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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?
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.
But the biggest issue with that is: you basically wrote "if there is systemic sexism, there's profit in exploiting that". Why would anyone want to work for you in that case? You're not improving the situation, and benefit from it continuing - that's what's wrong with the idea.
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?
You act like it's 1820 still and there's still domestic work to be done. The washer and dryer do the work, the dishwasher does at least half the work, the water is already gathered and available to pipe, dinner comes in trays, fat doesn't need to be made into soap, butter doesn't need churning, clothes don't need sewing, etc. etc. The life of a house wife is easy. Take the kids to school, pop a xanax, binge on daytim…
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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.
My guess is that even assuming a perfectly rational employer (with no unconscious bias), the viability of this sort of arbitrage would depend on women _costing_ $0.70 to the dollar to their employers when compared to men, not on women _earning_ $0.70 to the dollar.
I'm not at all knowledgeable about how this is usually handled in the US, but what I've heard from entrepreneurs in Brazil (where I live) is that despite the fact that maternity leave here is paid for by our social security system, it still ends up incurring in additional costs to the employer, mainly because they need to hire/train a temporary replacement. (Who will most likely be less effective/productive than the more experienced person who took the leave)
Even if the law got updated to grant both genders the same parental leave time (or to allow a shared amount of months to be split by the parents in however way they prefer) it would still require a significant cultural shift to have men actually _choose_ to take the leave. (Anecdotal evidence: I've talked to several local male peers and most of them said they would not bother taking paternal leave even if available, and would rather stay at work)
This sort of market/cost-driven decision making is obviously not good from a moral perspective, and is especially unfair with women that don't want or can't have children, or would rather have children but take a shorter or no leave. However, I also understand that a lot of businesses have very thin margins and fierce competitors, so taking the actuarial calculation approach to estimating how much an employee will 'cost' you might be something they perceive as their only take on surviving.
I'm not sure on what is the best way to (re)align the incentives so that this doesn't happen anymore and the gap is closed for good.
EDIT: what other commenters have pointed out also makes a lot of sense: exercising this sort of arbitrage in the first place would likely require the use of immoral and probably illegal discriminatory practices
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 discri…
If they set wages at $10/hr hoping to capture all the women turned away, they will also fail to capture male employees worth $15/hr. That puts them in the same pool as Burger King. There isn’t an arbitrage opportunity based on gender here.
Assuming that Mcdonald’s and Burger King are the only employers, this also doesn’t get rid of the pricing gap. Women are paid less on average because they are turned away from the higher paying Burger King disproportionately. Burger King thinks what they are doing is not discrimination. Mcdonald’s must also think what they are doing is not discrimination, or they have a vast conspiracy to violate the law. They are both Group 2 companies.
The decline of two parent households and rise of single motherhood strikes again.
Men take more overtime, women do more domestic work, men are paid for overtime, women are not paid for domestic work. Is this not unjust?
Men take more overtime, women do more domestic work, men and women are paid for overtime, neither men nor women are paid for domestic work.
Whether women benefit from domestic labor or not, it's not something that would ever be reflected in wages. Wages are what people earn outside the home. It's an open question whether women are net beneficiaries of the informal transfers that characterize the domestic arrangement.
It's worth considering that during many eras almost all labor was unpaid. In prior eras, most people's labor was devoted almost entirely to domestic affairs: people made their own shoes, houses, food, &c. It was all "domestic labor". It doesn't mean nobody benefitted from it!
The coverage on this subject is more and more made to follow a feminist/sexist narrative that wants to prove that the world is patriarchal and against womens. the common saying "0.70$ for every 1.00$ of a man" is when you average all the women salaries against all the man salaries. It doesn't take into account specific individuals or interests. I believe the main issue here is that womens are on average more interest…
> These gender differences are consistent with women taking on more of the household and childcare duties than men, limiting their work availability in the process (Parker et al., 2015; Bertrand et al., 2015).