

Millennial women have seriously narrowed the wage gap with men - joelle
http://theweek.com/article/index/253953/millennial-women-have-seriously-narrowed-the-wage-gap-with-men

======
discodave
One obvious reason is that Millennial women (especially professionals) have
not had babies yet.

The effect of taking time of work for children is not immediate, it creates a
pay gap for the rest of somebody's career.

If we imagine somebody's pay over their career as an upward sloping line eg.

year 1 40k

year 2 42k

year 3 44k

etc...

When a woman takes 6-24 months of work to have a kid or two then that pauses
their pay increases for that time and they are 1-4k worse off than somebody
who didn't take time off at all when they get back. Add to that that women do
more of the school runs and other caring when they DO return to work...

~~~
nightski
Who really sticks to a linear pay schedule like that their entire career
though? Honestly you would have be rather unmotivated.

~~~
trentmb
> Who really sticks to a linear pay schedule like that their entire career
> though?

People with passions that don't pay well (or at all), so they keep a steady
job and pursue said passion outside of work.

~~~
pdog
If your passions don't pay well, you're probably not making something people
want.

~~~
adamnemecek
This is possibly the most misguided comment I've read on HN.

~~~
nightski
What are some passions that people have, which other people greatly desire,
that are not paid well? I am genuinely curious.

~~~
rm999
Academia/research. I was making more than some of my world class professors a
few years into my career, where I was using research they developed and
improved upon.

~~~
jjoonathan
A thousand times this. Markets automatically value knowledge and discoveries
at nothing because you typically have to possess knowledge (sometimes for 100
years) before you can estimate its value. If the development of a new industry
goes through stages "A B C D ... X Y Z," where A-M are academic discoveries,
the market awards 100% of the profit to N-Z and maybe a percent or two to M if
they got lucky with patents, even though A-M required significant capital
expenditure to carry out.

Everything we care about has been touched by uncompensated academics in some
way (uncompensated = rewarded with <1% of the produced value for the purposes
of argument). Much of the Nitrogen in your body comes from the Haber process.
The air you breathe has benefited from emission reduction chemistry figured
out by academics. The basis for the chemistry that produced the plastics
around you was all figured out by academics (albeit tested, refined, and
implemented by better paid engineers). Academic physicists made semiconductor
models that formed the basis of simulations that made the industry practical.
If you're not on Windows, academics wrote a healthy chunk of the OS on your
computer. Physicists figured out the details of nuclear energy (in the US, 20%
of the energy you are using right now) and built models that are used to a
significant degree in the engineering of all of the others. Scientists are
going to be responsible for pulling our collective asses out of the fire wrt
global warming. The more I write the more I realize (and hopefully you
realize) just how silly this train of thought is. As for mathematics, where
would engineers be without linear algebra or calculus? How much less efficient
would industry be without linear programming (programming = schedule making in
this context)? It's impossible to even formulate these thoughts correctly
because everything is interrelated.

I challenge _you_ (great?-grandparent libertarian) to find an industry that
does not inextricably depend upon some kind of model or fact produced by
uncompensated academics (as defined above -- use any threshold for value
capture you deem appropriate).

Whatever the market rewards people for, it is not value creation. It is value
creation multiplied by a long list of factors which often go to 0 for
arbitrary reasons (your customers are too poor, your product is not
excludable, etc.)

\---------

Fortunately, people are not rational actors wrt accumulating money. Here's
what future career paths very roughly look like for new grads (based on my own
perceptions, not glassdoor):

Helping the poor: $0 (maybe $12k if you count a fellowship)

Trying to Cure Cancer: $25k/yr, bump to $40k after 6 years

Engineering Medical Devices, Airplanes, etc: $60k/yr

Trying to Build the Next Twitter: $100k/yr-$150k/yr

Helping Rich People Game the System to Get Richer: $150k/yr, $300k/yr after a
few years if successful

What disturbs me is that if I were to prioritize this list based on benefit to
humanity, it would take the exact opposite ordering. There was <1% chance of
that happening randomly.

------
excelsiores
Remember this next time you hear the "77 cents to the dollar" lament by young
feminists in college with a degree in "women's studies". _They_ are not likely
to be disadvantaged, just more likely than men to want to have babies and/or a
more flexible job when they turn 30+.

Also, interestingly enough, white women have been typically been better off
than black or Hispanic men as regards wage gap with respect to white men
([http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882775.html](http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882775.html))
-- something that is often conveniently swept under the carpet by white
feminists.

~~~
normloman
Most feminists I know don't hesitate to mention the wage gap between white
people and black / hispanic people.

~~~
excelsiores
Guess it's a matter of personal experience then (Note that I intended to refer
to young feminists in college in the second paragraph as well).

Most of the ones I know tend to be from a pretty decent-earning group
themselves (white, upper middle class, college-educated) and almost never
mention the race-based earning gap, but constantly mention the gender-based
one.

------
eecsninja
Check out the absolute pay numbers in the Pew Research article:
[http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/on-pay-gap-
millenn...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/on-pay-gap-millennial-
women-near-parity-for-now/)

While women's wages have dropped slightly in recent years, men's wages have
dropped much more. The OP article is misleading, or uninteresting at best --
both men and women are worse off in terms of wages.

~~~
hayksaakian
I think the OP relies on the notion that the overall drop affected people
equally independent of gender.

The question remains: are men uniquely worse off?

~~~
tsotha
I don't think there's any question about that, actually. Women tend to cluster
in government, academia, and health care, which have been the most resilient
sectors in this recession.

------
ams6110
The employment picture for millennials is supposedly bleak, from what I've
heard. If a lot of men in this age bracket are now taking sub-optimal jobs as
an alternative to being completely unemployed, that could also explain a
narrowing in the gap. There's a lot more wage parity in hourly service-sector
jobs.

------
calinet6
Other than the note that has already been made about the difference in the age
women first have children, I don't think this is a huge surprise to most
"millennials." In most circles, as well as in most pop culture, an ideal
expectation of equality is the well-accepted default.

Now an expectation of equality and the practice thereof are two very different
things, but it seems like we're making progress, and I can only hope we
continue to do so.

------
khuey
How much of this is that most millennial women have not yet had children (and
have not temporarily or permanently exited the workforce)?

~~~
vasilipupkin
not sure how you would compute a pay gap between those who are working and
those who have exited the work force. Isn't it like dividing by NULL?

~~~
bmelton
Woman A works January 1 to March 31, has baby, quits work. On her $100,000
salary, she only makes 3 months' worth, meaning she _earned_ ~$25k, while her
male counterpart makes $100k.

Woman B works January 1 to March 31, has baby, takes 6 weeks off paid, and
another 8 weeks off unpaid, makes only $84k while her male counterpart makes
$100k.

------
Mikeb85
This article has some possible explanations:
[http://theweek.com/article/index/249955/why-is-the-gender-
wa...](http://theweek.com/article/index/249955/why-is-the-gender-wage-gap-
stuck-3-theories)

------
tsotha
Great, so it's time to get rid of affirmative action, right?

------
brokenparser
Does not compute. Millennial "women" are 12 or 13.

~~~
Mikeb85
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials)

"There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends. Commentators
use beginning birth years from the early 1980s to the early 2000s"

Millenials are basically those 30 years old and under at the moment.

~~~
brokenparser
That makes no sense at all. Generation X/Y/Z, sure (except does it roll over
after Z and would that be AA or just A?). But millennial? The name implies
turn-of-the-millennium, not before as that would be a premillennial. Back in
the day, there were reports of people trying to plan a "millennium baby" to be
born in the first week of the year 2000 so it would make sense to call them
millennials as they're not exactly babies any more.

