[HN Gopher] Young women earn more than young men in several U.S....
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Young women earn more than young men in several U.S. cities
Author : elsewhen
Score : 363 points
Date : 2022-04-03 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pewresearch.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pewresearch.org)
| frob wrote:
| "Several" is doing some very heavy lifting here. According to the
| paper cited, it's 22 out of 250 metro areas (or 9%).
|
| Another way to put this is that in the vast majority of metro
| areas, young women DO NOT earn more than young men. Even when you
| look at the areas where young women do outearn young men, it is
| not by a lot. For example, in the NYC area, young women earn 102%
| of what young men do. To my ear, that's parity.
| newsclues wrote:
| Weren't there big campaigns about the gender pay gap recently?
|
| I thought they said women made a fraction of what men earn?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Great. Actually great. This is what equality approximately looks
| like, not equal in all cities, some more for men, others more for
| women, just because there's different industries and tons of
| random variables, but equal overall.
| nwiswell wrote:
| Interesting to see Wenatchee, WA at the top of the list. That is
| (or was) the epicenter of Bitcoin mining in the United States due
| to some of the cheapest hydro power in the nation.
|
| Presumably, there was an influx of young male unskilled labor to
| set up all those mines, and this statistic was the result.
|
| I'd be similarly curious what happened to the local dating scene.
| ravenstine wrote:
| People are assuming this is possibly a bad thing.
|
| How do we know that young men today don't lack the interest in
| monetary success that may have been possessed by their elders? I
| know I'm not the only guy who's made it to "senior" level in
| their career and realized that money doesn't make up for time
| spent with people and fulfilling activities.
|
| This isn't to say there aren't other factors at play, or
| disadvantages specifically towards men, but earning more money
| isn't the end-all-be-all of success. Many wealthy people are
| actually miserable, and the suicide rate for women has also been
| increasing (yes, along that of men, but still). How do we know
| that women are proportionally reaching more life satisfaction, or
| that men aren't?
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I'm surprised to see that the San Francisco and San Jose metros
| are so different on this stat (median women's earnings as percent
| of median men's earnings for workers younger than thirty).
|
| San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA: 98%
|
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA: 88%
| acchow wrote:
| Check out the child birth rates between the two areas.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Men are slowly realizing this and other gaps
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Is this just data mining?
| daenz wrote:
| Interested to see, if this trend continues, if heterosexual women
| will adapt to desire men with less financial success than them.
| ip26 wrote:
| Well, supposedly the current pattern is the successful women
| are conditioned to seek _more_ successful men. This is a big
| courtship problem if women are more successful than men.
|
| Age preference could shift- e.g. even if 25 year old men are
| less successful than 25 year old women, 30 year old men might
| still be doing better. This affords men extra time to take high
| risk high reward financial strategies & mature.
|
| Continuing on the theme of risk, it could drive men further
| down the path of risk & split outcomes (men are over
| represented in boardrooms and in prisons). That could be
| socially destabilizing, with an increase in men on the bottom.
|
| Or, preferences could transition to prioritize other things.
| Who cares if he is broke, look at those muscles!
|
| The second order impacts are the crazy part to think about. If
| responsibility, providing, and stability become feminine
| traits, then do men culturally assume current feminine traits,
| like "free spirit" and "experimental"?
| jokoon wrote:
| > Well, supposedly the current pattern is the successful
| women are conditioned to seek more successful men.
|
| I really don't understand this, it feels like it's matter of
| culture. Success is subjective. I still wonder how success is
| defined in those studies. I have a difficult time believing
| that women really prefer men with higher social status, it
| seems like a bad meme. And if it's true, it would be
| interesting to hear what feminist think about this, because
| that would explain why men still seek social status in the
| first place.
| ip26 wrote:
| Have you spent even ten minutes reading research on the
| matter? Reality is nuanced, but it's _very_ well
| established that women highly value status in men.
| jokoon wrote:
| It made sense, in the past, that women with less social status
| would desire men with more social status.
|
| But once women gain social status, I don't see why they would
| still desire men with higher status.
|
| If most women still do desire men with higher status, it means
| most women have integrated patriarchal values, which is
| something feminists should really talk about.
| filoleg wrote:
| I feel like this one is a problem on both ends. Quite many
| women are not ok with dating men earning less than them, and
| quite many men are not comfortable dating women earning more
| than them.
|
| From my personal perspective, it is sheer silliness, especially
| on the part of (a good number of) men. While I don't agree with
| it, I can see why someone would be hesitant to date someone
| earning less than them. But I am struggling to see that many
| tangible downsides of dating someone earning more than you do.
|
| There are, of course, some potential downsides in every
| situation. But given that men (in general) seem to have no
| personal qualms about dating women earning less than them, i
| fail to see why a good number of them would be so vocally
| opposed to the inverse of it.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| People compare themselves to their spouses. If you feel like
| your spouse is "our of your league" it's harder to feel
| secure in your relationship. Men are probably being pretty
| pragmatic here, given that even though higher income tends to
| make men more attractive as a spouse, women still initiate
| 70% of divorces.
| ip26 wrote:
| Culturally, a lot of the value men bring to the relationship
| is providership, security, stability. If you as a man don't
| even bring that anymore, what _do_ you bring? If you don't
| bring anything, are you just another fling?
| tsol wrote:
| We used to say that about women and doing domestic chores.
| "Well women take care of the kids, provide a stable loving
| home and warm meals for the family. If they work what do
| they even bring to a relationship??". It's unfortunate that
| we can't seem to be so progressive on these things
| ip26 wrote:
| That's a very interesting line of thought.
|
| Once upon a time if you were not an attractive woman, you
| could still be a very appealing match if you learned to
| be a great cook & were great with kids. Now, if you
| aren't gorgeous, a winning personality is the only play
| you have left. There might be a really interesting
| discussion there. Perhaps reduced role of homemaking has
| increased the pressure of beauty standards on women...
| archhn wrote:
| adenozine wrote:
| I feel like if I showed this comment to your therapist, they'd
| detain you and try to get you some help.
|
| Please do not write things like this where other people can
| see. It's shocking.
| archhn wrote:
| Detain me for dissent?
|
| What is so shocking about my comment?
|
| Look at the suicide rates. It's highest for middle aged white
| men.
|
| What's going on? And why are you so hostile to dissenting
| opinions?
|
| Edit: my account seems to have been locked and I can't reply
| to posts here. My original comment contained some harsh
| truths about gender, which runs contrary to the present
| groupthink.
|
| I'm leaving hacker news for good. The last thing I'll say is
| that if you keep censoring dissenting opinions, you'll end up
| in a delusional echo chamber. This will take you further and
| further away from reality until you are completely unadapted
| to the world as it is and become completely impotent in your
| attempts to navigate it. Those who oppose you do you a huge
| service by doing so. If you crush your opposition, you'll
| also destroy yourself.
| ecf wrote:
| Unfortunately this is hacker news where even upvoted
| comments are flagged and removed if they go against the
| hive mind.
| Freestyler_3 wrote:
| Turning more into reddit.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Your hypersensitivity is shocking. Are you sure you're not
| projecting your own personal issues?
|
| Just to be clear for those seeing the flagged notice, the
| author wasn't violent or promoted hate against a gender.
| coolso wrote:
| I assumed his post must've been genuinely awful, based on how
| dramatic your response is, but it's been flagged so I can't
| see it. I did see a quote below from it which makes it seem
| pretty harmless and now my gut is that your post is probably
| more "shocking" than his was...
|
| What's with the current trend amongst certain members of
| society of using such extremely dramatic words to describe
| things that... aren't actually that bad? It feels like a
| tabloid or something. "Shocking. Horrific. Abhorrent.
| Reprehensible." (Like, unless you've been on the internet for
| a day, you really actually thought it was "shocking"?)
|
| I'm seeing this everywhere now and it's kind of annoying.
| It's like you don't have much of an argument, and you realize
| they probably have a point, but you want to silence the
| opposition, so you downvote, flag, and then write something
| super melodramatic as an attempt to scare others away from
| daring to have a similar opinion.
|
| Pro-tip: you are likely reinforcing and bringing more people
| to the cause you so histrionically oppose.
| goto11 wrote:
| It said things like "Women have always been better suited
| for taking orders and submitting." "women are better suited
| to thrive under oligarchic tyranny." Just enable showdead
| on your profile if you want to see all of it.
| archhn wrote:
| Am I wrong? Are women not the more submissive sex? Is it
| not generally accepted that men are more independent than
| women?
|
| What's your argument against what I said?
| coolso wrote:
| You are 100% correct in your statement, and even women
| themselves know this and admit it... and like it. Some
| may be more shy to admit it, but they all do - especially
| behind closed doors. Even the most feminist, Bernie-
| voting women I know.
|
| The only problem with your statement is it goes against
| what our feminist, matriarchal schooling system and media
| have been shoving in our faces for the past several
| decades, so we've been conditioned just as they want us
| to be: to react as if the world is coming to an end
| because someone said something that makes females not
| look like strong, independent perfect, women who don't
| need no man (because men are evil, in so many words).
|
| What's wrong with women being more submissive and less
| independent? If everyone were the same the world would be
| a better place. Man needs woman, woman needs man...hence
| why we're all here today. Men have their own flaws we're
| more than happy to own up to. And those flaws, like
| women's innate flaws, are so great because it allows men
| and women to serve even more of a purpose for each other
| and make each other complete.
| archhn wrote:
| Great comment. You get what I'm saying.
|
| > What's wrong with women being more submissive and less
| independent?
|
| The real problem with this, as the social engineers
| running this country see it, is that less independent
| women = higher birthrates. They are trying to reduce
| birthrates and break up the atomic family as part of
| their plan to make us into a highly atomized workforce,
| unable to form bonds with eachother. They're trying to
| engineer a society where there can be no retaliation
| against the corporate oligarchy that has overthrown the
| republic.
| goto11 wrote:
| No, this is not "generally accepted". Of course
| historically in traditional patriarchal cultures, women
| have been forced to submit, and men have had more
| individual freedom. That does not mean women are more
| more "suited" to submit any more than say enslaved
| peoples are more suited to submit than their captors.
|
| There are plenty of examples of men willingly submitting
| to authority, e.g. in the military.
| adenozine wrote:
| It included the phrase "Women only want to look good and
| receive complements" if that gives you enough context?
|
| You've made a lot of assumptions and I suppose it's a waste
| of effort even responding to someone so vehemently
| convinced of my position despite having not heard anything
| from me.
|
| People have been shunned for thousands of years. It works.
| It's a functional and pragmatic tool for societal
| management. I don't have to take time and explain to
| someone why women are worthy of respect and of being
| treated in more than just one dimension, I can just choose
| to ridicule and exclude people who think that. It's far
| more efficient, and far more effective in cluing those
| people in to the civilized world. These people need help
| from somebody, but I'm not here to help them, I'm here to
| read and to discuss.
|
| If you saw someone acting antisocial at a bus stop, you'd
| feel bad. I would too. We'd both probably want for this
| person to receive help and attention, and to be given
| resources, like a therapist or psychiatrist. That being
| said, I'm just there to get on the bus, I'm not this
| person's keeper and it's in my best interest to not
| interact with this person to any extent beyond what's
| necessary, as they may be dangerous in some way.
|
| I treat people with these toxic opinions the same way. I
| truly do feel empathy that someone feels that women are
| objects or that one dimensional creatures. It sucks, and it
| makes that person both difficult to deal with and it
| probably makes their own life quite difficult as well.
|
| Still, they are reprehensible. They are shocking. They are
| horrific. It hurts, because it's supposed to. It keeps
| society greased up and functioning that these people hurt
| themselves, so that they might seek help for themselves,
| lest they stay the same and attract support to their cause.
|
| Histrionic. That's rich, coming from a reply to a reply of
| a stranger on the internet.
| coolso wrote:
| > It included the phrase "Women only want to look good
| and receive complements" if that gives you enough
| context?
|
| Are you a male or a female? I have heard multiple women
| (friends, girlfriends, acquaintances) literally admit
| this. There is also a multitude of evidence that exists
| showing that the "theory" is not shocking in the
| slightest.
|
| These women I speak of don't consider it a bad thing. Why
| should you, a (presumably) male consider it that way on
| their behalf? Or anti-scientifically argue against truths
| that are too shocking for you to handle?
| archhn wrote:
| Nope, it didn't. You're straight up lying.
| krapp wrote:
| You do know that your comment is still readable even
| after it's flagged, right? Anyone who wants to can
| literally read what you wrote.
| lobocinza wrote:
| To be accurate he said this: "I know many young men who
| are incredibly disgruntled, but many women I know don't
| care about the bigger picture at all. They are selfish.
| They don't care about history or the future. They just
| want to look good and get complements."
| coolso wrote:
| FWIW I'm not the person claiming that, the person I'm
| responding to is.
| globular-toast wrote:
| The prevailing theory for the past couple of decades at least
| is the world has been built for and generally favours men.
| But when someone suggests the exact same theory to explain
| why women are doing better you say they should be detained
| for mental illness?
| goto11 wrote:
| Maybe it is the assertion that "They [women] don't care
| about history or the future. They just want to look good
| and get complements." which have people worry about the
| posters mental health? This is far beyond just saying
| society favors women.
|
| To be fair, I don't think the quote necessarily implies
| mental issues. It could also just be a person which had
| very limited interaction with women or people in general.
| globular-toast wrote:
| He said many women he knows follow this pattern. Also,
| George Orwell did observe this too, it's the bit of
| _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ that people forget.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Isn't it true? You can say more or less the same for most
| men. "They just want to look strong and get toys".
| robot1 wrote:
| archhn wrote:
| Calling people mentally ill because they have a different
| worldview than you do is not healthy.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Maybe you do but as I can't read your comment because it
| was flagged I can't judge you and can only assume that you
| are being unjustly condemned as that's the more frequent
| case on social media.
| archhn wrote:
| I basically said women thrive in different environments
| than men, and that our current society is better suited
| for women.
|
| I'll admit that I could have phrased my argument more
| politely. I could have couched it in all sorts of
| diplomatic language to make sure no one was offended, but
| that would have obscured my veiws. And I'm tired of
| censoring myself for the benefit of hypersensitive
| people.
|
| My comment wasn't spiteful. As far as I'm concerned, it
| relayed objective truths confirmed by my experience.
| goto11 wrote:
| > objective truths confirmed by my experience.
|
| I assume your personal experience with regard to women
| have been quite limited, if you have never met a women
| who cared about anything beyond "getting compliments".
