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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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?
> 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%
Which is why it is unexplained. i.e. We don't have strong confidence in the causal structure. No one is really disagreeing with this. But to create causal graphs you have to have... causes. If you can't measure something well then you can't form that graph well.
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.
I would question if we still need to work on some of these topics. Particularly #1 and #3 that you bulleted, and your example.
Sometimes you can find the explanation and it is "totally fine", if your goal is to eliminate gender discrimination. This is only a problem if your goal is equality of outcome, independent of preference.
>Women have fewer years of of experience on average because of childcare.
It has been long shown that women desire to raise children more than men. Fixing this difference would require making both men and women do something other than what they want. For what purpose, so that the numbers are symmetrical?
>Men on average work higher paying jobs, male dominated fields are on average higher paying.
As long as these fields are open and non-discriminatory to women, there is no problem! Some fields do have discrimination issues, and we should focus on that, not try to fight the market demand for occupations.
>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.
If women don't want to be SWEs, this isn't a problem. Last I checked, there was a massive imbalance in computer science application and graduation rates. Last I checked, SW firms were tripping over themselves to hire and promote women.
At some point, you have to question the premise that numbers would be equal if you removed unequal barriers and discrimination. At some point, if your sole metric is equal numbers, you have to force men and women to do jobs that they don't want to.
>It has been long shown that women desire to raise children more than men.
This is a false, when you actually ask people of their desires rather than repeat sexist tropes more men want children than women. This actually makes sense when you think about it since the expectation is the woman will be doing the majority of the childrearing and they're the ones expected to make sacrifices.
>The Statistics Canada General Social Survey of the family has been asking Canadian men and women about their fertility intentions for decades with this question, "How many children do you plan to have, including the ones that have already been born or you are expecting at this time?"
>When this question was first asked in 1990, more women than men expressed a disinterest in having children. Among childless men and women between the ages of 15 and 44, 15 per cent of women said they had no desire to have children in the future compared to only 10 per cent of men. Additionally, more men than women expressed a desire to have children in every age group and regardless of whether they were married, single, cohabitating, or divorced.
It's weird reading a post that I aggressively agree with except for the conclusion. You have it exactly right in the cases where we should ignore pay gaps due to preference differences and what we should do about it. Because you're right, it would be silly to try and force the numbers to be equal, even if you could it wouldn't fix the more fundamental issues that caused the numbers to differ by such a wide margin in the first place.
> At some point, you have to question the premise that numbers would be equal if you removed unequal barriers and discrimination. At some point, if your sole metric is equal numbers, you have to force men and women to do jobs that they don't want to.
I feel like we're 99% in agreement, the difference is that I see a 20-30% difference among groups that have more variance within them than between them as evidence of those barriers and discrimination and a system that continuously reinforces the same outcomes. And it goes both ways, the barriers that push men out nursing, child care, and art are just as important, the difference is what data you use to demonstrate it.
Sounds like we are mostly in agreement so I would add two parting thought around differences.
#First, the simple numeric argument:
Small innate differences in mean preference can have large effects at the margin for normal distributions. If you take two identical distributions, and move the mean of one 20-30%, the number that falls above or below a threshold changes a lot more than 20-30%.
For example, decrease the mean of one curve a single standard deviation (~35%), and the tail drops a lot more. A value that is in the top 2% of the first curve is now the top 0.1% of the second curve. That is a 2000% difference in samples above the value.
#The second is the feedback-loop argument:
People have preferences, and lets assume the innate preferences between genders is small. Over time, positive feedback loops can amplify these differences. This doesn't have to be sinister, but can be as simple as becoming interested in what are exposed to via same gendered friends and what your social network does.
