Gender Wage Gap

"I'm not trying to be sexist, because hell if I was a mechanic I'd die." Yeah, you'd die because you're 4'9" and most of your time is spent on your computer. But you don't represent all males, your inability to do basic manual labour is absolutely unrelated.

 

LOL trying to insult someone because of their height and time spent on electronics isn't related either

 

I wasn't trying to insult you, I was giving reasons as to why you wouldn't be the best mechanic.

 

Sure - But men aren't putting on make up while driving either. In the end I believe it's a wash.

 

Sure - But they put it on at stoplights

 

wow

 

I've had my mom climb from the passenger seat to put on my makeup during our half-hour drive to the final rehearsal with my choir.

 

What?

Being an aircraft mechanic shouldn't have anything to do with your gender; As you say earlier, just because you're a woman, it doesn't mean that you're an inherently bad mechanic. The reason that fewer women actually become mechanics is because the trade has historically been male-dominated, and thus is generally associated with males. If you're a woman and good at fixing airplanes, then you should by all means be an aircraft mechanic, and you should by all means be paid the same as your colleagues who share your seniority.

I don't understand this, either. Nothing makes women inherently good at nursing--nursing has simply been female-dominated for a long time. As such, it's developed a degree of association with females, which creates a stigma about male nurses--male nurses aren't inherently less competent than female nurses. (I sound really liberal saying this; my friends will make fun of me probably)

Like Smarties said, I fail to see how your points relate to the gender-wage gap.



Anyways, like many posters before me have stated, other factors than sexism are at play--and the gap isn't even really significant in the first place.

 

If you think making a statement like that is liberal, then I can only assume that you're not as conservative as you think you are. It's a pretty moderate point of view.

Regardless, I agree with this. For quite a while, I used to wonder if men were even allowed to be nurses because male nurses are hardly ever heard of. Same goes for female construction workers and male (straight) fashion designers. It seems like it's more social status (with a few exceptions).

 

pro tip: when going into a job interview haggle your salary agreement until you either make double what the guy sitting next to you is or until they throw you out

 

This is what feminists are out for. "Gender Equality" apparently is a myth, and all men are disgraces to humanity. Feminists are such a waste of time. Gender Equality is alive and well. I don't know about America, but cashiers at grocery stores are mostly female because they tend to have better customer service skills than men. You don't usually hear a full grown man saying in a high pitched voice "Hi, Bonjour!" and "That'll be $375.28 please!" and "Thank you! Come again Mrs. Morris!".

 

...

 

sighs very heavily at the content of this thread

y'all.

Let's just start off with the intersectionality of the issue, how using the 76-79c to the dollar is the best of the group, in comparison to women of other ethnic backgrounds. This doesn't even include the gay and transgender wage gap.


(x)
Women of all major racial and ethnic groups earn less than men of the same group, and also earn less than white men, as illustrated in Table 1. Hispanic workers have lower median weekly earnings than white, black, and Asian workers. Hispanic women’s median earnings in 2014 were $548 per week of full-time work, only 61.2 percent of white men’s median weekly earnings, but 89.0 percent of the median weekly earnings of Hispanic men (because Hispanic men also have low earnings). The median weekly earnings of black women were $611, only 68.1 percent of white men’s earnings, but 89.9 percent of black men’s median weekly earnings, which are also fairly low (Table 1). Earnings for a full-time week of work leave Hispanic women well below, and Hispanic men and black women not much above, the qualifying income threshold for receipt of food stamps of $596 per week for a family of four.

