Employers have made it such a taboo to talk about wages that they can easily get away with it while no one’s the wiser. Given that, it doesn’t have to be an antagonistic view since all other things being equal, “pay our employees more” is strictly at odds with “maximize profits”.
To piggyback off of Matt_W’s excellent list, there’s still just an enormous problem with latent and actual sexism. “Women aren’t as smart. They’re not good engineers. They lack the focus and dedication to succeed. They just aren’t ambitious enough. If push comes to shove, I know she’d fold.”
I suspect for a lot of the cases of actual 1-to-1 comparable wage discrimination (which, although greatly diminished, is still a Thing, especially in certain industries and cultures), the wage-setter never really considered the two candidates to be equal, but that consideration arose entirely from internal biases (recognized or otherwise) and had nothing at all to do with objective measures or facts.
Then toss in the fact that gender and race discrimination’s effects begin mounting long before people even first try to enter the workforce, piling up a mountain of disadvantages, on aggregate, for members of certain communities, so that many of them have to work twice as hard to even be able to present a “comparable” resume in the first place to even get a crack at the possibility of equal pay. If you grew up inner city poor with shitty schools and a single-income household cuz dad got 3rd-strike busted for bogus weed charges by a racist cop and everyone you’ve ever met treated you like you were somehow less than human, and never encouraged or bolstered you, but just assumed you were a failure waiting to happen. . .
Well, all I can say is you’re a real badass when you crack into that top engineering school’s freshman class. And moreso if you persevere to graduate while held back by a whole other set of societal disadvantages.
Ditto also for women, religious minorities, out members of the LGBTQ+ community, etc.
Wage discrimination is deeply rooted in almost every level of the school-to-workforce pipeline, compounding disadvantages over decades of people’s lives without active, malicious, conscious bigotry ever needing to enter the equation (and hell, if it ever does, enjoy being mega turbo-fucked instead of just plain old regular fucked).
Timex
3860
Ya, I know that those are things that folks say, but I also know how obviously bullshit they are. Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with are women. The idea that women can’t hack it is bullshit.
Mayor Pete is pretty explicit that his idea on say changing the Supreme Court, which has some appeal to me, isn’t something that is going to happen in four or even eight years. More like 28 years. It took forty odd years to get women the right to vote, it started at the state level. But the longest journey … People are demanding we make extensive economic changes limit temperature changes by 2100. Constitutional changes should take decades to occur but it’s important to start now.
And congratulations for having realized and internalized that fact. For all that I slag on you here, you are in fact more enlightened than an alarmingly enormous portion of the electorate. The roots for that shit run deep.
Timex
3863
I suspect that some portion of it is generational, as there was certainly some notion in the past that women “just weren’t built for certain things”.
But, even if you believed that in your heart, it doesn’t seem like the result would be “pay them less”. It’d be “don’t hire them” (which, I realize, is certainly something that also happens).
The notion of paying them less really does seem like it’d just come out of an antagonistic employer/employee relationship, where you’re just engaged in some kind of transaction with the employee, and trying to get the best price. But that also seems weird to me, as it seems like it’d result in an inherently dysfunctional workplace. And yet, I realize that such environments do exist.
Now start to consider compounding effects. You take six months longer to find a job than your male compatriot due to sexism. You are held back from promotion nine months longer, eventually hopping jobs, but not getting as large of a bump from switching. . . since you never did get that promotion. The next job delays and dawdles. . .
I mean, yes, again, there are people who’ll just straight up stamp “Pay Less Cuz XX Chromosomes” into the file, but the same situation can arise from smaller, incrementally built up injustices.
I’ve definitely witnessed instances at a previous employer where I’d push for salary increases for employees I managed, and there would be noticeably more pushback from above when the employee in question was female, even if I had given them more positive feedback on reviews than male counterparts.
wavey
3866
Agree 100%, and I remember a Freakonomics episode that drove home the point about those kind of incremental effects, even when any direct human bias is removed from within a job.
It was an episode looking at Uber’s pay data for drivers. The pay is calculated by algorithm, per trip, based on length of journey, time of day and so on, and is gender-blind. The same is true for the job dispatching algorithm - it doesn’t take into account gender when assigning trips to drivers. There’s total flexibility, drivers can choose their own hours. So you might expect there to be no pay gap between male and female drivers.
Men were still paid 7% more than women, however. They looked at the data to see if they could explain the difference: 20% of the difference was explained by the times and places of the start of each trip - men happened to do more late night trips, and the more profitable airport trips. 30% was due to on-the-job experience - i.e. the longer you have the job, the more you know the system and the better you can work it. Women tended to leave the job at a higher rate than the men, so didn’t benefit from this as much. And the other 50% was due to men driving slightly faster.
The economist put this down to “differences in gender preferences”, but this exchange caught the crux of it, I think:
DUBNER: And when an economist like you says “differences in gender preferences,” can you unpack that a little bit? Because I think you guys mean something a little bit different by the word “preferences” than the layperson does.
