People who don’t believe in the gender wage gap and people who do seem to agree on an awful lot.
Many people who think the gender wage gap doesn’t exist argue that the gap between male and female wages can be explained by other factors. Women are more likely to work in low-paying jobs and to work part-time. Women are more likely to leave the labor force to take care of children or old people. Women are more likely to seek out “family friendly” jobs that have better benefits and lower pay. When you account for all these factors, while outright wage discrimination still exists, it plays a relatively small role in why women earn less than men. (For more, here‘s a good Politifact article.)
All of the smart, well-informed feminists agree. For instance, NOW’s factsheet on pay equality talks about occupational segregation, cutting back on work to do caretaking, and the motherhood penalty. Barry Deutsch’s excellent article on the pay gap also talks about those factors. I got a gender studies degree; when we talked about the origins of the pay gap in class, we talked about caretaking and occupational segregation. While there are a lot of people who think the wage gap is purely a product of wage discrimination, they are mostly people who prefer slogans to statistics.
But I see a lot of conversations online arguing about the wage gap exists in which the participants don’t seem to realize that they agree on all the empirical facts. The anti-feminist leaves thinking that the feminist is using shitty statistical methodology to justify hating men and playing the victim, and the feminist leaves thinking that the anti-feminist is using shitty statistical methodology to justify ignoring the history of sexism against women, and they never actually argue about what they actually disagree about.
I think the actual point of disagreement between smart, well-informed anti-feminists and smart, well-informed feminists about the wage gap is whether or not occupational segregation, unequal distribution of caretaking, and so on are bad things.
My understanding of the anti-feminist position is that the wage gap is a product of women’s choices. Women want to be nurses, elementary school teachers, and social workers; women want to take care of their children and their parents. It is obviously unjust if someone is paying you less than they’d pay a man because you’re a woman, but it is not unjust to allow someone to make their own damn decisions about their own lives. If women have decided of their own free will that they care more about being able to take a day off when their kid is sick than they do about having a company car and a corner office, then there is nothing unfair or sexist about this reality. Many anti-feminists believe that these decisions are a product of innate female psychology; while of course many women have no interest in caretaking, they argue, women as a group tend to care more about taking care of others than men as a group do, perhaps for evolutionary reasons. Since caretaking professions tend to be paid less (or, in the case of parenting, to not be paid at all), they earn less money.
The feminist position is that these choices are not made in a vacuum. Of course, any individual woman can choose to become a nurse or a stay-at-home mother if she so pleases; neither I nor Barry nor the National Organization for Women has any interest in forcing women into careers they have no desire to pursue. But we don’t view the fact that this is the product of a choice to mean that there is no injustice, simply that the injustice is probably located somewhere else.
To pick an extreme example, consider a slight variant on the trolley problem. A runaway trolley is going to hit five people on the trolley tracks, and you have the ability to switch it so that it hits you instead. You do so. Would it make sense to say “there’s nothing unjust about this situation! It would have been unjust if someone had deliberately switched a trolley so that you would be hit by it, but you made the free and independent decision to be hit by the trolley yourself, so there is nothing morally wrong about this situation.” That would be silly. It is true that you have not experienced the injustice of a person deliberately hitting you with a trolley. But you may have experienced the injustice of poor trolley safety practices, or a philosophy-themed supervillain going about tying people to tracks in order to set up moral dilemmas, or similar. Your free choice in a situation does not mean the situation itself was okay.
Similarly, the injustice of the gender pay gap might be located somewhere else. Perhaps we should fix the mysterious great filter keeping women from going into STEM. Perhaps we should create special programs to encourage men to enter low-paying female-dominated professions like nurse or teacher, the same way we have these programs for women in high-paying male-dominated professions. (I actually think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in that one, partially because a lot of feminists are opposed to affirmative action for men.) Perhaps we should fight the stigma that keeps many men from becoming primary caregivers of their children. Perhaps maternity leave causes women to bond with their babies and not want to leave them to go to work, and if we expanded paternity leave then more men would bond with their babies and not want to leave them to go to work. Perhaps daycare should be state-subsidized. Perhaps we should end the idea of “supermom” and raise awareness that if you aren’t a completely shitty parent your kids will probably turn out fine and you don’t have to feel mommy guilt about sticking your kid in front of Sesame Street instead of baking cookies with them. Perhaps reforms to the care of the elderly and the disabled would ease the burden on female caretakers. Perhaps we should buy boys more dolls.
The anti-feminist, naturally, will respond by pointing out:
(1) If you have this thoughtful, nuanced position, then how come you are spending so much time on ending wage discrimination, which is a tiny part of the problem? Why are you prioritizing the Paycheck Fairness Act instead of expanding paternity leave?
(2) Feminists tend to assume that “sexism” is the correct explanation for everything, and they should at least leave open the possibility that the wage gap is a product of legitimate preferences on the part of women that are not the product of sexism, whether internal or external.
And then we can have an interesting and productive discussion! Which we cannot have as long as both sides are confused about whether or not they agree on the empirical facts.
Thing of Things 
The smart feminist position is that these choices aren’t made in a vacuum, but the popular feminist position is that greedy and sexist employers are just paying women less for the same work, and anti-feminists are responding to the latter. The sophisticated feminist position might well be correct, but it lacks the outrage factor of having a clear villain.
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The popular feminists also happen to be the ones that are making laws and policies, at least in my country. When they do things that cannot work because they don’t understand the actual causes and thus mostly cause damage for little gain, I have a pretty big incentive to oppose this.
This is not so much about cheap outrage or weak manning, but about actual bad things that are happening in the world under the flag of feminism. If the smart feminists ever manage to take control of the movement and start implementing sane policies, I’ll be glad to stop calling myself an anti-feminist.
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What if we found that as a country gets richer the gender wage gap tends to increase because as they get richer women and men tend to make different decisions, and these differences further increase the gap? What if a small gap indicates women being treated unjustly because they are being pushed to make income maximizing decisions?
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That seems like a small variation on the typical anti-feminist position?
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What if a large gap indicates *men* being treated unjustly because they are being pushed to make income maximizing decisions?