Pay equity may be affected by the segregation of jobs by gender and other factors. IWPR’s research shows that, irrespective of the level of qualification, jobs predominantly done by women pay less on average than jobs predominantly done by men. Women have made tremendous strides during the last few decades by moving into jobs and occupations previously done almost exclusively by men, yet during the last decade there has been very little further progress in the gender integration of work. In some industries and occupations, like construction, there has been no progress in forty years. In middle-skill occupations workers in jobs mainly done by women earn only 66 percent of workers in jobs mainly done by men. This persistent occupational segregation is a primary contributor to the lack of significant progress in closing the wage gap. According to a recent regression analysis of federal data by IWPR, the poverty rate for working women would be cut in half if women were paid the same as comparable men. (x)

Here's an article worth reading (copied for ease):

The 79 percent wage ratio figure, the most commonly used figure to measure the gender wage gap in the United States, is often derided as misleading, a myth, or worst of all, a lie. In this post, we argue that the figure is an accurate measure of the inequality in earnings between women and men who work full-time, year-round in the labor market and reflects a number of different factors: discrimination in pay, recruitment, job assignment, and promotion; lower earnings in occupations mainly done by women; and women’s disproportionate share of time spent on family care, including that they—rather than fathers—still tend to be the ones to take more time off work when families have children. Just because the explanation of the gender wage gap is multi-faceted does not make it a lie.

When a phenomenon, such as the wage gap, can be explained by various factors, it does not mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. In fact, those explanations are the exact factors to look at when identifying interventions to solve the problem. Take another phenomenon for example: poverty. Black and Hispanic populations in the United States have higher poverty rates than the white population. When analyses control for education, place of residence, type of job, and many other factors, the remaining differences in poverty rates are smaller but not gone. It is not a myth or a lie, then, to say that black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately more likely to live in poverty. Indeed, they are. Here are five key facts to remember about the gender wage gap:

1) Other data series on weekly or hourly earnings are not necessarily more accurate than the annual figure.
Some claim that proponents of equal pay use the 79 percent annual wage ratio figure because it shows the biggest wage gap, 21 percent, when other data series on weekly and hourly earnings available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show slightly smaller gaps. There is no basis for the claim that weekly or hourly data are a more accurate representation of inequality in pay between men and women. The 79 percent annual wage ratio figure is the historical headline figure, likely because it allows the longest comparison across time and includes the broadest range of different kinds of earnings, including self-employment income. Annual bonus payments, for example, are a big part of remuneration in some fields and are included in the 79 percent figure, but are excluded from the weekly or hourly earnings figures. Both the weekly and annual earnings ratios are for full-time workers only; if part-time and part-year workers were included, the ratios of women’s to men’s earnings would be even lower, as women are more likely than men to work reduced schedules, often in order to manage unpaid childrearing and other caregiving work.

2) The annual wage ratio of 79 percent is actually a moderate estimate of gender pay inequality.
If part-time workers were included, a figure that Statistics Canada uses, the wage ratio would be 69.9, a gap of 30.1 percent. The United Kingdom has used life-time earnings ratios. One IWPR study found that across 15 years (ending in 1998, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics), the typical American woman earned just 38 percent of the typical man. The Urban Institute, using Social Security earnings data, finds that the typical wife earns about 50 percent of what her husband does across their working lives. In fact, the 79 percent figure falls in the middle of the range of these other estimates.

3) Women’s ‘choices’ are not necessarily choices.
Wage gap skeptics emphasize that women ‘choose’ different and lower-paying college majors than men, implying such differences mean that the wage gap measure is not a good measure of economy-wide wage inequality. ‘Choice’ is, of course, an unverified assumption. There is considerable evidence of barriers to free choice of occupations, ranging from lack of unbiased information about job prospects to actual harassment and discrimination in male-dominated jobs. For instance, a library assistant may choose to go to school for 6 more years to become a librarian, or she may choose to go to school for half that and become an IT support specialist, if she knew that librarians and IT support specialists were paid roughly the same per year. In a world where half of IT support specialists were women and half of librarians were men, men and women might ‘choose’ very differently than they do now. We do know that young women and men generally express the same range of desires regarding their future careers in terms of such values as making money and having autonomy and flexibility at work, as well as time to spend with family.