You see it often in certain communities or families that specialize in a given trade (eg, my uncle was a carpenter, or my aunt was a nurse). The only way to stop these influences is to raise people in a bubble or gender randomize their friends and role models. What we DO want to avoid negative feedback loops where people are actively pushed away from a trade. (e.g. inhospitable workplaces for male nurses or female carpenters)
Just to be clear, the above discussion is not about median wages between genders, it is about median wages between genders for similar job experience and job titles. The former is a 17% difference in wages and is related to men and women choosing different types of jobs that have differences in pays while the latter is a discussion about differences in pay for similar work. There are different decisions that women make in a job, but that doesn't explain everything. Hence the "no smoking gun" argument that keeps being said.
What I wonder is that if there is no explainable cause for this, and it's equivalent work for less pay, why don't more people hire women and save millions on labor expense?
Cultural factors could play a significant part. I remember an article shared some time ago about understanding Japan by understanding the concept of the salaryman, wherein the author mentioned a (Japanese) entrepreneur and friend of his who claimed to save a massive amount of money by hiring people that greater society deemed undesirable, such as otakus and women. Can't seem to find the article right now or I'd share it.
Based on your recommendation I listened to a few episodes of The Paycheck.
I would strongly recommend this podcast to anyone that enjoys leftwing propaganda, strong rebuttals of strawman arguments, and misinterpreted statistics.
In particular interesting was their implicit praise of slave-labour-supported childcare in Singapore and their analysis of the problem of falling birth rate by studying China.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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".
Maybe that was true in the pre-firearm era. You'd have a hard time arguing that in today's world "if you send women to war your population dies." Israel, since its conception has proven that this antiquated viewpoint is no longer valid.
Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.).
The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries.
Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?
But also that many men have an inherent biological desire to "protect" Women. Many men don't "want" women to go to war, don't think it's right to hit a woman no matter the situation, etc.
We all are, after all, governed by our evolutionary journey; we're just simple animals at our core.
Well lets not forget the whole physically stronger and pumped more full of testosterone aspect of it too. But yes, this is also a good point. If you had a choice about sending people who could manufacture new humans to the slaughterfields or keep them out of harms way, you'd be better off keeping them out of harms way.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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 =)
> Adding incentives, nudging, and valorizing specific actions puts equality of outcome over equality of choice.
I'll buy the part about adding incentives.
Nudging and valorizing, however, are inevitable aspects of human life. Abolishing heroism is not realistic (and, honestly, it's a pretty mild incentive anyway).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really doubtful about these claims. I know gender studies has generated tons of studies like that, but the quality is low.
And in these examples, what would be the repercussions for being perceived as lazy? If he wants a family, the problem for the part time working man would presumably still to be able to provide for a family, which would not be an issue of perception, but of actual shortage of money. If he doesn't want a family, it doesn't matter. The difference is that a woman would never need to earn enough to provide for a family, so the judgement "too lazy to provide for a family" would not apply.
And a messy woman's household will be seen and judged by whom, exactly?
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.
It is disturbing because it makes a number of assumptions, which seem skewed from reality.
I don't think the transactional and combative assumption of gender relations is really applicable, or a constructive framework for this kind of analysis.
Specifically, I dont agree with the premise that the man is "convincing" the woman to have "their" child, and shouldn't "get it for free" . It also seems to imply the father is freeloading if they are the primary caretaker and the mother works.
In my reality, women usually want to have children, even more so than men. In a healthy relationship, it is a jointly owned undertaking, not coercion by one partner. Additionally, the role of childrearing is not seen as a cushy reward and payback for going through the hard work of pregnancy.
"It is disturbing because it makes a number of assumptions, which seem skewed from reality."
The underlying biological reality is that making children is more costly for women than for men. The rest follows from that.
I think therefore that you have the skewed view.
"I don't think the transactional and combative assumption of gender relations is really applicable"
It is the low level consideration of evolution - other things are layered on top, like the construct of "love" enabling people to stick together.
"the man is "convincing" the woman to have "their" child, and shouldn't "get it for free""
So you don't think a man fathering a child should take care of the mother and child? You wouldn't think it bad style to father a child and then leave mother and child to their own devices?
