls? I mean 2 cents is less significant than 7 or the starting 25, but it is still an actual gap which, according to him, actually exists. That he can conclude that no wage gap exists in a video where he shows that a wage gap exists strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.
I mean if it’s considered too small to be statistically significant, or if it’s within the margin of error or something, then I suppose it could be called no wage gap, but he doesn’t say that the 2 cent gap that he comes to in the end is too small for statistical significance or is within the margin of error so at the moment his dismissal of it bothers me.
While 2 cents on the dollar may not seem like much it does add up, at the high end of the pay scale, engineering say, that small gap can add up to quite a great deal of lost income. And women at the low end of the pay scale, while they are loosing less in the final totals, are even less able to absorb the marginal loss of income.
I posted a link in my second comment that covers some interesting aspects of what you just talked about (the harvard study).
A snippet:
“In 2000 we started following the careers of MBA graduates from top U.S. schools; in 2008 we expanded the study to also track thousands of MBAs from top schools around the world. This was a good population to study not only because the degree ensured that the group we studied brought comparable credentials to the table; it is also true that companies invest a lot to attract, recruit, and retain MBAs from prestigious programs, and they’re often regarded as the next generation of business leaders.
Our study’s overall finding is clear: The problem isn’t only a late-career phenomenon by which women are denied the big promotion after having advanced steadily alongside men. Rather, the entire pipeline is in peril. More particularly, our research has managed to explode four prevailing myths about the progress of women in workplaces.”
“Our study’s overall finding is clear: The problem isn’t only a late-career phenomenon by which women are denied the big promotion after having advanced steadily alongside men. Rather, the entire pipeline is in peril. ”
So we have competing studies. This one you have to admit is extremely narrow. If confirmed the data at best shows the deck is stacked against Ivy League MBAs who want to reach the position of CEO and who say they have no plans to have children. The application of this one study to the economy as a whole is limited.
Sure, it’s a narrow lens. I didn’t pretend otherwise. As with anything, it’s an interesting study, and hopefully there will be other studies in this vein.
What grinds my gears about this is that it creates this idea that women want and choose to have children and men are innocent bystandards who cannot account for that disparity. Yet, in 100% of the cases of human reproduction, there was a man’s sperm involved in some way shape or form.
Sure, there are women who get in vitro or women who want kids while her partner doesn’t, but there are many many more cases where a couple decides to have children or continue with pregnancy in cases where it wasn’t planned.
The cost of daycare is extraordinary and if you don’t have a reliable free resource for childcare, the options for a couple are slim. Often, women find that what they can get in salary for their shitty job that gives her the flexibility to do the stuff parents need to do, only just covers the cost of the childcare to take care of the child while she goes to work. In other words, her job pays her just enough to afford to go to work.
But of course, it’s looked at as “well, that’s HER choice.” It’s never, “this is the compromise a couple makes to raise THEIR child/ren. Nope.
Personally, and I’m guessing I’ll get a lot of disagrees here, I think that the write offs people get for dependents should be eliminated. Instead, parents should receive write offs for the cost of childcare. Children use public resources like public schooling, parks, etc. Parents often drive far more, to take their kids to programs and events that they’d never attend without kids, putting greater wear and tear (often in much larger cars) on the roadways. So losing tax revenue for something that uses tax revenue is a double loss.
But for parents who want or need to work, it makes sense to subsidize the cost of childcare a bit.
There seems to be a consensus here that the video pointed an accusing finger at the silly women who chose to have children instead of becoming highly paid CEO’s. If he had said such a thing I think you would have a legitimate gripe. He said no such thing; you are merely reading between lines and assuming that’s what he meant. Women DO have a say in whether or not they have children. And they DO have a say in whether or not they return to work and what type of work it will be and this is true if the woman is a single parent or not. Are you suggesting you would have this another way? Yes, I can see the headlines now, “women march in Washington over being forced to return to full-time executive work while hubby stays home with kids”.
This is the kind of stuff at the root of the term “femi-Natzi”. I am a liberal and a feminist (although I am male), but I can tell you that every Conservative person I know thinks your argument is baloney and on this occasion I have to agree.
