The more interesting thing is the distribution of income. I would happily bet that there still is a considerable gap between women on average and men on average and that the total amount taken home by that majority is significantly less than the total amount for the men.
On average, there is no hourly pay gap for unmarried women and men without kids. After they get married, there is an hourly salary gap, and this gap is even larger for married parents.
As hours worked per day increase, the hourly pay rate also increases and married men spend much more time at their jobs (on average). Hourly pay also increases as experience increases. Married men with children spend more time at their jobs (vs. married women w/ children, on average), so they accumulate more experience over the years. The gap increases when they get older (on average).
This is the same reason I see trotted out by companies looking to defend gender imbalances; but the real issue is that the higher up you go in a profession, the less likely women are to be promoted. Even without kids. And these days in the US, "women with children" only get a few weeks off when they have children before having to return to work. Suggesting the difference in career outcomes is due to this time is ill-informed at best.
The poster you're responding to pointed out that on average, after children, men spend more time at their jobs than women.
It would seem to go without saying that implies all the top performers are going to be men, and if the system is performance based, that means the promotions will tend towards the men.
What about marriage? If a man makes more money and he is married is HE talking more? Isn't that income split (or in reality spent by the women)? I have never understood why data on married men is treated as if the men are single and it's their money alone.
A lot of couples keep separate finances. Money is one of the biggest reasons couples split up, after all. While my boyfriend and I aren’t married, we do split our household contributions and pay from our own accounts.
I think it is also interesting to study the money men and women bring separately into their relationship and how that plays into relationship dynamics.
> Married people BY LAW do not have separate finances.
That's... not true at all.
The IRS tax forms even have an entire category for people who are married but maintain separate finances. It's called "married filing separate".
Now in some states there are laws that property acquired after marriage is shared, you can still maintain separate finances, and then it is up to a judge to figure it out in the case of divorce.
Also, you keep what you entered the marriage with. If you maintain separate finances, it's a lot easier to disentangle if you get divorced.
I have a friend who is on his second marriage, and his wife is also on her second. They maintain separate finances because they were both burned on a divorce, and they are very aware of what is common property and what is not. They could split up pretty much any time without a lawyer because they keep such good books.
There is law and there is convention. I don't know what the legal status of our finances, but practically we have separate finances. Once in a while my wife spends more than her share con groceries and I transfer money to her account to make it up, but our accounts are in separate banks.
In the case of a married couple, it's my understanding that if you refuse to share your earnings with a spouse, the spouse has to either put up with it or divorce you and ask the court to give them a share of it. Absent the nuclear option of a divorce, finances can be kept separate.
Most states, except those listed as community property states below, use the "common law" system of property ownership. In these states, it's usually easy to tell which spouse owns what. If only your name is on the deed, registration document, or other title paper, it's yours. If you and your spouse both have your name on the title, you each own a half interest in the property unless the title document says otherwise. If an item doesn't have a title document, generally you own it if you paid for it or received it as a gift.
Community Property States
If you live in a community property state, the rules are more complicated. But in general:
spouses own equally almost all property either one acquires during the marriage, regardless of whose name the property is in
half of each spouse's income is owned by the other spouse during the marriage, and
debts incurred during marriage are generally debts of the couple.
In community property states, the following is separate property:
gifts given to one spouse
property either spouse owned before the marriage and kept separate during the marriage, and
inheritances.
The community property states are: Alaska (by agreement), Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. (In Alaska, spouses can sign an agreement making specific assets community property.)
It is interesting that California, being an extremely "blue" state (along with Washington to a slightly lesser extent), chooses to retain this antiquated artifact of the days when it was a Spanish colony.
And why would Wisconsin choose this, when it never had any connection to Spain?
Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that this is dependent on if you are in a community property state or not. In a community property state (Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin) all income earned by either partner is automatically community property and owned equally by both parties. In a non-community property state you have the right to keep your earned income separate from your spouse.