In any case, as I explained, the mother invests more into bringing the child to life than the father, so doesn't it seem fair if the father tries to even the scales by providing other things?
"In my reality, women usually want to have children, even more so than men."
Sure, but they need food and shelter to succeed in raising those children.
>In any case, as I explained, the mother invests more into bringing the child to life than the father, so doesn't it seem fair if the father tries to even the scales by providing other things?
>Sure, but they need food and shelter to succeed in raising those children.
So it is work when a woman raises the children, but when the man raises the children, they are providing nothing? This premise seems to be the cornerstone of your argument that men who take care of children are freeloaders. You think that women deserve payback, and these men are not providing it.
Pregnancy and birth are work, and most importantly, only women can do it, and they can only do it once every 9 months. It is a skill that is highly in demand (male sperm not so much), so a woman could potentially get a lot more in exchange for it than "nothing".
One thing women usually get in exchange is the privilege to choose to stay home with their children.
Now how hard it is to stay home and provide for the children every couple has to decide for themselves. But yeah, I personally will claim that it is not as hard as most jobs, putting a roof above the families head and so on.
You can also check the cost of household services (cleaning, cooking, washing) to estimate the value a male housekeeper brings to the table. I think a husband as housekeeper is usually more expensive.
Not everything is about financial value. What happens to this calculus when the man enjoys staying home, and the woman values that the man enjoys it?
If it were, you can also check the cost of hiring a surrogate. It looks like pregnancy and birth are worth $20-45k, at least in Canada, and far cheaper if you are willing to travel.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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".
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."
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.
If and individual makes the personal decision that some priority is more important to them than money, society should tell them they're wrong and give them the money anyway?
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not really what I said at all. How does allowing someone to have gaps in their employment history mean accumulated experience should not contribute to pay?
In my opinion general "years of experience" is not a large contributing factor in regards to pay anyways. Relevant experience on specific projects using certain technologies and expertise in specific domains matters a lot more. It's supply and demand.
Someone has 10 years of continuous experience, knowledge, and work. They makes $100k.
Someone else is the same age, graduated the same year, from the same school, but took two years off of work and therefore has 8 years of experience. They make $80k, which is less than their colleague.
* 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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career.
This phrasing is bizarre and reflects a cramped notion of gender equality. Child rearing is something that has to happen. We will already face economic challenges due to our increasing ratio of retirees to workers, and bad things will happen economically if our population begins to contract.
Now, Americans can allow the fertility rate to drop below 2, and bring in immigrants, but that’s not a sustainable equilibrium. You’re just outsourcing the burden to immigrant families from cultures that don’t have the same notions of gender equality.
At the end of the day, women (as a group, not necessarily individually) have an indispensable role as mothers. They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. We should approach discussions of how to keep women in the workforce long term recognizing those facts.
Do I think American society needs to incentivize having children through government intervention because of our falling birth rate? Yes
Do I think those women are making the right choice for both themselves and society by choosing to at the margin spend more time with their kids than working? Yes
>They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do.
From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
My point is that your framing of it as a “choice” is inapt:
> From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
This isn’t a “choice” like deciding what car to buy. Fully 56% of women with kids under 18 would prefer to not work at all and stay home instead: https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-wome.... Only 39% would prefer to work outside the home. Meanwhile only 26% of men would prefer to stay home.
When society has two groups, and one group is biologically capable of reproducing the species, and expresses strong preferences for caregiver roles, and the other isn’t and doesn’t, it’s not just about individual choices. It’s about accommodating reality—just like we design airplane seats around real humans and require buildings to have bathrooms for men and women.
There’s concrete things we could do. For example, right now, it’s extremely difficult for women who take time off to raise young kids to return to the workforce. We could, for example, make it illegal for employers to consider childcare-related resume gaps in hiring decisions. There’s a whole universe of system-level things we could retool if we went in with the assumption that women would want to take a few years off work at some point to attend to child rearing without permanently downshifting their careers.