There is a problem with the system not because women choose to be stay at home parents but because our system penalizes the individual who stays home to raise children and often penalizes women who are likely to have children soon. The deck is stacked. If men are more likely to be promoted because they aren’t expected to take paternity leave or be the parent who has to say home when junior is sick, then men tend to make more meaning that when the time comes to choose who stays home with the kid, the woman’s salary is often lower making it a no-brainer for the couple.
Further, female dominated careers overwhelmingly pay less than male dominated fields. Not only does this stack the deck, once again but also serves to maintain that disparity since men frequently feel they are obliged to be the bread winners and avoid these fields and women, knowing they may need more flexibility in their schedule continue to take these jobs.
The fact that people don’t think it’s an issue that a teacher with a masters degree is likely to make less than a man with equal or less education in another field, only speaks to how deeply ingrained our comfort with this disparity is.
Two things. I have never, in 25 years of industrial work as an engineer and manager, seen any woman “penalized” because she “might” have a child, nor for one who actually had a child. I have seen at least 2 women who were begged to come back to work after quitting to stay at home with one child. Neither accepted. Of all the female engineers I’ve worked with, all but 2 had children at some point.
Secondly, if all of these “male” jobs are paying so much more, then why are women not making them into “female” jobs? What the heck is stopping you women? The invisible dragon in your garage? The invisible spaghetti monster? What? I have had a hand in hiring over 20 engineers in my time and I have never seen a woman applicant treated unfairly.
There’s something call college that was invented long ago. And in that college there are schools called engineering and business. Intelligent beings who want good paying jobs enroll in these schools and study like hell to make good grades, get a job, work their ass off for years before cashing in. If you are one of them, then kudos to you. The vast majority of women are getting the easy degrees (education, accounting) and plotting for a nice house, fast cars and rug rats by shagging the men in engineering and business school.
Excuse me, did you seriously just call degrees in the humanities EASY?!
“The vast majority of women are getting the easy degrees (education, accounting) and plotting for a nice house, fast cars and rug rats by shagging the men in engineering and business school.”
Oh, well look at that, you totally did and you added the extra lovely sauce of accusing women who choose those degrees as going to college as a means of husband hunting. Based on what you’ve said, you have an engineering degree of some kind, congratulations, I understand many, in fact probably most, engineering programs are quite challenging and it is an interesting and stimulating choice of degree for some individuals. However EXACTLY the same thing can be said of degree programs outside of STEM, philosophy can be quite intellectually challenging, education can be quite intellectually challenging, art history can be quite intellectually challenging, accounting can be quite intellectually challenging, English (literature, creative writing, linguistics, or any of the other sub specialties) can be quite intellectually challenging, theatre can be quite intellectually challenging. Have I made my point? I’ve typed the phrase intellectually challenging so much that it has started to look less like actual words and more like just a jumble of letters (I’m sure you know the feeling and apologies to those who didn’t need quite that much repetition to grasp my point).
You keep screaming about the women posting here are being conspiracy theorists and how fact is oh so important, yet you consistently use your “experience” as a A MAN in a male-dominated field as some sort of fact that institutionalized sexism doesn’t exist, even though every single women in this thread is saying otherwise. You are invalidating their experiences, while claiming yours are somehow more important.
STOP
IT
“The vast majority of women are getting the easy degrees (education, accounting) and plotting for a nice house, fast cars and rug rats by shagging the men in engineering and business school.”
And, wow. Just wow. Yeah, all women who get degrees in education or accounting are totally just lookin’ for dudes in the oh-so-amazing fields of engineering and business to bang and have babies with. You’e nailed it!
And aren’t you just so amazing! An engineer! WOW! *falls at your feet* Please, oh please, can you pay attention to me? *bats eyelashes* You are so sexy, because you are such a manly, manly engineer, and here I am without a degree! I AM NOT WORTHY! Please fuck me, RIGHT NOW! I want your babies!
Jesus christ. Your sexist biases are showing.
“Secondly, if all of these “male” jobs are paying so much more, then why are women not making them into “female” jobs? What the heck is stopping you women? The invisible dragon in your garage? The invisible spaghetti monster? What?”
