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The Wage Gap and Its Fallacies
So for whatever reason, I hang out on Facebook and argue with liberals because take that liberal friends! Any case, today one of the more reasonable ones (a guy who appreciates a chance to argue ideas with people opposing his own) posted this picture:
Ohoho! It’s funny because it’s liberal.
Words ensued. Wage equality is a big issue on the rise right now. Clinton has spoken out in favor of it. Arguing that it doesn’t work just gets you sneers of derision from liberal-folk because you suck, bigot. Or something like that. Since many of the typical arguments were showing up, I didn’t feel obligated to add other than that this policy would result in less jobs for women.
My friend countered that there’s little evidence this would happen. So I noted this will mean less jobs in general for everyone, and women are a part of everyone. His reply was this was an acceptable trade off considering the benefits. After all, it seems to have worked out for Affirmative Action. So me being me, I couldn’t let that lie.
“Seems” is a loaded word, and the conclusion from your statement speaks to Frederic Bastiat’s Broken Window story. The problem here is that there are trade-offs once you start meddling in the economy, and though you can justify it with how things appear at present because the losses involved are invisible. One person might get a job or promotion, but another won’t. A lawsuit might encourage a company to promote or hire certain protected classes of people, but it might also discourage them from hiring or promoting anyone at all until absolutely necessary. Is the loss smaller than the gain? There’s no way to tell. Sociological experimentation lacks active ways to compare. We don’t have a parallel universe to observe what happens when District Manager Schrödinger is trying to fill a position.
And here we run into the basic conceit of these policies: That a third, outside party has better judgment about how to run a business than the actual business owner. In this case, we’ve taken statistics that focus only on one output, wage and salary comparisons between the sexes, and assumed that there is only one input that has any consequence: sex. But these comparison tables beg the question. They separate the sexes and assume that any disparity exists only because of this ultimately arbitrary grouping. They ignore or dismiss as inconsequential any other inputs.
And the problem is, there’s as many varied inputs as there are individuals. If we were to take two individuals of similar pay rate in my office, you’d get two entirely different pictures of why they are paid that rate. Likewise take two people of similar experience and seniority and you’d get two different stories of why they are paid differently. It is almost arrogant for a third party to look in and say, “Well this person is paid less because you don’t like his race/sex/curly hair/dashing good looks.” (I’m the last by the way.) This is precisely what such legislation and regulation does, and shifts the burden of proof the employer to prove otherwise — guilty until proven innocent.
Moreover, these comparison tables rely on a false premise that such disparity is not only unfair, but systemic. There has to be some unspoken agreement somehow that all businesses, big and small, would agree to such disparities — at least on average. It defies self-interested reason even. The only way such disparities in the past have been able to be enforced just about anywhere is to encode it in the law, putting the force of government behind it. Otherwise there’s almost always someone who can figure out there’s more to gain in bucking the system than to go along with it.
This is a short-sighted policy that has good intentions but ignores any possible trade-offs or long-term consequences. Moreover, it removes the right of two individuals to negotiate a contract to their satisfaction, placing a third party with their own agenda forcing decisions in a way they approve. It’s going to cause problems.
Essentially the part of the pay-gap argument that drives me nuts is that it ignores anything at all about the individuals involved. The employee’s contributions, achievements, and abilities are ignored. The Employer’s needs, ability to pay, and company vision is ignored. It’s all distilled away until only one thing remains: gender (or biological sex because words no longer mean anything). This is the essential fallacy Progressives hold to: that an individual’s accomplishments and needs are inconsequential to the collective they belong to.
People will argue that if you take a man and a woman with the exact same employment history, skills, talents, and abilities, the man will obviously be paid more because misogyny. But this is a spherical chicken of uniform density argument: IT’s a hypothetical that can’t happen and only exists for exposition alone. In reality, you will never see such a pair that their only difference will be their biological sex. It’s impossible as each individual’s human experience will vary from person to person.
Progressives want you to believe that not only does this highly improbably situation exist, but it exists en masse on a frequent basis such that only intervention from a third party will fix things. But of course, with Progressives it’s never ultimately about fixing things. It’s about giving more power to the State.