>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.
There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(
Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time.
And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
>Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time.
So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for.
Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide.
Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced.
I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age.
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.
The data supporting the position is pretty low quality, usually the figure cited is average median salary.
Medians without context are dangerous. If you’re trying to assert discrimination, something like adjusted hourly wage makes more sense.
Another stat will be total compensation male v. female; this is the statistic used to make this point in union shops with pay scales. Then the argument shifts to assert bad promotion practices.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Do you really think if you took 200 22 year olds and gave 100 of them 4.0 GPA degrees from Harvard that those two cohorts would make the exact same income over the next 10 years?
Compared to themselves in a parallel universe where no degrees were awarded, yes. A 4.0 GPA from Harvard isn't making the kid with Down syndrome any more hireable than they already were. If the cure for Down syndrome, or any other condition that impacts one's potential, was as simple as handing them a degree from Harvard on a silver platter, we'd be helping a lot more people than we do.
Where did you come up with this idea that a degree is a medical cure?
> You keep thinking im arguing that a degree makes society better off
Not at all...? I think you've misinterpreted my comments.
> But it sounds like we can agree the degree makes the individual better off in this world
When the degree is used as 'quota', to use a Canadianism, into a supply managed profession (doctors, lawyers, etc.), then yes, we can agree. The data is clear that supply management has proven that it can artificially inflate incomes, making those inside the inner circle better of than they would have been in a rational market, at the cost of denying entry to those outside of the special group. In Canada, dairy and poultry farmers simply buy quota to achieve the same outcome. No schooling necessary. You will find that how you get into the inner circle is just an implementation detail.
But when you exclude those with 'quota', the numbers get interesting. Those with only a bachelors degree are less likely to be found among high income earners than those with no degree. That may seem surprising at first, but actually isn't. Those who are economically desirable are compelled away from their studies before they finish. It's just the failures who nobody wanted to hire, so to speak, who reach graduation.
So, there's a whole lot of depends. If you have a professional degree, the numbers show it helps. Not because of the degree, but because of the distorted market associated with having a degree that brings economic value to those who jumped through the right hoops. If you have only a bachelors degree, however, it seems to hinders. At best it has no effect. However, since there is a cost to attaining a bachelors degree (even if just the cost of your time, but certainly most will also see a monetary cost), we know it always hinders in the net. Unless, again, it is the stepping stone towards a professional degree.
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.
> 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.
> 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)
At the local community college where I grew up ago they had open enrollment 25 years ago. Anyone in the county could attend. That doesn't mean they didn't have standards for you to pass the courses necessary to graduate.
Suggesting that incomes should start to normalize as the kids with down syndrome start graduating form community college more and more? That's quite reasonable, if what you say is true.
Last time I saw the numbers only ~40% of Americans had reached some kind of post-secondary achievement, so even semi-recently it has still be fairly abnormal to graduate from college, including community college.
Incomes are stagnant, so as more and a wider set of the population attain such scholastic achievement in community college the averages on this level will mathematically have to show a decline, which will narrow the gap spoken of before relative to today's high school.
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.
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".
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.
> If you broke it into quartiles i bet the top quartile college graduate does much better than the top quartile plumber.
Yes, as long as college here means that one has a professional degree (MD, JD, etc.), where access is granted to a career with an artificially constrained labour supply, thereby producing artificially high incomes. Of course, it's the supply management that boosts incomes, not some mystical power of the degree itself.
Interestingly, having only a bachelor degree seems to put you in a worse position than without, based on what we see in the makeup of high income earners. Which probably isn't too surprising. Graduating from college, save striving for a professional degree to gain access to an artificial market, is where you end up if you weren't already found to be useful in the economy. It's a sign of someone failing economically.
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.
If we are to consider the definition of "better off" in strictly financial terms, the answer is clear. However, if we take into account a definition of "better off" that includes factors such as life satisfaction, I don't have the data to answer.
