If you want to be taken seriously, learn grammar before attempting debate, child.

I think that's certainly one factor, which is why i said "for various reasons". In a patriarchal society, jobs that men do will tend to be valued more than other work.

However, I don't believe it gives us the whole picture: in the nature vs nurture debate I have a foot in both camps.

I'm typing on a phone. I don't bother much with going back and fixing things.

But hey, you keep making those good arguments. Very compelling and thoughtful. Lol.

What is the counter argument to the argument that women get a lot of other benefits outside of employment income which are transfers from men? If you go to expensive events you will typically see as many women there as men. In those cases, as well as high end restaurants etc. you know damn well most of the women aren't footing the bill.

I think people should get the same pay for the same work, and that the idea that "negotiating skills" or other nonsense should decide differences there is ridiculous. But isn't some of that difference due to men trying to get more money to spend on women? There also seems to be a pretty clear financial bias in women's favor in family law. Isn't the pay gap mitigated to some extent by voluntary traditional financial roles and the law?

It's also true that women have made tremendous gains in income over the past few decades. White women in particular have seen their wages skyrocket while men's have been very flat. Black women have also done much better, though they haven't made the gains white women have. Can't we just wait for continuing gains to rectify the pay gap?

Also, women have been starting to dominate the "wordy" professions like law, marketing, publishing, etc. These professions will probably be more robust against robot/software takeover than many male dominated professions. So while I'm a neophyte on this issue, my superficial glance at it always makes me think it's not really a priority. Employment and income seem to be going quickly in the right direction for women. It's not where it should be, but it will get there while we worry about more important things like the threat of mass death and suffering.

Lol at this nonsense. Like if you believe there's a problem, why the **** should women just wait for it to get better?

This same nonsense is used with minorities and civil rights. Hey, black guy, I know you're targeted by police unfairly. But at least you're not beat as often as your grandfather. And you can sit on the bus wherever you want! Why don't you stop complaining and wait for things to keep getting better!

if people were to actually attempt to look at this with any sort of open mind the absurdity grows larger and larger. lets just look at some basic numbers here

what % of women join the workforce?
what % of women get married to a man?

now lets look at a more realistic wage gap in the 6-12% range. that means a married couple gets penalized on one side and bonus on the other. does that family see any benefit or penalty from the wage gap? how big is that?

ok so now lets look at the women that don't join the workforce and get married (we can assume the vast majority of women outside the workforce are obviously married). do these women or families get penalized or benefit from the hypothetical wage gap?

it seems to me that the only group being penalized by a hypothetical wage gap is single women in the workforce. which makes up what % of women? what are we talking about here? 5-10% of the population? maybe its not a coincidence that the people teaching the wage gap myths on campus are exactly the type of women who would be affected by a hypothetical wage gap, single women in the workforce. the funny thing is, they try to convince you that women don't need men and men are out to oppress them. in reality the math will tell you that it doesn't make any sense in an economy with two income households

do the math, the majority of women in the USA would actually benefit from a gender wage gap

JJ are you even aware about how you misconstrue what I say? I'm saying the pay gap is getting better, measurably so, at a pretty good clip. I don't mean we should do nothing. I am saying the things we are doing are working so, with everything else we have to worry about, the pay gap issue should not be a high priority.

Wages for black men have actually dropped over the last few decades, so the situation is not analogous. We obviously need to prioritize that gap more than the gender gap. White women have seen their wages go up more than 30% since the 70's. So the measures are working.

I would definitely support the publication of the gender pay gap by company to further incentivize equal pay. But given the continuing progress, as well as that progress having gone against a trend which has more or less been in place for the entire evolution of the human species, I don't see why it needs to be at the political front and center. We should be patting ourselves on the back on the gender pay gap issue, not making it a wedge issue.

Just because people have tried to filter out variables like hours worked or maternity gaps doesn't mean they addressed all the differences, and that any other gap must be attributable to sexism/bias. Social science is imprecise and it's really impossible to know whether you've completely isolated the variable in question.

Why ridiculous? It doesn't even require that you think that women are inferior at negotiating, or that lower levels of testosterone make them less combative. It may just suggest that women who're good at negotiating are way less likely to enter the work force because they're inclined to just "negotiate" a marriage contract with a high income guy. Or maybe bitches just be crazy. Or maybe both! ... or neither.

Lol. The mental gymnastics you guys go to are pretty amazing.

