Let's go back to this one, because there's an issue of disjointed realities when this topic is discussed.
IRStuff said:
Or that the fact that women have systematically been paid less for equal work not sexism?
There's a huge trend in the media to talk about 22 cents on the dollar, and then slip "equal work" in the back door of the discussion when "equal work" does not fit the 22% figure, statistically.
Obama's department of labor did a pretty exhaustive multivariate analysis on the gender wage gap in 2009. Link:
After controlling for the confounders for which they had data, which would include "equal work," the wage gap shrunk to between 4% and 7%. Those confounders included choice of profession, choice to have kids, how many kids, how many years people take off of their professional careers to do other things (which may include children, or taking care of the elderly), whether you're a single parent, whether your household is a two income household, and such. It did not include things like personality type, or how aggressively the different genders tend to negotiate salaries, or how often they switch employers to chase a better paycheck, because they didn't have data for those. But each of those impacts salary as well.
So the salary impact of those things (personality typing, negotiation, etc) as well as workplace sexism, all must fit within that band of 4% to 7% differential.
If we're going to speak honestly about the gender wage gap, we need to acknowledge up front that sexism likely does play a part, but that the media is grossly overstating that part. And that analysis is almost a decade old. The band may have shrunk further.
There's also some touchy math we'd have to do regarding the
male variability hypothesis, which was a thing that sexists used (very improperly) to justify sexim for a while, but non-sexists are finding unbiased evidence for in modern studies. So for instance, the median scores across genders on the ASVAB are basically the same, but the male bell curve is flatter, with more males appearing on both tails of the graph. (more smarter males, more dumber males) This wouldn't matter at all for the "22 cents on the dollar" math if the income distribution were linear, because the high and low variabilities in men would average out. But income distribution is not linear, and that nonlinearity is increasing, with a higher share of the income being increasingly concentrated in the bank accounts at the right hand side of the bell curve. So that's going to skew the numbers some. I can't say how much, maybe not a lot, but it's worth mentioning. It would probably take an actuary to unravel how significant that effect is, honestly.
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