| goto11 wrote:
| if you really want the see the stuff getting flagged, go
| to you profile and select showdead=Yes.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Thanks.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I'd urge people to read the article before jumping into the
| comments on this one. So many comments are just plain counter to
| the data, arguing over questions that are literally this one
| click away. It's a short and to the point data article.
|
| For example, the headline is referring to 22 out of 250 metro
| areas.
| [deleted]
| greatpostman wrote:
| https://archive.ph/5sD80
|
| The Boston globe has an article out about all the single women in
| their 30s who never found a partner. The hypothesis being there
| are fewer and fewer men who match them in professional/career
| success, which stops them from settling down.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| And here I am, a man of color, highly educated, very well
| paying jobs. And very unsuprisingly, almost no dates.
| roschdal wrote:
| yongjik wrote:
| > In fact, in 22 of 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, women under the
| age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male
| counterparts ...
|
| In other words, in 228 of 250 US metropolitan areas, women under
| the age of 30 earn less than their male counterparts. Why is
| everybody reacting so weirdly?
| gurjeet wrote:
| Because the title uses the word "several". Had it been replaced
| with "a few", the reaction would be consistent with what the
| reader would feel after reading the full article, and the
| statistics.
|
| original > Young women earn more than young men in several U.S.
| cities
|
| vs.
|
| alt. 1 > Young women earn more than young men in a few U.S.
| cities
|
| or
|
| alt. 2 > Young women earn more than young men in some U.S.
| cities
| tsol wrote:
| I feel like it's the framing. We all know the background
| reasoning is for the sake of equality. And yet it's not taking
| about equal earnings, it's taking about women earning more.
| This echoes other discussions where it feels as though the goal
| is not so much to achieve equality, as it is to reverse the
| trend and put women in a dominant position. And of course most
| people deny this is happening so it makes some people feel
| weird to see this obvious nonegalitarianism
| frob wrote:
| In NYC, young women earn 102% of what young men do. While
| that is technically more, I would count it as equal.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| This forum is majority male tech workers and has been weird
| (aka reactionary to the dismantling of the patriarchy) since
| I've been reading it in 2016. I don't know what the cause of
| the weirdness is though.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Banana699 wrote:
| 'Patriarchy' is just a dumb conspiracy-theoritic ideological
| framework for viewing society that starts with "women are
| victims" and back-propagates that to whatever beliefs and
| assertions needed to make it true. HN is mostly non-political
| compared to other Social Media forums in my experience, but
| if it's skeptic against that dumb conspiracy theory, then
| that's Good News.
|
| >I don't know what the cause of the weirdness is though.
|
| Might I suggest that you're reacting favorably to young men
| earning less and having the deck stacked against them even
| more and more, calling it the 'dismantling of the
| patriarchy'? perhaps that is making people a little bit
| weird?
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >I don't know what the cause of the weirdness is though.
|
| Because "dismantling the patriarchy" isn't what is happening
| to begin with, and the current actions are coming at the cost
| of young men. Meanwhile, it is questionable whether young
| women are getting much better from it.* There are many
| variables compounding on one another which are very difficult
| to interpret, despite people on both sides of the debate
| claiming they can.
|
| The majority of people are still ruled primarily by a bunch
| of rich men. The majority of people are women _and_ men. This
| hasn 't changed at all. What has changed is the giant
| sandwich of men and women between the poorest of the poor and
| the richest of the rich shuffling around, while they also
| have a smaller piece of the pie as a whole.
|
| *: Yes obviously not being dependent on others is a good
| thing. However, there is an underlying connotation that women
| are better off in the workforce than they are doing what they
| would do as of old. Considering many other social factors at
| play, there is enough reason to doubt this.
| jsnodlin wrote:
| ShamelessC wrote:
| cmdli wrote:
| Because it is evidence of a broader trend, where womens' and
| mens' pay is equalizing for people under 30. This has long been
| predicted by some given the gap in college attainment.
|
| What remains to be seen, and what has people acting weirdly, is
| whether this trend will stop once pay equalizes or if it will
| continue farther and result in a pay gap in the other
| direction.
| klyrs wrote:
| With an nationwide median pay ratio of 93% in men's favor,
| that is a weird thing to worry about now, isn't it?
| cmdli wrote:
| When that gap is rapidly closing, I don't think it's weird
| to speculate how it will go in the future. We saw something
| similar with college attainment, where women were being
| pushed out and are now the majority, which is causing pains
| with both men and women in college right now.
|
| Is it weird to worry about the direction the future is
| heading? Plenty of problems can be seen before they arrive,
| so why not start thinking about them sooner?
| scarmig wrote:
| Yes, women under the age of 30 earning less than men in the
| metropolitan areas of Baton Rouge and Tuscaloosa definitely
| outweighs them earning more in the metropolitan areas of New
| York City and Los Angeles.
| frob wrote:
| I'd hardly call the 102% ratio in NYC "more" in this context.
| scarmig wrote:
| Fair enough, but the point was more that you've got to
| weight metropolitan areas by population, and that you can't
| negate the existence of pay equality in many large
| metropolitan areas by pointing out the lack of pay equality
| in a lot of small metropolitan areas in the long tail.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| quantum-crt wrote:
| What is "the third gender?"
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Third gender: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
|
| [..] Third gender is a concept in which individuals are
| categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither
| man nor woman. It is also a social category present in
| societies that recognize three or more genders. The term
| third is usually understood to mean "other", though some
| anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth and
| fifth genders.[..]
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| About my original now flagged/down voted comment that I
| can't reply to anymore...I understand that my comment is
| unpalatable to many. But why can't we talk about it?
|
| It's like having a door shut instead of saying No. If we
| can sort out the fundamental inequality and unfair playing
| ground, then we don't have to argue ad nauseum ad infinitum
| about unequal pay.
|
| Discuss it. Please. If not with me, amongst yourselves in
| your safe spaces. For your children and future generations'
| sakes. Status Quo is damaging for our futures.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I read your post before it was flagged. Have you ever
| played Civ: Beyond Earth?
|
| You're like the Purity faction, who bends all new
| technology around human whims and limitations (dome
| cities, big anthropomorphic mechs), solving the issue by
| segregating genders into silos where their whims and
| limitations are directly catered to.
|
| There's two other factions in the game, Supremacy and
| Harmony, both of which are transhuman, who transcend
| their human whims and limitations and exploit and adapt
| to new technologies on the technologies' novel terms.
|
| Purity is comfier and easier, but I think it's a net
| retardation of growth and development. (It's certainly a
| regression in terms of liberal egalitarianism.) That
| future is stagnation. Transcendence is the key. We should
| _all_ become third gender. (Just kidding. I had nothing
| else to end with. By the way, your emphasis on "third
| gender" is pretty unusual to me. Do you mean non-binary
| people? Or are you using it as some TERFy catch-all for
| trans people? :p)
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Sorry. I don't know but will look into it.
|
| Although I do subscribe to transhumanism philosophy IRL.
| But there are all flavours of transhumanists. We don't
| all agree with each other.
|
| Third gender is the term used in India for transgender.
| They are a very visible group with their third gender
| identity for centuries now and are part of our societies.
| They are recognized and it is important to recognize
| third gender as a category so they don't feel the need to
| identify with the biological genders. It is a failure of
| western society that they haven't been recognized as non-
| binary and hence rendered invisible.
| crowbahr wrote:
| Local pockets of inconsistency will always occur but the national
| gap is thankfully getting smaller. This is a good thing.
|
| The gap is still 7% overall.
|
| Most of the biggest gaps are in small or resort towns: so it
| kinda makes sense. The closer gaps are in big metros where there
| is added value to the company to try and pull in from the thinner
| workforce of women in stem.
|
| As more women get into stem there will be less bargaining power
| and therefore closer to national average for a position.
|
| Supply and demand.
| fastball wrote:
| 7% gap among young people? Do you have a citation for that?
| frob wrote:
| In the middle of the article this is literally the discussion
| about, it literally has a chart showing that young women earn
| 93% of what young men do when looking across all metro areas
| in the US.
| 1over137 wrote:
| >The gap is still 7% overall.
|
| Is that normalized to number of hours worked? Women often work
| less hours than men.
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| It's not normalized for any of the factors that actually
| determine wages earned by any worker of any gender.
|
| So therefore the number is virtually useless, except to
| identify aggregate level choices made by men and women.
| trashcan02 wrote:
| > The gap is still 7% overall.
|
| Pure fiction, which is why nobody can present a credible
| analysis to support it.
|
| Try this instead:
|
| https://hwfo.substack.com/p/graphing-the-gender-wage-gap?s=r
| Epiphany21 wrote:
| >The gap is still 7% overall.
|
| Please provide a source. If you're the primary source, please
| present your findings and methodology.
|
| Workplace discrimination like this already illegal and pretty
| well enforced in the US, so if it's true where are all the
| lawyers lining up to take the easy cases?
| ddayz wrote:
| Looks like if this trend continues to grow we will be talking
| about the wage gap in a different context in the future.
| dudul wrote:
| No we'll move on to another "problem". We talked about the
| college gap while women were the minority. Now that they are
| more than 60% of enrollees no one cares.
|
| It will be the same for wages.
| filoleg wrote:
| Nah, people just switched from being upset about "the college
| gap" overall, and started driving "the college gap in certain
| specific degrees (that are tied to high wages, like CS)".
|
| I don't think the same type of a thing would work for wages,
| as wages are fairly absolute. Your bank account doesn't care
| which degree you had, it cares about the dollar number
| attached to it.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Actually I think majority of Americans are not in favor of
| the diversity programs and affirmative action. It's
| detrimental to your career to speak up.
|
| I suspect in the next decade progressives will fall out of
| favor as the masses get fed up.
| paxys wrote:
| If that ever happens the baby gap will be an exponentially
| larger problem we will have the deal with than a wage gap.
| Zigurd wrote:
| More women getting more university degrees is why this is so.
|
| This is one reason why it is a bad idea to locate a business that
| depends on intellectual capital in a state that denies women
| bodily autonomy, and that is generally hostile to anything other
| than "traditional" gender roles. Doing so further disadvantages
| recruitment.
| ipnon wrote:
| In the middle class where women graduate college at twice the
| rate as men, move to big cities for a lucrative career, and delay
| childbirth until their 30s, women are easily outpacing men in
| earnings.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| a majority of adults in my cohort have not had children, that I
| can see.. what "delay" ? its not happening, on a large scale
| ipnon wrote:
| Average woman's age at time of first child is above 30 in New
| York and San Francisco.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-
| bir...
| michaelt wrote:
| I think mistrial9's point is: It's only a _delay_ if they
| have children _eventually_
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| That's not what the data shows. Let's call "easily outpacing"
| as earning at least 110% between medians. The metros where this
| happens are: Wenatchee, WA, Morgantown, WV, Barnstable Town,
| MA, and Gainesville, FL. In every single other one, it's either
| pretty close or below 100%.
|
| Which is pretty heavily at odds with the "easily outpacing"
| statement.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yup this is one of those headlines that generates the
| opposite discussion of what the data actually shows. The
| conversation on this article will naturally be about how men
| are falling behind or about how feminism is outdated but the
| actual data in the article shows men outearning women in most
| metro areas (in some of them, by huge amounts) and women
| outearning men in some metro areas.
|
| The article shows men earning more than women. But the
| discussion is all based on the interpretation that women are
| now outearning men.
| tsol wrote:
| If the point is egalitarianism(which I believe is
| ostensibly the whole point), then both are wrong and need
| to change. We should be aiming for equal pay, rather than
| considering progress to be only when women outpace men
| mpweiher wrote:
| No, we should be aiming for people getting to make the
| tradeoffs they want when it comes to earnings and other
| life choices.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Sure. But it is just interesting how "in a few small
| cases, women outperform men" is often considered a larger
| crisis than the multi-generational norm of men dominating
| various careers and fields.
| [deleted]
| sprash wrote:
| Welcome to the world of dysgenics where the brightest and most
| diligent are not reproducing.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's interesting how the world of dysgenics ignores the idea
| of mass class-correlated die-offs, despite them featuring
| prominently in both the historical and genealogical record.
|
| COVID was a dress rehearsal. Deaths were heavily skewed
| toward poorer people, who had to go to work as essential
| workers despite the danger, or dumber people, who refused to
| get vaxxed. We'll likely have a famine later this year and
| into next - rich people will wince at the hit to their
| pocketbook from higher food prices, poor people will starve
| and die. If we get nuked, it's going to hit the inner cities,
| where relatively poorer people concentrate in dense housing,
| rather than the country estates and vacation homes of the
| rich. Poor people join the armed forces because it's their
| best option, rich people go to college and get a draft
| deferment. If a hostile totalitarian government takes over,
| the "brightest and most diligent" will bribe the right people
| to be left alone, the hoi polloi will get shot in the streets
| if they look at an armed soldier the wrong way.
|
| Genealogical studies have indicated that most Europeans
| living today are descended from the nobility of the High
| Middle Ages. What happened to all the peasants? Well, between
| Black Death, the Hundred Years War, Wars of the Roses, Wars
| of Religion, and other mass-casualty events, most of them
| caught fatal diseases from living in crowded and unsanitary
| city conditions, or they got sent to die in some nobleman's
| war.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Society needs to pay a competitive price relative to their
| other options.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this
| considering the long term value to be compensated (hundreds
| of thousands of dollars per child, if not $1MM). Society is
| too short sighted and short term financially focused.
|
| The world already has almost 8 billion people though (with
| population momentum landing is at 10B-11B by the end of the
| century), so I'm hard pressed to argue for more children
| (and the necessary policy and financial support) when we,
| in aggregate, already don't take care of the ones here (no
| subsidized child care, limited parental leave, half a
| million kids in foster care at any one time [US], ~120
| million unintended pregnancies globally annually, etc).
| Also consider that in parts of Europe where pro natalist
| policies are very robust (subsidized childcare, very
| generous leave policies, and "baby bonuses"), the fertility
| rate continues to decline regardless. Kids might be
| valuable to society, but the data supports the idea they
| are not as important to individuals (opportunity costs,
| life choices, etc).