(Not that many feminists are particularly helpful on this front)
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I’ve heard college professors in 2009 argue that since women are paid 76 cents on the dollar that the recession was causing employers to fire their male employees since their female employees in the same positions were paid less.
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What field were these professors in? If they were in a humanities field or primarily studied something other than gender, yeah, even college professors can believe stupid things. If they were in a social science and studied gender in the developed world and you are not misremembering a more complicated argument because it was eight years ago and that happens, I am very very surprised.
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What I seem to recall is that proportionately more men lost jobs during the recession because a lot of pink-collar work is stuff that you can’t do without and you can’t outsource to another country – care workers, nursing, childcare, teachers versus business and manufacturing.
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@loki
And then Obama proposed an investment program to restart the economy, that would mostly end up going to the male-dominated industries that were hit hardest by the recession (like construction), where the US needs investments anyway (and still does). Then NOW opposed this because of pro-female sexism and they successfully lobbied to get more money for female-dominated industries.
So the gendered effects of the recession was not merely because some male-dominated sectors are more sensitive to recessions, but also due to intentional gender warfare.
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Because, notwithstanding a stupid statement, it filled the need to protect the agenda. The Stupidest kind of stupid when making any form of statement.
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Anyone aware of venues on the Internet where people are in fact having that productive and interesting discussion? Anywhere I go, it seems like it’s either people trying to hunt down the cause of that mysterious 7% wage gap while pretending it’s actually a 23% wage gap…or its hard-core redpillers.
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My fear is that the wage gap is product of a few legitimate preferences on the part of some women compared to some men that are not the product of any kind of feminism, but those few preferences snowball into more substantial differences which reinforce the gender gap and are definitely not fair or just. For instance, if we had a completely blank slate society, it might be that when all the women and men choose their careers, childcare careers end up being 51% women and 49% men. Eventually something about the childcare workplaces becomes more welcoming and accommodating to women compared to men, because of that small initial difference, and so the 51% magnifies to 60% or 80%. And in the other corner, if IT happened to be 51% men, that small difference creates an environment just slightly more welcoming to men, which ends up encouraging more and more men into the field and pushing out the women.
That’s scary because it seems like we could get all the facts in front of us and there’s still a dilemma. Do you work against the original preferences in order to make sure there’s no implicit discrimination? Or do you just try to stop those 51% of women/men from defining their workplaces in a gendered way? I guess that’s a start, but if you have larger societal factors and gender norms outside the workplace, which similarly are borne of innate differences but snowball into discrimination, it’s going to take more than that.
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It seems empirically unlikely, women have headed into the medical and legal professions in large numbers. Or indeed universities at all.
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Even the “nuanced” position seems to me to be the result of motivated reasoning.
I can engage with the issues if they’re unbundled:
Do you have a way to increase the number of STEM girls? Great, I’m for it. But I’d be for it even if it increased the number of STEM boys even more. Would you?
Pushing boys into nursing to reduce the earnings gap? Let me get this straight. Nursing is actually a solid middle class career, so I’ve got no problem with encouraging kids of any gender to go into it, but if the plan is specifically to reduce the earnings gap then by definition you’re pushing boys who would have earned more into a worse career so that the aggregate earnings numbers between the genders are more equal. That is literal comic book misandric villainy of the kind even Milo couldn’t make up if he tried. The only way you could even start to make a morally decent case for it would be to assume a zero sum competition for the high paying careers, which is preposterous.
Are girls socialized into expectations and roles that disadvantage them career-wise. Yea, maybe they are. I think in general people are socialized into much too specific sets of expectations of what they “should” be, of what their proper role is. If I have a daughter I’ll certainly try not to make that mistake. Or if I have a son.
Are women coerced by circumstance? Yes. We are all coerced by circumstance. Without something more specific to talk about then a vague miasma of “sexism” and “patriarchy”, I don’t know what you want me to do about that. It is a generic affliction of the human condition, which feminists unfairly and without evidence claim primarily afflicts women.
Free daycare / mandated leave? I’m not in favor of more socialism at current margins, but if you’re going to offer maternity leave I think nondiscrimination demands you offer paternity leave too.
But how do I add that all up to some kind of position on the earnings gap in general? Those are all really different issues with really different answers. The only reason you’d expect them to all line up with each other is if the real reason you cared about the earnings gap was you just wanted a rhetorical device to claim women are oppressed, society is sexist, and push for policies that favor women over men to “fix” the “problem”.
If you get into specifics on any particular issue, there’s a nuanced, thoughtful debate to be had. If you talk about the earnings gap generically, it’s just identity politics.
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“if the plan is specifically to reduce the earnings gap then by definition you’re pushing boys who would have earned more into a worse career so that the aggregate earnings numbers between the genders are more equal. That is literal comic book misandric villainy of the kind even Milo couldn’t make up if he tried.”
You’re assuming that for an individual, being in a career that earns less is worse than a career that earns more.
If we started with the idea (not one I’m committed to, but for the sake of argument) that there are no innate differences between men and women, but individuals have preferences for different fields, then there must be men out there who would be happier in nursing but avoided it to avoid conflict between their gender identity and perceived feminity of a nursing career. So for those men, going into a lower paid career might be an acceptable tradeoff for doing something they’re more interested in.
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Good point. Getting rid of pointless stigma is fine. Actively trying to push individual kids into worse paths on the basis of their immutable characteristics is evil. So whether it’s fine or evil depends on exactly what it is you’re doing to “encourage” boys to go into nursing. Also good point on money isn’t everything, which of course undermines the entire case for worrying about the earnings gap in the first place.
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First, neither of us said that money doesn’t matter, only that it isn’t everything; with that in mind…
It doesn’t undermine the case if you’re completely convinced that on the aggregate, there are no innate preference differences between men and women (again, just for the sake of argument). In that case, it’s best if everyone follows the best trade-off between getting paid well and other characteristics of a particular career that suit them. Because we’re assuming there are no innate preference differences between men and women, it follows that if there are differences in the pay gap between men and women, it must be because men are being socialized into higher-paying careers against their own innate preferences.
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I don’t agree with that, on several counts.