I don’t intend to over generalize, but at least part of the answer to your question is: people like you. Sometimes the extra pay just can’t justify dealing with individuals who behave with such disregard for other individuals who happen to be women. Additionally some people who happen to be women think that the low valuation of “traditionally female” careers is stupid and aren’t willing to give up on doing work that they find fulfilling just to get a bigger pay check but still think that the added value of having a career in a field they love isn’t adequately balanced out by the lack of financial remuneration.
(For other readers, I apologize for my crimes against sentence structure, I couldn’t come up with a better way to formulate my point)
Also, you seem to keep implying that being an engineer is somehow more worthing than being, say a teacher. Where would you be if there weren’t teachers? You wouldn’t be an engineer, that’s for certain. The field of education is VERY important for society. Being an engener isn’t somehow more worthy than educating people.
The fields that are traditionally done by men are not somehow better or more worthy than the fields that are traditionally done by women, or vice versa. They are all equally important. This is what we are railing against: The fact that male-dominated fields seem to be deemed more worthy than woman-dominated fields, and also the fact that men tend to get paid higher over all whether they are in a woman- or male-dominated field.
You are an engineer. Good job. You are not somehow better than the female (or male) teachers that educated you.
In addition to the completely correct criticisms of your mansplaining, I must add that that is an awful lot of anecdote for someone so bent on facts and studies.
As a younger engineer, I will dispute your anecdotal evidence with my own.
I have had several female friends in engineering have trouble, not because of unfair hiring practices, but because of boys-club mentality that made it difficult to enter the workforce as an equal. Also, the cute ones were often treated with kid gloves and the others were treated dismissively.
Also, having relatively recently gone through engineering school, I can tell you that the girls in arts are not shagging the engineers for our potential future earnings. For the most part they aren’t even talking to us. There were very few women on campus with any interes in getting their MRS. degree.
Also, accounting is one of the hardest degrees as my school and leads to stable and profitable careers.
Also, the women entering engineering are, as a rule, exceptional. They wanted to be engineers enough to overcome societal pressures. So the few that are kicking around are mostly outliers. The interesting group are those that kinda wanted to be engineers but settled for something else. Unfortunately, you can’t find them cause they don’t wear badges to let us know.
Regarding income disparity – it not only occurs between sexes, but intrasex as well. A basketball player, or the richest man in the world Bill Gates, who dropped out of college and never received a degree, make more money than a PHD professor. That’s not because of sexism. It’s because we have a system where salaries are determined by the people who do the work and who pay for the work. We don’t have system where a central authority sets wages or requires that one pay a person with a master’s degree more than a person who never went to school.
Further, there is no inherent reason why one individual must pay people more just because they have degrees. Everything depends on the details of what job is being done, how much the person doing it is willing to do it for, and how much the person who is paying money for the work to be done to have that work done. If I’m going to hire an assistant in my field, I don’t really care if he or she has a PHD, or a Master’s Degree – I care more about their work ethic and organizational skills. A Basketball team owner cares more about how well the person plays basketball. A school cares about how well a teacher teaches, and may well use levels of degrees, in that academic setting, to judge between teacher candidates and as a method for basing compensation.
However, to say that just because a teacher has a masters degree automatically means that the teacher must be paid more than someone with no degree at all is impractical, unworkable, unenforceable, and not even fair. What about male dominated fields of say, bricklaying, which is dominated by men, many of whom make more money per year than many masters degreed teachers?
The amount of money paid by a person to hire a bricklayer will depend on a variety of factors, including the supply and demand of qualified bricklayers, the skill and experience and reliability of the bricklayer, and the budget of the construction project which can be allocated to supplies and labor (which is ultimately based on the market for the building in question). The salary of bricklayers has little to nothing to do with its relative importance to our society, or whether bricklayers are more or less important than teachers or basketball players.
I think it’s fair to say that in the vast majority of cases, the choice of who “stays home with the kids” is generally the woman’s. We don’t have a society that sanctions men staying home with the kids very much. Stay at home dads are lazy deadbeats, and not “real” men. Men, of course, could stand firm, and demand to stay home with the children, but we generally don’t.
One wouldn’t place the blame on women, though, that men aren’t homemakers and primary child caregivers, would they? It’s the choices men make, like it or not, to be breadwinners instead of homemakers.
I’m baffled that people can claim to value women and then not look at pay inequality and say “let’s do everything within our power to make it stop!” Actions speak louder than words.