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Life is one big selection criteria bias. You don't need
| all societies to work, just one. Unfortunately for us it
| may not be our society that makes it so there may be
| temporary setbacks. So long as designer baby technology
| is developed practically any amount of dysgenics can be
| reversed.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Extremely unlikely there will ever be a will to do this
| considering the long term value to be compensated
| (hundreds of thousands of dollars per child, if not
| $1MM).
|
| Parent here. You don't need $1mm to raise a kid. You
| don't need anywhere close to that, actually.
|
| Kids aren't free, obviously, but this internet meme that
| they'll bankrupt you is getting out of control.
|
| Honestly, how do you think people making the median US
| household income are affording kids? Multiple kids, even?
| I hope it's obvious that households with two kids earning
| <$100K per year (a common situation) aren't spending $1mm
| on each of them.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What people prefer is what matters, now that people can
| enjoy sex without worrying about having kids. I would not
| have had kids with a household income less than $100k (or
| even $200k), but that is just my preference for the type
| of life I would have wanted for the kids. I grew up poor
| as the child of struggling immigrants, and I want my kids
| to be very far from that quality of life for the portion
| of their life I am responsible for.
| ip26 wrote:
| I'm not sure how you can spend a 200k income on a kid and
| avoid them becoming spoiled rotten.
|
| Having been poor, you should have a good sense of just
| how little money it actually takes to leave the
| insecurity & want far behind (in my own experience &
| opinion)
| michaelt wrote:
| I think a lot of people on this site are from Silicon
| Valley, and what they actually mean is "I wouldn't start
| a family until I could afford a 3-bedroom house in a
| reasonable school district, and you can't afford such a
| house in Silicon Valley without a 6-figure income"
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I did not say their cost ($270k in 2022 inflation
| adjusted dollars per child in the US). I said their long
| term value (over their lifetime to society).
|
| If you're at a median income, you're barely getting by
| with kids.
| dmm wrote:
| > The world already has almost 8 billion people though
|
| The grocery stores are already full of food, why do we
| still need farms? If you ever plan to stop working you
| need young people to buy your 401k stocks from you and
| pay for your Social Security.
|
| The problem with low fertility rates is not (primarily)
| population decline, it's demographic collapse. As long as
| fertility is below replacement the proportion of elderly
| increases _forever_.
|
| What about immigration?
|
| The US is in a much better position wrt to this than many
| other nations because of our high rates of immigration
| but low fertility is a global phenomenon outside of a
| handful of places like Nigeria and Afghanistan.
|
| > the fertility rate continues to decline regardless.
|
| You're right. Nobody has figured out how to raise
| fertility rates once they start dropping.
| [deleted]
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| You could give the parents some kind of benefit(s)
| proportional to the taxes generated by their children
|
| /ducks
|
| (Yes, terrible idea for a number of reasons, but the
| incentives would be aligned...)
| WithinReason wrote:
| Or just reduce their taxes, e.g. like Hungary
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I'm always baffled when I read these comments from non-
| parents who describe parenting as the end of your life.
|
| Daycare isn't prohibitively expensive for any of us in tech
| careers. Anyone quitting a $150K+ job to avoid paying
| $20-30K for a good daycare for the few years before kids
| entire school isn't doing it because it's the optimal
| financial decision.
|
| You don't stop having a career or earning money or having
| career advancement when you have kids.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am a parent, but society wide data indicates people's
| preferences/risk assessments/perceived cost-benefit
| ratios better than individuals' opinion.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I agree that for high income people ($150k+ for the sake
| of argument) it's not strictly speaking a good idea
| financially to drop out of the workforce to avoid child
| care expenses.
|
| However, given the way taxes on two earner families work
| it is a much cheaper decision then it looks like at first
| blush.
|
| Maybe this is a good thing. But it is a bit
| counterintuitive if you think of salary in pretax
| dollars.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am not sure what you are referring to, but the tax
| penalty for dual similar income earning married filing
| joint tax filers was removed in the 2017 tax cuts and
| jobs act.
|
| https://taxfoundation.org/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-marriage-
| pen...
| bradleyjg wrote:
| What's the disposable income difference, in say
| California, between:
|
| 1) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing
| $150,000 a year, $40,000 in childcare costs.
|
| and
|
| 2) Spouse 1 grossing $250,000 a year, spouse 2 grossing
| $0 a year, $0 in childcare costs?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Looks like $110k minus the taxes on $150k of additional
| income, which are probably ~40%, so $110k minus $60k =
| $50k more disposal income. I still do not see what taxes
| have to do with this, the $40k childcare cost is the only
| variable.
|
| Also, that is ignoring the far higher probability of
| being able to earn $150k and more for the woman in the
| years agree her kids are out of daycare, plus the benefit
| of the woman maintaining financial independence.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| What are you even talking about? Two earner households
| are taxed pretty much just like two separate single
| earners
| ip26 wrote:
| I don't see how it changes the optimal choice, but there
| was previously a small penalty on joint filers with
| similar incomes.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Hence pretty much. Not something that would be
| consequential for this calculus.
| ip26 wrote:
| Yeah, at least in tech the cost angle seems essentially
| irrelevant. Kids aren't cheap, but the necessary expenses
| (food, care, clothes) are small relative to an income of
| six figures.
|
| I wonder if young adults making 120k are hearing "kids
| are crazy expensive" from families living on 60k, and
| developing a somewhat warped perception.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I live in SF and my coworkers with kids are paying
| roughly what I pay in rent for daycare alone. I'd guess
| that food, clothing, and healthcare are probably another
| 50% or more on top of that. Even with a FAANG salary,
| $30-50k per kid per year is a heck of a lot of money.
| ip26 wrote:
| You _can_ spend $20k on food, clothing, and healthcare
| for a kid, but pants for a preschooler are like $8 at
| Target, and they really don't eat much at that size.
|
| I know the daycare in SF is crazy, and I sympathize (it's
| not cheap for me either) but as others noted it's only a
| few years, and you only pay for full time daycare in the
| first place if you have dual incomes.
| watwut wrote:
| Daycare still requires you to pick up the kid and drive
| it there. And with culture of mandatory long hours, you
| can't really do it on time. Plus they get sick, they need
| to be driven to extracurriculars etc.
|
| Same with school later. You can't have kids 12 hours a
| day there.
| ip26 wrote:
| I'm not sure how to react to you referring to a child as
| "it".
| I-M-S wrote:
| Two other languages I speak refer to noun "child" in
| neutral gender, so maybe English is the outlier here.
| ip26 wrote:
| A fair point. "It" is neuter, not neutral, but I can
| understand "lost in translation"
| bsder wrote:
| > I'm always baffled when I read these comments from non-
| parents who describe parenting as the end of your life.
|
| Because it is?
|
| Seriously, _everything_ now revolves around your child--
| as it should.
|
| You can't "just stay jobless" for a year anymore. You
| won't take that project that makes you skip your
| children's play, sports, etc. You probably won't move
| very far (or at all) if you change jobs because your
| children are in school somewhere. You will stay in a job
| that may be suboptimal because uprooting your family is
| lots of effort. etc.
|
| And, this is doubly so for women. Women, in spite of
| everything, are still expected to be the primary child
| caretaker.
|
| How is this _not_ the "end of your life"--especially if
| you are female?
| imtringued wrote:
| This is because childbirth is an externality that we expect
| women to bear.
|
| Isn't it strange how there are only three factors of
| production? Land, capital and labor? Ultimately everything is
| being derived from the land but surely it doesn't take much
| imagination that humans are also derived from female humans.
| Reproductive work is not part of any economic model. It's
| just lumped in with labor even though it is not compensated
| and the very thing it produces is labor.
| Teever wrote:
| I predict that we will see the development of artificial
| wombs in the next 10-15 years and combined with rudimentary
| genetic modification this will result in a baby boom from the
| middle and upper class.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Seems unlikely for a few reasons. But let's say that the
| technology gets there - what's the value of outsourcing
| gestation? Pregnancy is no doubt uncomfortable though some
| women also say they enjoy it, but on a practical level all
| it takes is a few hundred extra calories a day to incubate
| a baby. And women in less physical professions seem to be
| able to work for basically the entire period. The thing is
| that once the child is born it will take much more effort
| to raise and that cannot be outsourced to cheap technology
| at this point, and that work has always fallen more on
| women.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I don't think genetic modification is a necessary pre-
| requisite. Having a market for sperm and eggs where the
| genetic value is known could be sufficient and this can be
| done with existing data science. Creating and testing a
| panel of IVF babies and selecting for certain genes and
| away from others would be a powerful evolutionary force.
| rileyphone wrote:
| there was a heated twitter thread a while back: https://twi
| tter.com/VitalikButerin/status/148349118090604544...
| sometimeshuman wrote:
| Perhaps the level of love and care for a baby/child are
| positively correlated to the severity of challenges parents
| face during pregnancy and eventual pain a mother endures in
| the natural childbirth. Hazing rituals exist for a reason.
| Will the nature of parental bonds change when Amazon
| delivers your baby via an electric stork/drone ? Will abuse
| and neglect increase the way it does with step-children,
| for example. It's admittedly a dark thought but worth
| contemplating since that technology seems inevitable and is
| already possible through surrogates as noted by another
| comment.
|
| Edit: ADHD, dark though disclaimer.
| tsol wrote:
| I was thinking similarly. From neurological,
| psychological and human perspectives-- women spend their
| pregnancy bonding with their child before they're even
| born. They give their child names, learn their mood, play
| music or sing for them. They feel their babies kick and
| plan all the things they're gonna do together when the
| baby is born. Large amounts of oxytocin, the bonding
| hormone, are released to strengthen the emotional bond
| between mother and child. Not just oxytocin is released,
| but a variety of hormones prepare mother and child
| together.
|
| I think the fact that we so naively try to paper over all
| of this with "it's cool we will just invent metal
| birthing pods to replace this" is part of why we have
| this problem in the first place. People didn't
| intentionally have children throughout history because
| it's logical, they did it because of emotions(99% of the
| time). We don't really emotionally appreciate the fact
| that women can CREATE LIFE. Like it's actually an amazing
| unbelievable thing. But it's rarely viewed as that
| wpasc wrote:
| Cancer progress in the last 40 years hasn't been that great
| (I'm not discounting the hard work and incredible
| breakthroughs there have been, etc). I'd predict we're
| closer to a cancer cure and other not so soon medical
| advances than a fully functional artificial womb. (10-15
| years would be F-ing amazing but I wouldn't be surprised if
| it was 100-150 years and aging was cured first).
|
| Edit: bc I forgot, we can't even replicate human breast
| milk fully well!
| lostlogin wrote:
| By and large, pregnancy isn't something that hinders work
| in a large way, with the obvious exception of the last few
| weeks.
|
| It's the small child that needs years of care that does
| that.
| paxys wrote:
| "Artificial wombs" for the rich exist today, and are called
| surrogates. Ultimately the bigger problem isn't the birth
| itself but the time, money and space required to raise a
| child after it is born. For more and more young
| professionals in urban areas the numbers simply don't work
| out.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Unfortunately surrogacy is entangled with large amounts
| of human trafficking around the world...
| doliveira wrote:
| Wow, I was about to joke about artificial wombs coming up
| as a solution in tech circles, but you beat me to it by
| being serious.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Sexless, genderless, genetically modified people grown in
| vats operated by the state and implanted with cybernetic
| backpacks that short-circuit decades of education before
| they're sent off to subvert alien civilizations and
| expand the empire is obviously the way to go; this
| demented legacy biology game we're trapped in is played
| out af.
| Teever wrote:
| People seem revolted by the idea of artificial wombs but
| I don't understand why.
|
| Can you explain your perspective to me?
| dudul wrote:
| Even if this tech was invented I don't think it would move
| the needle that much. A pregnancy will keep you away from
| work for a few months. Taking care of the baby is when the
| shit hits the fan.
| incrudible wrote:
| https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538
| ?...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| From the real world, I can assure you this is entirely
| untrue.
|
| It may seem like that if you're living in a super high cost
| of living city and everyone in your work social bubble is in
| their 20s and early 30s, but step outside of those small
| bubbles and age groups and there are plenty of happy parents.
|
| This whole "lol parents are dumb" meme really needs to die.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Parents are not dumb but they are paying a high price that
| in a totally incentive-driven world nobody would pay. We
| (the public) who set the incentives need to do some soul-
| searching about the question of why we assign such a high
| cost to creating our future.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Sure, but, there is plenty of evidence that educational
| attainment is negatively correlated with number of
| children. And so we have this strange phenomenon of
| educational success negatively correlated to evolutionary
| success. Here is a graph:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-
| attain...
| sprash wrote:
| As somebody who lives in Europe in a country with one of
| the lowest reproductive rates in the world I can assure you
| that is is entirely true.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Perhaps society shouldn't make women choose between a career
| and a family and it would be less of a problem. Many white
| collar workplaces are pretty hostile to working mothers in
| some ways overt, and other ways more subtly.
|
| It's entirely possible to have a culture where women can have
| families and careers at the same time. It's entirely a
| cultural problem and is completely solvable if there is a
| collective will to solve it.
| tonguez wrote:
| "Perhaps society shouldn't make women choose between a
| career and a family"
|
| Perhaps society shouldn't make men choose between a career
| and jerking off all day
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Where are these countries that within the population a
| woman's fertility isn't negatively correlated to her
| education and career attainments?
|
| Scandinavian countries do everything you are advocating for
| and have the same fertility trends as everyone else.
|
| Advocate for those policies anyway, if you want to, but
| don't claim they are going to move the needle when we have
| evidence they won't.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Which evidence?
|
| In Quebec/Canada, when state-spondored affordable daycare
| was introduced, it made a notable difference both for the
| number of women in the workforce, and also an increase in
| childbirth.
|
| https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/daycare-difference-
| queb...
|
| Far from perfect, it was defunded in recent years, and it
| again made the birthrate and workforce go down. As a
| parent, I can anecdotally say that this system, when it
| worked, made a huge difference for our family.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I didn't read the underlying study but based on the
| summary it looks like there was a statistically
| significant difference in overall fertility. It still
| never came close to replacement rate and tells us nothing
| about the sign on the correlation between a woman's
| educational and career achievements and her fertility.
|
| There's arguments on all sides about whether sub
| replacement fertility among woman with successful white
| collar careers is or isn't a problem. But what I haven't
| seen is any country that's managed to reverse it. So we
| don't in fact know if it is possible.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| As someone who grew up thanks to this system, it did
| tremendous good to our family.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| why is throwing kids in daycare so parents can go slave
| for more money a good thing
| qiskit wrote:
| > It's entirely possible to have a culture where women can
| have families and careers at the same time.
|
| You can't have your cake and eat it too. Can't be a good
| mother and a good worker. You can't be at home taking care
| of your baby and at work being productive for your
| company/boss/etc. Not rocket science.
|
| > It's entirely a cultural problem and is completely
| solvable if there is a collective will to solve it.
