Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

scholar.harvard.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 115 posts

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#11

Post by mattnewton »

wallace_f wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this: If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity necessarily exists. In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.

Wild speculation follows: So there could be two kinds of employers each competing in their own pool: one pool that believes gender (directly or indirectly) is a significant factor, and the other that does not think it is a significant factor to job performance.

Because pool 1 believes that gender is not a significant factor, they know that wage discrimination on the basis of that factor would be illegal and open them up to lawsuits. Pool 2 does think gender is significant, maybe indirectly laundered through other things like personality assessments, and they therefore think they can and should act on that information.

Critically it doesn’t matter if the sexist pool is openly sexist or using factors more strongly correlated with sex than job performance (like whether or not the employee looks the mental model of the part). The result is the same, they believe they are justified in paying women less. The arbitrage opportunity would never occur to them because they don’t think the labour is worth more.

But if you see the arbitrage opportunity, that puts you in Pool 1 by definition. And so those who are aware of the opportunity know that it would be illegal since the gender isn’t relevant to their position.

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#13

Post by monochromatic »

door5 wrote: post #9

Men take more overtime, women do more domestic work, men are paid for overtime, women are not paid for domestic work. Is this not unjust?

Seems pretty just. Who would be paying for the domestic work, anyway?

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#14

Post by wallace_f »

koboll wrote: post #7
wallace_f wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this: If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity necessarily exists. In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.

I mean, you could have said the same about blacks in the decades between emancipation and the civil rights movement. Certainly, there were some people who took advantage of those arbitrage opportunities to some extent. But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time.

In fact, when the dial was turned up all the way on prejudice and discrimination, slavery was the result, as an extreme version of this ability to arbitrage the pay gap. As insane and unjust as that was, that really existed.

Today, if there is a pay gap it would be exploitable, no? Salaries are typically the by far the most expensive cost for most tech startups. Discrimination against women is illegal and socially shunned today. So what's stopping entrepreneurs from arbitraging this opportunity?

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#15

Post by dabbledash »

door5 wrote: post #9

Men take more overtime, women do more domestic work, men are paid for overtime, women are not paid for domestic work. Is this not unjust?

If the woman’s domestic labor enables the man to work overtime and she enjoys a legal right to half his earnings, I guess it works out.

But when people are not pooling resources as family units (for whatever reasons) it does seem like women are the ones left holding the bag.

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#16

Post by chcknsammich »

manicdee wrote: post #8
wallace_f wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this: If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity necessarily exists. In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.

Can you walk me through the acquisition process? I am getting lost at that point between “fire all the men” and “hire women with the appropriate experience.”

Let's say you are a small startup owner, and you have enough cash on hand to hire 6 male devs.

You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price, all this while still offering more money than their supposed current employer who is underpaying them.

If all of this were true the price would shift over time on these margins, and this "gap" would disappear.

Why is it that we must constantly slice up society on demographic lines, point out a statistical in-congruency with some ideal (non-extant) world, and then claim some third party is culpable for causing this?

If women were malevolently directed away from a field by educators, families, or traditions, why is it now an employer's responsibility to calculate said deficit in interest for a field and allocate resources sub-optimally in one direction or another for the sake of aligning statistics on some dubious spreadsheet?

Don't tell women no, encourage them in what they want to do in life, and if in the end they don't choose the path that aligns with your macroeconomic utopia... get over it.

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#17

Post by fizwhiz »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

TLDR: > Mechanically, the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and women face different choice sets in this job. Rather, it is that women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work hours than men.

While that is a rather uncharitable reduction of the arguments made, I'm not sure why people are downvoting you.

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#18

Post by jldugger »

wallace_f wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this: If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity necessarily exists. In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.

This is the Greenspan argument. In his own words:

> I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better-quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women.

But in order to arbitrage this, you have to be willing to pay women and men differently. It's not impossible to see a market where everyone internally values work equally, but believes the market does not, and thus all lower their offers made to women.

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#19

Post by b1gtuna »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

TLDR: > Mechanically, the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and women face different choice sets in this job. Rather, it is that women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work hours than men.

So the gap here is entirely due to choices made directly by the employees?

Re: Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf]

#20

Post by BeeOnRope »

mattnewton wrote: post #11
wallace_f wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this: If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity necessarily exists. In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.

Wild speculation follows: So there could be two kinds of employers each competing in their own pool: one pool that believes gender (directly or indirectly) is a significant factor, and the other that does not think it is a significant factor to job performance. Because pool 1 believes that gender is not a significant factor, they know that wage discrimination on the basis of that factor would be illegal and open them…

The group 1 group, which wishes to hire more women to "exploit" this gap, doesn't have to engage in wage discrimination though, do they? They just have to hire at the "going rate" for women, which to the extent that a wage gap exists means they would be hiring mostly women. If they did hire any men, they just need to ensure they are paid the same as their existing workforce.

So you don't need to engage in wage discrimination to hire women, since that is evaluated within a company, not in relation to a sector has a whole. That is, if McDonald's pays all their employees $10 an hour and they are mostly women, and Burger King pays all their employees $15 an hour for approximately the same work and they are mostly men, I don't think there is any (legal) claim for discrimination?

Post reply on HN