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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]

#71

Post by nearbuy »

rubidium wrote: post #64
nearbuy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You snuck an assumption in that last point: “and the husband fully controls all the finances”. Why?

It's not an assumption, it's a hypothetical. If a couple did this, I'd consider it unfair. I imagine that sort of arrangement was a lot more common in the 50's than today.

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

#72

Post by dabbledash »

stcredzero wrote: post #65
dabbledash wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I test center-left politically. However, I still think that education and stable family life is quite important for raising children to be successful. As for the direction of the causality, Chinese emigrants the world over have arrived on distant shores with very little money, often less that the general populace and often less even than the local poor. Yet they prospered, maintained a high regard for the value of ed…

You seem pretty worked up. I am also left of center politically and a fan of education and marriage and the whole bourgeois shebang. That doesn’t really have anything to do with my comment, which describes the state of the debate.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by stcredzero »

dabbledash wrote: post #72
stcredzero wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I test center-left politically. However, I still think that education and stable family life is quite important for raising children to be successful. As for the direction of the causality, Chinese emigrants the world over have arrived on distant shores with very little money, often less that the general populace and often less even than the local poor. Yet they prospered, maintained a high regard for the value of ed…

You seem pretty worked up. I am also left of center politically and a fan of education and marriage and the whole bourgeois shebang. That doesn’t really have anything to do with my comment, which describes the state of the debate.

My apologies. I thought you were labeling me based on which side gets which ideas. I'm very glad that you are not doing that.

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

#75

Post by BeeOnRope »

mattnewton wrote: post #36
BeeOnRope wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, group 2 must be doing wage discrimination per the definition: they are paying women less solely because of their gender, that’s the only way the arbitrage works. 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…

I made everything much more confusing by making a typo in my first sentence. I meant to refer to group 1 (it's corrected now). I agree that group 2 exhibits wage discrimination.

It was group 1 one or a variant thereof that I meant to discuss: this group presumably values women equally to men [1], hence wants to exploit the wage gap as the GP suggested by hiring mostly women and hence getting ~30% more for their hiring dollars.

You proposed that this group would be knowingly paying women less, therefore acting both unethically (depending on your ethical view of the matter, anyway) and opening themselves up to legal liability.

I'm saying that this group can just offer positions close to the lower going rate for women: this would presumably result in them hiring mostly women (and some men due to variance, etc). As long as all hiring and wage decisions are gender-blind however, they would not be discriminating - they are only "passively" taking advantage of the gap via their range of salary offers.

---

[1] I.e., to them the wage gap is not logical hence women are being underpaid.

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

#76

Post by stcredzero »

nearbuy wrote: post #71
rubidium wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You snuck an assumption in that last point: “and the husband fully controls all the finances”. Why?

It's not an assumption, it's a hypothetical. If a couple did this, I'd consider it unfair. I imagine that sort of arrangement was a lot more common in the 50's than today.

In my experience, the traditional wife has a lot of say in the family's finances. Audio enthusiasts have talked for many decades, sometimes with dread, about "The Wife Acceptance Factor."

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

#77

Post by dabbledash »

stcredzero wrote: post #74
dabbledash wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem pretty worked up. I am also left of center politically and a fan of education and marriage and the whole bourgeois shebang. That doesn’t really have anything to do with my comment, which describes the state of the debate.

My apologies. I thought you were labeling me based on which side gets which ideas. I'm very glad that you are not doing that.

I can see how I gave you that impression, sorry. My personal guess re causality is “it’s complicated” (always a good bet).

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

#78

Post by BadassFractal »

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…

Disclaimer: Armchair backseat keyboard-jockey evolutionary biologist here.

I wonder if a big part of this difference is that for men, making more money directly translates to better mating opportunities, which is a primary driver for humans. Thus climbing the male hierarchy is something many men will do at all costs, because they're programmed to associate that with much greater power and reproductive success (the, maybe unproven, theory that the top x% males get exponentially more mating opportunities than the rest). So for males, working themselves to the bone beyond a lifestyle that's "comfortable enough" still has significant evolutionary ROI (notice how many powerful and wealthy men also happen to be huge playboys, regardless of how clean and wholesome their media image often begins as), while the returns diminish noticeably for women.

Whereas for women, once a baseline of comfort is reached, let's say "I can afford live at a decent place, I can do my hobbies, travel occasionally, I can generally take care of myself" then the additional income doesn't make that much of a difference, at least not until you have a family and suddenly you have to make enough to afford the extra medical, babysitters, daycare, good schools, tutors, college etc.

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

#79

Post by stcredzero »

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.

I mean, you could have said the same about blacks in the decades between emancipation and the civil rights movement.

I think Jesse Lee Peterson might have something to say with regards to that. I suspect that there were perceptive people who took advantage of societal conditions and hired industrious people for less money.

But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long time.

According to Thomas Sowell, with some kinds of work, some American slaves were paid additional bonuses for certain kinds of work requiring care and attention to detail. Otherwise, the proper level of motivation couldn't be maintained even through torture. Biases certainly can distort market forces, but the market forces will also bend society. Southern bus and train lines were opposing Jim Crow laws quite early on because they didn't want to spend money on extra vehicles/train cars.

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

#80

Post by warp_factor »

abalone wrote: post #57
warp_factor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The gender roles as you describe them result from an individual choice from every man/women involved. Nobody forces a person today in the system to follow those gender roles.

What I see in my circle of friends is that in most couples with kids, it is a conscious choice for the women to spend more time at home (and give up extra hour?) and for the man to spend more time at work. This is indeed a stereotype but there is nobody forcing anyone to follow those gender roles. We all know successful women/men going against those gender roles.

If you take a conscious decision to work less hours to spend more time at home, you cannot be mad at "society" for patriarchism etc.

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