|
| The most egalitarian societies with the most women-friendly
| workplaces have some of the lowest birth rates. Your
| assertion, which has been around for decades, has been well
| tested and well debunked. For decades, wealthy western
| societies have increased benefits for working mothers.
| Birth rates continued to decline.
|
| If you want higher birth rates, you want women to spend
| less time in school/work and have children in their prime
| birthing years ( 18-29 ). That's simple biological fact.
| The question for society is whether we want women at home
| with their babies for the benefit of their families or we
| want women at work for the benefit of
| corporations/shareholders. The elites have spoken and it's
| the latter. It's why the elites want more immigration. We
| need to maintain the population somehow.
|
| The issue isn't complex unless you want it to be complex
| because you don't like the simple truth.
| datavirtue wrote:
| sokoloff wrote:
| How much is society making them choose versus the biology
| of pregnancy and delivery versus there being 24 hours in
| everyone's day and anyone can only do so many different
| things well in those 24?
| umvi wrote:
| Outsourcing childrearing to daycare farms is prioritizing
| work over family. Sometimes it's necessary. But often it's
| not. Both parents can't work full time and effectively rear
| young children IMO. Under such a scenario kids are spending
| 9 hours a day with paid strangers and 3 hours a day with
| the actual parents (or less, if you count naps).
| sprash wrote:
| No, "society" should encourage smart women to reproduce.
| It's as simple as that.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| So now you are just arguing in favor of eugenics?
| postsantum wrote:
| There is a heavily stigmatized word associated with this
| idea
| sprash wrote:
| You mean "evolution"? That's true, creationists hate it.
| greenonions wrote:
| Not the above poster, but I would guess the word they
| were referring to was "eugenics".
| tomp wrote:
| Not really. Clearly the current socio-economic model
| discourages smart women to procreate.
|
| So encouraging smart women to procreate would in reality
| simply unbias our society and make things fair again.
|
| No need to invoke "eugenics" or something
| postsantum wrote:
| Smart women have absolutly no problem reproducing because
| most of them optimize not for the amount of money earned
| in lifetime but for the quality of life. And one of the
| metrics is having children. I believe sociologists of the
| future will find a way to quantify the quality of life
| with such an ease as they do it with salaries. Let's talk
| about "happiness gap" then and see who is smart
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| That is what they said.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "Perhaps society shouldn't make women choose between a
| career and a family and it would be less of a problem."
|
| Society does not. You do.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> Perhaps society shouldn't make women choose between a
| career and a family_
|
| Is this a pressure applied to women, or to people in
| general?
|
| Is it easier for men or for women to return to work after
| spending a few years taking care of their kids?
|
| Perhaps discrimination goes the other way.
| mhh__ wrote:
| It is culturally possible but given how busy (say) I am
| now, I can't even imagine being a woman and choosing to
| have a baby concurrently. Maybe if I had truly vast amounts
| of money to spend on "automation" (of sorts), but I think
| it's somewhat fantastical to think it's easily done.
| tsol wrote:
| I don't know why it's taken for granted that this is so
| easy to solve. The truth is, there's a biological
| inequality between the genders that results in these
| discrepancies. It's not so simple to eliminate the
| consequences of giving birth to another human-- it's a long
| and difficult process, and society can't change that.
| Capitalism destroys the ecology of poor people around the
| world and we just about accept it can't be stopped, so I
| don't really think capitalism can be stopped from trying to
| extract maximal resources from the workforce(and therefore
| have bad policies for pregnant women).
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Designer babies are around the corner so I wouldn't worry
| about dysgenics.
| [deleted]
| dalbasal wrote:
| Or rather... this specific class may be accumulating more women
| than men.
| cs702 wrote:
| ...which is not _that_ surprising, because in the US more women
| than men have graduated from college over the past two decades
| (roughly):
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ft_20...
|
| In other words, this is a predictable consequence of the growing
| female-male gap in college enrollment and graduation rates:
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...
| mostertoaster wrote:
| The pay gap in this case can be explained.
|
| But if the larger pay gap we fight over is explained, that
| explanation is dismissed because it doesn't fit the narrative.
|
| The facts don't matter. What story the facts tell, and what
| story is heard and believed, does.
| ip26 wrote:
| Are you sure? College education is dropping as a predictor of
| income, especially in the degrees with the highest female:male
| ratios. Increasing numbers of women graduating with degrees in
| journalism and poetry would probably not explain an increase in
| income for women.
| [deleted]
| godelski wrote:
| It's only surprising because people just repeat pay gap
| statistics and don't learn about them (I believe there are non
| good faith actors promoting this).
|
| Pay gap for men and women only starts mid career. But this
| isn't the 80c on the dollar pay gap (that's median male
| earnings vs female). It's usually in the 90c range (iirc 93c is
| the median and even Uber found a pay gap in this range).
| There's also the glass ceiling. But neither of these things
| have a smoking gun to them. They are hard to solve and going to
| require a lot of us to start talking about them. So I'm not
| sure why we only discuss median gender earnings, which isn't a
| great way to discuss fairness. It's especially bad when we
| discuss median gender wages as if they are controlling for
| variables (like the 90c+ gap does, which you see in part of
| this data). But don't let the bad discussion of median earnings
| prevent a discussion over the actual phenomena that exist.
|
| Edit: there's a lot I didn't say here, I'm glad others are
| adding more. But let's also try to be nuanced because it is a
| complicated topic. I also wanted to plug a podcast "The Pay
| Check" which goes in depth into these issues, including
| attempts to solve them. It's from the perspective of economics
| (by Bloomberg) and discusses all the common misconceptions like
| child rearing.
| worik wrote:
| > Pay gap for men and women only starts mid career
|
| The article states that in ~10% of USA cities young women
| earn the same or more than men.
|
| If my arithmetic is working that implies that in ~90% of
| cities young women earn less than men.
| godelski wrote:
| Thank god for Pareto then
| QuikAccount wrote:
| Someone will correct me but I thought the gap between men and
| women pay was due to the fact that men are more likely to
| negotiate for pay than women?
| peanuty1 wrote:
| I thought it's mainly due to women prioritizing child
| rearing over career.
| godelski wrote:
| This can be part of it (same with other factors that people
| are discussing) but none of these (even combined) fully
| explain that 7% difference. I do highly recommend The Pay
| Check podcast as it goes in depth into all of this and it
| is far more nuanced than most people believe the problem
| actually is.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The pay gap stuff is bullshit with no real analysis.
|
| I worked at a union shop where everyone was paid on a tenure
| based scale, and you qualified for advances as long as you
| had 500 hours of paid (working or not) time in a calendar
| year. There was literally no way to have a pay gap.
|
| But... a group of women complained, and the company agreed to
| open a few female only promotions to buy them off.
| worik wrote:
| > The pay gap stuff is bullshit with no real analysis.
|
| There is enormous quantities of analysis.
|
| This anecdote you tell does not counter that
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| > Pay gap for men and women only starts mid career.
|
| Is a big red flag for me.
|
| You can't control for age. This subject is generational. The
| underpaid 40 year old women in 2010, are the same underpaid
| 50 year old women now. We didn't get a new group to sample.
|
| We can talk about 'the average 30 year old' within one
| generation. We can talk about 'the average 30 year old'
| across time. But they are easily mixed up and mean very
| different things.
|
| 'mid career' is not a useful phrase.
|
| ---
|
| In the same vein, the middle is steadily shifting as our
| pension age shifts from one generation to the next.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Exactly. It is insane that people expect equal outputs from
| a 20-30 year pipeline immediately after changing the
| inputs.
| laurent92 wrote:
| We'll discuss the glass ceiling when people admit than men
| also need help. Not an open ear with active listening to
| /dev/null and no actions behind, no; Actual help with real
| funding behind it.
|
| As it stands, this focus on women exclusively is only
| reproducing the divide from generation to generation, male
| managers being reluctant to hire women after the 2016 #metoo
| movement.
| hervature wrote:
| > But neither of these things have a smoking gun to them
|
| I don't have much proof, but it is almost certainly caused by
| the lost experience/networking/politicking of maternity
| leave. There are some very rough studies and pieces like this
| [1]. To me, it is obvious that if an athlete took a season
| off in their 20's that they would experience a gap and
| ceiling in their lifetime earnings compared to those that
| didn't. Having a baby in your 30's can be this
| transformational as many future CEOs would be starting their
| upper management careers around this time. If this is indeed
| the case, there is no clear solution as forcing paternity
| leave just doubly hurts the family but would equalize the
| aggregate statistic.
|
| [1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2019/05/14/how-
| paid-...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| This could be verified by looking at the differences in pay
| between woman with children vs. woman without children, or
| men vs. woman with and without children.
|
| The best study I could find at a moment's notice is [1];
| didn't read the full study in depth, just the write-up, but
| it seems to be a large factor.
|
| [1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-
| gap-child...
| JamesBarney wrote:
| My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to
| women prioritizing child rearing over career.
|
| There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's
| choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see
| women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as
| internalized misogyny.
| scarmig wrote:
| Another option would be to respect and valorize men who
| want to focus on things like home life over career success.
| misslibby wrote:
| scarmig wrote:
| Men and women both make sacrifices when it comes to
| building a household: working more isn't a privilege. If
| we're interested in liberating people from gender roles,
| we have to look at both sides of the equation.
| misslibby wrote:
| Feminists claim going to work is the privilege, and
| staying home with children is the chore. The opposite is
| true.
|
| People are being "liberated from gender roles" merely by
| technological progress: washing machines and the likes
| making household chores not a fulltime job, office jobs
| being doable even while pregnant, that sort of thing. The
| claim that people choose jobs just because of societal
| expectations is unproven.
| bobthechef wrote:
| The presumption here is that there is something to be
| liberated from. That men and women are generally better
| suited toward different aspects of parenting is not an
| artificial construction. Ideological commitments have
| taken the place of reason.
|
| The result will be that those who do live in a way more
| aligned with human nature and the specializations each
| sex entails will out breed those who don't.
| scarmig wrote:
| The existence of gendered statistical tendencies (some of
| which, I agree, are rooted in biological realities)
| doesn't mean that there aren't social structures that
| penalize people for deviating from those tendencies.
| misslibby wrote:
| How is anybody penalized for "deviating from those
| tendencies" these days?
| scarmig wrote:
| E.g. on the woman's side of things, a woman who is messy
| is judged worse than a man who's equivalently messy would
| be, which is society actively pushing women toward taking
| up more household responsibilities.
|
| On the man's side of things, a man who is a part time
| teacher's aid for the sake of work-life flexibility is
| judged as lazier than a woman doing the same thing would
| be, which is society actively pushing men toward taking
| up more work responsibilities.
| simulate-me wrote:
| I'm not even sure many women want someone else to take
| care of their kids after giving birth. I'm a man. I took
| many months of paternity leave after our child was born
| so my wife could return to work. My wife enjoys her work,
| but definitely less so after giving birth. She was
| totally fine to work until midnight before giving birth.
| Now, she wants to clock out as early as possible to
| maximize the amount of time she has to spend with our
| daughter. I've since returned to work and feel the same
| way. Hanging out with your child is fun and special, and
| it's not something you can buy with more money or status.
| The bond between a mother and child is also very powerful
| on a hormonal level. One thing I found surprising was how
| direct and physical the hormonal bond is shortly after
| birth. For instance, the uterus enlarges to hold the
| baby, and is still large right after birth. When a mother
| breast feeds, her body releases oxytocin (aka the love
| hormone). Oxytocin causes the uterus to contract.
| Literally within seconds of breastfeeding, a mother can
| feel physical changes occurring in her body. Pretty wild.
|
| Of course, the above is just my anecdotal experience and
| doesn't apply to everyone.
| chillwaves wrote:
| The tone of this comment is disturbing. Can you keep that
| kind of FDS/incel ideology off this forum, please?
| misslibby wrote:
| What about it is disturbing? And it is not ideology, but
| biology.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Maybe that would make sense if that was the trend, but it
| isn't.
| scarmig wrote:
| Trends have to start somewhere. But I'm convinced that as
| long as a male teacher's aide is considered a less
| desirable prospect than a male CEO, we're going to see
| shitty gender roles that limit and oppress us.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| One question is why try to start a trend if that isn't
| what men want? It seems like trying to manipulate desires
| to meet some other goal. If men want to care for
| children, then good! We should respect their wishes, but
| why try to change desires?
| scarmig wrote:
| Men do not collectively want things, as collective
| entities don't have psychological experiences like
| desire.
|
| Individuals of whatever gender exist within incentive
| landscapes, and they act within those landscapes to
| result in the best life for them. Many men and women wish
| they had different incentive landscapes to navigate
| through. My argument would be that creating a world where
| men and women can choose their paths according to their
| individual dispositions without penalty would result in
| one where more men and women are happy, which is why I'd
| like to nudge our existing world in that direction.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Almost all women I know who have kids prefer being the
| primary care taker to the primary bread winner.
|
| About half the men I know with kids would prefer to be
| primary care taker.
|
| If we somehow convince more men to want to be the primary
| caretaker, and feel more strongly about does that
| necessarily make the world a better place? It means both
| more men and more women don't get what they want.