This is anecdotal, but men I know have more expensive hobbies then women. Men are more eager to buy what they want while women save money more and feel bad about unnecessary purchases.
Think gaming equipment, steam sales for games they will never play, flying, cars, tech, 3d printer and what not.
Compared to that, feminine hobbies are few bucks once in a while.
That includes being "chief purchasing officer" at home - e.g. women buying things for whole familly including tv, furniture and electronics everyone will use. Someone has to do it.
Similarly anecdotal, women spend a lot on clothes.
My actual point is this type of discussion doesn't really add anything. It's difficult to prove, and prone to an extreme amount of bias combined with generalizing from a small sample.
> Compared to that, feminine hobbies are few bucks once in a while.
Hahah. Sorry, but there's just no way. The entire McMansion industry, the furnishing industry, IKEA, fast fashion brands and high fashion are all driven by women's business.
I'd have to disagree about IKEA actually; IKEA is where you go if you want to get the most bang for your buck with furniture without buying it used. So I imagine it's probably the one part of the furniture industry that has the most balanced gender stats in their customers. How many men want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on furniture or home decorations?
I agree about the rest though, and I think the McMansion industry bit is an insightful comment. I'll also add giant luxury SUVs to this list.
By IKEA I mean especially the idea of disposable fashion applied to home furnishings. That you would update your bedsheets, curtains, napkins, kitchen utensils for the new season every year.
Hmm, I see. Yeah, I can see those sections of the IKEA store getting more sales from women perhaps.
But I'm thinking that someplace like Bed, Bath & Beyond probably gets more female customers, and would be a preferred place to go for the items you list. That store has fancier stuff than IKEA, and is seriously overpriced; it's not a place you shop at to get a good value. I'd also suggest various mall shops or department stores.
Wow, this is some really biased observation on your part.
This is anecdotal too, but in my experience women spend FAR more money on unnecessary stuff than men. Here's many examples:
- donations to churches
- designer clothes
- luxury SUVs
- jewelry (the conflict diamond trade wouldn't exist without women)
- eating at expensive restaurants
- McMansions
- stuff for those McMansions (e.g., custom-made "window treatments": my Mom just spent $15K on "window treatments" for her new house!)
- luxurious vacations (as opposed to, for instance, staying in hostels)
Of course, I'm generalizing, and probably mostly describing the Gen-X to Boomer white American woman demographic, but it's what I've seen the most.
As for men, I work with a bunch of Millennial and younger men, and they spend money on Magic cards and video games, and that's about it. That stuff costs hundreds of dollars, and that's about it usually unless you go really nuts. A woman can easily spend a few hundred dollars on a single article of designer clothing. Meanwhile, these younger men don't seem to really give a shit about cars the way men in older generations did.
And of course the things on my list aren't all exclusive to women; some men like eating at nice restaurants too, some men have BMW SUVs, etc., but in my observation, most of those purchases are either done by women directly, or insisted on by them if they're married.
I can see why you think that women tend not to have "expensive hobbies" the way some men do, but even here you're actually wrong. Here in my metro area, the single women all seem to be members of some kind of exercise class (like Zumba, Barre, Orange Theory, etc.). Those memberships are quite expensive, and easily comparable to men spending money on Steam games. Single women also almost all have dogs, and those can be really expensive too when you account for fancy food, grooming, dog-walking, dog-sitting, etc. The problem is that you're not looking at where people are actually spending money, and you're not counting women's purchases as "hobbies". My most recent ex-girlfriend had two big "hobbies" before I met her: one was her Barre class, which was hundreds of dollars per month. The other was going out to eat: she basically had a hobby of going out every weekend with her girlfriends to some new super-fancy restaurant in DC. That too would amount to hundreds of dollars per month. The other thing I've seen with single professional women is they spend a LOT of money on alcohol: they like to go "out for drinks" a lot, and of course a single drink at a nice DC restaurant will probably run $15. That really adds up over a month. So no, not a lot of women buy 3D printers or fix up old cars, but they do have luxurious things they like to spend $$$$ on.
