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Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

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Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#61

Post by lm28469 »

depthcharge wrote: post #59
lm28469 wrote: post #44

The problem of gender pay gap is a really hard one to tackle. You have to be a fool to pretend there is no issue, but the number of causes is incredible at the gender, education, industry, company and individual levels. Every time there is a public debate around that topic you end up with two major groups, one saying that women work less or are less productive because of XYZ, the other saying something close to "it's…

Since gender only seems to play a very minor role in wage differences between men and women, as opposed to say, willingness to work full-time/overtime, personality, and job choice, it is not at all clear that the 'gender' pay gap is a problem that needs tackling. I believe systems that strive for equality of outcome and put group identity above individual qualities will only create more injustices, not fewer. If the…

> Since gender only seems to play a very minor role in wage differences between men and women, as opposed to say, willingness to work full-time/overtime, personality, and job choice

But isn't personality heavily influenced by gender, job choice by education and stereotypes, will to do over time by lifestyle (getting the kids from school, ...)

I agree with your point of view on identity politics, but you seem to assume that the current "system"* is neutral and isn't favoriting any demographics right now. Last time I checked, studies tend to show that the "gender pay gap" isn't entirely based on gender, as you said, but still, a non negligible part of it is.

* I don't like that word but can't find better

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#62

Post by raducu »

lm28469 wrote: post #58
raducu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about option 3: men choose to work on jobs that pay more but are more stressful while women chose to work on more social jobs that pay less and value other things more than just pay.

You'll have to be a bit more precise because right now it's hard to tell if you're trolling or trying to make a point. In any case, the pay gap isn't a thing that can be addressed with a single sentence such as yours. It's a really simplistic point of view to say social jobs are valued other than with a salary. And I'm fairly certain that social workers, teachers and nurses get their share of stress. If anything the…

Yes it is a very simplistic explanation to why genders tend to gravitate to one job or another. And yes, I'm saying that most, but not all of the disparities are biological and while it's a great idea to encourage women to pick higher paying jobs, we're at a point in time where we'll see diminishing returns in those attempts.

For the same position with the same experience, in roughly the same location, I'd be very much surprised if the AVERAGE/MEAN pay gap is more than a single digit percent across an industry.

By all means go after those X% numbers, teach women to negotiate more, assert themselves and so on, but I think you'll end up with numbers similar to the ones in this study -- a couple percent improvement.

What I'm trying to say is there's no conspiracy against women earning more in the western world.

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#63

Post by hopler »

gherig4 wrote: post #8
xfitm3 wrote: post #2

I found this to be really interesting: "The researchers were especially surprised by the way in which the companies adapted to the regulation – by slowing the growth of men’s wages, not increasing women’s."

I experienced this first hand and as a result I departed for greener pastures. Isn't diversity a great thing when it suppresses wages, no wonder all the big boys are pushing for it.

If you know any employees of the big boys, you'll know that management is not supportive of diversity until they face worker revolts.

Your model makes no sense. If powerful forces wanted diversity out of self interest all along, we wouldn't even have a diversity movement, because the environment would be diverse already due to natural locally optimizing market forces, so there'd be nothing to advocate for.

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#64

Post by hopler »

chosenbreed37 wrote: post #49
lm28469 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you remove biases from such a process though. Given two employees, same education, same title, same working hours, same productivity (based on managers reports), nothing guarantee that the HR department won't "like" one more than another. Or one might ask for raises more often or with better arguments (having kids, longer commute, getting offers from other companies all the time). Office politics are what they…

In addition, the more fuzzy the nature of the work the more room for variations between remuneration. I suspect that the gender pay gap is lower workers in warehouses, factories or fast food restaurants.

The gender pay gap is large in restaurants -- women servers get bigger tips.

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#65

Post by fastball »

lucozade wrote: post #46
dmichulke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once read an interesting thought experiment about this, adapted to this story it goes like this: We assume: - Greedy capitalist bosses (wanting to pay less for more work) - Same productivity of men and women Now if there's an 18.9% pay gap, then women are on average 18.9% cheaper to employ than men. Greedy capitalist bosses should therefore only employ women, closing the gender pay gap by driving womens' wages high…

The incorrect assumption is an implicit one: the fungibility of workers. Your argument would work (-ish) if you were arguing against pay inequality. And, in fact, pay inequality is usually a lot lower than the pay gap. But for many large organisations, the pay gap is due to women being more likely to be in lower paid roles while men are more likely to be in higher paid roles. Replacing men with women and vice versa w…

You can't just "replace men with women" though, as it's not clear that the reason men are in higher paid positions is because of discrimination. For example, men on average work longer hours than women, which obviously contributes to the pay gap. Men also take less vacation than women, which generally makes them "more reliable". If I have two SysOps people, and they have the same skill level, I'm probably going to promote the one that took less vacation time.