First, anything that makes you think the earnings gap is the result of free choices and preferences cuts off a huge region of issue-space where the earnings gap is used as an argument, even if those choices and preferences are the result of socialization. If you think most of the gap is the result of choices and preferences, then the only kinds of remedies that make sense are cultural ones. More role models, less stigma etc. That undermines the “wage gap” argument in most of the places it’s used, so it undermines the “wage gap”.
Second, the idea that there are no innate preference differences between men and women is just silly. Of course there are innate differences. Any sexually dimorphic animal species is going to have innate behavioral differences. What they are, how big they are, are the relevant to what careers people chose? Who knows. Not me. But assuming it’s zero is silly hypothesis privileging.
Third, the practicalities of reproduction can legitimately influence women’s decisions even if innate preferences were identical.
And finally, I’m not so convinced that you seem to be that innate, i.e. genetic preferences are more legitimate and authentic than cultural preferences. There are some cultural preferences I’d view as illegitimate, such as rigid gender roles and expectations which are enforced by stigma. But I object to that as much because of my *cultural* preference for respecting individual autonomy as much as any innate preference against gender roles. If culture results in preferences that are asymmetric across gender without impinging on autonomy or some other value I care about, then I don’t see why I should see it as a problem.
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“getting rid of pointless stigma is fine. Actively trying to push individual kids into worse paths on the basis of their immutable characteristics is evil. ”
I partially disagree? Even presuming that positions that pay less are worse, the current system pushes female kids onto worse paths on the basis of their immutable characteristics, for the benefit of male kids. Fixing that imbalance pushes some kids onto worse paths, but it also pushes other kids onto better paths. It’s a wash on job satisfaction and a net gain on fairness, so it’s a net gain overall.
“Second, the idea that there are no innate preference differences between men and women is just silly.”
I think that the idea you think this is silly is silly. “Of course” is not an argument. I personally think it’s fairly obvious that the null hypothesis is no innate difference and any innate difference needs to be justified by evidence.
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@argleblarglebarglebah
This is actually a highly debatable assertion, which is a premise that many feminists believe uncritically (aka dogma).
The female paths have many advantage (or privileges) over the male paths and vice versa. Deciding which is better is inherently subjective. It’s very easy to engage in fallacious reasoning, such as a ‘grass is greener for the other gender’ cherry picking.
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@argleblarglebarglebah
“the current system pushes female kids onto worse paths on the basis of their immutable characteristics, for the benefit of male kids”
Even if you’re right about that, the solution is to stop hurting girls, not to hurt boys more so they’re equal. This isn’t a tradeoff. It’s not like pushing boys who would have been engineers into nursing is going to somehow have an equal and opposite effect of pushing girls who would have been nurses into engineering.
In the long term, and we’re talking about education and career paths here so we are talking about he long term; there is not a fixed pile of good jobs to be “distributed”. There is not a fixed pie to be fought over. What there is is a generation of kids coming up after us and the more capable and productive they are, the better off *all* of them will be. We all compete, and competition is highly visible, because the personal stakes are high. But what is unseen, is that we all cooperate too. And we’re competing with a tiny fraction of society while cooperating with the vast majority of it. The zero sum model is almost totally false in the long run.
But of course I also disagree with your premise, especially the “for the benefit of male kids” part. For the benefit how? Like it actually benefits them? Like men are actually made worse off by women being more productive? Or you’re saying institutions deliberately sabotage women’s careers? For the benefit how? The only case that can be made that the system sabotages women careers has to something like an “implicit bias” argument, because obviously anything deliberate would be caught and shut down, in which case where’s the “for the benefit”. Men do not benefit from women being more productive.
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oops! that’s “Men do not benefit from women being LESS productive”
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argle&etc. – “I personally think it’s fairly obvious that the null hypothesis is no innate difference and any innate difference needs to be justified by evidence.”
Challenge accepted!
If you look at particular features, you can detect a male or female brain with around 93% accuracy from the brain scan alone:
Click to access E1968.full.pdf
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That trolley problem metaphor is great, and I think it works even better if extended:
Consider a world populated entirely by Consequentialists and Deontologists, where trolley safety is such a problem that most people will face the choice sometime in their lives. Deontologists don’t pull the lever, and a group of people dies; Consequentialists sacrifice themselves, often pushing past Deontologists who won’t act.
After a while, the Consequentialists notice that suicide-by-trolley is a leading cause of death for their half of the population. They say it’s unjust that they’re shouldering all the burden of saving other people from runaway trolleys, and the Deontologists ought to step up and close the gap.
But that’s not going to be a convincing argument. Deontologists aren’t just freeloading: they’d make the same choice even if there were no chance of someone else stepping in to pull the lever.
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Only certain Nordic countries care enough to put actual money into these types of gender equity programs – and it kind of works on things like paternal leave (https://aeon.co/essays/swedens-hands-on-dads-and-the-hormones-of-fatherhood).
But they’ve been *notoriously* unsuccessful at balancing fields like nursing, engineering, &etc.
We can also discuss how much extra we’re going to need to pay women to take dangerous jobs to equalize the work place death gap, as well.
Here’s where the injustice is located, IMO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Gender_differences
Agreeableness and open to feelings = nursing & teaching
Assertiveness and open to ideas = CEOs and STEM
And those Nordic countries that throw all kinds of money into gender equality? The personality differences in the population there are *more pronounced*. (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.502.9219&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
Unless you have a plan to change human personalities on a mass scale, we may have to live with the injustice.
And by the by, toy preference (“Buy boys dolls”) in non-human primates and human girls with CAH is well-studied.
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I support *mandatory* paternity leave – if you’re the father of a child, you have to take off as much time from work as the mother does, whether you like it or not. That’ll fix the wage gap right up! 😉
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Also, there is no STEM worker shortage.
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I think you may be treating the anti-feminist position too charitably. Yes thats probably what the smart well informed anti-feminists would say, but a randomly selected one wouldn’t. MY impression is that the median feminist is closer to the truth,
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Funny, I would have said Ozy was getting the anti-feminist side right, and that feminists who “prefer slogans to statistics” are unfortunately much more common than people who subscribe to Ozy’s more nuanced view. But in both cases, that isn’t the point; it doesn’t matter whether feminists or anti-feminists tend to be more wrong, it matters what the problem is and what, if anything, we should be doing to fix it. If the goal is finding the best solutions, then we’re right to seek out the best arguments available and assess those, rather than argue about which group tends to have views that are more divorced from reality and common sense.
