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

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

#51

Post by stcredzero »

nearbuy wrote: post #22
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 you're talking about singles, then no, not really. You do domestic work for yourself. Men still have to do cleaning and maintenance at home, or pay someone else to do it, or live with the fallout. If you're talking about couples who share an account, it doesn't really make a difference. The couple ends up with the same amount of money and domestic care whether one spouse does more or if they share responsibilities…

Quite often, the wife mostly controls the finances. Women have exercised power over domestic budgets even in quite patriarchal societies. My wife works and has control over the finances, even though we make about equal amounts. I save more for retirement than she does. I also do more of the housework. (Except this week.)

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

#52

Post by throwaway7312 »

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.

My experience hiring women for our company has been 1.) they often don't want the job, 2.) when they get the job, they often balk at how demanding it is, then 3.) if they do stick around, regardless how much training we give them we end up having to let them go. This is not all female hires; we have women in customer service roles, for example, who outperformed our male hires; the females kept the job, the males did not. But for more technical roles, they have consistently either balked at the workload or underperformed and been quickly fired (we fire male workers who underperform just as quickly).

I would love to hire female employees who are every bit as driven, thorough, methodical, and accountable as our best male employees (the ones we don't fire), who are also cheaper. But they do not seem to exist.

The rare female prospective hires who are available and seem good are often priced so high I assume their rates are the result of Fortune 500 companies competing over them to have an effective female on the team. Good for them, but until effective females become cheaper than effective males it doesn't make sense for us to hire them from a value perspective (we don't need the social signaling points).

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

#53

Post by stcredzero »

abalone wrote: post #49
stcredzero wrote: post #40

A female friend of mine who worked at Whole Foods did the typically male tactics cited in this article: Trading off regular hours for more lucrative Holiday and overtime hours. She also had a family. (And a 2nd job as a Yoga instructor. Not sure how that aligned her incentives.)

Great, well I guess that one anecdote overrides a careful study by the Harvard department of Economics.

Of course it doesn't. I simply admire my friend for bucking the typical trend. (And boosting her income by doing so.)

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

#54

Post by chowells »

warp_factor wrote: post #23

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…

Well, yes, those first couple paragraphs are the data. Everyone, even those who disagree with you, are aware of that. But people who disagree with you have considered other things, too.

One such thing is the question of whether income is genetically determined.

Well, there are 3 characteristics (aside from the direct sexual characteristics of genitals, mammaries, and presence/absence of a womb) that are associated with sex sufficiently well that describing them is a strong predictor of sex. Those are vocal register, height, and physical strength.

2/3rds of those factors make it awfully unlikely women will be playing in the NBA and getting those salaries. But the number of jobs where those characteristics are strong predictors of performance is vanishingly small.

So why are women making less money at the median? Women aren't genetically predisposed to desiring a better quality of life. If that's a real factor, there has to be a non-genetic reason underlying it. And that's what people are looking for. You can't just dismiss that as feminism.

As if there's something wrong with that? Precisely what are you coding in your assertion that something is just because of feminism? That it's worth less? That it's not important? If not those, why bring it up at all?

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

#55

Post by door5 »

westiseast wrote: post #50
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the original complaints of feminism was that we had developed a culture where both men and women work all day long, but women’s work was unpaid domestic work while the men got the paycheck. That gave men huge power over women in a society that still relied on the women’s work. So we can identify a problem. The society (of the 1960’s and before in particular) required women’s work, but women were not compensate…

I’m a stay at home dad and have been for the last 5 years. My wife works for herself, spending anywhere from 10-14 hours a day working pretty much 6-7 days a week (she loves her job and gets paid well to do it). Personally I don’t see it as an unfair bargain. I work hard at home, it can be stressful and tiring sometimes, but my wife takes on all the stress of providing income. I get ‘compensated’ pretty well - we hav…

Those are two great examples -- one thing I'd like to add is that the audience of Hackernews is pretty upper-middle class (as are the anecdotes in this thread), these issues are compounded greatly when it comes to poor or working class women, who may feel completely trapped in a bad marriage economically, or may be struggling as single working mothers.

