As it turns out, the answers you seek can be found in basically all of my previous posts on this subject, which you apparently haven't read. I will provide you a hint, from my very first post on the subject from the Milo thread, which I also linked in this thread:

I'm not being purposefully obtuse so please draw your own conclusions.

During the hiring process (nearly) nobody asks a prospective employee about their health or chances of having a baby. However, a young women is more likely to take off time to raise kids than a man is to take off for kids so I'm not sure there is a reason to ask.

I'm pretty sure no insurance agent ever asked me if I was likely to speed or get in a wreck when I was young. They just assumed I was more likely than a young women too because young males are more likely to get a wreck.

You subtly changed what I said. I didn't say 'ask the employee'. I said we've never discussed it.

Do you know why? Because a woman candidate potentially having a child is such a tiny factor in whether someone should be hired. Same with a fat person having a heart attack. Or a smoker having health issues. Or a person that has a 2 hour commute getting in an accident. And so on...

A hiring decision is a bet that the candidate will have the best possible impact on your company from the options available to you.

The chances of your new hire having a heart attack in the next 5 years is way less than a young woman having a kid and taking time off.

Have you ever hired anyone? In a lot of cases you will have 2 candidates that are really close and it comes down to a gut feeling or one small thing. One candidate being far more likely to take significant time off plays in a lot of people's minds.

Bah bah, what do you think the odds of a 20, 25, and 30 year old women having a baby in the next five years are?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I've hired a lot more people than you. But I don't know your background (except I think you're a financial planner who didn't know how income taxes work?), so I could be wrong.

Edit: Also, the 'gut feeling' comment probably has a lot to do with the unexplained wage gap. And I don't mean that specifically for bah bah, but in general.

I'm not sure of the odds of any of the ages of women having a baby in the next five year but I'd venture to guess they are far more likely to take significant time off for anything than their male counterparts.

I assume you have hired more people than me too if you were confident enough to say that.

repeatedly told you they were to help you understand where i have a problem with your comments in post 135. now you are just wellnaming your way out the door when you reach a point where you can cope with the massive blind spot in your though process

what? that post doesnt even come close. i'm actually having a hard time believing you do. this is why i was able to sniff out the wellnamed tactics and suggest it was starting to feel like it was pulling teeth. i've seen you get elusive when it gets uncomfortably obvious you're stumped to come up something that makes sense.

this was all just to help you understand where your comments are off the mark in post 135
the only attempt at answering my questions is the bolded part. i hope you can understand that its a completely scientifically ******ed statement. if you can't figure that out, and cant see why my questions are relevant, then obviously you're out to lunch here. i could go back to 135 and address the points individually but if youre going to conclude that anything i haven't thought of or that i cant explain yet is discrimination or may be, then we now see how completely unscientific and blatantly obvious your bias is. what is even more obvious is that you didnt even come close to articulating an answer to straight forward questions

The important part of the post which I quoted is the last paragraph, especially the last sentence.

The point is that it's a mistake to focus solely on the idea of active discrimination. This explains why I brought up my support for a law which does not -- in any way -- involve investigations of discrimination, a point on which you appear to be confused.

So, you are asking me how I would investigate or establish discrimination and my answer is that this is not my approach at all. My answer is that it makes more sense to think about other aspects of the wage gap, in part because discrimination is difficult to establish but also because the evidence suggests that intentional discrimination isn't the largest cause of the gap to begin with. It is not clear to me why you would have any objection to either of the preceding sentences, but you don't seem to be aware that this is my position, or else you don't understand why your questions about establishing discrimination seem of secondary importance to me given my position.

In any case, the idea that active discrimination is not the most important part of the wage gap has been fundamental to basically everything I've said on the topic, which should explain to you why I am not interested in some hypothetical tangent about proving discrimination.

P.S. nothing you've said since really has anything to do with my response to you in #135.

Venture a guess on the odds.

I mean, you want me to believe that its reasonable for you to use these odds in making hiring decisions. If that's true, you should be at least able to tell me the general values that you think it is.

Can you explain why it matters what the odds are?

Even if women are 1% more likely to take extra time off than a guy don't we have a reason for employers (rightly or wrongly) to lean towards males all else equal?

Because you want me to believe they're meaningful and something that employers should care about. You literally can't even tell me the ballpark on what the number is. And yet, this is somehow something that you feel strongly that employers should think about???


This is now a different thing. We should be clear that the odds of having a baby are not the same as the odds of taking extra time off. Do you know what the actual odds are for women to take extra time off? Or, more appropriately phrased, do you know what the expected difference in person-hours is between a women and a man?

Even putting that aside, "all else equal" isn't a thing in this case. If you're trying to say it's reasonable to consider the odds of a woman having a child, why wouldn't you care about everything else? Smoking? Length of commute? Number of children (the majority of my non-vacaction time-off is related to my kids and not to me)? Physical fitness? Age? Family history? Ethnicity? All of the factors that can influence time off in non-trivial ways make it impossible to ever have two candidates exactly the same except for their gender.