Published in Economics
I’ve met one electrical engineer in my career who was a woman. Most women in the engineering field I’ve met were mostly civil, environmental, and a couple structural.
True, but the argument still gets made, and when there is a Federal Bureau of Job Classification and Wage Scale Adjustment, those jobs will be treated as though they were the same.
Depends on the kind of shop. Corporate 9-5 style you’re right. But for consulting companies who work at the client’s site, travel and so forth, I’m not sure I remember a single woman.
Not really. You would get what you are starting to see now. Womyn can get about any job they want making about the same or more money. They get more flexible work hours for taking care of children and family because of work-life balance programs designed for womyn. Men still have to work the same or more hours to make up the difference that womyn don’t work. As I have heard several managers say when I have seen men asked off early for “work-life balance” stuff like pick up their kid from school. “That is a you problem, not a me problem. You need to find a you answer”.
You see all you need is two standards. As long as the womyn standard gets them what they want nobody will care. Any men that does make an issue of it can just be fired. There is nothing like threatening a man’s livelihood and family to back them the heck down and make them shut up.
That’s not how it worked in the military. They lowered physical requirements for women. They didn’t like having people mention that, so they lowered them for men too. If we’re under an enforced regime of wage controls, hours will be part of it. So if the women get time off to pick up the kids, the men will too. The solution will be to prevent men from being allowed to work harder than the women can. This will not be good for productivity.
They are more likely IT rather than real-time propeller-heads. There they fall off to maybe 5%, if that.
Some related jobs have lots of women. If you want good Business Analysts, hire young women, and you’ll get the best info. Women like talking to women, and men like talking to women. She’s asking about your job like you’re the most important thing, and men like that too.
The wage gap is a fallacy. They compare generic women and men. Women do tend to drift towards certain fields that don’t pay as much and they leave the workplace for motherhood. When they have the exact same jobs, they either make as much or make less because they work fewer hours or the reasons above. Their arguement is a fallacy. Even if women were more productive in the exact same job as men and earned less, they would be more attractive to employers, but the wage gap is a fallacy so it doesn’t matter.
Thanks, Spenglerson.
I see what you did there.
This pretty much already exists.
Here you go. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational Classification).
With just the click of click of a mouse, you too can download to your PC, either an XLS or a PDF file of the 840 detailed occupations according to their occupational definition.
If you scrounge around on this site long enough, there are wage tables somewhere.
Our little symphony orchestra almost hired an H1B individual as a general manager a couple of years ago. Contrary to everything you hear, the process was unbelievably complex, and that is how we ran into the SOC, the wage tables and the Occupational Employment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was a nightmare.
A large company has the resources to handle the paperwork. Smaller outfits are at a disadvantage.
They were looking for an H1-B for general manager? That is the first time I’ve heard of something like that.
(A dirty little secret: some of the H1-B techs have been known to stretch their resumes a tad. Hard to believe, I know.)
Doesn’t everyone, or is this excessive even by regular standards?
Not all of them to be sure, but I’ve run into a few that I knew weren’t proficient in the things that they were supposed to be proficient in. They certainly aren’t unique in that regard, but there have been cases where guys have come in who didn’t have a clue about a communications protocol that they had supposedly worked with before.
Depends on what you mean by stretch. In one case I was involved with the guy that sent the resume and interviewed was a different guy than the one that showed up for the job.
The so-called wage gap is simply the transfer of “disparate impact” statistical manipulation from race to sex.
Actually,women and US educated women in Japan earn far less. So I fired 5 overpaid Japanese men and replaced them with 4 women, and one connected man who could write in Japanese, increased our effectiveness, computerized an old fashioned office for half the cost. So if women are really paid less here, start a business and hire only underpaid women. Or start a business if we ever get rid of the Democrats and starting a business becomes a good idea again.
Isn’t it interesting that all of these visionaries can spot large scale misallocations of labor and capital, but absolutely none of them do what you did. In addition to being profitable it would also reduce the “wage gap” slightly over time.
But no, that would require work. It’s much easier and a lot more “fair” to ask the clerics to perform a ritual under The Marble Dome to fix everything.