Yeah, totally not a problem that a women gets penalized as long as her husband gets some offsetting benefit (or more accurately some other man somewhere...)? Like there's no consequences in terms of how people feel, power dynamics in relationships, options the women have in cases of divorce, consequences on financial decisions for the family, etc. etc.

Deuces, I guess I just don't consider maintaining the status quo to be 'doing something' (and I mean this in general, not just in the case of this issue). But whatever.

Also, I agree that the equal pay issue isn't the most pressing political issue of our time. But I think it's important and think it's silly when people dismiss issues just because there are other more pressing issues. We can tackle more than one problem at a time.

Okay, but other studies do control for that stuff:

http://time.com/105292/gender-wage-gap/

Skimmed through a couple of replies here. Just wanna state categorically that there is absolutely 0 'gender wage gap' in developed countries. Please don't come @ me quoting bad studies and terrible hypotheses that will force me to conjure up the sheer facts and rationale of my statements. Just be like me and think objectively about this recurring non topic fake news.

I think that in most cases people know what the going rate is for their job, level of experience, and geographic area. Outside of upper tier level managers, there just isn't that much room for negotiation. What is going on is a downgrading of value based on the hiring manager's perception, which is usually infused with stereotypes.

I'll give you a great example. A major orchestra, I believe the NY Philharmonic, used to be dominated by men. The justification was that men were just better players, plain and simple. Then they went to blind auditions where the judges could only hear the players, not see them. This resulted in a major demographic shift in the orchestra which became flooded with women once talent was judged objectively. Now, were the women who were unfairly denied employment or higher chairs in the orchestra just not good enough negotiators? Nope. It's that stereotypes are so powerful that they can bias even freakishly talented evaluators (someone hearing auditions for a major orchestra is going to be a virtuoso musician) judging an apparently objective measure.

The status quo is doing something and making progress. Don't get mad over this issue just because Obama told you to. Think JJ. Think.

Can we? If I thought it were possible for you to learn anything from me I would produce a pretty astonishing list of topics that were avoided during the last two presidential election seasons. But I would rather you investigate that yourself than think of reasons why I am wrong about it.

The importance of not being manipulated is higher now than ever. It's not just Trump, but the democrats also who are trying to manipulate the public. The public has to dictate the agenda. It can't just take sides on whatever divisive issue emerges, seemingly out of the blue.

Deuces, I think you keep forgetting that I'm not American or a democrat. But your terrible reads are amusing. So by all means, keep spouting them!

Hell, the OP wasn't even about USA#37. I think your typical American egotism is showing.

And there are other examples of studies/tests/etc that show the same thing. Like the study where the exact same resume was sent out with only different names and the male names came back with better offer numbers.

How would you know? You think management advertises it when they cave in and agree to give someone a 10k/y raise? It's always in their interest to keep peoples expectations low.


I didn't say discrimination doesn't exists.

The quote i responded to was, "the idea that "negotiating skills" or other nonsense should decide differences there is ridiculous." A company that isn't willing to offer raises in any situations is making a highly irrational decision, and of all the bad things you can accuse large companies of being irrational isn't one of them.

And even if you don't think that women are equally willing and capable at negotiating (...) there's a matter of sample bias. Women and men have different life trajectories dictated by cultural norms, and that skews the proportions of men/women based on all sorts of criteria.

It's not that discrimination doesn't exist - it's that even if it didn't exist you'd still find all sorts of disparities.

I suppose the argument is that the expectation that men ought pay for women in such scenarios is a hangover of gender roles and a society in which women didn't, or were far less likely, to have their own money.

In a society in which gender equality is reached there is no compulsion for men to pay an unequal amount.

Time says 9% difference when you control for some differences.

and from OP quote:

"The UK gender pay gap is 18.1% for all workers, or 9.4% for full-time staff."

So... some studies control for some differences. I wonder if there are some differences still not controlled for. In other words, maybe the difference is zero, when you control for all the important variables. Or maybe it tilts in women's favor due to affirmative action over-correction.