DIAMOND: Sure. For example, women prefer to work fewer hours per week than men on Uber, and in the broader economy. That’s a choice by men and women, given the other aspects of their life, that they’re taking into account, when deciding how much to work. Women are choosing to drive slower, which is a choice likely just based on preferences of just how they’ve learned to drive in their broader life. Those aren’t aspects of the labor market, those are just differences between men and women outside of the labor force that happened to lead to differences in compensation in the labor force.
DUBNER: Right. But then what if I say, Well, I know they might look like preferences on paper, that I choose to work 20 hours a week instead of 30, but the reason I’m doing that is because I’m the one who needs to, let’s say, take care of my elderly mother — or worse, my mother-in-law, my husband’s mother, because he’s not going to do that. So yeah, it shows up in the data as a preference, but in fact, it’s much more of a structural component that I really can’t do anything about.
So in conclusion: the patriarchy strikes again.
And hell, more late night trips? Possibly got something to do with the fact that women have a well established and extremely justified series of reasons to be much more nervous about being alone with a stranger in the dead of the night…
You can say that women thus choose to avoid a lucrative opportunity, but the genuine capacity for free and clear decision making there is removed by existing in a society where women are violently assaulted in exactly that situation at a massively high rate than men, with enormously more severe results…and then, more often than not, get somehow BLAMED for it!
ShivaX
3868
I wouldn’t want to be an Uber driver as a man. As a woman, there is no way in hell I’d do it.
Maybe if I had a Heavy Metal-style backseat vaporizer.
I’d love to see the data behind the claim that “woman are assaulted at a massively higher rate.”
All the data I’ve seen from the FBI shows the exact opposite. So for instance from the DOJ website.https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=955
Males experienced higher victimization rates than females for all types of violent crime except rape/sexual assault. Females age 12 or older experienced about 552,000 nonfatal violent victimizations (rape/sexual assault, )
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports , most murder victims were male, 78%
Looking at the most recent data 2012. Men were almost 50% more likely to victims of serious violent crime 9.4/100,000 people vs 6.6 for women. Serious violent crime being rape, sexual assault, aggravated assaults (assault where the victim ends up in the hospital) or robbery. Now to be fair, it is possible/likely that men are victimized at higher rates than women because we engage in more stupid/risky behavior, like hanging out at midnight in high crime neighborhood.
I skimmed the whole report looking for crime discussion. It appears that 5% of the earnings gap was because men were more willing to drive in higher crime areas, which were underserved. But the much more significant factor 24% was merely men were more likely to pick up folks at bars. I’d guess that drunk passengers are more likely to hit on by the opposite sex and be belligerent with the same sex. (I’ve seen plenty of videos of drunk girls being obnoxious with male Uber drivers). So it is not at all clear to me that women Uber drivers are in more danger of being attacked dealing with drunks then men.
But that’s just a guess on my part. I’m going to ask Jonathan Hall, the Uber economist, for the actual data on crimes committed against Uber drivers. My guess is there wouldn’t be any statistically significant difference, that the actual number of Uber drivers who are crime victims is quite small. Armando is partly right, women are far more fearful. The other prediction, I’ll make is that if you survey male and female uber drivers that women are a lot more fearful of being attacked.
ShivaX
3870
Also consider that most women who are assaulted probably happens in a domestic situation where they are less likely to report it.
Also rapes are under reported as well and that’s the most likely form of assault you’d be talking about in this scenario, which is infinitely more horrific than just getting your ass kicked and robbed (which might also happen anyway).
Uh… cause a drunk chick can’t overpower a male driver. Now take the inverse of that…
If a woman let drunk strangers get into her car and something happened… well I can already hear the victim blaming.
Now is this something we can fix from the top? Not really. Unless you’re going to pay women more to do the same job as a man to make up for the difference where a man is willing to take on more risky opportunities, which would be a wrong-headed approach.
This is really one strange, misshapen hill to choose to die on.
Catching up here, but when going through the click through for the 26% claim, the numbers are skewed.
That only includes strongly agree /mostly agree and excludes other categories such as don’t know, don’t care.
Only 12% of democrats /independents said disagree /strongly disagree (6% each) that they were comfortable with such a candidate.
As Russert would say “Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin”
Wow - if that map is really true then I’m feeling pretty pessimistic about a democrat in the WH in 2020. I have a hard time envisioning a WH run w/o winning either Texas or Florida.
Also interesting that democrats would lose most tie-breakers in the case of a 269-269 tie
It’s 15 months until the election, the incumbent is a Republican, most voters don’t know who the Dem candidates are, and the economy is going great guns.
By any traditional measure, the incumbent should be well ahead at this point. And yet the Dem is still winning.
You shouldn’t be feeling so pessimistic.
Matt_W
3876
Curious where that data is coming from. Is it just 2016 results plus PA and MI? I don’t think there’s been any recent general election polling against a generic D at the state level.
Matt_W
3877
Here’s Trump’s current 50-state approval ratings, from Civiqs:
I’m not sure how good that poll is, but that looks like AZ, GA, NC, IA, OH, PA, MI, and WI are all potential pickups from 2016.