Female doctors work fewer hours, have shorter careers, and gravitate to easier less demanding specialties. I am so sick of the BS surrounding this.
I don’t get what the big deal is: some dead people hurt other dead people before I was born and therefore I have to pay some other people who weren’t born when the first dead people hurt the other dead people to help even out the stuff that was done to the other dead people before I was born.
It makes perfect sense you guys.
In my twenty-seven year EE career, I’ve known two women EEs. The first was a peer in my first job. She’s stayed there, working through marriage and baby. I’m sure she declined promotion into the management track, as she never shirked any task, displayed any incompetence, nor played the woman card in any situation I’m aware of.
The second I met through a customer in the oilfield business. She was always the only woman on a fracking well-site that I ever saw. There were occasional physical tasks on site where engineers would pitch in instead of twiddling their thumbs. She was truly too petite for much of that, and it probably played a part in her preference for coding tasks over hands-on with the process components. One guy who was happy to do the hands-on engineering was the only one to survive the oil crash bloodbath.
Families, physical characteristics, and specialty focus areas matter to a career in ways the feminists won’t acknowledge.
I’m reminded of the Steve Martin joke about not paying taxes when you are a millionaire – first, get a million dollars.
Women get ahead in the same fashion as men – they outsource as much of their non-work related lives as possible. There are too many factors to simply say “Bob and Jane started worked at the same time with similar backgrounds so they should get paid the same after x amount of years”. This is not Japan in the mid 1980’s.
In some industries and in some locations, it is possible for a wealthy couple to hire nannies or governesses (typically live-in) and outsource domestic and childrearing enough that they can both pursue very profitable careers – say investment banking, law, lobbying, or medicine. That being said, I think to most people in most places rising up the ladder means being not only skilled but flexible: to go in early and work late, to go to dinners, to travel upon occasion or frequently, to move. Children and non-mobile spouses are, for these purposes, spanners in the works. That’s why the more common model for women who have risen up the ladder is either no children or a stay at home spouse who allows them to be as flexible as they need to be.
“Dismissive of a lot of these facts.” You just described most progressives. The narrative matters. Their cause matters. But the facts? Not so much.
I suspect when one really compares apples to apples, most of the gap disappears. In my own world —
Writer’s are paid the exact same royalty rate, regardless of gender. Sales are based on whether the market likes what we write. Currently, several of the best-selling choral music composers are women.
Orchestral recording session musicians are paid equally per hour, regardless of gender. Easily half of the Nashville studio string players are women. A woman has been the concert mistress for some years now. The top two horn chairs are women.
Teachers (secondary & higher ed) are paid based on years of experience and their own level of education. When my wife retired from an elementary school, nearly every teacher in the school was a woman. The handful of male teachers were not paid any more than the women.
Nailed it. I always argue from individual rights: by what right does the state interfere in the voluntary exchange of work for money in the first place? That undercuts all the Titanic-deck-chair-shuffling. This argument is just as likely to fail with a Leftist as any other, but you have the advantage of arguing what really matters, and stating aloud what really matters. Maybe some of it will stick after a few (thousand?) repetitions.
The refutation of the Wage Gap myth requires math. The use of math is a kind of mansplaining, a derivative of white privilege and math itself is simply another metaphor for rape. Shouldn’t the internet like erase most of the these comments as hate crimes?
OK. Any women out there who are afraid they won’t be paid as much as a man, join the military. Pay scales are set by Congress. Cheers.
After sleeping on it…
I think a better comeback is along the lines of, “Hey, I’m down with any excuse to implement Soviet style centrally controlled wages. For equality.”
One of the points I keep hearing Obama, HRC and the Democrats make is that womyn get paid less. I have seen numbers that show this in private, public sectors. I have also seen numbers that show this on the White House staff, the HRC campaigns, the Clinton Foundation. My thoughts are if they really thought this was an issue then remove the pay gap from those areas they control. Obama can do it to the White House staff with no law changes. I suspect he could do it in the Federal government the same way. HRC has total control over the pay of her enterprises. She can implement the changes at any time. Once they have their own houses in order then preach to the private sector.
But you didn’t build that. So it’s time for the Feds to step in and rearrange things a little.