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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
If They do it, its because of Reasons; if You do it its because of Racism (sexism, islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, …)
Oh, do I ever heart this post. Let me count the ways:
Someone else alluded to this. Pretty sure I’ve heard Rush say it. If women really were paid a percentage of what men are paid for doing the same job, someone would’ve started an Amazon or a Starbucks (or whatever), filled the entire roster with women, undercut everyone else’s prices, and would be dominating the market. Why hire a man if he costs more? (Of course, here we are trying logic against a liberal argument…..)
You’re too kind. I did particularly like my “District Manager Schrödinger” joke and I glad someone caught it.
Actually, I hadn’t heard that before, and it is a great argument.
Good post, C. U. Several of the member comments have mentioned that one difference is that women often rank home life as a higher priority than men do, making them prize a job that might be less demanding, has fewer or more flexible hours, and is closer to home and family. I’d add that women are probably more likely to go for the safe but lower-paying job over the riskier but higher-paying one.
This same calculation has played itself out in my family, with the expected results, but with the opposite sexes. I have a slightly lower-paying job than my wife’s. We’re both physics professors. I already had my job when we married, and she found one at a college just an hour away (a wonderful stroke of luck for us—many married physicists have trouble getting jobs near each other). Her college is more prominent, and there is a bigger push for research. Getting tenure is much harder there. I’m at a lower-paying, pretty easy-going college that’s happily surprised I do research at all. But it’s stable, and I like the stability, especially now that I’m married with children. I’ve considered going elsewhere, but it’s not worth the risk of starting over and not making tenure.
Meanwhile, I’ve made some sacrifices of my time to support her and make sure she’s got the time to devote to a more competitive research environment.
On that note, I wouldn’t be surprised if men are shown to be more likely to change jobs if dissatisfied with pay. As one of my first supervisors in the engineering field noted, sometimes the easiest way to get a good pay raise is to change jobs. I’ve found that true. I wouldn’t be surprised if women are more likely to remain in a job despite slow gains because they appreciate the stability.
I would even hypothesize this could manifest in ways that we couldn’t account for. Are men more likely to make waves? Are they more likely to threaten to leave if they don’t get better pay? Are they more aggressive in pursuing gains? All these are risky behaviors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of factors that might cause a disparity that we don’t even realize are there.
Again, this is why these studies are so faulty. Human interaction is rarely distilled down to one factor and that alone, yet Progressives attempt to say that not only does this happen, but necessarily so.
We shall not rest until all professions are broader professions.
Back in the dusky ages, it worked. When I was in the public IT consulting arena, I could ensure quality staffing on a project by picking women; women who bucked the trends to make it as far as they did were almost uniformly better at it than the men at the same level. Then came the feminist political steamroller. Within three to five years, the situation reversed itself.
Very true. Also the way to get “promoted” to a higher status title.
There is a difference between wage parity and earnings parity. Being a superannuated railway clerk (over 35 years service) I can cite anecdotal evidence that female employees working the same job classification earn about 75% of males despite receiving exactly the same wage rate. Trust me the collective agreement negotiated by the union makes no distinction between wage rates for different sexes.
The reason is that female clerks worked on average 35 hours per week compared to 44 hours for the male clerks. Do the arithmetic yourself and you will note the extra 5 hours straight time plus 4 hours at time-and-a-half per week accounts for the difference.
Since the 1970s’ most employers are committed to the concept of employment equity that is recruiting equal numbers of men and women. During my 35+ years of service I noted a higher turnover rate for female employees than male. In a union environment found in the railway industry (unions have been a thing on the railways since the Nineteenth Century) seniority is really important. Senior employees get first dibs on overtime, promotion to higher rated positions are based on experience and seniority and senior employees enjoy better employment security. Junior employees are the first to be furloughed in the event of a reduction in the volume of business.
Women, on the whole, work fewer hours and are junior hence earn less despite being paid at the same rate.
Particularly if you are willing to relocate anywhere in the country.
Men take risks, generally. Few women do, comparatively. Risks sometimes lead to more rewards , especially if you don’t take risks. Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. The opposite is Harrison Bergeron .
I’ve made that argument itself, many times. It usually meets with feigned incomprehension or blank looks by the lefties.
It’s best to keep pointing it out anyway. I’m not going to explain why in a place where the bad guys may be listening in.
Well, if they all had fallacies, they would all get paid.
This is the question I keep coming back to, not just on this, but nearly anything being pushed by the left.