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I think anyone trying to call that one on personal experience is just going to be describing their bubble. E.G. I hang out on left-wing mainstream news sites, which means the commenters patiently explaining why articles don’t make sense are typically right-wing, which is clear close enough to “anti-feminist” for me to think of them as the sensible ones. But IRL my friends are left-wing and feminist and smart and would probably be in the right if they got into a row with an anti-feminist, so in meatspace I think of feminists as the smart ones.
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Have we considered the even simpler explanation that men get more utility from each marginal dollar because women select harder for well heeled and moneyed partners?
I mean, according to Forbes approximately 70% of americans report that they hate their jobs. I know the crowd here tends to skew relatively high g, high performing in general, and located in relatively wealthy parts of the country, so I’d imagine job satisfaction would be higher among this crew, but for the majority of the population work is bullshit and toil that people suffer through what they must in order to get what they need.
Have we considered that the men making more, but working disproportionate amounts of overtime to do it *might* not be the winners in this equation? Personally, I’ve recently taken an hours cut at work, and am down to a weekly average in the mid 80s. Let me tell you, I don’t do this for my health. I do this because, as summed up in an oktrends report captioned by (Very pro feminist) Christian Rudder:
“The data is clear: if you’re a young guy and don’t make much money, cool. If you’re 23 or older and don’t make much money, you can go die in a fire.”
(https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/
Chart located midway down the page)
Given Scandinavia’s dismal results despite a lot of time and money being thrown towards equalizing the gap, I think the only thing that’s really going to change things is if female billionaires start choosing to elope with their virile, young, penniless backup dancers, pool staff, and moderately successful cover models like their male counterparts, and the trend filters down to the masses.
As it stands, life is way too good for men at the top of the food chain, and way too dismal at the bottom not to be motivated to compete, even at the risk of life and health. Maybe women have similar motivational structures in place, though my impression is that they don’t. Would you really want to build them if it would solve the gap?
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Um, would you mind to actually cite those “dismal results”. I happen to live in Finland, and while our society is not an egalitarian paradise, I do not think we have many areas left where men outperform women.
We tend to have another rather gendered problem, which tends to give fuel to antifeminism: While there are plenty of girls in STEM, a large fraction of boys performs very poorly in school and they regularly drop out completely. Nowadays pretty much even the most trivial blue collar jobs require some sort of formal education and the job market is abysmal even for people with university degrees, let alone someone who has no diploma whatsoever and a bunch of mental health issues on top.
Antifeminists blame this development on feminism. Essentially, they say we should restore gendered privileges to those boys so that they would perform at least as well as girls. And feminists see this as a silly argument, and much of the problem as a product of patriarchy. The traits we encourage in boys will make them rebel and drop out; the traits we encourage in girls will make them conform.
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This is a straw man. I’ve heard anti-feminists argue that boys tend to benefit from a different environment and that schools have started to cater to how girls learn best. The argument is generally that schools should find a way to cater to how boys learn best (I’ve never seen it argued that this has to be to the expense of girls).
Dismissing this as ‘restore gendered privileges’ is the typical dismissive argument against doing anything for boys/men, which equates anything that helps men with the patriarchy and thus something to be opposed.
That is inherently a misandrist position.
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For lack of much time before heading back out to the field, I’m going to cite roe0’s comment from upthread and the links found therein.
I’ll remain open minded, and if you have some inside information that the pay gap itself, or gender gaps in nursing and engineering (As roe0 mentions) have closed, I’ll certainly update as necessary.
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Well, the pay gap in Finland is 20%, which is above the OECD average (http://www.wikigender.org/countries/europe-and-central-asia/gender-equality-in-finland/)
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See also here – http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/files/epo_campaign/131205_country-profile_finland.pdf
Looks pretty much like everywhere else.
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I’m extremely curious whether income effects are equally strong for (A) all humans who want to date women, or (B) for all men who want to date any humans, or whether they’re limited to (C) men who want to date women. (I feel like I’ve read somewhere that they’re not as strong for women who want to date men.)
If income selection in dating is driving some portion of income equality, it would be interesting to try to figure out what’s causing income selection in dating. “High income is seen for some reason as desirably masculine” would be my default hypothesis (I’d bet that effects in (B) and (C) are stronger than in (A)), but curious what the numbers would say.
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The most likely hypothesis for income selection in dating IMO is:
In non-human animals almost always, females mate up and across dominance hierarchies (dominance hierarchies are very old – lobsters have them).
Human women pretty much certainly follow this same heuristic in mate choice (though it’s more complicated, because humans are more complicated)
A high income is a very good indicator of being near the top of a dominance hierarchy.
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Roe0 – this would be one reason why data on how strongly men preferentially seek high-income men and/or how strongly women preferentially seek high-income women would be interesting. If women prefer high-status people, and that’s driving sexual selection for incomes, we should see very strong benefits to being a rich lesbian and very weak benefits to being a rich gay man. That does not resonate with me as the most likely pattern, but I would like to see real numbers.
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Katclar –
It’s pretty easy to see why the dominance hierarchy heuristic is adaptive. But what qualifies as adaptive for homosexual attraction?
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Homosexual attraction is not decoupled from heterosexual attraction. Young people with symmetrical facial features, good social skills, and popular body shapes are more successful in attracting partners, no matter who they’re going after. Humans are human and tend to be attracted to other humans for recognizable human reasons, even when their expected number of offspring is not directly affected.
It would be unexpected, to me, to find that any particular trait was attractive only to heterosexual women, rather than a trait that was more attractive to women or a trait that was more attractive to humans who like men. The attraction algorithm of “be attracted to X, but only if you are female and your target is male” seems over-complicated and strictly more difficult to implement than plausible alternatives (“be attracted to X,” or “be attracted to X if you are a woman,” or “be attracted to X in men”).