If it's not that surprising, then we should ready to accept that the whole gender wage gap thing is a myth, rather than to keep trumping it up as a reality.
Except if you look where the gap is the widest, it’s places that have high paying blue collar jobs in heavy industry that are the big employers and male dominated (e.g Odessa, TX = oilfield, Beaumont, TX = Refining and petrochemical, Houma, LA = offshore oil and gas, etc,), so at least at the local level I think it’s driven more by what are the pervasive high paying industries and are they tilted largely to one gender…
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> There is a clear (and hopefully obvious) association with testosterone levels and aggression.
Which is been rather strongly been debunked in the last 20-30 years of modern research. Testosterone does not cause aggression, nor does it causes poor concentration. One of the few surviving theories on what testosterone actually do is that it amplify cultural defined behavior associated with social status and sex, primarily during encounters where status might be lost.
Abnormal levels of either low or high testosterone is associated with irritability, mood swings, poor concentration, and even delusions. Those findings are quite similar to studies on estrogen and progestogen.
Can you point me to some overviews on this research?
I know this is just one example, but I remember the pretty fascinating study linked below quite well, where mens' testosterone levels were the determining factor in seeing how they reacted to their dogs' loss in an agility competition: men with high levels of testosterone punished their dogs by yelling and hitting them, men with lower levels of testosterone supported, petted and praised their animals. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to see how the "high testosterone response" would have been a status benefit to the man in question in the not-too-distant past, but now is much more likely to be a liability.
Missed that you replied, but he is some directions in case you see this.
The first is a meta study done on testosterone by Robert Sapolsky. An other (which is referenced in that one) is a theory called the challenge hypothesis as it applies to humans, which makes predictions that testosterone rise along social status (as it apply to sexual reproduction), and it boost protective behavior in the case that status is challenged.
One famous experiment was a version of the game theory experiment called the ultimatum game. If the experiment is carefully constructed in a way where social status is maintained by cooperation, and status is lost by aggression that rewards personal gain, people injected with testosterone behave more cooperative and less aggressive. A noticeable finding was that if participants was told they got injected by testosterone, but it was in reality a placebo, the participant then acted more aggressively and less cooperative, displaying contrast between the effect and the cultural perception.
Testosterone has a few other effects, among those is that they disrupt receptors for female hormones that promote maternal behavior and bonding. Dog-human interaction promotes excretion of that female hormone in both humans (men and women) and dogs, a finding that itself has made some news.
In modern time, social status still play a huge role. High status for men is highly correlated with successful reproductive success, better health and longer life. The benefit of having testosterone rise after gains in social status is a biological balance act, boosting protective behavior at a time where the potential risk from a loss in social status is at their peak. It also illustrate why testosterone levels goes down after a partner has given birth, as at that time the cost of lower social status is significant less and the benefit of improved bonding capabilities is a reproductive advantage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The average amount of time a person has been taught by a professor is a tiny tiny portion of the individual person education. It would be interesting to see a number for it, but I suspect its significant less than 0.1% of all the hours that the average person spend in the education system. Professors are under-represented in the education system.
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).
If we define any difference in outcome as discrimination (which I don't find useful, but I'll accept it for the sake of argument), then I think we should make a clear distinction between discriminatory factors which the individual affected can control and change, and discriminatory factors which are outside of the control of the individual.
I don't question the particular claims in isolation, but they are obviously cherry-picked. If having more female middle-school teachers have a discriminatory effect towards males, then surly having more male university professors and are discriminatory towards women, right? Somehow women have still been able to overcome that, historically.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Egalitarianism would imply that 50% of metros have one outearning the other, as the differences would be noise. As opposed to the 91% of metros where men out earn women today in this age group.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
Of course you can.
Wait, are you expecting the mother to be doing all the child-rearing?
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah daycare / preschool is 20-30k in SF but as you noted it is temporary. Once the kids reach K5 SFUSD is free (well paid for by taxes).