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm not proposing engineering people's desires. I'm
| proposing eliminating the social structures that penalize
| men who want to be the primary caregiver (and penalize
| women who want to be the primary bread winner).
|
| Couples with compatible desires in line with the status
| quo would be unaffected. Couples with compatible desires
| opposite the status quo would purely benefit. Couples
| with discordant desires would negotiate the allocation of
| responsibilities more freely without social expectations
| biasing the outcome, which would lead to one partner
| benefiting and the other losing, but in a way that's
| either neutral or leads to a net benefit across the two
| individuals.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| What social structures penalize men who want to be the
| primary care giver?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Companies with different different policies for non
| medical birth leave would be one example of a social
| expectation codified as corporate policy. It is a pretty
| fringe issue in the United States because many companies
| that do give non-medical bonding time, give the same to
| both genders.
|
| There is also the hypothetical idea that stay at home
| dads get a called pussies, but I've never seen it come
| up.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| If you want freedom and equality of choice, we should
| focus on breaking down barriers that stop people from
| doing what they want, not pushing them to do something
| different.
|
| Adding incentives, nudging, and valorizing specific
| actions puts equality of outcome over equality of choice.
|
| We shouldn't push a trend to respect and valorize men who
| stay home more than those who work. We should push a
| trend to respect them equally
| scarmig wrote:
| > We shouldn't push a trend to respect and valorize men
| who stay home more than those who work. We should push a
| trend to respect them equally.
|
| We are in violent agreement.
| bavell wrote:
| You don't think they should be respected equally?
| scarmig wrote:
| "Violent agreement" is a phrasing often used to indicate
| two people were discussing something and appeared to be
| on opposite sides but eventually realized they want the
| same thing =)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think we are in violent agreement this point.
|
| Where I thought we differed is providing preferential
| incentives to men who stay home over those who work.
| trees101 wrote:
| segue from the topic at hand, but perhaps collective
| entities _do_ have desires. There are many different
| people converging on this idea. This link has a concise
| analogy for how it works:
| https://youtu.be/4IjW16FCpkA?t=766
| bobthechef wrote:
| godelski wrote:
| > My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due
| to women prioritizing child rearing over career.
|
| This is a common misconception. The gap I'm talking about
| can't fully be explained by this. It does affect the glass
| ceiling though, even if the women don't choose to have
| kids. I really do mean there's no smoking gun. You can even
| account for worse negotiations, prioritization of work life
| balance, work flexibility, family, and you don't fully
| explain a gap (albeit it does get smaller, but remember
| that even a 1% difference is significant here).
|
| I really suggest listening to Rebecca Greenfield's The
| Paycheck. The first season goes into all this. I think it's
| a lot more convoluted and surprising to many. It's also not
| focused on median earnings and so I think is really good if
| you want to understand fairness (glass ceiling is also
| discussed). And I don't think anyone disagrees with your
| second paragraphs. Women should have choice. But there's
| still gaps that aren't explained and we shouldn't just
| easily dismiss them. I should also mention that this gap is
| in no way a phenomena strictly in America. It's global.
|
| A lot of economists have put in a lot of work trying to
| understand this and there really is no agreement on what
| does cause it. So don't dismiss things so easily. Most
| problems in our modern and complex world have many casual
| factors and large casual graphs.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| You're listing off a bunch of factors that would be very
| hard to measure exactly and then concluding they don't
| add up to 100%. I think it's much more likely they don't
| add up to perfect measurement.
|
| It's standard to consider the null hypothesis as the
| answer if it lies within the margin of error of what
| you're measuring. Last I knew comparing exact jobs (not
| merely professions), actual hours worked (no "full time"
| category) and years of experience (not age) explained
| more than 90% of the gap. Are all these other causes you
| mention measured accurately enough to ensure the null
| isn't within the error range?
| Spivak wrote:
| Other than the tone you have it exactly right. There is,
| depending on the study, a 3-10% pay yet unexplained pay
| gap -- it always shows up. If it was actually 0% +/-
| error you would expect to see women as a group making
| more sometimes once all the explained parts are
| controlled for.
|
| However, people take "explained" to mean "it's fine, we
| don't have to do anything" when instead it's actually the
| stuff we know we should be targeting.
|
| * Men on average work higher paying jobs, male dominated
| fields are on average higher paying.
|
| * Men on average hold higher titled positions in a given
| field, the glass ceiling is a thing, and women have a
| harder time becoming managers and directors.
|
| * Women have fewer years of of experience on average
| because of childcare.
|
| This is all stuff we need to work on because
| "controlling" for all this stuff and then forgetting
| about it makes it seem like it's totally fine that 99 men
| and 1 woman are senior SWEs as long as the 1 woman makes
| the same pay.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I think there was a miscommunication
|
| > My understanding is _most_ of the mid career pay gap is
| due to women prioritizing child rearing over career.
|
| >The gap I'm talking about can't _fully_ be explained by
| this
|
| Articles like this are where I get my understanding.
| https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-
| explai...
| godelski wrote:
| On thing to note here is that this article discusses only
| University of Chicago MBAs. You'll see some pretty biased
| data. Not many people make $250k-$400k/yr with MBAs.
|
| And I want to quote something from this article that you
| may also find from my above comment
|
| > As Goldin put it recently to Freakonomics, "It's hard
| to find smoking guns."
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| >raising a child instead of slaving for corporations is
| misogyny
|
| wow
| thathndude wrote:
| It does feel like society is swinging towards the latter. I
| think there's a non-negligible slice of the population that
| look down on women's desire/choice to stay In the home and
| make child rearing their job.
| proc0 wrote:
| That's what they're good at??? It's the same reason only
| men get drafted to a war, at least for most of human
| history. Why is that a men's burden? Because we're better
| at it.
|
| I feel the whole women empowerment has gone so far that
| it's like soccer goal keeper complaining they can't go
| out on the field and score a goal, and when they start
| doing that the opposing team scores goals on you and then
| your team loses.
| worik wrote:
| > That's what they're good at??? It's the same reason
| only men get drafted to a war, at least for most of human
| history. Why is that a men's burden? Because we're better
| at it.
|
| Sigh. No.
|
| IMO the reason men are drafted is men are disposable.
| Much less valuable than women.
| proc0 wrote:
| > Much less valuable than women.
|
| Because... they can have babies, right? If you send women
| to war then your population dies. This just reinforces
| what I'm trying to say that there are "roles" which are
| crucial to a civilization (or society?). I'm not saying
| they can't change or evolve.
|
| I think there is underlying requirement (not necessarily
| just biological, but they are requirements of some kind)
| that allows you to be "valuable" to society, vs.
| "disposable".
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| > I think there's a non-negligible slice of the
| population that look down on women's desire/choice to
| stay In the home and make child rearing their job.
|
| I agree, and there's an easy test: I know from experience
| that there's a non-negligible slice of the population
| that look down on _men_ who make this choice.
| daenz wrote:
| I've seen the argument that women having and raising
| children should result in no interruptions of their career
| growth or earnings.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I have seen companies where having and raising children
| result in no interruptions of their career growth or
| earnings: I personally know 2 women in my office that
| were promoted while in maternity leave and one after she
| left the company: some companies bend backwards to
| promote women. I also have a colleague in the team in US
| that took a 15 year break to be a stay at home mom, the
| kids are now teenagers so she came back to work; she was
| automatically promoted to a position similar with having
| the past 15 years working. My point: it depends on the
| company, country, field of work etc.
| smugma wrote:
| Claiming someone got promoted after they left the company
| doesn't really make sense. Just thinking about HR
| systems, I don't believe the claim.
|
| I do know someone who was promoted while on maternity
| leave (@FANG). She absolutely deserved the promotion and
| has done a great job leading her (analytics, engineering
| adjacent) team. She subsequently went on leave for a
| second child (no second promotion that I'm aware of).
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| That lady (a close friend of mine at that time) resigned
| because she moved to another country where we did not
| have offices. A few days before she left, she was
| promoted because the management had promotion targets for
| women, so they scored one for the target. Everyone knew
| she is moving out of the country, so the promotion was
| just a dumb KPI hack - when the target is to have 70%
| women in an IT organization of thousands, people do crazy
| things to manipulate numbers.
|
| In my country during maternity leave the work contract is
| legally frozen, no change is allowed of any kind (due to
| a history of frauds with salaries, the government pays a
| big part of it so there were cases where they increased
| the salary 10 times for the duration of the leave).
| Still, nobody said anything because that target beats the
| law. The only thing they did not touch was the salary
| because this is the only thing the government is
| checking.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Do your male coworker get promoted while on bonding
| leave? Is that typical?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Males are rarely, if ever promoted, in the past 10 years
| the ratio was 10 to 1 female to male.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What does someone getting promoted after they left the
| company _mean_ , in practice?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| An announcement was posted the person is leaving the
| company (she gave notice). 2 weeks later, another
| announcement was posted that the person was promoted. The
| person did leave the company as planned.
| Fargoan wrote:
| bertjk wrote:
| > ...and one after she left the company
|
| This honestly sounds pretty fishy-- like they wanted to
| goose their diversity stats for free while not actually
| changing any part of their org chart.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Exactly. A manager reported one more female promotion for
| that year. Because the office in my country is relatively
| small, one promotion still makes a measurable impact.
| david38 wrote:
| This is laughable. For this to be true,
|
| * raising children would require zero time and overhead
|
| * or people who don't have children should be barred from
| working more hours than a working mother can reasonably
| work.
|
| Of course this entire discussion is mostly classist to
| such a degree many people literally don't see it. For a
| mother to work full time with young children requires a
| lower paid (usually a woman) person to take on the child
| rearing role. So it's sexist for a woman to take a few
| years prioritizing her children, but it's equality for
| another woman to raise those children?
| jldugger wrote:
| Probably the better faith argument is that it should
| impact both genders equally, but it's a lot harder
| problem to solve, with multiple layers of interaction in
| a dynamic system.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Even, you would need to define a specific problem.
|
| If you are talking about overall career impact post
| birth, you would only expect equal outcomes if men and
| women are making the same choices and have the same
| preferences.
|
| If the "problem" is simply different numeric outcomes
| between men and women, it ignores any differences between
| the wants of men and women.
| godelski wrote:
| If it affects both equally that's equivalent to no effect
| when comparing the difference. I think if we're
| discussing in good faith then you and the parent agree
| but are using different perspectives.
| DFHippie wrote:
| > women having and raising children should result in no
| interruptions of their career growth or earnings
|
| is different from
|
| > affects both equally
|
| Perhaps the first should have been "women having and
| raising children should result in no interruptions of
| their career growth or earnings greater than those
| experienced by men".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >women having and raising children should result in no
| interruptions of their career growth or earnings greater
| than those experienced by men".
|
| Greater than men in general, or men who make the the same
| choices as the impacted women?
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Well, if the parents are married all the earnings
| typically accumulate as common assets. In the event of a
| divorce those common assets are divided, and usually for
| a period of several years or more the higher earner is
| required to transfer further income from their paycheck
| to the lower earner. This doesn't show up in the
| statistics I assume.
|
| It's possible this doesn't create a 100% balance, but
| it's also not 100% balanced that one partner was able to
| spend far more time with the children (and usually both
| parents want to despite what some debate participants
| will say), and other non financial costs and benefits.
|
| One way to solve this would be to require all marriages
| to have a pre negotiated divorce agreement with
| experienced advisors on both sides to discuss what would
| be fair compensation in case of divorce.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > but it's also not 100% balanced that one partner was
| able to spend far more time with the children
|
| That can easily be balanced via legislation. What cannot
| be balanced is one partner having to take on all the
| health risks and lifelong consequences of childbirth and
| breastfeeding, etc.
| scarmig wrote:
| In general, men get the short end of the stick with the
| current setup of household gender roles. They work more
| hours, at jobs they like less and are more stressed at,
| and experience far more on the job fatalities and
| permanent disabilities than women do.
|
| The net result of this is that men are more likely to die
| any given year during their careers and have a life span
| shorter by several years than women do.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > one partner having to take on all the health risks
|
| Sure, but let's be careful not to cherry pick the
| statistics. It's still true that the average life
| expectancy for men is about 5 years shorter than women.
|
| I notice that there are attempts in our society to
| balance some areas of risk but not others. Breast cancer
| funding is much greater than prostate cancer funding
| despite the latter killing more people, etc.
| klipt wrote:
| Yeah if we really cared about equality of outcome we'd be
| funding men's health to the tune of trillions to reduce
| the life expectancy gap.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > What cannot be balanced is one partner having to take
| on all the health risks and lifelong consequences of
| childbirth and breastfeeding, etc.
|
| Good thing it's opt-in. Why would you want to legislate
| opt-in behaviour?
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| So you are ok that Ukranian women atm to also not be able
| to leave the country and have to fight? Because there are
| also _a lot_ of consequences for being a man that just
| keep being ignored (famous Hillary Clinton 's quote that
| the real victims of war are the widows of the fallen
| soldiers springs to mind)
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah, I've encountered multiple feminist types who feel
| this way.
|
| Sorry, the market pays based on experience, not on age!
| You're asking for a subsidy.
| smugma wrote:
| It shouldn't. If you have 10 Years experience and take a
| year off to birth and raise a child, you should be able
| to come back and be paid similarly to a man or woman who
| has 10 years of experience and not be penalized 2-3 years
| of experience for it.
|
| People may have different commitments to work after
| having kids, and compensation can and should be adjusted
| based on that.
|
| I definitely work much less than I did pre-kids, but my
| compensation has gone up significantly. I think this is
| typical for men. My wife also works less for more money
| post kids (but she had kids while doing postdoctoral
| work, and then moved to private industry).
| nightski wrote:
| I'd take this a step further and argue that any gaps in
| employment history should not be looked on nearly as
| negatively as they are today. It really invokes a wage
| slave mentality.
| freedomben wrote:
| At least in tech, I think we're mostly there already,
| particularly if the applicant has some explanation for it
| (and even then it's getting rarer to ask about it). With
| the large amount of no-child/one-child families and
| waiting until mid 30s to start having kids, it's very
| common for people to have enough income/savings that they
| can take a few months or even a couple years off to
| travel the world or try a startup, or something else.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| I'd be careful stating this, as the reason why this isn't
| happening might be as simple as "there aren't enough
| experienced tech workers to make such a demand".
| Considering tech recruitment is still willing to do many
| other things which aren't empirically proven or even have
| empirical evidence suggesting against the act, there is
| room for skepticism here.