I’m a middle manager (which must be it’s own level of hell) in a large-ish corporation. I manage about 100 people, in tech, so mostly men. So onerous are CA state laws, and our companies reactions to them, that I simply won’t hire anyone into a full-time job now. If they perform poorly I cannot fire them without months of special monitoring and documentation. If they are a woman that would likely take years, if they are a lesbian you likely won’t be able to do it, if they are a Jewish Lesbian in their 50’s, no chance. (Never mind how I know this)
Ergo, contractors. I can terminate contracts with relative ease.
A couple other anecdotes. Show up at a BART station before 8…men. Show up at the office before 9, men. Show up at the office after 4:30, men.
If I were to check the records I’d find that most of the woman on my team are out of, or bumping up against the limits of, their sick time.
I simply cannot get as much work from my female engineers as I do the men. But that’s okay because it’s a patriarchy ….doh….this company is run by woman.
And don’t get me started on millenials.
Please do. This I have to hear….
I’m right on the millenial cusp, born in 1983.
Talking to someone 10 years younger gives me hives.
I see what you did there.
This is something I’ve wondered about. I’m a lawyer with the state court system. There are about equal numbers of men and women lawyers employed here. My supervisor is a woman. The wages are set by the court’s administration along with the state department of management and budget. There is no overtime; it’s basically a 9-5 job, although some people choose to work longer, or at home in the evening, or on weekends in order to complete a particular task (but they’re not paid extra for doing so). Everyone is paid on the same scale; if you’ve been around longer, you might be slightly higher on the scale within a particular classification, but ultimately you top out and unless you move to a different scale, you make the same pay as everyone else at that level.
But in a union shop, as you point out, seniority is everything – and the most senior members are usually men. So to the extent that a wage gap exists among workers doing the same work, it would seem that it would most likely exist in union shops. And yet which party do the unions support? The Democrats – the party that consistently makes a big issue out of purported wage inequality. One wonders what will happen if the Democratic Party’s push for wage equality bumps up against the unions’ commitment to collective bargaining and the realities imposed by a seniority preference system. That is, will the Democrats enact laws that will eviscerate collective bargaining agreements that impose seniority preference rules? And how will the unions respond if they do?
No, they will include seniority in the calculation of how much everyone is allowed to earn. They do that now with public school teachers. (Of course they are also union.)
The Democrats use the unions and the unions use the Democrats. The Unions use the Democrats to cover their featherbedding and in return give money to the Democrats and persuade their members to vote Democrat. The Left is against uncontrolled wages and against profit, so the Unions fulfill those goals (by design). The ultimate goal, as I see it, is for everyone to belong to a union, run by the Federal Government, and all wages will then be controlled. The Feds won’t want to do it directly, because there is no one to point the accusing finger at when people complain and want change. It’s a similar situation to True Socialism or Fascism. If the government outright owns all the means of production, if there’s problems who can you blame? It’s like a balance of power, except it’s a balance of blame.
It’s important to remember that when Democrats give us reasons for their actions, they are not bound to use those reasons, ever. Reasons are weapons to achieve more power, and when they no longer serve that purpose, they are discarded.
Some people seem to need to learn that lesson over and over.
Many of the same forces in a union shop exist in a non-union workplace, so I doubt wage disparity statistics would be much different.
What the stats in a union shop do is prove the lie. They explain all the reasons for wage disparities.
I should be careful here as I haven’t seen a clear definition of a millenial. Those in my workforce that are under 40 which covers a range of about 30-40 (we hire very few junior engineers) have a sense of entitlement that never ceases to baffle me. I feel as though I missed a memo. A memo that informed all employees that they need not bother coming to work before 10; that an 8 hour day is an outrageous request; that any expectation of complete work is unreasonable. It truly seems like they see a job as something to squeeze into their busy lives as and when they can.
I keep thinking the next tech bust will finally wake them up but I’ve seen two rounds of layoffs have no effect whatever.
I have recently hired a couple of 20-somethings and have been impressed with their work ethic but it’s only a couple so hardly a sufficient population for drawing any conclusions.
Hear! Hear! Just this year, I was recruited by a competitor to do basically the same job I was doing. 30% more salary and my title went from supervisor to manager. The catch was I had to move from Tulsa to Houston. The vast majority of women I worked with at the old job (and quite a few of the men) would have never entertained an interview, much less an offer, because they won’t make that kind of geographic move.