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

#56

Post by dabbledash »

stcredzero wrote: post #48
BadassFractal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the (trite?) conservative talk points that if you 1. finish high school 2. don't have children outside of marriage 3. hold down a job, then you should more or less have a successful middle class existence.

1. finish high school 2. don't have children outside of marriage 3. hold down a job, then you should more or less have a successful middle class existence. What's wrong with that? I think that's a fine way to plan one's life. It's over simplifying some things. Not all high school educations are equally valuable, for one thing, which then also relates to point 3.

People who don’t start out committed to socially conservative ideas are suspicious about the direction of the causality.

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

#57

Post by abalone »

warp_factor wrote: post #43
abalone wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper directly contradicts your beliefs about “womens”: > 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).

how does that contradict any of my "beliefs" ? The workplace is not the one restricting the women to work more hours. It seems to be based on a choice and preference.

You didn’t limit it to the workplace. You said the pay gap is due to “interests” not a “patriarchal world against womens.” The study specifically mentions patriarchal gender roles as a primary factor behind those interests.

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

#58

Post by AnthonyMouse »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #29
monochromatic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One of the original complaints of feminism was that we had developed a culture where both men and women work all day long, but women’s work was unpaid domestic work while the men got the paycheck. That gave men huge power over women in a society that still relied on the women’s work. So we can identify a problem. The society (of the 1960’s and before in particular) required women’s work, but women were not compensate…

> One of the original complaints of feminism was that we had developed a culture where both men and women work all day long, but women’s work was unpaid domestic work while the men got the paycheck. That gave men huge power over women in a society that still relied on the women’s work.

The woman is effectively doing the work for the man (or for herself). She doesn't do the work for nothing, she does it in exchange for a roof over her head and food on the table, and medical insurance coverage and an address in a good school district for her kids etc. etc.

If the non-monetary compensation is less than she can earn by formally working as a cook or a maid (or a retail clerk or a biology professor) then she can do that instead. But if it's not, she's still not working for nothing.

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

#59

Post by nearbuy »

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.

You seem to be ignoring the linked study, which found that female bus and train operators earned less because they took more time off and worked less overtime. Pay gaps due to reasons like these don't create arbitrage opportunities. You want people to work overtime when you ask for overtime.

In general, the pay gap due to discrimination is much smaller than the total pay gap. It's also not universal: it varies by city and occupation. If you're evaluating two employees who seem about equally qualified and one asks for a 30% lower salary, it's easy to see the arbitrage opportunity. But if the employee is only asking 5% less? It's less obvious. You may have felt from the interview that the other candidate was 6% better overall.

Then consider that discriminatory employers may not be evenly dispersed. In towns without much discrimination, there may be no arbitrage opportunity. In towns with heavy discrimination, there may not be enough non-discriminatory employers to hire all the undervalued workers.

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

#60

Post by stcredzero »

abalone wrote: post #47
hnaccy wrote: post #37

>Crucially, a gap in overtime acceptance rates barely exists for those who are married. As we can see in Figure 10, married male operators with dependents are only 0 to 2 percentage points more likely to accept overtime than married women with dependents. This suggests that those who are married with dependents, men and women, are able to divide up caretaking responsibilities at home in a way that allows them to work…

> rise of single motherhood strikes again. The study addressed this. There are sexist gender roles at play even among single parents, potentially. (To wit, you didn’t lament the rise of “single fatherhood.”) From the study, > These results suggest that single men are able to take care of their dependents by working more overtime, possibly to pay for child support or to finance other forms of child care. Single women,…

There are sexist gender roles at play even among single parents, potentially.

How can we determine those aren't preferential choices?

(To wit, you didn’t lament the rise of “single fatherhood.”)

There is an apparent bias against men getting custody of the children. There also isn't a lamentation about men's under-representation in certain medical fields in certain countries.

It is, of course, possible that for women this situation is not as much a personal preference as it is a constraint.

Why is it a constraint? How are they being coerced? Are you implying that some mothers would rather spend more time working, make more money, and have less time with their children, but they are being compelled to do otherwise? There are some wealthy mothers who do this by hiring caretakers.

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