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Katclar – You’re imagining an algorithm with an input for “gender of the subject in which the algorithm is implemented” and I don’t think that exists.
I imagine the algorithm is instantiated at some developmental phase and is probably modulated by the presence or absence of testosterone plus other unknown factors. (That is, there’s no good reason to assume homosexuality is heritable that I’m aware of).
So does the “hypergamy” component develop as an inseparable part of that attraction module or does it develop discreetly? Or is there some unknown factor? Even maybe the social constructionists are right?
Point being, you don’t need a thesis about extra complexity. Something either happens developmentally or it doesn’t. I think?
The problem with data collection on this is that there are very obvious external lifestyle benefits for younger, attractive homosexuals to date older, richer homosexuals (of both genders).
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I have a more fundamental objection to the wage gap narrative: limiting the discussion to that topic is in itself biased and destructive to solving the actual issues.
The earnings/wage gap is merely one aspect of workplace differences. We know that men work more hours. Work more overtime. Work more risky jobs. Have longer commutes. Etc, etc. We also know that these differences are all correlated to salary, which makes perfect sense. If you are willing to work more hours, employers will reward you for that. Same for overtime, workplace risks, commutes, etc.
So the full picture is not that men make more money. It’s that men are willing to make more sacrifices to earn more money. As Lawrence D’Anna argued, this is at least partly because the social norms are different for men and women, where men gain more from earning money (for a bunch of reasons, not in the least that men are expected to make wealth transfers to women aka ‘providing’ which simultaneously makes it more important for men to earn money and less important for women, who are expected to do things that compensate men for providing for them).
However, in our society, we greatly value earning money. A person who makes more sacrifices for their children and puts less effort into work is is ‘lazy’ according to our unspoken meritocracy norms and being ‘lazy’ is a sin. So you can’t say that women are less willing to sacrifice to earn money, without that being interpreted by most as claiming that women are lazy and thus sinful.
So the truth is interpreted as misogyny because the truth is mutilated by our stupid norms, which means that the truth becomes an emotional falsehood. The lie that women don’t make different choices is emotionally true, as the blame then goes to accepted scapegoats (old white men).
Of course, my truth completely goes against feminist culture, which is heavily invested in placing women on a pedestal, denying female agency and scapegoating white men (all patriarchal biases adopted by feminism, btw), while claiming that they don’t do so.
The fundamental divide between feminists and anti-feminists cannot solved and a truly productive discussion cannot be had on a more high level, unless opposing these biases stops being seen as misogyny.
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Seems like people could at least start by figuring out whether the whole “caring for children and other people (rather than selling your labor) is lazy” thing is a value we want to uphold, or whether caring for other people is actually a valuable thing to spend one’s time on, and a necessary form of service that some people enjoy more and are better at than others. Even if most of the people who are good at supporting and caring for others are women (unsure whether this is true), surely some of them will be men, and if we could stop socially devaluing caretaking, maybe some of those men would be more willing to make the tradeoff and do the tasks that would make them happier.
Of course, this is difficult in a society where everyone is expected to be independent and family units are less stable than they used to be. You don’t want to spend much of your life supporting someone only to have them desert you when they decide the arrangement no longer suits them. If stronger social ties are in place, supportive roles are financially safer, but I don’t think most people are willing to move back to the sorts of social technologies that allowed for those support structures. They tend to create systems that are stable but inflexible. A person without the ability to provide for themselves is unable to negotiate effectively for better treatment if their relationships become strained. So there’s something to be said for independence and flexibility, but there are always going to be costs involved.
If we decide that caregiving is important and necessary, but that it isn’t possible to restore the necessary social ties on a large scale (not that anyone has to give up on an individual level, mind you), I suppose we’ll eventually have to find some way to directly financially compensate all caretakers for the work they do. Kind of a difficult proposal, for multiple reasons, but if the alternatives are either abandoning support entirely or pretending that it doesn’t involve any of the costs of “real” work, those don’t sound very sustainable.
It’d help if the average household contained more than two adult members, of course. If more caretakers and more income-earners (and people who are combinations of both) share space and resources, it reduces the strain on all of them, provided everyone is contributing. The cost is having to share things with more people, though, so people would probably have to put more effort into being agreeable and understanding.
I note that Ozy said a lot of this stuff about caregiving above, but with the idea (I think?) that the earnings gap would disappear if we gave people more and better options. I’m not sure that’s true (it seems obvious to me that there are at least some differences between men and women, and eg average level of interest in caring for small children may be one of them), but certainly giving people better options is a good thing. Given all the very upset caregivers and wage earners there are in the world, I’m confident that we can still do better in this area.
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IMHO, one of the major problems with modern norms is that we’ve rejected the old inflexibility, but not really reflected very much on the benefits that it did have and how we achieve the same things (or better) with alternatives.
So some progressives simply want to impose their own inflexibility (like making it pretty much mandatory for women to work (a lot) or forcing men to clean/care/whatever), based on the specific norms that they like. However, such a position doesn’t liberate people from social norms, it just replaces the strict paths that the patriarchy mandated with other strict paths. So it effectively makes the people who like a traditionalist arrangement unhappy and women who like to work happy; while the patriarchy did the opposite. But it doesn’t necessarily increase overall freedom or happiness a great deal.
Then you have the people who want to maximize freedom, but as you said: you run into practical issues, like who will carry the burdens? It’s similar to how I feel about the universal base income: it’s nice if people get to turn their hobby into their work, but you still need people to maintain the sewers, which is never going to be anyone’s hobby. In practice, I see a lot of ‘freedom maximizers’ simply place these burdens on an outgroup, whose well-being they choose to ignore. That doesn’t seem very ethical either.
There is also a more fundamental conflict between individualism and collectivism that we need to negotiate. To what extent is a child a personal benefit & responsibility vs that of society as a whole? I don’t want children and I think that my country is overcrowded, so how much of a burden can you reasonably place on me for your child? On the other hand, do we want to see children punished for being born to poor parents?
Of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle for these issues. My objection is more that a lot of people don’t honestly debate the downsides of their proposals (usually not on purpose, but because humans are inherently prone to bias and fallacies). And you have the culture wars where ingroup bias is seen as a virtue and the biases of the outgroup is seen as evil.