A bigger problem is after school care. All the programs at SFUSD along with all the independent ones have long waitlists.
Those of us in tech are fortunate: work hours are flexible so it isn't as much of a problem as it would be for many others.
(For our part I aim to be ambitious at work which has paid off so far and my partner stays at home, but that is not easy or even possible for everyone in tech let alone those outside it)
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.
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.
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.
As lotsofpulp said you'd be ahead by at least 50k with both spouses working even accounting for taxes at 40% which is almost certainly on the high side. Total tax rate for federal+state on the extra 150k is likely less but it depends on the exact situation.
In reality that's just pure cash. You'd be ahead even more in terms of saving for retirement which can also lower your tax basis. Benefits might also be better - some employers cover a greater percentage of the employee's premium so having the 150k spouse covered under a different plan could save money. There may be other benefits worth considering.
Also childcare at 40k is overpriced even for SF. All day preschool is 20-30k unless you're trying to get them into a super exclusive preschool as a status thing. Once they start real school you only need to cover after school care for 10-15k. So net take home would be more like 50-90k depending.
> 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?
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.
Yeah, I am not a native speaker. It felt "natural" to say it. It was not meant as some kind of statement on the nature of children. It does not force me to pick gender, but even that was not conscious decision.
“It”, being neuter, is usually reserved for inanimate objects and sometimes wild animals. Calling a living human, dog, or cat “it” is basically a slur.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
'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?
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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)?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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...
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”?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Okay I just meant to say that the conclusions you find from personal experience have basically no correlation with what happens in the aggregate. But you were defending points as though they were applicable in the aggregate, or at least that was the implication.
No one should change their minds on a subject based on a single anecdote.
Further, that your experience lined up with original stats are similarly potentially unrelated and could be due to lots of variables specific to you that we don't know.
If your goal was to make a point, I don't think you've done that. Instead you've just highlighted a personal, mostly unrelated success story of yours. Which, that's fine, just not very convincing.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
Why do you think this is due to discrimination? Isn't it more likely women are just more willing and able to put in the hard work necessary? If some men feel it is "unfair" that they have to put in the same amount of concentrated study as women to achieve the same degrees, then it is understandable these men are not as successful academically.
Same question for the CEO ratios. Are board of directors discriminating against women or is it that men are more likely to make the sacrifices to become a CEO?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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."
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.
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.
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".
[..] 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.[..]
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.
I didn't downvote your post but it comes off as deranged.
Describing men and women as different species is technically wrong. Women and men who are psychologically healthy don't want to be separated from each other because they like each other. I read Out of Africa recently and this quote stuck with me:
> The love of woman and womanliness is a masculine characteristic, and the love of man and manliness a feminine characteristic
I don’t think they should be ‘separated from each other’. What I meant was that they have diff social roles and different strengths/weaknesses. We shouldn’t be competing with those who are unequal to us. However, not competing doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t cooperate.
The reason I brought up the example of healthcare is because that’s the most egregious injustice against women. Because of women’s biology and the primary care taking role they adopt(and are good at..), our healthcare needs are different. And yet..women are not taken seriously when they complain of pain and are always under prescribed pain meds. They are not believed if they explain their symptoms.
It’s worse in the USA by all accounts Altho I don’t have first hand healthcare experience in other countries(well..other than india and UK). And yet, we are supposed to be peers with men who never go through half the illnesses or conditions we experience. Doesn’t quality of healthcare and health condition and mental well being affect how people work? How are we ‘equal’ to men?
And yet…in a workplace you can’t discriminate. The only solution is to create separate economic blocs and healthcare blocs for different genders as we all have different struggles that affect our ability to perform in professional and social spheres. There is no need for seperataion in communal spheres.
I think often about healthcare and health insurance that is exclusively for women. How will it change our quality of life? This isn’t to say that men are inferior or that women are superior..nor is it a victim card. Absolutely not! But to not see the differences is a fail. No one wins.