Noting from the article above – “When comparing men and women with equal background working the same jobs, women and men earn the same.”
If that is true, then what more equality ought we be striving for? There is nothing inherently “wrong” with women choosing different career paths than men.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with women choosing to sit at the back end of the bus, either.
Oh wait, there IS!
My bad.
“Back of the bus” is typically a line, in the US, that applies to discrimination against blacks.
The link you posted was to Jews in Israel, IIRC.
Anyway, it doesn’t change the fact that comparing this to being forced to sit in the back of buses is ridiculous. Nobody is asking women to sit in the back of buses, or drink from separate water fountains, or use separate restroo….oh, well… uh…that’s right – men are being discriminated against by not being allowed into the ladies room, but I digress…
Yeah, did you actually READ the post about the ultra-orthodox jews? Because if you had, chances are you would have understood it’s completely analogous to what we’re trying to talk about here. Women in paternalistic religions might have chosen their lot in life as far as the law can tell, but the fact that they were socalised into that “choice” and quite often don’t really have any other options means calling it a “choice” is disingenuous. That’s what this whole thread is about.
@Felicia
Considering he put the setting of said discrimination in Israel (it was actually in Brooklyn) I would guess that’s a no on the actual reading thing.
You equate stay at home mothers and homemakers, and women who become nurses and such, to blacks being forced to sit at the back of the bus under pain of arrest and prosecution?
And, you have the gall to criticize “how” Mr. Horowitz presented his study?
…it would be enough to make a cat laugh, if it weren’t so tragic.
I said nothing about blacks. Follow the link I posted.
Know what would be very helpful? If you’d actually read what she is linking to you, instead of making comments on things that have nothing at all to do with what she is talking about. Seriously.
“…it would be enough to make a cat laugh, if it weren’t so tragic.”
And this, right here, is some hilarious irony, considering you didn’t even read what she posted to you! It would be enough to make a cat laugh, if it weren’t so tragic, indeed.
Talk about fucking mansplaining: “I know I’m right, so I will just explain to you how right I am, even though I’m responding to something completely different from what you are actually referring to, because I am so certain I’m right, that I don’t even need to actually listen to your arguments. You are wrong and tragic, and I am right. NEENER!”
You know what would be helpful: If you would explain exactly what the “sit in the back of the bus” has to do, regardless of whether that refers to blacks, Jews or anyone else, to the subject at hand.
It has nothing to do with anything being discussed here. What is being discussed here is the issue raised by Mr. Horowitz work.
Nobody is denying that there is discrimination and sexism, not even Mr. Horowitz, and of course there is extreme discrimination among extreme Hasids and other fundamentalist religious groups. What does that have to do with the point made by Mr. Horowitz?
“You know what would be helpful” -romulus
Reading the link before going off the rails?
Just want to drop in and say I took classes from Steve back when I was at St. Lawrence.
I don’t have the bandwith to watch the video (stupid lab in the basement!) but from what I am hearing it sounds like it is his tone that seems a bit off. He was a very good lecturer, but also a little too sure of his theories. I think this is more of an inherent problem in disciplines like economics where many (though not all) of the professionals start with theory first, then find facts to support said theory. When you already know the answer, it is that much easier to have a certain level of … I don’t know, arrogance but that is too strong a word to use. Us poor slobs in the sciences have to do it backwards and are always just so unsure of ourselves…
I’ll look at the video when I can and report back…
It’s not the tone as much as the way he chooses to frame the issue. The word “choice” and its derivatives crops up constantly, which contributes to the overall message that women’s diminutive paychecks are completely voluntary. If we only made different choices, we’d get just as much money as the men do. At no point does he actually call women stupid. I don’t think he thinks we are. But what he’s definitely doing is throwing his hands in the air and going “IT’S NOT THE LABOUR MARKET’S FAULT SOCIETY SUCKS FOR WOMEN!”. As if the labour market doesn’t have any problems with sexism. As if the market and everyone who is part of it isn’t part of society. As if it isn’t up to each and every one of us to fix the problems.
He didn’t say society sucks for women.
According to Horowitz, women are paid as much as men are in the same field.
If, for a hypothetical example, not as many women as men choose to work for paying employers 16 hours a day, then one would expect that more men would advance or make more money in that field than women do. Isn’t that true?