4) There is no proof that being a mother makes a woman less productive on the job.
There are legal cases, as well as social science research studies, that show that just by the mere fact of being a mother, women’s advancement opportunities shrink, and just by being a father, men’s grow. And why should women who may be decades past the phase of active childrearing still be suffering a wage penalty? While it is true that women typically take more time away from work for child rearing than do men, that decision often makes economic sense when a wife’s wages are lower than her husband’s—equal pay would likely lead to more equitable sharing of child rearing. In fact, women’s human capital (generally measured as years of education plus years on the job and in the job market) are increasingly equal for women and men. Furthermore, research shows subsidizing the cost of child care and providing paid parental leaves of up to six months would help women return to work sooner, and would help men to more equally share care.

5) Discrimination is still a factor—a big one—in the gender wage gap.
It is true that, when factors such as occupation and parental or marital status are used as control variables in statistical models aiming to explain what ’causes’ the wage gap, the size of that gap is reduced, and what is left unexplained is generally thought to possibly be the result of discrimination. But it is just as likely that discrimination affects these ‘control’ variables as well as the size of the remaining gap. Peer reviewed literature surveys published in mainstream economics journals, including a recent study by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn estimate that 38 percent of the gross wage gap remains unexplained when factors reasonably thought to affect productivity are included as control variables in the models. Blau and Kahn estimate that occupational segregation—where women work in lower paid jobs, typically done by women, and men work in higher paying jobs typically done by men— along with segregation by industry and firm, are now responsible for half the wage gap. While some occupational differences result from differences in preparation for the labor market by women and men, others result from different job assignments by employers when women and men first participate in the labor market.

It is important to look at the 79 percent figure as a baseline to understand the true magnitude of the problem, so we can intervene on factors such as employer bias, career preparation, and time spent on family care. When we look at the control variables, the findings do not indicate that the wage gap is actually a smaller problem than we thought. The findings indicate that women need more information and opportunity to pursue certain lucrative careers, like those in STEM, where the largest employers are only now providing paid family leaves that can encourage the more equal division between women and men. Redressing the US lag in providing paid family leave and subsidized child care can help, but so can improved information about pay and stronger enforcement of our equal opportunity laws.

says you, a man, with literally no evidence to support your claim. check your privilege.

There's resources available to you on this magical internet to back up your claim, look for it. If all you're going to do is spew your uninformed opinion then you aren't worth speaking to.

 

There is no wage gap, there's somewhat of an income gap due to the fact that ;

Men are typically doing the more dangerous jobs leading to higher pay, woman tend to work in career fields that generally pay less
Men tend work more overtime and longer hours, overwork is near enough necessary to move up in any company meaning a higher income.
Woman take more time off for children and maternity leave and usually work less hours after returning to work from maternity leave or return to work a few years after, resulting in the industry moving forward and them staying behind.
Woman make up the majority of the part time workforce
Men tend to haggle more for wage raises and such

The 76-79c to the dollar or however you put it is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. - On top of the cents to the dollar being a silly fall back anyway due to the fact of that being a random sample with a few thousand men and woman that could have been based on that in the thousand woman there could be 700 woman working retail and 300 working as surgeons and in the thousand men there could be 700 surgeons and 300 working retail.

There's no logic to believing women make less money than men because they're women. If you could hire someone with an identical education, years of experience and time willing to work for even 1% less in salary than someone else you will always hire the cheaper person. If the wage gap was true then 0% of women would be unemployed because they can supply the same labour at a lower cost.

This "gay wage gap" is just even more of a unneeded joke

 

Skaros doing the legwork for me. Beautiful. Thoughts echoed, for whatever that's worth.

 

Something new that I saw somewhere...

Women in America control a majority of the wealth, but men pay 85% of taxes. Sounds sexist, right? It isn't, but it just goes to show how easy it is to distort reality.

--- Double Post Merged, May 30, 2016, Original Post Date: May 30, 2016 ---

It isn't though. That's why guys pay more for insurance (of all kinds, really). We're more likely to get hurt, more likely to die, more likely to get into an auto accident... Facts are facts, and when you don't complain about reality, life gets a lot better.