So we come to pregnancy, PMS and menopause…all of which have been caricatured that many women feel like they shouldn’t complain. We are reduced and clubbed under the label of ‘ menstruating persons’ and ‘birthing people’. And these are official terms. Slowly our dignity and our identity is being erased.
Men don’t care enough for women because it’s not their battle to fight(and that’s ok) because they have no lived experience. I don’t know why the third gender wants to appropriate our identity when they haven’t shared our struggles. Women are the silent majority whose cries aren’t heard anymore but are still judged as equal players and competitors on playing fields that is grossly unfair.
P.S: I would have appreciated your words if you didn’t call my comment ‘deranged’. I am less inclined to take someone seriously when their evaluation of my words is needlessly rude. Perhaps choose your words and consider if it comes across as an insult. Thanks.
ETA P.S2: In a forum that had an equal or higher split of male: female ratio unlike this testosterone heavy HN, my comment wouldn’t have been flagged. Or called ‘deranged’. There would have been at least some curiosity and a discussion even if there were some who would disagree.
ETA PS3: Imagine if it is so in a small forum online…imagine how it would be for women who work in male dominated work places and a world that has more power vested with men. Men make decisions about women’s reproductive rights in Texas. A man in Utah decided that it’s ok for a transgender student to compete with biological girls students in high school sports. Transgender women insult biological women calling them TERFs. Women have lost all agency. This needs to change.
> I don’t think they should be ‘separated from each other’. What I meant was that they have diff social roles and different strengths/weaknesses. We shouldn’t be competing with those who are unequal to us. However, not competing doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t cooperate.
Some women want to compete with men in the workplace, the academy, wherever. Besides, men are not equal to other men. Nor are women.
> The reason I brought up the example of healthcare is because that’s the most egregious injustice against women. Because of women’s biology and the primary care taking role they adopt(and are good at..), our healthcare needs are different. And yet..women are not taken seriously when they complain of pain and are always under prescribed pain meds. They are not believed if they explain their symptoms.
Most new doctors are women. Going forward, I think you're going to have a hard time blaming this on men doctors.
> It’s worse in the USA by all accounts Altho I don’t have first hand healthcare experience in other countries(well..other than india and UK). And yet, we are supposed to be peers with men who never go through half the illnesses or conditions we experience. Doesn’t quality of healthcare and health condition and mental well being affect how people work? How are we ‘equal’ to men?
Women have better immune systems than men and live longer.
> So we come to pregnancy, PMS and menopause…all of which have been caricatured that many women feel like they shouldn’t complain. We are reduced and clubbed under the label of ‘ menstruating persons’ and ‘birthing people’. And these are official terms. Slowly our dignity and our identity is being erased.
These are bizarre neologisms invented 5 minutes ago and used by a tiny group of people. I agree that they're grotesque but there's no reason to think they're going to catch on.
> P.S: I would have appreciated your words if you didn’t call my comment ‘deranged’. I am less inclined to take someone seriously when their evaluation of my words is needlessly rude. Perhaps choose your words and consider if it comes across as an insult. Thanks.
Sorry for "deranged" but you said men and women are different species. That's an extremely odd thing to say.
> ETA P.S2: In a forum that had an equal or higher split of male: female ratio unlike this testosterone heavy HN, my comment wouldn’t have been flagged. Or called ‘deranged’. There would have been at least some curiosity and a discussion even if there were some who would disagree.
Your post would be flagged almost anywhere on the internet. Most online spaces dominated by women would consider your views about trans people to be hate speech (I don't).
I agree with you that men and women are not the same. But under the law, we are treated the same. This creates all sorts of conflicts. I don't know how to solve these conflicts, and equality under the law seems indispensible. I think we just have to live with an imperfect arrangement and I would point out that women aren't on the losing end of every conflict.
