Tag Archives: Gender Bias

The Persistent Wage Gap Myth

women-stem

I was discussing pay inequality between men and women the other day.  I absolutely don’t know what to do with someone who won’t acknowledge that men and women work different jobs.

Another point of interest:

In 2014 4,454 men died on the job.  The number of women who perished?

367

Blink.  Blink.

Interesting Wage Gap Insight

Gender Pay Gap

The article in whole is great – read the whole thing.  But this was interesting:

There’s something importantly different between a job in science and a job in business — and that matters more than you might think in explaining the wage gap

Think of your prototypical businesswoman. She has a standard 9-to-5 schedule so she can meet with other businesspeople or clients.

Maybe she’s a venture capitalist. Maybe she’s an accountant. Either way, her clients want to deal with her specifically. Her employers won’t think she’s doing a good job if she isn’t there at the hours others need her.

Now think of your prototypical scientist, lab coat and all. Most of her work is self-directed. She has experiments she needs to run — but it doesn’t really matter to her lab when, exactly, she does them. So long as she’s getting the work done, her supervisors will think she’s doing a good job.

This is, of course, a simplification. But it speaks to something important about the situations where women earn less.

Certain hours are more important than others in some jobs — and those jobs have especially high wage gaps

Goldin’s research has found that workers in the industries with large wage gaps are more likely to say their jobs value those who “develop constructive and cooperative working relationships” and that their company generally determines their “tasks, priorities, and goals.”

Workers in these industries often face steep penalties for any interruption to their career. One study estimates that among lawyers, a year out of the labor force causes an 8.4 percent salary reduction.

Now, is this fair?    Yes.  Yes it is.  It is not the corporation’s role to determine what social norms are, or are not, more valued or valid.  If you think that this woman should earn more money, then you should remove the time constrains that limit her hours and/or flexibility.

 

Gender Bias: Joe Biden

Gender BiasI’m continued to be surprised that the Democrats push this meme that not having to work, and therefor live off the labors of someone else, is a good and noble thing.   Perhaps the notion forwarded by Republicans that at the base of liberal policy is the idea that we need to create more Democrat voters.

Anyway, Joe Biden was at it again:

“How many of you are single women with children, in a dead-end job? You’re there because of your health insurance,” Biden said. “You would rather have the opportunity to spend the next couple of years with your child until they get — if that was your choice — until they get into primary school.”

Biden said because of Obamacare that women will now be able to make an “independent choice.”

“You’re now trapped in that job because if you leave, you lose your health insurance. Now you’ll be able to … make an independent choice,” Biden told “The View.” “Do you want to stay in that job and still have health insurance, or do you want to … stay in that job, even though you can get health insurance absent that job? And it gives women a great deal more freedom.”

Forget the fact that he’s advocating the idea that working is somehow a state of “lesser freedom”, a notion that is reprehensible.  But how does Biden get away with the gender bias implicit in his logic?  Why is it that only a woman would feel trapped by a job and wanna stay at home with the kids?

Why wouldn’t a man in similar circumstances want the same freedom?  Or, for that matter, why restrict to single moms?  Why not allow for the fact that anyone would wanna quit his job in order to live off the fruit of someone else’s labor?

Men.

Gender Inequality

Gender Inequality

There has been a ton of talk about the “fact” that women earn less than men in the market place.

Let’s forget that men die more on the job than women.

Let’s forget that men work more hours than women.

Let’s forget that men travel more than women.

Let’s forget all that.

Let’s ask women:

Denied Promotion

When women were asked if they EVER have felt that they have been passed up for promotion because of gender, the answer is “No”.

There is no group o f women that even comes close to even 20% that feel they have been discriminated against based on gender.

Except one:

Denied Promotion.Liberl.Conservative

Yes.

Liberal women feel that they have been denied promotion more than twice the rate that conservative women do.

Why am I not shocked?

Men Are Better Than Women At Everything Except —

Well, virtually everything.  This includes making money.

And now for the latest in 21st century news, women are even better at getting elected than men:

AMERICAN politics has a glass ceiling that keeps women down. This is a wisdom so conventional that Hillary Clinton, in conceding to Barack Obama in 2008, could safely earn cheers and tears by thanking her supporters for those “18m cracks in it.”

The only trouble is that empirical analysis has not found a bias against female candidates. In fact, a new study in California suggests that voters are, if anything, biased in favour of women. That glass thing in American politics, in other words, might be an elevator, not a ceiling.

In the Democratic races, women fared much better than men. This might be expected, because voters seem to associate women with more “liberal” issues (starting with, well, women’s issues), and Democratic primary voters tend to be liberal. More surprising, perhaps, were the results of the Republican primaries. Conservative voters tend to be more concerned with allegedly manly issues such as law and order and defence. This should put female candidates at a disadvantage. But it didn’t. Even among Republicans, a male name carried no advantage.

In half of the political races, women had an advantage.  In the other half, there was no advantage to be had; for men OR for women.

It might be time to put the bras back on ladies.