The priority should be in curbing the behavior of men who are overzealous in their work to the detriment of their own health. That would probably bring down the pay gap significantly.

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#66

Post by fastball »

Traster wrote: post #47
dmichulke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once read an interesting thought experiment about this, adapted to this story it goes like this: We assume: - Greedy capitalist bosses (wanting to pay less for more work) - Same productivity of men and women Now if there's an 18.9% pay gap, then women are on average 18.9% cheaper to employ than men. Greedy capitalist bosses should therefore only employ women, closing the gender pay gap by driving womens' wages high…

Your assumption in your model is wrong. You aren't assuming the same productivity of men and women, you're assuming the same observed productivity of men and women. If you're in a widget factory and both a man and a woman are producing 10 widgets per hour then your effect would be expected - because the boss would be able to evaluate true performance. In the real world however, no job is that simple. The problem with…

The point of the model is that there will be many bosses that are not affected by such biases, who will then employ only women because they recognize that the other bosses have overlooked women due to "liking people not things".

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#67

Post by fastball »

lm28469 wrote: post #44

The problem of gender pay gap is a really hard one to tackle. You have to be a fool to pretend there is no issue, but the number of causes is incredible at the gender, education, industry, company and individual levels. Every time there is a public debate around that topic you end up with two major groups, one saying that women work less or are less productive because of XYZ, the other saying something close to "it's…

  Striving for equality of outcome is a good first step
Did you you mean equality of opportunity?

Equality of outcome is evil. Equality of outcome is a goal that stomps all over individual liberty and completely ignores the fact that different people have different abilities and different personal goals. Outcome should only be equal in cases where ability/desire is identical and opportunity was equal. Anything else is fundamentally wrong.

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#68

Post by lucozade »

fastball wrote: post #65
lucozade wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incorrect assumption is an implicit one: the fungibility of workers. Your argument would work (-ish) if you were arguing against pay inequality. And, in fact, pay inequality is usually a lot lower than the pay gap. But for many large organisations, the pay gap is due to women being more likely to be in lower paid roles while men are more likely to be in higher paid roles. Replacing men with women and vice versa w…

You can't just "replace men with women" though, as it's not clear that the reason men are in higher paid positions is because of discrimination. For example, men on average work longer hours than women, which obviously contributes to the pay gap. Men also take less vacation than women, which generally makes them "more reliable". If I have two SysOps people, and they have the same skill level, I'm probably going to pr…

> You can't just "replace men with women" though

Indeed. I was just pointing out why the argument was broken. The lack of symmetry in the workforce would also mean that that's not a way to reduce the pay gap even without the assumption of a reducing wage bill.

> Men also take less vacation than women

Are you sure? Men are statistically likely to take more of their vacation time (in the US at least) than women. If you are correct that implies that men get more vacation time than women but I'm not sure that that's correct.

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#69

Post by reitanqild »

adrianN wrote: post #33
dmichulke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once read an interesting thought experiment about this, adapted to this story it goes like this: We assume: - Greedy capitalist bosses (wanting to pay less for more work) - Same productivity of men and women Now if there's an 18.9% pay gap, then women are on average 18.9% cheaper to employ than men. Greedy capitalist bosses should therefore only employ women, closing the gender pay gap by driving womens' wages high…

Another assumption that could be wrong is that greedy bosses can accurately determine productivity. If bosses have biases that cause them to underevaluate women's productivity this would also explain the pay difference.

Can we assume greedy capitalist bosses aren't to stupid to run (or get someone else to run) A/B tests?

Yes I admit. It is leading question. And personally I guess greedy capitalist bosses would happily ditch more than a few biases if that meant they became richer, quicker.

Given you agree you have three options that I am aware of (interested to know if there exist more):

1. oppressing women on a large scale is somehow more valuable to greedy bosses than getting a huge competitive advantage over other greedy bosses, or

2. for some reason it wasn't such a huge competitive advantage after all.

3. for some reason it isn't possible to test it. Maybe because women chose another career path from the start. Or maybe women aren't as easy to fool into working for greedy capitalist bosses. Or something else.

Re: Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

#70

Post by progval »

3rdgender wrote: post #41

"The researchers compared those companies to firms with 25 to 34 employees that didn’t have to release their data" So they are comparing two different types of firms (with > 35 employees and between 25 and 34 employees): Doesn't that invalidate their study right there?

They did not directly compare the two types of companies, they compared evolution of each type.

Of course that's not perfect, but it's good enough

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