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| > If you have 10 Years experience and take a year off to
| birth and raise a child, you should be able to come back
| and be paid similarly to a man or woman who has 10 years
| of experience and not be penalized 2-3 years of
| experience for it.
|
| Except that 1 year off has put them 1 year behind their
| peers who now have 11 years experience. Their skills have
| also decayed by a year, and they missed 1 year of
| developments in the industry.
|
| People shouldn't be penalised for having kids, but
| likewise it should be recognised that having children
| does impact career trajectory in a non-discriminatory
| way.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| How do we fix this when the underlying cause is workers
| who prioritize their job more and have more years of
| experience get paid more?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| What does it mean to prioritize a career?
|
| There are a lot of career obligations that aren't
| fundamental to productivity. For example, people are
| largely expected to go to an office and be physically
| present for eight consecutive hours. This makes certain
| kinds of childcare activities impossible. But if instead
| flexible hours or work-from-home were the norm, this
| choice would no longer be necessary and it no longer
| becomes a "one or the other" situation.
|
| Consider something like the idea that pumping at work is
| unprofessional. This is a 100% cultural thing. Pumping
| does not make somebody less productive. But if we don't
| consider this cultural influence we might just say "well
| women just choose to stay at home when they have infants
| and there is nothing we can do about that."
| daenz wrote:
| This is what "equity" refers to. It means that the
| playing field must be deliberately tilted to "counteract"
| any natural tilting. If that feels unfair, that's because
| it is, intentionally. But the counter argument is that it
| was already unfair from the start.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Is it _unfair_ if choosing to prioritize career, working
| longer /harder at it, and becoming more
| skilled/productive at it is rewarded in the market?
| tomp wrote:
| Paying more productive people the same as less productive
| people is a great way to ensure there are no productive
| people.
| Izkata wrote:
| IIRC if you control for type of job and years on the job, it
| goes all the way to 97 or 98 cents per dollar.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| And from what I recall, unmarried women with no kids
| actually earn more than unmarried men with no kids, and
| have for several decades.
| godelski wrote:
| I thought that number was a much stricture control. I think
| you have to do a lot more go get to the number you're
| talking about and there's no explanation for that one. It's
| been a bit since I looked but I don't think things improved
| that much. Even still, a 1% median difference on earnings
| is a pretty large number.
| rdtwo wrote:
| It's also 1% that you maybe failed to account for by
| other means. What's the error bar on your study anyway.
| 1% seems like noise
| ryan93 wrote:
| No one would ever have been talking about the disparity
| if it was only 1%
| andreilys wrote:
| _1% median difference on earnings is a pretty large
| number_
|
| 1% of $60k is $600, which after tax is probably $400. Not
| exactly life changing money.
| darkerside wrote:
| Since we're talking about a median, it would be
| interesting to see how many people you would need to
| remove from the top end to get the numbers to line up.
| godelski wrote:
| On a personal level, small difference. On a _median_
| level, big difference.
| sidlls wrote:
| Compound that over a person's working years and it adds
| up to a non-trivial number at the individual level. At
| the aggregate level it's already non-trivial without any
| compounding or the like.
| laurent92 wrote:
| 97-98 cents per dollar, excluding control on overdue hours.
| Twice more men than women do unpaid hours every week (34%
| vs 17%) leading, each year, to 3-5% more experience per
| year. Therefore, 97c for 5% less experience per year
| worked, and the wage gap already goes the other way.
|
| And we can't measure the quality of the focus per day,
| obviously. (But we can measure the toilet time. It's mean
| but results always go the same way).
| servercobra wrote:
| Curious what you mean by "toilet time"
| Pyramus wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. It's written "the pay check"
| in case you are trying to find it in a Podcast app with an
| underdeveloped search function.
| godelski wrote:
| > It's written "the pay check"
|
| Thanks! I updated my comment
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Pay gap for men and women only starts mid career
|
| The article in OP says the gap starts below 30 in 91% of
| metro areas.
| scarmig wrote:
| It's more about age of first child. The metro areas where
| the pay gap starts below 30 is where women have children
| relatively early, while in places that women tend to defer
| childbearing until their 30s show little or no pay gap
| among people below 30.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| At least in the context of my comment, I'm interpreting
| "mid-career" to be like age 40-45, which would makes
| childbearing orthogonal.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Women spend significantly less time in the workforce than
| do men. I can't easily find stats for the US, but in the
| EU it's about 33 years currently [1], which would put
| "mid-career" (assuming career start at 22) in late-30s,
| which is very much in the same timeframe as child rearing
| for many parents.
|
| [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
| explained/index.php...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Also,the male participation rate is decreasing see
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
| estro0182 wrote:
| This chart is insane. I wonder what combination of phenomena
| this data can be explained by?
| yakubin wrote:
| Keep in mind that the lower bound on this chart is 65%, not
| 0. Threw me off at first.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| There is no existing explanation because it is invariant
| under recessions and other events. The only change that you
| can see is COVID.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Wouldn't increasing labor participation by women
| displace, and also counteract the need for, male labor
| participation?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| You are assuming that the amount of jobs are zero sum and
| I don't think we can answer that question. There are
| situations where there doesn't have to be displacement
| such as producing goods faster that require more and more
| people have to sell the item productive.
|
| But, if we would assume that people keep on getting more
| and more productive due to corporations optimizing for
| productivity wouldn't we see a drop off of both women and
| men at the same time? I don't think we would legitimately
| seem the existing of displacement but actually mutual
| decreasing.
| c22 wrote:
| It might not be zero-sum but someone still has to raise
| the kids. I'd imagine we'd see dads dropping out of the
| workforce any time the mom makes more and dad's income
| doesn't more than cover full time 3rd party childcare.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Note also that it's the lower earner's income _after
| paying the marginal income tax rate_ on it (when
| analyzing "what if they quit their job to stay at home?",
| marginal, not average, tax rate drives the decision).
|
| For a high-earning couple in a high-tax state, this could
| be ~50%.
| phil21 wrote:
| I was curious about this and looked into it some.
| Unfortunately couldn't find any source material reliable
| or concise enough for me to consider linking here - but
| my overall take on the data is that stay at home dads
| certainly increased in number, but nowhere near the
| change these graphs depict.
|
| Numbers vary, but even as of today there are low-single-
| digit millions of stay at home fathers (under the liberal
| definition of "18+ male with children in the home who
| does not work") vs. about ~1m total in the late 80's.
| Seems like it may account for a point or two on the
| graphs, but not much more.
| klyrs wrote:
| > It might not be zero-sum but someone still has to raise
| the kids.
|
| In generations past, that was done by women who were
| counted as not having a job (despite working longer hours
| than their husbands, 7 days a week). That doesn't need to
| be the case -- and in fact, dual-income households can
| create jobs: cleaners, cooks (delivery drivers etc), and
| childcare. In my grandma's generation, a woman's
| household duties also included gardening and preserving
| foods, and making/repairing clothes -- but those jobs
| have been outsourced so completely that they're now seen
| as quirky hobbies.
| watwut wrote:
| Covid job losses were more on women side then male side.
| (Partly due to kids and partly due to women being more in
| service sector that lost more jobs)
| Izkata wrote:
| Barely. 3.2% vs 3.3%, per
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 and
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I'd guess two of several factors:
|
| - Loss of manufacturing jobs since 1950, primarily held by
| men
|
| - Women's increasing participation in the labor force
|
| https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-
| labor-f...
| yobbo wrote:
| Honestly, (young) women in the workplace generally make for
| a better experience. They typically care more about
| creating a nice friendly atmosphere.
|
| Young men (used to) bring assertiveness and a created an
| atmosphere of competition.
|
| Maybe these roles aren't so clearly divided any more. For
| the vast number of job positions, it doesn't matter much in
| terms of competence who gets the job. It matters so much
| more that the coworkers are comfortable and enjoy the
| workplace.
|
| Men had obvious advantage in physically demanding jobs, but
| fewer and fewer of these remain.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Your post is just "Let me tell you about the stereotypes
| I hold".
| krastanov wrote:
| I think it is a bit more complicated than just a
| stereotype. "Women bringing a different, less
| adversarial, work culture" is a trope present in the
| works of some feminist activist, DEI workshop
| facilitators, and sociological researchers. Usually it is
| phrased more as "we should be more accepting of
| workstyles that differ from the dominant workstyle",
| where the dominant workstyle happens to be associated
| with our current stereotypes about masculinity. This is
| definitely a difficult to discuss topic where you really
| need to steelman what you hear, otherwise the
| conversation quickly devolves.
| hu3 wrote:
| It's funny. At three places I worked at, I often heard
| from women that they preferred to work with men "because
| they are easier going, more honest and their mood is more
| stable".
|
| I as a man, prefer to work with women. I've met some
| remarkable women and learned a lot from them and not only
| in tech.
| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly how this particular number is
| calculated but given the fairly consistent trend I'd
| suggest longer education before employment, earlier
| retirement and retired people not dying as early seem
| likely.
|
| Some other people think it's women entering the workforce,
| but that not a 1 for 1 affect here and it seems women have
| possibly hit a similar downward point.:
|
| https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-
| labor-f...
| Msw242 wrote:
| Imagine how much work it would take to maintain a household
| without a dishwasher, or a washing machine, or a vacuum
| cleaner, or febreeze, or modern medicine, or...
|
| We have significantly decreased the cost of chores. They
| are still extremely painful, but 1/10 the burden they used
| to be.
| Zamicol wrote:
| The participation rate for women:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
| hackernewds wrote:
| This is eye opening
| andi999 wrote:
| Heard this a while back, basically total number of jobs
| stays the same, so more women work less men work. It was
| mentioned that this is not videly discussed (by political
| parties e. g), since non of them have a political agende
| which would/could/wants to change that.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| This is caused by increasing education and a aging workforce.
|
| You should look at the prime age employment participation
| rate https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Doesn't that create a bubble of people that are unable to
| get a job because the aging workforce will retain jobs
| longer and the time for people to get educated just
| increases ?
| lordnacho wrote:
| And degree jobs tend to be in big cities like NYC, DC, and LA,
| which are the ones that are mentioned.
| whathappenedto wrote:
| Doesn't that go counter to what is usually posted, about how
| college is a financially poor decision, whereas trades are
| particularly lucrative now? As far as I know, trades are still
| almost mostly men, so if this were true, we'd see the opposite
| trend.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| The average college graduate still makes more than your
| average plumber.
|
| The issue is at the margin there are a lot of kids going to
| college who are wasting their time. But still most of the
| kids in college are making a good financial decision even if
| all of the aren't.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Median income of somebody with a bachelor's degree is
| $60,585 [1].
|
| Median income of a plumber is $59,880 [2].
|
| The big gaps you'll find rely on either average income
| (where an uncapped high + hard capped low = inflated
| numbers) or household income. There are numerous biases
| that deserve mentioning, but the simple component of
| college debt vs earn while you lean means plumbers are
| probably already better off on "average".
|
| [1] - https://dqydj.com/income-by-education/
|
| [2] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472152.htm
| JamesBarney wrote:
| That's a good point I was using average and not median.
|
| But I think my argument that >50% of college grads are
| better off having gone to college than plumbing school is
| true.
|
| If you broke it into quartiles i bet the top quartile
| college graduate does much better than the top quartile
| plumber. The second quartile grad does moderately better
| than plumbers. The 3rd quartile about the same and the
| 4th significantly worse.
|
| I see the quartile data for plumbers trying to find it
| for bachelor grads.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> But still most of the kids in college are making a good
| financial decision even if all of the aren 't._
|
| Not likely. The data continues to show that incomes are
| stagnant. If there was a financial benefit, not just
| filtering, incomes should be rising alongside the rise of
| college attainment.
|
| The filtering effect is real. Colleges put a lot of effort
| into rejecting people who aren't "born successful" to
| maintain an aura of prestige. Colleges pumping out
| graduates with severe mental disabilities that hinder
| learning, for example, would not serve the brand well. The
| model only works if you limit the possibility of graduation
| to those considered the "best of the best". The same people
| who are more likely to do well in their careers. There
| being an income spectrum, with some making a lot of money,
| and some making very little, predates the existence of
| college.
|
| The decline in college attainment among males no doubt
| comes on the back of colleges recognizing that males are
| now less valuable in society (i.e. they are less likely to
| be among the best of the best) and apply the appropriate
| filters in response, not the other way around.
| ModernMech wrote:
| It's an interesting theory, but how do you explain
| associates degree holders having higher lifetime earnings
| than high school diploma holders? Surely community
| colleges can't be found guilty of being prestige
| factories that filter out poor performing students.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When I look back to my high-school graduating class, in
| general terms, the community college attendees were the
| "middle students", so the poorest performing students did
| not (perhaps naturally did not) attend any college.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Surely community colleges can 't be found guilty of
| being prestige factories that filter out poor performing
| students._
|
| No? Back in my day community colleges still had
| relatively stringent entrance requirements and would not
| see you graduate if you did not meet a certain level of
| academic excellence during the course of being there, not
| to mention the imposition of a financial barrier to have
| the economically disadvantaged think twice. The
| expectations weren't as high as college. They certainly
| were not gunning for the same calibre of people as
| Harvard. But they weren't fawning over people with Down
| syndrome either.
|
| Maybe things have changed drastically in the intervening
| years, but in my day community college was seen as the
| place to go for those around the middle of the pack.
| Those who did reasonably well at things, but were not the
| stars, with admissions expectations to match. What you
| tell us about income mirrors the social expectations.
| Those who can make it through college are higher on the
| "born to do well" spectrum than those who could only make
| it through high school.
|
| Let's face it, a lot of people out there could never make
| it through college, or even community college, even if
| they wanted nothing more in life. It can be hard, and
| when things are hard, some will fail. They just weren't
| born with the "right stuff". And it turns out that "right
| stuff" can also impact one's career in significant ways.
| The aforementioned people with Down syndrome aren't CEOs
| at a Fortune 500s just because they didn't go to college.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Maybe things have changed drastically in the
| intervening years, but in my day community college was
| seen as the place to go for those around the middle of
| the pack.
|
| I think things have indeed changed. The role you describe
| is filled by state schools now. These days the biggest
| admissions barrier to community college is the residency
| requirement. Fulfill that and you're pretty much
| guaranteed a spot. (Source: attended community college
| for some time)
| randomdata wrote:
| Suggesting that incomes should start to normalize as the
| kids with down syndrome start graduating form community
| college more and more? That's likely true, if what you
| say is true.
|
| Last time I saw the numbers only ~40% of Americans had a
| post-secondary degree, so even semi-recently it has still
| be rather abnormal to graduate from college, including
| community college.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| > Not likely. The data continues to show that incomes are
| stagnant. If there was a financial benefit, not just
| filtering, incomes should be rising alongside the rise of
| college attainment.
|
| This is a good argument college isn't making workers more
| valuable. But that doesn't mean college won't increase
| your personal income. Just imagine a world where all the
| jobs stay the same but employers preferentially pick
| college grabs because they believe they're smarter and
| harder working.
|
| This value the degree holder gets is called signalling
| theory. And it'll make the degree holder richer without
| making the economy richer.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Just imagine a world where all the jobs stay the same
| but employers preferentially pick college grabs because
| they believe they 're smarter and harder working._
|
| If that hypothetical world existed the smarter and harder
| working people would be the only ones capable of
| graduating from college, and so the economic order would
| remain unchanged, leaving no economic benefit for anyone.
|
| Furthermore, the smart and hard working people going to
| college would realize a net loss in their economic
| potential as, given that employee value did not rise,
| their income would not increase to offset the larger
| expense of going to college. Smart people aren't going to
| accept lesser economic potential without anything else in
| return. They are smart enough to know what they bring to
| the workplace.
|
| And, so, if that hypothetical world existed the smart and
| hard working people would quickly stop going to college,
| pushing colleges to crush academic standards so that
| anyone could pass in order to maintain some kind of
| student base. But soon employers would catch on that
| college graduates are actually the dumb and lazy and any
| signal potential that existed for a brief moment in time
| would be lost.