1. ‘Some women’ are not ‘all
Women’. I don’t know what women you are speaking of and you have no idea about the women I am speaking about…isn’t it better to have a system where your ‘some women’ are free to compete in the unequal battleground.
Example: It is like belonging to a country as a citizen with citizen rights. Those who want to emigrate are free to join any other country they want.
Today women are guests in a world built by men. I am just saying we need a country and passport of our own.
2. I am not ‘blaming anything on male doctors’ as you are suggesting. I am not saying that you are purposely misreading me, but I am afraid there is a communication problem here. English is not my first language and so I will take responsibility for not being clear.
However, claiming that ‘women have a better immune system than men and live longer’ is dismissive. And this is exactly what I mean about the need to separate from men because it is absolutely unacceptable.
[..] "Gender influences that way that people are treated and diagnosed in health systems," Annandale said. "It influences the kind of health conditions that men and women suffer from, the way people relate to their own bodies, and what kind of access to health care they have."
Understanding gender differences in health can help scientists and doctors find ways to better treat patients, she said.
"Women generally live longer than men, but in many countries that gap in life expectancy has been decreasing over time. One of the reasons for that is thought to be that men's health is improving, but women's is not."
[..]
3. Yes, they are ‘bizarre neologisms..used by a tiny group of people’.. but..BUT..how many are actually talking about it? It is once again dismissed as ‘bizarre’ and those who protest it are either being cancelled or called TERFs.
There is a clear line in the sand and it is always men on the other side throwing sand on our eyes. We have no support.
If I posted a poll here on HN about definition of Woman, I will be flagged and possibly banned.
I have seen posts here about HNers expressing how lonely they are or how to deal with isolation or mental health. But this isn’t a community where I can express my dejection over my experience and feelings as a woman. You dismissed my lived experience as ‘bizarre’ and ‘deranged’.
I am not saying this as an accusation but just that it reminds me of other experiences with most men. perhaps you are a woman or transgender or non binary..I have no way of knowing and so I am not going to assume that you are male. There is just low relatability that we might as well be ‘different species’.
4. I am a little offended that you consider that my speech would be considered ‘hate speech’. Perhaps on the internet because there is no free speech on the internet.
People are afraid of being accused of ‘hate speech’ that even normal conversation is being stifled. And this is about a subject that affects me as a woman.
I am sure there are men here who have daughters. Husbands who have wives who agree with me. Men with female friends. But I am also pretty positive that they will remain silent. Because this is radioactive. But if we don’t assess the radioactivity of a site and discuss further action, it will affect everyone in time. That is the tragedy of being silent due to cancel culture. There are no winners.
How can a woman fighting and claiming her identity be tagged with ‘hate speech’? This is our VERY IDENTITY that is being erased and stripped away from us.
I am not trying to be dramatic here..but as I am typing this, I have a lump in my throat and I don’t know if I am at the cusp of rage..or tears.
This is absolutely unfair what is happening in the world. It is unfair for girls, women and all the unborn girl children. I am not sure I can continue. I am done here.
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)
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.
>Third gender is the term used in India for transgender.
Aaaah. That makes sense.
The reason that was unusual to me was because, in the West, currently, the prevailing view/jargon is that there's genders, and each gender can be "cis" or "trans". More controversially, there are also non-binary people, who may report no gender, a mix of genders, or a gender other than "man"/"woman". That would be your usage of "third gender".
Right. For many non-western people, ‘cisgender’ is a made up western term. There has always been non binary and transgender in different cultures around the world. In my culture, there are two genders(not ‘cis’..what does it even mean?) and then there is the third gender.
In Hindu puranas, there are many gods we worship who are of two genders, transgender and then there is the father of Ganga(the holiest River of Hinduism) who was born to two women.
Here is ..provided with much reservations…a generic search result link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_themes_in_Hindu_mytholo... ..I reject all western interpretations and ‘scholarly work’ and have a dim view of western style psychoanalysis of my gods and culture. But it works..as a list.
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.
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?
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.
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...