They're on average more interested in people, so they tend to choose to become nurses, teachers, etc., while men are interested in things and become software developers, engineers, etc.
I have no idea why income HAS TO be distributed equally. Unless you want to force women to become software developers..? But why.
Ignoring everything else wrong with your post, I'll just point out that most software developers were originally women before about 1960 -- it was seen as "woman's work" because it didn't require physical labor. Women were significant contributors to the development of computing from the very beginning -- in fact, "software" as a concept was invented by a woman [1]. The profession didn't become high-status or highly-paid until after men took over (and shut out the women by redefining it as "men's work").
The story is far more complex than this, and the history makes interesting reading. As one might imagine, what we call software development today was really split into an array of roles: some more like mathematicians, some like engineers, some typists, etc.
The idea that women were somehow shut out of the industry doesn't really hold up. My programming classes in the 80s, for example, were about 50-50, and in my early career, I worked under several senior women programmers/technologists.
Back then software development was split over a much bigger amount of roles. The idea of a single person sitting in front of a screen is a modern invention.
One does not need to refute the position that woman are less interested in computer science than nursing or teaching because asserting the personal interest of a hundred million people you've never met is nothing more than made up nonsense. There is of a course a lot of information out there about how societal expectations, existing power structures, gendered use of language, workplace dynamics and many other factors influence things like education and career ambitions. But ascribing it to the idea that "women are more interested in people" is lazy and meaningless.
I was more addressing the habit of colonial power structures to use violence and intimidation to push women and minorities out of positions of economic prosperity.
"Violence and intimidation" in a modern context is exactly what #MeToo was about, so it didn't stop just because women have equal rights under the law. Frankly, a lot of women don't want to put up with that kind of crap and so choose careers in industries where they feel safe (which often pay way less).
One problem I see with this is your example of nurses. Women went into nursing in the past frequently because it was open to them, and being a doctor wasn't. That's changed, and now the only reason to be a nurse is because the educational requirements are much lower, and consequently, there's a shortage of nurses because who wants to do that instead of being a doctor and making more money, unless they don't want to spend as long in school and rack up as much debt?
Also, nurses are some of the least empathetic people around. Don't be fooled by the common misconception; they're usually not caring people at all. "Nurse Ratchet" is not that far from the truth. My mom was a nurse, and I've met many others; they're just not the nicest people around. And there's a good reason for this: a highly empathetic person would not last very long as a nurse. They'd get burned out very quickly, after seeing so many sick and dying people up close day after day.
Unless there's lots of well-known material that I'm unaware of... there seems to be a lot of mind-reading going on here. How can you know what drives people's thinking and decision making?
This is accurate, but not for the reasons you have given.
Think of it this way. Within a profession, say "lawyer", there are different career paths. One career path involves a lot of travel away from home, and one does not. Because traditionally women are expected to be home for children, women tend to more often select the path that involves staying at home more, which tends to also pay less.
So then, when you look at "lawyer", you see a pay gap, and then you dive in and see that the women have chosen the "lower paying job".
But that still doesn't account for the entire pay gap. It still leaves about 7% difference.
That last 7% is what people are concerned about. That women doing the same job with the same experience get about 7% less on average than men, depending on the field. In some fields (I believe medicine is one), there is no pay gap between women and men with equal experience (although there is still an opportunity gap, where men will be promoted more often with equal qualifications).
Then there is tech, where there is a pay gap between people with equal experience. I've seen this personally first-hand (but at least when the manager was called out on it he made it right and gave the woman a raise, but before being called out, it didn't even occur to him that he was making that decision).
> I have no idea why income HAS TO be distributed equally.
Because people doing the same work should get paid the same for doing it. And because you shouldn't be barred from a career for reasons that aren't related to the job (ie. your gender).