|
| When I was a kid, many decades ago, there were always
| rumours of what you describe being the reality at some
| point in history, but it hasn't been a thing since I've
| been an adult. If it was ever the reality it quickly
| succumbed to the unstable nature of such an arrangement.
| I strongly suspect it never happened, though. The whole
| idea has the markings of it being an advertising
| campaign.
|
| Indeed, the data does show that the smart and hard
| working are more likely to have a higher income within
| the same cohort over those who aren't as smart or hard
| working. Colleges also try to attract the same kind of
| person. This develops an undeniable correlation. But the
| smart and hard working would still have the higher
| incomes even if college magically disappeared, just as
| they did before college was a thing. It is not a causal
| relationship.
| jozvolskyef wrote:
| Suppose I join the workforce at 26, and earn an average of
| 65k per year while in the <30 cohort, while my friend joins
| at 19 and earns an average of 55k per year, in this statistic
| I'll seem better off even though my friend earned 345k more.
| dudul wrote:
| Trades are probably not that great when you start. Also, does
| this study take into account student loans?
| option wrote:
| So the causal link, at least in US, seems to be
| education->earnings, not gender->earning (which is a
| correlation).
| zmgsabst wrote:
| This was always the case.
|
| The purported wage gap was always a manifestation of other
| facts like aggregate job choice, as shown in the death gap --
| that men die 10x as often in the workplace, according to BLS
| statistics.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi2006_13.pdf
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the casual link also includes behavior like following
| directions over time, not challenging authority structures
| and participating in team oriented work being monetarily
| rewarded, while other social behavior like breaking and
| establishing territory or unique solutions, are suppressed
| via market signals. Corporations collectively with fewer
| employees, are the most profitable in the West as they have
| been in seventy years, so those that can take what they are
| handed, play by the rules, and not make waves are rewarded
| (at their level). Never mind the big picture, not for the
| likes of you.
| amyjess wrote:
| The wage gap is largely a function of how women are expected
| to be the primary caregivers of children.
|
| Here's a detailed article that goes into these things:
| https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-
| explai...
|
| It makes sense that _young_ women would earn more, but the
| gender-wage gap appears once you get into middle age as by
| that point childrearing expectations have destroyed women 's
| careers.
| kaczordon wrote:
| It's not about expectations. Many women also _want_ to have
| children(and raise them) and a side effect of that is being
| out of the workforce for some time.
|
| Most people hate their jobs[1] and not everyone wants to
| work a 9-5. Raising a child can actually be more fulfilling
| than working for a tax filing company for example.
|
| [1] https://www.staffsquared.com/blog/why-85-of-people-
| hate-thei...
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yeah, I practically pushed my wife into the work force
| because I wanted her to have her own money/freedom etc.
| She worked for a few years, did really well to the point
| of having several paths to promotion in the company, and
| then "noped out." She just wanted to be mom...full time.
| mpweiher wrote:
| See also:
|
| _My Wife Won 't Get A Job While I Work Myself To Death:
| Why This Is Unfair_
|
| https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/antonia-865/my-wife-
| wont-ge...
| scarmig wrote:
| > The wage gap is largely a function of how women are
| expected to be the primary caregivers of children.
|
| The wage gap is largely a function of how men are expected
| to work more at worse jobs to provide for women and
| children.
|
| They're two sides of the same coin, of course. But the
| relentless focus on how gender roles victimize women serves
| to distract from the fact that gender roles are a two way
| street that women are co-equal enforcers of.
| tomp wrote:
| > are expected
|
| Not just _expected_ but also _want to_.
|
| Money for men is like makeup for women - it makes the
| person (appear) more attractive.
| scarmig wrote:
| > Not just expected but also want to.
|
| Better stated, they choose to, in response to social
| expectations. People would make different choices given
| different incentives. It's reasonable to work to
| eliminate social expectations that are conditioned on the
| gender of the individual.
| tomp wrote:
| I think it's just biology/genetics.
|
| Men want young sexy women. Women want strong successful
| men.
| sokoloff wrote:
| One thing I've found puzzling is the framing of _societal
| expectations_ on caregiving (as that Vox article and other
| sources often frame it). No one from society nor either of
| our companies sat down with my spouse and I when we decided
| how to accommodate infancy and early childhood parenting.
|
| We had to decide all by ourselves how our family would
| handle it.
| Izkata wrote:
| It means something along the lines of "the depiction of
| stay-at-home mother on TV shows/assumptions made by
| friends and family/etc make people think that's how they
| should do it and they just follow along".
| mpweiher wrote:
| It's good to have it written down explicitly like that,
| because then you notice just how inane the idea is.
|
| This could possibly influence you if you have no idea and
| no desires yourself.
|
| Very few have no ideas and no desires about having and
| raising/taking care of kids. Particularly once the kids
| are there.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| When you see a single way of doing things through your
| entire life, from infancy on, very few people will choose
| to do something different.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Typical "wet roads cause rain" fallacy: you see this way
| of doing things because people choose to do it this way.
| DantesKite wrote:
| I wonder what's driving this phenomena.
| anonu wrote:
| I don't think there's any one reason: its a confluence of
| societal, economic and cultural shifts and perceptions about
| higher education. Many men don't feel they need more
| education. Costs of education are too high and some men
| prefer to get going to support themselves and their families.
| langitbiru wrote:
| We had a lively discussion about this topic:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I would hypothesize that modern education and careers put
| specific male traits at a disadvantage. Some specific
| examples: men are diagnosed with ADHD at 3-4 times the rate
| of women. There is a clear (and hopefully obvious)
| association with testosterone levels and aggression.
|
| While these traits can be advantageous in some situations,
| modern education often requires sitting still and focusing
| for hours.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Or the fact many companies have quotas that
| disproportionately hurt male participants. There's no
| nursing quota against females, yet theirs a quota against
| males in most enterprises.
| goto11 wrote:
| > modern education often requires sitting still and
| focusing for hours.
|
| Is that a modern phenomenon? At what point in history _didn
| 't_ college level and higher education require sitting
| still and focusing?
| ouid wrote:
| the modern phenomenon being proposed, i assume, is that
| of more jobs requiring more education.
| goto11 wrote:
| So it isn't modern education that is putting men at a
| disadvantage, it is the demands of the modern workplace?
| hnfong wrote:
| I guess you can say that apprenticeships were an accepted
| form of education before the modern times...
| phil21 wrote:
| Not sure if my barber needs to sit through a year or two
| of school to be effective, for one random example in many
| places.
|
| Sure, modern education can be seen somewhat as a proxy
| for modern jobs. But it also is used as gatekeeping for
| jobs that have no business requiring prior education and
| which did not just a few decades prior.
|
| Even when jobs don't "technically" require a degree these
| days - those holding them raises the bar on everyone
| else. If you can hire all college educated baristas for
| your coffee shop, you likely don't get down to the 18
| year old kid who just wants to work hard on something
| meaningful and directly in front of him - even if they
| would make better employees in the end. No reason to take
| any chances if you can get pre-vetted mediocracy.
|
| I'd argue the gates are being raised now in tech as well
| - many entry level positions in IT that you once could
| talk your way into and learn on the job are now
| credentialed.
|
| Interesting times.
| icare_1er wrote:
| Systemic discriminations against men.
| dijit wrote:
| I suspect there will be an emotional reaction to a message
| posted naked like this, but assuming you're not trolling or
| trying to farm for downvotes: You're not entirely wrong.
|
| There is absolutely a correlation between education being
| focused on female success (a combination of predominantly
| female teaching staff and optimising for traits generally
| held by women such as agreeableness) and the trends we've
| been seeing for 30 years now.
|
| Unfortunately this is not the popular narrative, but it
| does need to be discussed.
|
| EDIT: I, unlike the parent, am not trolling, so if you're
| going to downvote I would prefer a rebuttal.
|
| Citation 1 (agreeableness as a direct consequence of
| academic success): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar
| ticle/pii/S104160802...
|
| Citation 2 (women on average are more agreeable than men):
| https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178
|
| Citation 3 (Gender distribution of academic success over
| the last few decades): https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb2015/pxweb
| /en/STAT/STAT__30-GE__04...
|
| Citation 4 (Gender distribution of teachers in the USA):
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr
|
| Citation 5 (Gender of teacher affecting academic
| performance of same gender):
| https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/696203
|
| So we have direct correlation with a personality trait, it
| being attributed to a sex and a seeming consequence.
|
| I could be wrong, but while correlation does not equal
| causation: this does seem to be a _very strong_
| correlation.
| goto11 wrote:
| None of this shows systemic discrimination against men.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Last year I was considering applying to a master in the
| IT field.
|
| The University which had the programme I liked the most
| didn't offer for scholarships for men that I could apply
| for, only for women or trans-women.
| decremental wrote:
| So then it offered scholarships for both men and women.
| Banana699 wrote:
| What was their definition of a "Trans-woman"? is it
| enough to say you sometimes feel you're not comfortable
| in your body to qualify?
| dijit wrote:
| Systematic Discrimination is not an intent, it is a
| consequence.
|
| As defined: "Systematic discrimination, also called
| institutionalized discrimination, refers to a method of
| discrimination which occurs regularly in the workplace as
| an inherent part of the company through interactions and
| processes creating a disadvantage for people with common
| set characteristics such as race, gender and disability
| over a long period of time. Systematic discrimination is
| not apparent at first sight but is actually systematic in
| its application of policies and practices."
|
| Similar evidence is presented commonly to explain why the
| executives are predominantly male, I'm not sure why the
| circumstances must be different here.
| temp8964 wrote:
| This is not how "systemic discrimination" defined
| nowadays. You can't define systemic discrimination
| against men in one way (with intention), and define
| systemic discrimination against women in a different way
| (only look at specific outcomes).
| transcriptase wrote:
| You managed to read all 5 of the citations in less than
| 20 minutes?
| YATA0 wrote:
| All of that shows systemic discrimination against men.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| But the outcomes are so the system is discriminatory.
| torginus wrote:
| From my anecdotal experiences, women tend to focus on their
| careers much more early on, since they realize that once they
| have children in their late 20s/early 30s they wont be able
| to focus their energy as much on their work, and will not
| participate in the labor market at full strength for at least
| 5 years.
|
| So if they want to make it/continue their careers after
| having children, they need to take themselves much more
| seriously in their 20s.
| [deleted]
| josh_today wrote:
| enw wrote:
| Society should stop shunning masculinity and dismissing men's
| problems. Teach young boys they can be strong, respectable men
| and they will prosper.
| klyrs wrote:
| Why is this comment on this story? The news here is that the
| overall trend (median women under 30 make 93% of median men
| under 30 nationwide) has 16 counterexamples out of 250 cities?
|
| Is masculinity being shunned here? Are men _not_ prospering?
| That 's not what the data says. The headline is about outliers.
| swalls wrote:
| What exactly makes you comment as if woman gaining equality
| means men have lost something? Surely, in an even society, this
| is a _good_ headline, unless you 're pining for more
| patriarchal days.
| [deleted]
| ip26 wrote:
| Equality would be "young women earn the same as young men".
|
| Unless you are banking on some cities favoring women while
| others favor men long term.
| emerged wrote:
| Which begs the question, why not bank on the current
| reality where some jobs favor women and some favor men, due
| to conscious personal choices made by those men and women?
| ip26 wrote:
| To be fair, true preference (with true equality of
| opportunity) is hard to measure.
| enw wrote:
| Equal opportunity (not equal outcome) is good. What I'm
| worried about is that this correlates with the wider societal
| trend of positive discrimination in favor of women (hence
| discrimination against men) and dismissal of men and their
| issues.
| [deleted]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| If men graduating from college at a higher rate than women,
| or men earning more than women, is indicative of lack of
| equality, then wouldn't the opposite hold true - women
| graduating from college at a higher rate than men, or women
| earning more than men is indicative of lack of equality?
| tsol wrote:
| But it specifically isn't equality, even though there is a
| narrative that it is. A similar issue is present with kids
| where boys, who already tend to struggle at school more than
| girls, aren't encouraged as much and end up not trying as
| much as the girls do. You can see this in the gender
| discrepancy of college graduation rates
| xyst wrote:
| There needs to be a law which requires full disclosure of
| salaries/wages/earnings of all employees for US companies. It's
| hard to address this issue when the data itself is self reported.
| For example, most sales positions are paid out based on sales
| performance rather than salary. So if a man reports "I earned
| $200K in 2021" and a woman at the same place reports "I earned
| $150K in 2021", it would look like a "gender pay gap".
|
| Yes, I agree there are certain areas where gender pay gap exists
| and there are definitely some reports of it in news reports. But
| I want to know if it's a cultural issue at these companies or if
| it's a widespread problem nation wide.
| [deleted]
| FredPret wrote:
| This surprises exactly no-one who has ever lived in the downtown
| area of a big city. The number of young women there is vastly
| more than young men, except perhaps in a few edge cases
| IshKebab wrote:
| 1. The raw number of women wouldn't mean their average earnings
| are somehow more. 2. "Vastly" is clearly not true. Maybe you
| just look at women more? 3. This is only true in 22/250 cities
| so.
| FredPret wrote:
| Fair point regarding the average. But I stand by "vastly".
| Dating as a male who is breathing and can tie his shoelaces
| in downtown Toronto was absurdly easy due to the skew in
| numbers.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| You might be overestimating your peers' ability to find a
| date relative to your own.
| FredPret wrote:
| No, I'm comparing to my own previous track record. Unless
| men get drastically more date-able as they age, which
| might also be true.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| You don't see any problems with that statistically?
| zdragnar wrote:
| No apparent controls for occupation or education, as is typical
| for comparing gender incomes.
|
| Young women are also having children later in life, and the
| disparity between women and men enrolling in college and
| completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
| farmerstan wrote:
| If the same study previously showed that women were paid less
| than men, but now show they get paid more, does that not show
| that things have changed? Are you more inclined to believe it
| when it showed women earned less and more inclined to not
| believe when it shows they earned more?
| zdragnar wrote:
| It shows they earn more by getting more degrees than men,
| thus fewer are taking lower paying jobs that women typically
| dominate outside of degreed work.
|
| What it doesn't show is that business are treating women
| better. Maybe they are, maybe they havent treated them as
| badly as the wage gap politicians want you to think they
| still are, and maybe things like paternal leave are starting
| to make a difference.
|
| There's nothing actionable, no way to draw any meaningful
| conclusion, because it is observing the world through a fog
| of uncontrolled variables.
