News-Record.com

Sen. Kay Hagan employs the logic in her statement on the occasion of "Equal Pay Day."

The solution is federal action to enforce equality.

Let's see where else disparity exists. But in the following measures, the advantage belongs to females: *Doug

Not Really! A host of Transgender Cross Dressers who apply for jobs as Servers for the Hooters Chain, has decided to make equality work by opening a new Food Chain called " Tooters"

" All Food Servers are created equal, except some Servers are more equal than others"*Founder of Hooters quoted on March 19, 1971 at the Clemson Hooters Business School. Formerly known as the Strom Thurman Shool of Business And Slavely Marketing.

Sen. Kay Hagan employs the logic in her statement on the occasion of "Equal Pay Day."

The solution is federal action to enforce equality.

Let's see where else disparity exists. But in the following measures, the advantage belongs to females: *Doug

Not Really! A host of Transgender Cross Dressers who apply for jobs as Servers for the Hooters Chain, has decided to make equality work by opening a new Food Chain called " Tooters"

" All Food Servers are created equal, except some Servers are more equal than others"*Founder of Hooters quoted on March 19, 1971 at the Clemson Hooters Business School. Formerly known as the Strom Thurman Shool of Business And Slavely Marketing.

Doug:

The additional statistics that you cite regarding more education for women and lower levels of incarceration actually undercut your arguments regarding pay. Women are acquiring higher levels of skills and getting into less trouble, yet they still earn less.

Family responsibilities explain some, but far from all of the gap. The weakness with the family responsibility argument is that these responsibilities have decreased over time, yet the pay gap has been slow to close. In particular, marriage rates, childbearing rates, numbers of children, and time spent in household work by women have been decreasing, while time spent in household work by men has actually been increasing. To these trends, you can add the skills trends above AND increasing rates of market work among mothers of young children.

Given all of these trends, we would have expected the pay gap to close. Instead, the pay gap has essentially been frozen at around 75 - 78 percent since the mid-1990s!

Given the number of variables involved, the notion of the "real pay gap" is about as viable as the notion of the "real God." My guess is around 5.6%, and that's as good as anybody else's.

Just looking at incarceration rates, one might plausibly argue (in contrast to Dave) that, because these men are in prison and out of the labor force, they skew male pay higher (since women with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, education levels, etc. are more likely to be in the workforce in low-paying jobs). And such arguments--what does this mean? how should we look at that? is a secretary the same as a plumber?--are endless.

I've read that 78 cents on the dollar figure before. Hagan probably didn't explain it clearly enough. It's 78 cents on the dollar compared to a man for the same job. That means incarceration, leaving the workforce to care for children, or education rates, etc. don't factor in.

Andrew: Exactly. The averages can be skewed by those who don't factor in. As brian suggests, if you imprison large numbers of men who, if left in the workforce would be performing at low levels, that alters the average of those remaining. This is what Claudia Goldin seems to be getting at: There's an impact when women with high professional qualifications leave the workforce. Quantifying that impact, however, must be very difficult.

Dave, you left out your explanation. Are you sticking with the discrimination argument to account for most of the pay gap? Do you likewise accept the discrimination explanation for differences in other measures that favor females over males?

By the way, do professional athletes figure into this? Are NBA players (average salary $4.9 million) compared to WNBA players (average salary $55,000)? Is that prima facie evidence of workplace discrimination?

http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=339337

Andrew, this article says you're wrong.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/21/commentary/everyday/sahadi/

Can you cite something showing that you're right?

I haven't seen recent decompositions, but earlier decompositions indicated that very little of the difference by gender could be explained by observed characteristics.

For example, Altonji and Blank (Handbook of Labor Economics 1999) did a decomposition using 1995 hourly wage data. They found a raw difference of about 28 percent. They found that observed characteristics accounted for 1 percent and other differences accounted for 27 percent when you only considered education, experience, and area of the country. Observed characteristics accounted for 8 percent of the difference when industry, occupation, and job characteristics were included. So at most, it appears that these observable characteristics are accounting for 1/3 of the difference.

In contrast, if you look at differences by race and ethnicity, observable characteristics account for most of the difference in wages. Some researchers, such as June O'Neill (Journal of Economic Perspectives 1990) have shown that you can make virtually all of the race differences disappear with the right controls.

Discrimination is incredibly hard to prove or establish. People generally don't come out and say that they are discriminating. Moreover, people who are discriminated against usually have the option of seeking out better opportunities. These people face costs in obtaining "equal" employment; however, conditional on that employment, you would see little difference in earnings.

That said, there is some direct evidence of discrimination. For example, women are more likely to be hired into orchestras when auditions take place behind a screen (when the judges can only hear the performance but can't see the performer). Manufactured application letters bearing women's names are more likely to be turned down than those with men's names, even when those manufactured letters give the same qualifications. The problem is extrapolating from these types of examples to the actual extent of discrimination.

The fact that this phenomenon continues to be studied indicates to me a likely dissastisfaction with existing research. There's more here than meets the eye.

Here's June O'Neill from this link:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/ComparableWorth.html

"Attempts by social scientists to measure the component of the wage gap accounted for by nondiscriminatory factors are inconclusive for two reasons. First, data on complete work-life histories are hard to obtain, and what economists call career attachment (basically, dedication to work) is even harder to quantify. Several studies have found that about half of the wage gap can be explained by fairly crude measures of years of experience and schooling, leaving the reasons for the other half of the gap unresolved. But when women and men with more similar backgrounds are compared—such as women and men with training in a particular field, or women and men who have never married—the pay gap tends to be much smaller than in the aggregate. For example, the pay gap between men and women with doctorates in economics is about 5 percent."

So she's starting at 1/2 the gap and working up from there (while suggesting that discrimination is "almost certainly responsible" for some)--and she's doing so in the online "Library of Economics and Liberty," which sounds suspiciously libertarian. Research on feminist websites--this will shock everyone--tends to show a much larger gap much more closely tied to discrimination.

Conclusion: women make between 76% and 100% of what men make, depending on how you define, study, and control for the problem to be solved.

Prediction: we will continue to see studies with results in the range noted above.

Prediction #2: these studies will correlate strongly to the political beliefs of researchers and sponsoring organizations.