someproteinguy wrote:
Not that to say there isn't discrimination and people who are ******** and whatnot. There very clearly are; but it was nice to see the paper address the other reasons for the wage disparity, and try and break out how much of that may be due to various societal factors.
Sure. You can always find individual cases of discrimination. But is that the rule, or the exception? When one trots out the stat in question and follows it with a statement about "fighting for wage equality", it does send a strong message that said discrimination is widespread, when it's actually not. When we actually look away from individual cases and instead at the stats for sets of women in an industry, with the same job titles and
time on the job as a set of men in the same industry, we find that pay gap disappears, and in some cases is reversed. The problem is that the set of "all women" do not chose the same jobs as the set of "all men", and that women statistically work fewer total hours per year and fewer years over their entire working life. Assuming that pay tends to increase on average the longer you work in any given profession, this is a fact that cannot be ignored, but almost always is.
So even looking at a single profession, the stats can appear skewed. Looking at "all accountants", doesn't tell you anything if the average male accountant has worked in the field for 5-6 years longer than the average female accountant. Remember that every woman who drops out of the workforce to raise children is going to affect the stat, because the average woman left in that field will be younger than the average man. Which, again, has a significant effect on the average pay. If the male side of the stat includes a relatively steady participation rate at all age ranges between the ages 20 and 65, and the female side of the stat includes a sharp decline in workplace participation starting around age 30, the percent of women in the set who have had long careers in their chosen field will be smaller than the percentage of men. But all are "averaged" in the stat.
It's the wrong stat to use, but it's used because it's dramatic, and most people don't understand the math, and thus they can be influenced into an emotional response.