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Originally Posted by juan valdez
the actual number of advantages and disadvantages women actually face (as a group) in the work force is so large and complicated that the only thing you should do is make discrimination based on gender illegal and enforce it. treat people as individuals and that is as fair as it gets
Your suggestion is that no other solutions are feasible given the complexity of the issue. I disagree. The OP of this thread discusses a rule which requires companies to measure and disclose their wage gaps. There is some evidence that this leads to meaningful changes that reduce wage gaps (cf. the NY Times article I've linked previously). I see no argument that this "shouldn't" be done.
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Originally Posted by juan valdez
singling women out as a group in the workforce and trying to determine their value is absurd.
First, the phrase "singling out" is sort of strange given that women comprise nearly half of the US work force. Secondly, no one is trying to determine their
value, they are trying to measure and analyze differences in median wages. It is not plausible that the measured differences could be hand-waved away as differences in employee value.
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Originally Posted by juan valdez
assuming that they behave the same as men is absurd.
No such assumptions need be made, and I'm not aware of any wage gap research which makes such an assumption. Many analyses explicitly focus on differences in behavior.
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Originally Posted by juan valdez
assuming they should reach an equal outcome or parity is absurd.
Again, I'm not aware of anyone claiming that exact equality of outcome is the only tolerable resolution. Rather, the size and persistence of the gap (including especially the "unexplained" portion) suggests a meaningful social problem. It does not follow from this claim that any difference would constitute a meaningful problem.
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Originally Posted by juan valdez
trying to calculate the actual wage gap attributed to sexism is insanely complicated.
To the best of my knowledge no one has ever presented a claim that N% of the wage gap is attributable to "sexism", for which there is hardly any operational definition to begin with. It is, however, reasonable to believe that discrimination constitutes a meaningful part of the unexplained portion of the gap. It's also reasonable to consider how even the "explained" parts of the gap reflect particular attitudes about gender which might be called "sexist".
As with the objection about equal outcomes, the problem is the scope of the data. If the data were more mixed, with women earning substantially more than men in certain occupations, but less in others, and the overall gap much smaller, then the argument against over-interpreting statistical data would make more sense.
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Originally Posted by juan valdez
we could easily identify a long list of things that create a wage gap between people. easily 100 items long. focusing on gender is stupid.
This goes back to your first comment about singling out women, but the obvious flaw in your rhetoric here is your studious avoidance of history. It's not accidental that we consider gender a salient social category, or worry about discrimination against women. It's because of the long history in which women were explicitly treated as property or at best second-class citizens.
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Originally Posted by juan valdez
people should be treated as individuals and thats what discrimination laws are for. the problem we see here is that people are actually moving to affirmative action based on ******ed gender theories.
I am not aware of any policy proposals to address the wage gap via affirmative-action-like systems, but I would also agree that it's probably not a generally effective solution.
It's also not clear to me how the general conclusion that the wage gap is a problem depends on any particularly controversial theory of gender. You already claim to agree that discrimination is wrong. There is evidence that part of the wage gap is caused by discrimination. This does not require any particular theory of gender.