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Ozy
Framing differences in choices that men and women make as ‘women’s choices’ is making male behavior the default, which is a major problem in these debates.
Men’s choices are not necessarily less influenced by social norms and such than women’s choices. Talking about pressures on women that push them into gendered choices, while ignoring the pressures on men that push them into gendered choices perpetuates the false idea that men have huge amounts of freedom, that women do not have.
Men’s choices don’t necessarily result in better outcomes, unless you cherry pick gender differences to only look at the outcomes where women are worse off and ignore outcomes where men are worse off (framing workplace differences as merely being the ‘gender wage gap’ and/or pointing at only the jobs where women are underrepresented are examples of this cherry picking).
These are biased frames that this post suffers from (there are parts that add a little nuance, but most of it is one-sided) and in debates, controlling the framing of an issue is an immense advantage when it comes to persuasion, although it tends to reinforce biases.
Of course, anti-feminists have biased framing as well. It’s not even uncommon for anti-feminists to make the same mistakes as anti-feminists, for example, by talking only about women’s choices. Pointing at women’s choices as the cause of the wage gap is an implicit acceptance of a larger feminist narrative.
I’ve found this to be hard as well. I consider feminist theory/arguments to be a minefield of false premises, biased framing and such. Either you debate one or more of these premises or frames and then you get a very high level debate aiming at the rather hopeless goal of shifting the entire point of view of the person you debate with; or you step into their frame and point out internal inconsistencies (this is very tempting, since feminism tends to be full of double standards); but then you implicitly reinforce a large falsehood to combat a smaller one. Then the hope is that the smaller falsehood is a supporting strut, so a larger part of the structure collapses with it; and the person then builds a better theory in it’s place.
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Nursing seems like a terrible example to use. Median salary for registered nurses was $71K in 2015.
It seems to me that there are lot of men leaving money on the table by not considering nursing as a career.
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It feels like there is a weird, social construction thing going on here. Like, forget dudes and ladies, imagine tribe A and tribe B. Tribe A enjoys, on average, lady stuff. Tribe B enjoys, on average, dude stuff. They live together.
One day someone notices that B’s tend to get more money.
B apologist explains that their stuff is, as determined the incomprehensible masters of the marketplace, more valuable. A partisan tells him to shove it.
How can this be fixed?
I can see a few answers:
1. No need to fix it. People are allowed to have whatever preferences they want.
2. We need to pay A jobs just as much as we pay B jobs, screw the marketplace and its whims!
But the idea of trying to adjust stuff such that every member of A and B is still free to choose, but the total outcome ends up 50/50 strikes me as trying to fix literally the hardest interpretation of the ‘problem’. Like, even if that worked, it wouldn’t change anything (a few more nurses would be B, a few more CEOs would be A), and it would be super hard to do.
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(1) The masters of the marketplace, quite comprehensibly, pay everyone as little as they can get away with.
(2) Members of each tribe are encouraged to develop the virtues traditionally associated with “their” tribe, and seen as defective or difficult to deal with when they have the “wrong” virtue profile.
(3) Some of the virtues traditionally associated with Tribe A are niceness, caring, quiet selflessness and the ability to compromise to make everyone happy and get along. Some of the virtues traditionally associated with Tribe B are assertiveness, courage, self-confidence and the ability to get their way even when others disagree.
Imagine the ideal members of Tribes A and B, each being the perfect embodiment of tribal virtues. Assume that each of them does a very important job that produces a similar amount of value, and both of them do their jobs perfectly. The compensation for both jobs is determined by negotiation. Is it likely that our two ideal workers will receive the same amount of compensation?
Alternatively, replace / supplement the social conditioning of virtues in (2) with biology — hormones, brain structure, whatever you like. Now the majority of members of Tribe A can’t match Tribe B in assertiveness, even if they wouldn’t be judged “bitchy” for trying.
This is already getting too depressing to write, and we haven’t even introduced the quirks of human reproduction into our model.
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That’s very well put.
To make matters more depressing, it’s very hard to see whether the jobs produce as much value as each other. It might be that jobs that produce the most value (using the admitted somewhat cramped economic definition of something someone else is willing to pay for) select for B members, either because they require the B virtues you identify or some additional qualities that are also unevenly distributed. So if we pass a rule that says teachers and brain surgeons need to have their wages equalized and some percentage of future promising brain surgeons become teachers, we might all be worse off. On the other hand, if we do nothing and it turns out that brain surgeons and teachers really are misvalued, we’re also failing.
On the somewhat optimistic side, if it’s true that Tribe A is significantly underpaid relative to their value and has cultural qualities that prevents them from being paid as much as B, there is an opportunity for headhunters or other similar services to identify the most productive and underpaid As and convince them to move to higher salary jobs, benefiting the As, the firms that get them, and the recruiters.
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It’s interesting that no one is talking about why computer programmers earn more than nurses. The median salary for computer programmers is about $12,000 higher than for RNs. Why?
I’m in nursing school now – It’s a two year program but I had to take college classes in anatomy, chemistry, and microbiology to get in, among others, meaning that it takes around four years for most people to get their degree. We have a lot of coursework, plus hands on skills training, plus clinical days most weeks that start at 6:30AM. For most programs, only 60-80% of the starting class gets their degree – and then they have to pass the boards.
Nursing as a career involves a lot of technical knowledge and critical thinking – we have to be able to recognize any problem our patients have and alert the doctors, plus be able to double check doctor’s orders. Also, it involves 12 hour shifts, large amounts of bodily fluids, and a high risk for injury. There’s a serious nursing shortage in the US. So why don’t we make as much as computer programmers?
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If you think nurses are underpaid now, wait until we have a single-payer healthcare system.
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Well I’ve been considering saying this somewhere and this seems like a good place: another wage gap relavant idea that has not been mentioned is that being a career associated with women is itself related to a career being worse paid (as well as less respected etc) (and vice versa).
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Nursing wages are an interesting issue. There are a lot of factors.
1) Among the nurses I know, there are some pluses and minuses – it’s a relatively high paying job compared to a lot of other jobs with similar education (social worker, teacher, copy editor), and it often has very flexible hours. On the other hand, it’s high pressure and emotionally draining.