This is just my first thought/subscription to the thread. I'll come back.

mental gymnastics? i'm not pedaling completely false narratives to divide people and create resentment

if you haven't heard obama give a wage gap speech, go do it. i've posted already and its very easy to find. he tells women how badly they are getting screwed and how sexist society is. he is doing this by describing the 77 cent wage gap myth. this is a myth that could be debunked by a junior high student and yet the president is perpetuating it (along with hilary) in order to divide and create resentment. theres no chance they didnt realize they were being dishonest. also go ahead and do some research on creating resentment through class guilt, "privilege", and oppression in the 20th century, the body count is over 100 million. im not saying they are trying to take things that far but to dismiss how toxic it is, is totally ignorant. obama also does this at murdered cops funerals

the point is, lets look at reality vs obama and hilary speaking to the whole country

obama and hilarys message- you are getting screwed at the rate of 77 cents on the dollar. the country is sexist. you are being oppressed. you are a victim. we need to change and you need to fight for change. we need to fix this 77 cent wage gap. the gap should be zero

reality- there should be a wage gap. we don't know what it should be or for who but filtering by groups should actually never give you equal outcomes. there is a 6-12 cent wage gap. we aren't sure what the cause is, but certainly sexism is a portion of it since sexism exists. but even that is complicated since female servers make more money than male servers. on top of all that, more women benefit from a 6-12 cent wage gap than are penalized

yes the 6-12 cent wage gap is a worthwhile cause to investigate. discrimination is illegal and that should be enforced. what should happen is people start with the premise that we should not see equal outcomes. having a 6-12 cent wage gap isnt some giant red flag. what causes that gap is going to be very complex and interesting to discover, if thats your pursuit. we just saw a study that shows a wage gap in height. are we going to start measuring people, classifying them as tall and short, and then trying to figure out how society can stop oppressing short people in the work place? the point is, this list of oppressed people can grow and grow and keep growing to the point you realize you have to abandon it. or, we could look at balding men next. these things might be interesting and worthwhile to investigate but starting from the point that unequal outcomes is a sign of an oppressive system, is just total garbage. its incredibly divisive and toxic. it creates resentment and reactions (forms of affirmative action) that actually create more oppression and resentment

In the milo thread I posted this NBER paper that examines existing research and contributes its own findings. It's the most comprehensive examination of the issue I've found, if you're interested.

I would also reiterate my point from that thread that focusing in on measures of the "unexplained" part of the gap and the idea of intentional discrimination alone probably misses a lot of what is interesting (socially and politically) about the wage gap. As does the discussion about biology vs culture, quite often, although I don't think that's explicitly come up here yet.
C.f. this post or the second to last paragraph here, or here.

The misguided focus on intentional discrimination is also implicit in questions like "if there's a wage gap why don't companies adopt a strategy of hiring women to save money?" To which the most basic answer is that doing so explicitly would open them to lawsuits from men, but to which the real answer is that it's unlikely that much intentional and conscious discrimination occurs. I had previously mentioned this NY Times article from 2015 about the UK law which has now been implemented, and their example of what happened following public disclosure of wage gaps at PriceWaterhouseCooper is instructive on this point, I think.

Lol, once again the problem isn't the problem. It's talking about it. So many people get awfully uncomfortable with just talking about how women are getting screwed when it comes to pay. Too bad you guys don't feel bad about the actual problem.

It's just one more example of how you guys need safe spaces.

what bubble are you in? the president and hilary come out and publicly shame the nation for this mythical 77 cent wage gap and theres zero backlash. contrast that with any public figure speaking out against it. the topic is like playing russian roulette with your career and nobody wants to talk about it being a dishonest representation to the point its become a myth. people can confidently perpetuate the myth with zero backlash, and they do. on top of that, who has a problem with talking about this and who gets censored? maybe ask the mods how many wage gap posts they have deleted while declaring women a vulnerable group as a part of the rules. i got temp banned without warning for saying womens studies unscientific nonsense, which is true. the teachings of womens studies directly contradicts mainstream biology. some say they have even made up their own version of anthropology. who is being censored and who needs a safe space? what? you cant even have an open discussion anonymously in a political forum, never mind in public

what actual problem? you have no clue what actual problem there is or isn't. what we do know is, while obama was president and hilary the front runner to be the successor, they were proudly campaigning on a wage gap myth they knew to be false while there was absolutely no pushback on the radar

Lol, There is a wage gap and there's all sorts of evidence for it.

But let's do this. People have posted a bunch of studies/anecdotes/articles pointing to evidence about the wage gap. Why don't you post something showing there isn't?

Edit: Oh, nevermind, I'll save myself the trouble. I didn't realize you were the same moron that posted about it only being single women that were hurt by this.