Now that I have watched I see the hang up on the word “choice” which Steve is using in the economist’s sense of a decision made without regard to the desirability of the options.
“Should I make gobs of money and never see my family” or “Should I take a part-time low wage job so I can be with my kids more” is still a “choice” even though neither of the options is really great. What Steve is arguing is the sexism is there, but lies in the limitations of choices that women have. Since that wasn’t the point of the video, he didn’t get into it.
Assuming the data he cites are correct, he has a sound argument. Maybe he should have been more aware of how his words could be misinterpreted, but often we can’t be aware of such things until someone tells us so.
I watched this video suspiciously, and I don’t think I’ve ever sided with a libertarian over a feminist, but I have to say that I mostly agree with him.
Listen to this: “It might well be the case that women are being discriminated against, that sexism is a problem, in the choices that women make. For example, girls are guided away from math classes, and guided into other kinds of classes. And it is also the case that our expectations of women’s roles caring for children in the household and men’s roles caring for children in the household, are very different. And if we think those are poor choices, if we want to see women’s pay more equal to men, what we need to do is convince more women to go into areas such as the sciences and mathematics and engineering. And we need to convince men to take more responsibility for children in the house.”
I would object to the term “poor choices,” but this is mostly correct. He puts the responsibility on the educational culture that discourages girls from pursuing math and science actively, and on men who are reluctant to assume an equal role in childcare.
He doesn’t ask the important question of whether or not the labor market is correct in valuing careers in business over careers in education and health, or consider whether or not gender plays a role in that. It seems as though we’ve gotten used to thinking of certain jobs as “women’s work,” and expect such jobs to pay less then the “men’s work.”
He also assumes wrongly that more women work part time because they “choose” part time work. That probably doesn’t account for the 26%-13% difference. I would like to look at the study that controls for all of these gender factors, which he cites as showing the gap being 2%. That 2% is not negligible, as he seems to think. Is it possible that the blatantly sexist employers like Wal-Mart account for that 2%?
He didn’t cover everything he could have, but he came pretty close.
Well, again, his facts may or may not be correct regarding whether women actually get paid less for equal work (the jury still seems to be out on that one) — what I’m taking issue with is the framing. And since you also react on his choice of words, I don’t see how you’re “siding” with him. You might not be as riled up as I was by the video, that doesn’t mean we don’t agree on at least some things.
If we assume he is completely right, how would you have worded it?
The framing seems to be this: certain choices effect earning ability, but broader societal trends effect those choices. It seems to be the right approach, even if I have some nitpicks with his diction. I would also cast a wider net by not exonerating labor markets of responsibility for how they reward some decision patterns over others, but at that point it’s more of an argument about libertarianism than sexism.
I wonder why it acceptable to put the blame on “reluctant men,” but it is not acceptable to suggest that women’s choices have anything to do with it.
As someone who chose a non market driven and less economically competitive career, I did so knowing that there would be a lower economic reward. If this statistically skews a larger percentage of women (and men who make similar choices) toward a lower income level then all I can say is that making the world a better place is rarely the path taken if money is the goal. It would be nice to see more income data regarding men and women with similar educations and employment profiles in business. And it will be interesting to observe how or if income statistics change over time given women have been an ever increasing percentage (now the majority) of college graduates.
“And it will be interesting to observe how or if income statistics change over time given women have been an ever increasing percentage (now the majority) of college graduates.”
Good questions. Also fewer families are having children. This might play into it as well.
Well, it’s clear that you are not responding to this video rationally. First of all, if his facts are accurate (and I haven’t been privy to the details), then his conclusions certainly seem reasonable. Women do choose those fields that he said and they mostly do pay much less than other fields. As a prime example, I live in a town where a whopping 70% of the men are engineers, scientists or other technical professions and most work for defense companies. Their wives are mostly in teaching, nursing and service professions. Many of them stay at home to raise kids and many do part time work. And this describes my family exactly. Only a tiny fraction of women work alongside these men as engineers.
That women tend to take part time jobs more often than men is likely a side effect of their role as primary childcare giver, which isn’t their sole decision, but one made by both parents. I do know some families where the roles are reversed. Nevertheless, such a decision balances less pay with less childcare expenditures and better child care.