2) Some of the literature argues that government programs are pushing down starting wages, by offering tuition assistance conditioned on taking jobs in areas with nursing shortages, which relieves some of the wage pressure in those markets by providing them with extra hires at existing wages.
3) The gripping hand when you make a specific comparison, like computer programmer or football coach or whatever, is marginal productivity. How much extra will a customer pay for an hour with a smarter, harder-working nurse, or how much better is her product? How much extra is an hour of work by a smarter, harder working computer programmer worth than an average one?
Unfortunately for nurses, the market structure means that even if an above average nurse is much better than an average one, the hospital is unlikely to get paid as much more and a tech firm will make if their computer programmers are above average. Medicare and Medicaid pay pretty much the same for a given service no matter who provides it, and although a hospital with a terrific reputation can negotiate higher rates from private insurance companies, it’s still limited. There are other benefits – some providers are paid based on results, or only charge cash, and good nurses may reduce lawsuits, but having a workforce who isn’t merely qualified but is actually above average doesn’t translate to additional income per employee as well for nurses as it does for computer programmers.
As a result, we would expect the highest paying computer programmer jobs to be more and more selective, moving the average up.
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The benefit to having really talented nurses is in what kind of nursing they can do. Nurses need a lot of skill and extra training to work in specialty jobs like the cardiac cath lab and flight nursing, but those nurses make maybe $5000 a year more than working on a med surg floor.
A lot of my point too was that people say that women make less money because they don’t want to work long hours or do physically demanding jobs, but that isn’t true. People say women go into the caring professions, and that’s true, but that doesn’t mean nurses and CNAs just fluff pillows.
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@Basil
It is a fact that when you look at the averages, women do work fewer hours and less physically demanding jobs.
Of course, it is not true that every woman works less than every man.
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I’m not saying that women on average work as many hours as men, I’m saying that the idea that women won’t take physically demanding jobs that require long hours is false. It’s not that women are less hardworking then men, its that women are also expected to do most of the housework and child care on top of their paying jobs. Hospital nurses work 3-4 days out of the week and have the other days off. If men a fair share of the housework and child care things would be different.
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Basil, my hypothesis is that if computer programmers are paid more than nurses, it’s probably mostly because the extra money that a more talented computer programmer makes for her employer is more than the extra money a more talented nurse makes for his employer.
In other words, if hiring a top 5% computer programmer will earn my company an extra $50,000 per year over hiring an average programmer, then I have an incentive to pay more to recruit better talent, assuming I can identify those top programmers on average. If hiring a to 5% nurse will earn my hospital only $5,000 more than an average nurse, then I’m not going to offer as much. Over time, the middle and lower computer programmers get directed to other careers and overall computer programming wages go up.
(My hypothesis is that medical providers charge pretty much the same rates to most government and insurance payors. It’s great to have nurses who can draw blood painlessly and who require less supervision, but my guess is that it doesn’t have as direct a connection to revenue as computer programmer quality).
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Some options:
1) Nurses are generally union, which means that they have significant benefits and job security, and if you don’t count those then you are undervaluing their wages.
2) Nurses are generally union, and unions are usually set up so seniority will override smaller margins of skill w/r/t promotions and wages. This tends to keep wages down. It also deters truly top performers from entering the field since there is no “pot of gold” in nursing; unlike programming, you can’t make $1million/year with stock options and no matter how hard you work you probably won’t get promoted ahead of your senior peers.
3) Nursing covers a wide range of skill level, from an associate degree on up. Unless the studies are comparing apples to apples the median is probably off.
4) Nurses have less job competition: there are hundreds of millions of would-be computer programmers around the world, and more of them in comparison to the available full-time jobs, so the ones who make it to successful full-time work have been more heavily filtered than nurses.
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There’s a complication/simplification problem.
If we really mostly all agree that the issue is that women tend to have work/life characteristics that differ from men (job choice, amount of hours worked, length of time spent out of the work force), then it’s really reductive to just say “how do I tell my daughter she’s worth less than every man she’ll ever meet, that her grandmother is worth less than her grandfather, etc.”
I think the problem with the reductive argument is that it implies the problem is easily solved – we just pass some laws saying that women get paid as much as men, and we punish the evil doers. But if the problem is that because of their choices, men actually make more stuff (or pour more coffees or whatever) than women, then it’s not that simple – maybe we should try to nudge people’s choices, or maybe we should live with the status quo, in which the gap still exists but is narrowing over time. Or maybe men don’t actually make more stuff on average, but given the premise, it’s probably worth looking at.
(PS: I think the ban on the meme that dare not speak its name was helpful here – it helped me be less reductive in my argument against reductive arguments and think more about what I was saying).
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An element to consider is that the current system doesn’t appear to be static. Men are dropping out of the system at high numbers, creating an increasing imbalance of many highly educated women and far fewer men.
So we appear to actually already be changing things, although probably in a very destructive way and without much understanding.
My interest is in improving that understanding and acting sensibly, rather than just let things run out of control until you get a huge backlash that is equally uncontrolled.
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Some anecdata:
I’ve been involved with the environmental health and safety (EHS) aspects tangentially related to my job for my last six employers or so. It is very common to have a group of employees (NOT in the EHS department) that choose to get the training and equipment to deal with onsite emergencies. These go by various names (HAZMAT team, Emergency Response Team, etc). These teams are drawn from any part of the organization and (most importantly for this topic) they are all either volunteers or paid a trivial amount of money. So money isn’t a motivation. My observations are:
1. These teams are overwhelmingly male. I don’t have exact numbers for previous employers, by my current site has 3000 employees, 192 members of the ERT, of which four are women.
2. The teams are very much majority non-exempt.
3. There are more members of management than women, but not many.
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Jordan Petersen argues that the archetypal male is the hero. And you don’t just see this when people can think about it, but in emergency situations, you also see that the men tend to become active to eliminate the threat. For example, during various terrorist attacks in Europe, it was exclusively civilian men who fought back against the attackers (like the attempted terrorist attack on the Thalys or the truck that drove over the boulevard), even though civilian women were present too.