| kemayo wrote:
| It does make sense to not control for that, mind you, since
| you're trying to compare a broad set of societal factors. You
| can imagine a society in which people with the same
| occupation+education receive exactly equal pay, and yet one
| gender (or race, or whatever else) is widely discouraged from
| entering certain lucrative occupations or receiving certain
| levels of education in certain fields, for instance.
|
| For what it's worth, my understanding is that the gender pay
| gap still exists even if you do control for these things,
| albeit it becomes smaller.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Here is some nuanced data. It has closed quite a bit
|
| https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/the-
| gende...
| JaceLightning wrote:
| > one gender (or race, or whatever else) is widely
| discouraged from entering certain lucrative occupations or
| receiving certain levels of education in certain fields, for
| instance.
|
| Has that ever been true? I have heard people say "Men push
| women out of engineering" but in my experience it's been the
| opposite--it's been men trying to get women interested in
| engineering.
|
| There are uncountably many WISE, SWE, girls who code, etc.
| groups that try to encourage women to go into STEM. Women get
| STEM scholarships that are only available to them.
| tonguez wrote:
| "I have heard people say "Men push women out of
| engineering" but in my experience it's been the opposite--
| it's been men trying to get women interested in
| engineering."
|
| Of course it's not true. If you majored in CS at a decent
| university probably 1 or 2 out of 100 students were girls,
| and in the "labs" the TAs spend the ENTIRE TIME talking to
| the girls/helping the girls. "Men push women out of
| engineering" is just a performative statement that means
| nothing. You will find this in any field where men
| generally are better at something, like chess. There are
| plenty of people who whine that "women are pushed out" of
| chess and so on, and if you ask people to explain that,
| they can't. It's just pathetic and of course predictable
| that the same people who can't understand the logical
| reasons why the demographics of certain groups are the what
| they are, happen to be bad at activities that require the
| ability to perform logical operations in their head, like
| chess, or engineering, etc. All they can do is whine about
| it emotionally which is the same reason why they can't do
| engineering or play chess.
| sdfukhasf23 wrote:
| Not only that, but women have pervasive support
| structures from early education to hiring (at the FAANG I
| work at we essentially positively discriminate in favor
| of women and minorities).
|
| Still, the numbers don't lie. Nobody's "pushing women
| away", it's been the complete, deliberate opposite for
| many, many years now.
| fn-mote wrote:
| An environment where the "TAs spend the ENTIRE TIME
| talking to the girls" might not be as positive as you are
| imagining it to be. When I work, I want to focus in a
| quiet environment and only consult someone once I have a
| firm idea of what is wrong and what I don't know.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| The most commonly repeated "stat" about gender incomes(84 cents
| per dollar) also doesn't control for occupation or education.
| OJFord wrote:
| > the disparity between women and men enrolling in college and
| completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
|
| Including in higher paying first job degrees, professions, or
| however you want to make that adjustment?
|
| Not disagreeing, just curious. Many on HN probably studied CS
| or EE with a very male cohort, for example. Is that balanced by
| a programme(s) (with well-paid graduates) that skews heavily
| female? Maybe medicine (not as much as EE/CS though surely)?
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| You act as if CS and engineering is a great profession.
|
| On the medical side, some numbers and research are in order.
|
| Nursing is dominated by women; 90% women, though the trend is
| slowly decreasing. Nursing is a physically demanding job.
|
| Pharmacy school grads are over 60% women and the trend is
| increasing.
|
| I had a harder time finding dentistry numbers but 60% of all
| practitioners under 44 are women. The trend is increasing.
|
| Medical school is 51% women and the trend is increasing.
|
| These are highly paid professions with far more stability and
| prestige than software engineering. Even nursing is on par
| with the average software engineer, but with more stability.
|
| With actual compensation for time worked, you'll have to
| exceed L5 to get a meaningful jump ahead of registered
| nurses.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm not claiming it's number one, just that it's one of
| 'the professions', degree leads to a job, it pays
| relatively well. A lot of humanities students are studying
| just to study (which is fine) without a clear job that it
| leads to, and many inevitably end up in unrelated roles
| that don't require their degree and don't compensate for
| it.
|
| I only special-cased EE & CS because that happens to be
| HN's skew, not because there's something more special about
| them than some other engineering or science.
| toyg wrote:
| Most well-paid jobs now require a degree, no matter what that
| might be. I'd argue CS/EE are actually outliers in providing
| a career that will likely fall in the boundaries set by their
| programmes; many (most?) other people get degrees in
| something then find jobs in something else. For example, my
| brother graduated in sports science and is now a project
| manager.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Young women are also having children later in life, and the
| disparity between women and men enrolling in college and
| completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
|
| I think you're actually re-explaining the outcome of the
| report, not pointing out a flaw in their methodology.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think there is a tendency to look at outcomes like this and
| say that one gender is preferred by the workplace to another
| - e.g. the usual result, where women are underpaid compared
| to men, is used to support the conclusion that women are
| discriminated against in the workforce. However, if you don't
| consider potentially confounding factors then these
| conclusions are probably unsupported.
| paxys wrote:
| Several = 22 (out of 250 in the survey). While it isn't zero,
| maybe hold off on those men's rights campaigns just yet.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| Here's a screenshot of the data linked in the article, sorted by
| women's worker population.
|
| https://ibb.co/WWMQgQn
| xenihn wrote:
| Something I want HN's thoughts on: Does a 7% pay gap matter more
| or less between low incomes and high incomes?
|
| I'm looking at the bar chart with median annual earnings and a
| earnings gap percentage. The first gap is 7% (misleadingly
| labeled as 93%...), which does seem somewhat high.
|
| But then it's for $33,598 vs $31,288. A difference of $2310, an
| amount that your average Bay Area FAANG SWE earns in two workdays
| or less (when counting amortized RSU vesting and bonuses).
|
| You could argue that every single dollar matters for someone in
| that bracket. But what about when the 7% difference hits someone
| who is making over $500k a year in the Bay Area? Then it's a
| $40,000 swing. Most of that will get eaten up by taxes anyways.
|
| Which one is worse? I would say the $2310 difference, since the
| $40,000 is really closer to $20,000 after taxes, and having
| $220,000 a year after taxes vs. $200,000 doesn't make a huge
| difference when you're competing for homes that cost $2 million
| dollars or more.
|
| It would sound way worse with the title "x outearn y by $40,000 a
| year in the Bay Area", but only to people who don't realize how
| bonkers the financial scales are here in comparison to developing
| parts of the country.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Due to the phenomenon of Hypergamy this will likely have a
| negative effect on pairing and fertility.
| tyjen wrote:
| Society is in the fuzzy space where discriminatory pressure men
| face exceeds the perceived privilege in many areas of society.
| When discrimination continues in excess of actual privilege (not
| perceived privilege), it's no longer about equality or equity and
| turns into corruption, because equality or equity would turn to
| support men in these cases of disparity.
|
| For example, women are heavily overrepresented in the
| veterinarian field, in some cases representing 90 percent of
| current veterinarian students. When an Australian university
| decided to offer a single scholarship with preferences for rural
| and male students to try to balance representation. The female
| vet students were absolutely shocked and horrified, despite
| several female scholarships existing concurrently.
|
| Privilege as an absolute, ubiquitous, end-all and be-all trait
| pegged to immutable characteristics is turning into a
| mythological construct to justify continued discriminatory
| practices benefiting groups allowed to collectively act in their
| favor. Even many of the numerous articles or studies supporting
| discriminatory behavior are often specious at best.
|
| In reality, privilege is a holistic measurement that changes with
| localized community composition. Applying discriminatory policies
| with broad strokes at this point is unjustified and negatively
| discriminatory. Society could do better, but it's deciding not
| to.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It looks like in the huge majority of metro areas, women still
| earn less than men. I'm not so sure that women outperforming
| men in some areas is cause for alarm.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Very well written, and I completely agree.
|
| But how can we have this discussion as a society when anyone
| attempting to discuss it is shouted down as a bigot? (Which is
| odd because it's unfair discrimination we're trying to fix.)
|
| In our workplaces it is acceptable to promote one side of the
| argument, which is declared by HR to be morally virtuous, but
| promoting the other side of the argument would quickly lead to
| termination.
|
| Outside the workplace, any attempt to organize or speak out on
| this topic will similarly be intentionally misinterpreted and
| then the mob will demand the person be fired.
|
| I'm not sure how we resolve this when only one half of the
| discussion is allowed.
| scarmig wrote:
| At one job at a large company, several women were sitting at
| a nearby table during lunch discussing how much they love
| tall men and talking about how too many of the men in San
| Francisco were too short to be dateable. So I reported this
| to HR through the proper channels, not to get them into
| trouble but just in the hopes that someone would let them
| know that wasn't appropriate workplace conversation.
|
| Net result: HR lady laughed about it, let them know I had
| personally made the complaint, leading to teasing and mockery
| and no disciplinary action.
|
| Now, imagine if you had a group of men talking about how much
| they loved big boobs in the workplace and ranking the women
| in the company on the perkiness of their tits...
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| HR protects the company from discrimination lawsuits, not
| the employees from discrimination. Talk to a lawyer.
| scarmig wrote:
| I usually agree, but the way HR responded here actually
| implicated the company more in the sexual harassment, not
| less. A self-interested company would have proceeded
| according to established procedure, not participated in
| it itself.
|
| Not that that would be worth making a federal court case
| out of things anyway. I just wanted to be able to sit
| down and do good work for a generally tolerable company
| without distraction.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Stop being a pocket sized snitch.
| lobocinza wrote:
| I think he overreacted but what if it was two men talking
| about how SF women are too skinny?
| scarmig wrote:
| It's the double standard that gets me. Either people
| don't objectify members of the opposite sex at the
| workplace, or they do. A quote that applies here:
|
| _Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: there
| must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not
| bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does
| not protect._
|
| We need to strive for liberal egalitarianism, not the
| reactionary identity group politics that typify politics
| on both sides in the US nowadays.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| It doesn't make much sense to try and have a general
| discussion about a topic that is very context dependent.
| tyjen wrote:
| Collective action, studies and lawsuits.
|
| The difficult part for men, is maintaining appropriate
| targeting and not supporting or even providing the appearance
| of supporting causes that could be easily construed as
| chauvinistic or patriarchal. The sooner collective action
| begins, the less damage current policies will inflict on the
| population in the long-term. The problem is as you described,
| it's tricky to navigate for fear of retribution of going
| against the current flow of interpretation. Special interest
| groups who benefit from current policies will ardently work
| against them to maintain their sort of market share of
| resources and political power.
| scarmig wrote:
| For the case of men and women in particular, both face gendered
| discrimination in different ways and different contexts. But
| pop feminism had so thoroughly incorporated a shallow
| understanding of privilege that it's considered impossible that
| a man could face any kind of adverse discrimination because of
| his gender.
|
| Ironically, this is because it coincides with a preexisting
| sexist concept: the idea that men have universal agency and
| women lack it, leading to attribution of hyperagency to men and
| hypoagency to women. And from that we get the idea that the
| entirety of gender is Men collectively victimizing Women,
| blasting away all of the layered subtleties and contextualities
| of gender roles.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Politics is about making your opponents look like oppressor and
| your constituents looked like the oppressed. Both sides do
| this, and I'm not just talking about Republican vs Democrats it
| has been going on forever.
| [deleted]
| tonguez wrote:
| goto11 wrote:
| > The female vet students were absolutely shocked and horrified
|
| If you look hard enough, I'm sure you can find at least a few
| people "shocked and horrified" about absolutely any issue in
| the world. If you are building an entire argument on the
| alleged attitudes on some female veterinarian students in some
| Australian university, it could easily be taken down by a
| counterexample.
|
| For example in this very thread, you have people arguing that
| it is "systemic discrimination" that men have to sit down
| concentrate (just like women understand they need to do) in
| order to achieve a higher education. So clearly the attitude
| that men _should_ be privileged is alive and well in certain
| quarters.
| scarmig wrote:
| It's apparent that men and women have different learning
| styles, as evidenced by their widely different outcomes as
| they go through school. We as a society have constructed an
| educational system that privileges women, which is ipso facto
| systemic discrimination that creates a disparate impact.
| goto11 wrote:
| Historically, more men got a higher education. So it seems
| those men back in the day somehow _did_ manage to sit down
| and concentrate.
| scarmig wrote:
| 1) Pedagogy has evolved from the past, in ways that may
| have been broadly disadvantageous for boys.
|
| 2) Just because certain outcomes happen now doesn't mean
| it's some absolute, immutable state of the world. We can
| and should have an educational system that serves both
| boys and girls.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| As a left handed person that has had to deal with a system
| designed for right handed people, can I also join the pity
| party, and call myself a victim of discrimination?
| scarmig wrote:
| Do left-handed people attend university at a rate a third
| less than right-handed people do?
|
| And, yes, if a school system required all students to
| write right-handed and that resulted in lower grades and
| worse outcomes among left-handed students, that would
| absolutely make you a victim of systemic discrimination.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| My writing is slower and lower quality while using right
| handed desks, which I had to use many times in school. If
| you look hard enough everyone is the "victim of
| systematic discrimination"
| scarmig wrote:
| But you don't have to look hard to see the results of
| discrimination against men: something like 60% of awarded
| bachelor degrees are to women.
|
| I'd support requiring schools make left-handed desks
| available to students, and I'm more than happy to make it
| a major priority if there are statistics indicating that
| it seriously hampers left-handed students' outcomes.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| As a white male it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a
| lucrative position and on top of that the salaries are going down
| due to bs politics.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| That comments like these are so popular on such a simple
| article is an example of why HN has a reputation.
| fortran77 wrote:
| What are we going to do to achieve equity in these cities?
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| The goal is to diminish men, always has been. Equity is a
| marketing ploy.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| This is a point-in-time update on a much larger trend. The
| predominance of dual-earner households is being supplanted by
| female breadwinner households[1]. Predicting the future is always
| challenging, but the changes here appear to be accelerating, not
| declining. Looking back on the disintegration of corporate family
| economics, and male breadwinner family economies, imagine the
| seismic shift involved in the establishment of female breadwinner
| family economies. The opportunities to capitalize on the second-
| order effects here are astronomical.
|
| 1. Fig 10. Marriage, Family Systems, and Economic Opportunity in
| the USA Since 1850
| http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.738...
| mgaunard wrote:
| The pay gap only exists if you look at average pay for men vs
| women.
|
| Make it so that we only compare people with comparable skill sets
| and jobs and it magically disappears.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I think within 2% (roughly 5K per year, for a recent grad earning
| $250K) shouldn't be an issue to shout about.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Some of us have been predicting this for 20 years. The pendulum
| has swung way too far to the other side.
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