Now, you can interpret his comments as an insult and admonishment that women make poor choices if you want. Frankly I see that as an irrational reaction. Do women have the same access to career information such as pay and opportunities as men do? Yes, I think they do. Are women “guided” into certain types of professions by their parents and peers? Probably, but I don’t know for sure. But even so, there are no institutional barriers to women entering high-pay technical fields. About 10% of the students in my engineering class were women. Why not 50%? Why have those numbers been decreasing in recent years? It’s no surprise that education doesn’t pay very well. Why do women continue to dominate that field? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking instead of attacking the messenger.
For the record, I have two daughters and I have strongly urged them to avoid fields like education. I’ve advocated the importance of math and science and fields that utilize those skills. Am I in the minority? I suspect I am.
My last comment is regarding the decision of women to have children and to leave the workforce for periods of time. Now, this is a real thing. A woman may choose to stay off for the minimum required physically, or she may decide to stay off for a while and care for her child. Either way, this is likely a joint decision between both parents. In my career, I’ve seen both and some who left and never came back. Are you suggesting that these things don’t happen or that they don’t affect the woman’s pay down the road? Ridiculous!! If a woman is off for two years taking care of her child and misses a promotional opportunity during that time, what would you propose, put the rest of the world on hold until she returns? Be realistic. These are real decisions and they have real consequences. To argue that this is false is to live in a fantasy world. And to puff up at someone who says that women choose to have children as an insult is just as irrational.
Steve has asked me to pass this along:
If you folks would like a very good overview of the academic literature on the gender wage gap that summarizes the main findings pretty well, you should read this: http://jec.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=2a1f8ad4-f649-4ad3-a742-268d946962db . The bottom line is that when all of the factors I discuss in the video are controlled for, that is when we compare men and women who are as close to identical as possible aside from their reproductive organs, the gender wage gap is well under 10%. So men and women who ARE equally qualified and are of the same age and same experience etc get paid pretty close to (though not exactly) the same.
As others have pointed out, I do NOT deny the existence of sexism. What I argue is that the problem is not (for the most part) in labor markets, but in how we socialize young men and women. I would hope that a site named Skepchick would give me the benefit of the doubt and not see that as “covering my ass” but as a sincere, good faith argument that the world WOULD be a better place if more women were engineers, more men were nurses, and child-raising was more equal by gender. I believe every one of those things. I also believe that markets, generally, are not sites of significant discrimination by gender. Those are not incompatible.
Steve Horwitz
…
No offense, but professors in social science (yes business counts) tend to do some erm, BAD research.
And in this case it’s because of decontextualized evidence/data and bad correlation and the guy who wrote freakonomics would probably laugh at your conclusion.
You take data that says women with equal experience/background/etc. are earning nearly the same and that the wage gap is due to a lot of women making different career choices than men, so there must be no discrimination.
What you don’t account for however is that in many organizations, women are often passed over for or discouraged from positions where they get such experience & skills and end up remaining not as skilled our as high as their male counterparts. You draw a HUGE conclusion that discrimination doesn’t have anything to do with the disparity in the workplace without investigating much data to the contrary.
Do women make career choices with lower earning potential as a result of things like children, societal pressure, etc. of course, but that does not mean there’s no discrimination in the workplace.
Low quality research sir. You’re being part of the problem, not the solution.
It’s fascinating to note how how skewed the burden of proof has become on this issue. In light of the the undeniable, rock-solid evidence for pervasive sexism throughout history and throughout most of the rest of the world, the burden of proof for determining whether sexism is responsible for the wage gap in the industrialized nations naturally falls on us! Well, OF COURSE it does. Because extraordinary claims require a small modicum of decontextualized evidence, as Carl Sagan famously said.
Felicia is quite right to point out that discrimination isn’t just about what you’re payed at the same job with the same experience, and that defining it that way is just another way of moving the goalposts in. Indeed, it’s a red herring thrown out to distract us (and it appears to be doing a good job of it, judging by the comments above.) If you walk into a food processing plant and the people on the factory floor are all women (save one token man who gets payed the same) and all the people in the management office are men (save one token woman who gets paid the same,) you have not proved that discrimination has been banished from the workplace.
>>Felicia is quite right to point out that discrimi