Given that women are 1/2 the population, and given the sample size, women and men should on average be making the same amount of money. But they aren't. And study after study show that the reason is bias against women, and not women's choices.
Don't you think that is something that should be changed?
Would you be so kind as to pass along a citation for this?
>But that still doesn't account for the entire pay gap. It still leaves about 7% difference.
My understanding had been that the wage gap was a result of statistical malpractice. Further, I had thought that the intraprofession pay comparison between genders boiled down almost exclusively to (willingness to negotiate) and (taking time off of work to have children).
I would assume if someone did gap analysis they would factor that in. It isn't about the wholistic are women making more or less than men. Rather it's the equality of are women who are the same role of men making the same. There shouldn't be a difference there.
This analysis is continuously being done. You can find it for your country easily. In most developed countries a ~5% gap exists. This is usually attributed to men being more aggressive in negotiations.
I’d also factor in maternity, too. I believe research shows that women’s salaries lag significantly after they give birth, even if they take no time off.
Aren't there laws that prevent discrimination on gender and race pretty much in every first-world country? That would make it illegal to pay a woman less for the same job.
If you consider jobs where the title is the same but the professional works B2B, maybe women are less likely to ask for a better pay? That's why pink razors cost more, after all.
Female soccer players make less money because less people watch and there is less money, same thing for BBC journalists who demanded the same pay even though they got 10% share compared to their male colleague.
> Female soccer players make less money because less people watch and there is less money
I think this is a great example! The US women's soccer team is better than the men's but they make a fraction of the money. It's not their fault that sports have a sexist history that influences viewership, ad revenue, and ultimately their salaries.
It's not "sexist history", it's just that men are better at (almost all) sports. Male football is simply more exciting to watch (I imagine, for broader audiences... it's boring to me, in general). For modeling, it's the reverse.
How is men’s soccer more exciting to watch rather than woman’s soccer? It’s literally people kicking a ball around. Does the ball explode if you are a man and kicking it?
Well, I can tell the difference. Men look more aggressive and professional overall. I mean, the US women national team lost to kids etc, so you tell me.
We have some women teams here in Spain, and while there's some movement in the league honestly it feels... like watching amateurish football. I guess they need time to catch on, but meanwhile it's not very appealing.
Women can be just as athletic as men, and can easily beat them in many sports. It just depends on the sport. If the sport requires upper-body strength, forget it: men will always have a huge advantage here. But if upper-body strength is no help, and lower-body strength and endurance are important, women can do better. Off the top of my head, I'd point to endurance running: women have longer legs proportionally, and more fat reserves, and don't have to waste a lot of energy carrying around a lot of chest/arm muscles and bigger upper-body bones. They can also do well in downhill skiing, bicycling, etc.
Also, over in Tennessee, the UT women's basketball team has been much, much more popular for decades now than the men's team ever was.
Economically, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
If a business pays employees more than the market rate, it will be less profitable and thus more likely to fail. If a business pays employees less than the market rate, it will lose employees to competitors and it is thus more likely to fail.
Also, to say that "men decided" is pretty strange. It suggests a conspiracy, and it suggests that there are no women who could start companies or otherwise be in management.
So you've apparently just proven that no discrimination exists in the business world. South Africa's native population was just too stupid to work any job, until Nelson Mandela was freed, instantly improving their skills to make them eligible for employment.
Nobody would forgo a good bread, so Germans writing "Germans don't buy from jews" on bakery windows were just making the case that the bread had, within a few years, become intolerable. Hollywood studios stopped hiring communists because communists just aren't very funny. etc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcDrE5YvqTs -- According to the DOL there is a much smaller than typically quoted wage gap, and there are additional variables not accounted for.
The article is stating the exact opposite. In the past, this was true... but it seems like women are now starting to start participate in jobs Men have traditionally dominated.