Of course, women have their own archetype, so in other situations pretty much exclusively women step up.
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Late to the party here, and some of what I have to say has already been said by Lawrence D’Anna, but…
I’m going to take what’s more or less the standard “anti-feminist” position (an odd term for it when it incorporates a bunch of feminist reasoning, but whatever) on this one and say that looking at the unadjusted “pay gap” is meaningless, basically for the reasons above, but I think there’s a bit more to be said there.
(Note: Basically everything I am about to say here generalizes quite a bit.)
The thing about the “pay gap” in this sense is that it’s essentially a summary statistic — not a causal node. (Also, it’s a terrible term because it’s easily conflated with pay discrimination, which is a relatively coherent bundle of causal nodes.) It’s not something you can directly act on; it’s not a coherent phenomenon — it’s an effect (of a number of things), not a cause. Talk about actual causal nodes.
On top of that, and there’s no guarantee that bringing it closer to parity constitutes an improvement. It is, at best, an indicator. But even if we agree that non-parity indicates a problem, that doesn’t mean parity indicates the lack of a problem; there are any number of ways that you could bring it closer to parity while making the actual detailed state of things worse. Performing that sort of adjustment is just breaking your indicator.
Ozy has pointed out in the past that one advantage of SJ is that it’s consequentialist. (Although, I’m not sure I buy their argument that the alternatives aren’t; “actually pick who’s best” seems pretty results-based to me!) But it is, IMO, consequentialist in a really stupid way, one focused on summary statistics and disconnected from causality (often treating summary statistics as if they were causal nodes, rather than summaries of decomposable phenomena). Admittedly, this argument can be somewhat (entirely? unsure) avoided if you don’t endorse individualism, so that these summary statistics can be assigned direct moral relevance; but A. I’m not sure you can entirely avoid it, and B. then you’re not an individualist, so…
(Don’t forget the question: Who is hurt? If you claim women are harmed by something, but you cannot find any particular women who are harmed by it, then unless you’re not an individualist something is wrong!)
As Ozy says, one must look for the source of the injustice (if it exists) and stop it there. In the case of discrimination, that probably means blinding measures, although compensatory measures make sense too if you can come up with a way to measure it (one that does not assume equal distribution).
So like, Ozy, when you say “occupational segregation”… do you mean “hiring discrimination”? Because hiring discrimination is obviously wrong, but if this “occupational segregation” is occurring by choice there’s less of a problem — I’m not going to say “no problem”, but again it’s not the occupational segregation that itself is the problem, but rather it is the indicator of a problem. “Occupational segregation” is itself a summary rather than a coherent bunch of causal nodes.
(Again, we have my trilemma from here — you can escape this claim (the A branch) if you are a collectivist (the B branch) or if you make the claim that occupational segregation (in and of itself — not its underlying causes, that would put you back in the A branch!) does in fact have effects and negative ones (the C branch). Note that these negative effects could consist of discrimination in the same direction as the segregation, generating a positive feedback loop; but if you want to make that claim you should make it explicit.)
I mean, fundamentally what’s wrong with discrimination is keying off of irrelevant features, right? Like — I’m going to use religion rather than sex/gender in this example because it’s the first one that comes to mind, but everything here is analogous — I’ve heard of religious discrimination lawsuits against companies that require their male employees to be shaved, since some religions require their male adherents to wear beards. (Not sure how any of this applies to women with naturally hairy faces, but it’s not relevant to this example, so I will ignore that.) And, I agree that such a hiring practice is wrong — but the “religious discrimination” is not what is wrong with it. That is what you can sue over in this country, but that is not really the fundamental injustice here. Because in fact there isn’t discrimination based on religion, just different impacts on different religions due to their different rates of beardedness. Which here is something you can sue over, but what’s really wrong here is discrimination based on beardedness! Because beardedness is irrelevant, but you’re keying off of it anyway. That’s discrimination. If there were no religions requiring beards it would be just as wrong, even if our legal system would not recognize it as such.
That’s really the goal to my mind — to unbundle things, to decouple things — and why I like to speak of the goal in terms of “orthogonality” rather than “equality”.
I guess a more sex/gender-based example would be e.g. job interviews, or Nita’s example above of salary negotiation (well, Nita’s example involves a number of things — the social conditioning is an injustice also — but sticking to that one thing); the problem isn’t the disparity between genders, the problem is that you’re implicitly keying off an irrelevant feature, not how that irrelevant feature is distributed between genders.
Note by the way that one thing we can break down and unbundle is of course the notion of sex/gender itself — the relevance here is that the notion of “innate differences between men and women” is a bit, well, nonsensical. Biological differences, sure. “Innate”… well, I like to say, “innate” and “inherent” are words that usually indicate a mistake. So, let’s break this down — people fall into these two big clusters, yes? But, like, these two big clusters are made up of multiple components, and have causes. Which means that with more understanding we can likely determine just what causes what. Consider for instance the fact that men tend to do better than women at tests of mental rotation — Sarah Constantin here mentions a study that found that transgender men had their mental rotation ability increase over a period of hormone treatment (which I assume means testosterone). Assume for the purposes of the example that this effect is real. Now all of a sudden this difference is not a mysterious “innate difference”, but a difference due to testosterone! Which is something we can control. You could actually take testosterone if you wanted to get better at this. (In a sense, you could trade off femininity for mental rotation ability.)
Basically my point is, the more we learn, and the more we learn to control, the less “innate” differences will seem. Note though that this may often be irrelevant to the points above — whether it’s a mysterious “innate” difference or an understood biological difference, it’s not clear that this can be called an injustice. (But if it is, then once we understand it, we can do something about it! But again I’m not so convinced that it is.)
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Ah, crap, the links and formatting went away when I copied and pasted. Well, the italics we can probably do without, but the links were supposed to be as follows:
“Trilemma from here” was supposed to link here: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/open-thread-8-all-your-race-are-belong-to-us/comment-page-1/#comment-7294
“Sarah Constantin here mentions” was supposed to link here: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy-female-hormones/
(…and, now this will probably get caught in moderation leaving my comment above confusing; oh well…)
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