You're taking one possible factor, that you have absolutely no idea how meaningful it is, and trying to say its reasonable for employers to care about it.

Of course employers should care about who is more likely to take time off. As much research there is available about the gender pay gap I am sure this info is readily available if you want to look it up. I am not going to do your homework for you and stop acting like you don't think young women aren't more likely to take time off than young men.

I do think employers should care about most of the stuff you listed above about a potential new employee. I don't want to focus on women being more likely to take time off just because of a baby I want to looks at the total likelihood women/men take actions that hurt an employer. Examples: Men are more likely to commit suicide = bad event that men are more likely to do that should hurt their employer-ability. Women are more likely to need flexibly scheduling to pick kids up from school = bad event that women are more likely to do that should hurt their employer-ability

Coming up with the odds of a woman at a certain age having a baby is worthless exercise. If you want to know the number you can look it up.

Bahbah, its nice to know you'll never change.

I don't care what the number is, because its a meaningless number to me. Just like I don't care about the increased accident risk of someone with a 2 hour commute or the increased time off correlated with someone being obese.

But I love your dual philosophies of thinking its an important enough stat to make hiring decisions off of, but not important enough to even know an order-of-magnitude value for.

What? I said I care about most/all of the factors you listed a few posts ago and not just likelihood to miss work because of babies. I am unlikely to be hiring anyone in my current position so I don't see why you are surprised why I wouldn't know what the chances are that a women takes time off for a baby.

I like how you hand wave when I said all else equal by coming back and saying that obesity and commute time to work are important factors like I somehow didn't think about them.

Also who is more likely to sue their employer

I haven't looked this up, but because men work such a large percent of the dangerous jobs I can only assume men. Why do you ask?

Um... who are you talking to? I don't know how this is a reply to what you quoted.

But, if it makes you feel better your position is ridiculous for all of those other things, and not just the gender wage gap. You seem to think its reasonable/important for employers to make hiring decisions on a crazy number of different factors. And 99+% of people are going to be just like you and have no knowledge or ability to actually come up with a reasonable approximation of the 'risks' any individual candidate comes with.

Lol.


Saying "all else equal" in a case where it's literally never applicable, deserves to be 'hand waved' away. It's a stupid argument.

In saying all else equal I am saying if someone in a hiring position is on the fence with two candidates and one is far more likely to take a significant amount of time off in the next few years that can be a way to get off the fence.

That actually wasn't what you were saying. You were saying:

"If someone in a hiring position is on the fence with two candidates and one is a young women and may have a kid in the next 5 years that can be a way to get off the fence."

Which is stupid. Because there are many many many ways that someone might take time off.

However, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say you meant to say the first quoted section above. That's still a really stupid thing. Because, as you've just shown us, the vast majority of people have no knowledge or ability to accurately make the determination about who is more likely to take time off.

Bahbah, you've basically just put on a clinic here for one solid reason why there's still an 'unexplained' wage gap.

I just read a great article about the racial divide in the NFL. It talked about how rare the black QB, black center, white RB & white WR are.

A quote from the article said "Overt discrimination no longer is a major factor in determining which players are drafted at certain positions. There’s too much money involved. For NFL owners, green, generally, is the color that matters most."

It still amazes me that some people think the gender pay exists because they believe a very significant amount of business owners are willing to put profits second after working with people that look like them.

https://theundefeated.com/features/t...racial-divide/

Do you think it is even close as to which sex is more likely to take significant time off or retire early?

“Is that nepotism? Absolutely. Is that also a beautiful thing? Absolutely. Family business is a beautiful thing. The same applies for Ivanka. Ivanka is by his side in Washington.”

You don't think someone might employ people that they think they'll enjoy working with? Or maybe they just have some implicit biases.

Why does it have to be that they're taking huge cuts in profit by not hiring women? Maybe it's that when a male and female candidate are broadly similar, the one who might be the better golfing buddy gets the pick?

Of course some people hire someone because they think they will enjoy working with them more. However, that doesn't explain the wage gap as described by most of the liberal wage gap studies. To have a significant wage gap we aren't talking about 10%-15% of hiring people are sexist, because if that was the case then the others would all try to hire women because they are cheaper.

I'm saying that it's very easy for me to believe that employers hire men because they prefer them or have flawed reasoning that the man will perform better.

Sure. And again, this isn't even a relevant question (which just a few posts ago you tried to pretend wasn't what you were talking about).


Could you please link a non-liberal wage gap study?

Your reasoning is flawed about how the wage gap happens. But I'm pretty sure I've pointed that out to you before.

The end result here, is that you don't want to believe there's a wage gap. For whatever reason, it bothers you. So you've concocted this world where its all perfectly fair and reasonable to you and any evidence to the contrary is just biased.