
Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators [pdf] - wallace_f
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_gendergap.pdf
======
hnaccy
>Crucially, a gap in overtime acceptance rates barely exists for those who are
married. As we can see in Figure 10, married male operators with dependents
are only 0 to 2 percentage points more likely to accept overtime than married
women with dependents. This suggests that those who are married with
dependents, men and women, are able to divide up caretaking responsibilities
at home in a way that allows them to work overtime at similar levels.

The decline of two parent households and rise of single motherhood strikes
again.

~~~
abalone
_> rise of single motherhood strikes again._

The study addressed this. There are sexist gender roles at play even among
single parents, potentially. (To wit, you didn’t lament the rise of “single
fatherhood.”)

From the study,

 _> These results suggest that single men are able to take care of their
dependents by working more overtime, possibly to pay for child support or to
finance other forms of child care. Single women, on the other hand, appear to
be making the decision to do the caretaking themselves rather than to caretake
through additional earnings. It is, of course, possible that for women this
situation is not as much a personal preference as it is a constraint._

~~~
the_trapper
> The study addressed this. There are sexist gender roles at play even among
> single parents, potentially. (To wit, you didn’t lament the rise of “single
> fatherhood.”)

Isn't that mostly caused by a sexist judiciary. I know that as a man in
America in the event of a divorce it is very unlikely that I would get
majority custody of my children. From what I've seen it takes a lot for a
woman to lose custody if she wants it.

~~~
UncleMeat
The custody gap is largely caused by different desires about custody. This is
still an issue, but it is the same issue as the wage gap due to different
career choices. When men and women fight for custody equally, they tend to get
joint custody.

~~~
marchenko
I agree that there is an interesting and potentially informative symmetry
between the custody gap and the wage gap. They both describe situations that
different groups find deeply unfair, but can be ascribed in large part to
"different choices". It might be fruitful to take a more holistic view to
understand why the "individual choice" explanation is so unsatisfying to many.

------
wallace_f
Can someone explain to me what's wrong with this:

If women make $0.70 for every $1.00 a man makes, and women are
underrepresented in many lucrative fields, then: an arbitrage opportunity
necessarily exists.

In other words, if there is systemic sexism, then there exists a profit
opportunity for entrepreneurs to buy-up typical companies and replace
expensive, scarce male labor with cheaper, less-scarce female labor.

~~~
koboll
I mean, you could have said the same about blacks in the decades between
emancipation and the civil rights movement.

Certainly, there were some people who took advantage of those arbitrage
opportunities to some extent. But in the case of anti-black racism, it truly
was a case of human prejudice outweighing market incentives, for a very long
time.

~~~
wallace_f
In fact, when the dial was turned up all the way on prejudice and
discrimination, slavery was the result, as an extreme version of this ability
to arbitrage the pay gap. As insane and unjust as that was, that really
existed.

Today, if there is a pay gap it would be exploitable, no? Salaries are
typically the by far the most expensive cost for most tech startups.
Discrimination against women is illegal and socially shunned today. So what's
stopping entrepreneurs from arbitraging this opportunity?

~~~
warp_factor
Because there is no such opportunity. This whole "0.70$ per 1.00$ from men",
doesn't take into account different professions for example.

~~~
stcredzero
According to John Green, the actual gender pay gap is more like 8%.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI)

------
stcredzero
A female friend of mine who worked at Whole Foods did the typically male
tactics cited in this article: Trading off regular hours for more lucrative
Holiday and overtime hours. She also had a family. (And a 2nd job as a Yoga
instructor. Not sure how that aligned her incentives.)

~~~
abalone
Great, well I guess that one anecdote overrides a careful study by the Harvard
department of Economics.

~~~
stcredzero
Of course it doesn't. I simply admire my friend for bucking the typical trend.
(And boosting her income by doing so.)

~~~
abalone
This implies it is a choice on the part of the woman, when the study mentions
it may very well be due to sexist gender roles regarding childcare.

Hopefully you don’t congratulate successful minority friends for “bucking the
typical trend.”

~~~
stcredzero
_This implies it is a choice on the part of the woman_

Which is literally what my friend told me on the matter. She deliberately
chose to work less convenient hours with longer shifts for a higher pay rate.

 _Hopefully you don’t congratulate successful minority friends for “bucking
the typical trend.”_

I would so congratulate Jeremy Lin for doing so. It seems as though you have a
particular problematic preconceived notion of what a minority trend is. Just
who are you imagining when you write, “bucking the typical trend?”

------
blakesterz
Can we make any generalizations from this study? Especially to non-union,
private sector jobs? This seems like a great study because it was very
limited, but are the results limited as well?

------
belorn
I wonder why studies like this never explore incentive models of why there are
different choices. What does the data say about the subset of men who go
against the gender norm and avoid inconvenient days, do not work overtime,
prioritizing schedulerelated amenities, and take more unpaid time off. How
does society treat that subset compared to the majority that follows gender
norm?

I would predict that their income would be lower, but not as much as the
average woman. The risk of involuntarily childlessness would be significant
higher and their social support network would on average be smaller. Health
would be a interesting aspect to look at, which could honestly go either way.

I would also predict that for the subset of women who would go against those
gender expectation would look rather similar. Involuntarily childlessness
would go up but far below that of the average man. Their social support
network would also shrink but again not below that of men. In trade their
income would be above average but not as much as the average man. Average
health and life span would likely go down but not as low as the average man.

~~~
0db532a0
What data do you base these predictions on? Is there any relevant data in the
paper?

~~~
belorn
I base my predictions on the number of studies and lecture which explore
different aspect of those issues, but what I would like to see is a study that
address those directly in the context of wage differences between men and
women. This paper could have done this since they have much of the data, but
they didn't.

If you just want some random sources, there is a government study here in
Sweden that looks at involuntarily childlessness and there is a significant
correlation with income and men. That was published just a few weeks ago.
Dating sites have brought data and shown that both success and quantitative
response is very strongly positively correlated with income for men. It is
often mentioned when I read about social status, with the same old mentioning
of correlation between income and men. People who look at divorce rate see a
correlation when men lose their job and their wives filing, with a larger drop
in social support for the men. The theme is quite common in many studies on
the topic.

From listening to social experimental studies, when people try to reverse
expectations, you often see stereotypical results decreasing, but as is often
found, it does not go down to zero. When it come to life span expectancy and
health, a common theme is that women prioritize and spend more time with the
health sector than men. A commonly cited reason that men do not go to the
doctor is because it conflicts with work priorities. Thus by combining that
result with this study, I would predict that if you look at the subset that
defies gender expectations, then a larger percentile of that subgroup will go
to the doctor than the majority. However I have seen similar health related
studies say that especially psychologists treat men and women differently and
perceive men as being healthier than they are, resulting in worse health care
even for those men which do defy gender expectations. To add to the problems,
lower social status and smaller social support network affects health
significantly which is why I am not sure if prioritizing doctors over higher
income is better or worse.

~~~
0db532a0
You’re right. It would be interesting if the study looked at role reversal
too.

------
TheCoelacanth
This data seems of limited applicability to most jobs considering that these
operators would typically have very standardized pay scales, very standardized
promotion tracks, very standardized job roles, very standardized performance
evaluation criteria and so on which greatly limits the factors that can affect
pay differences. Most jobs have much greater variability in all of those
areas.

------
dang
Url changed from [https://fee.org/articles/harvard-study-gender-pay-gap-
explai...](https://fee.org/articles/harvard-study-gender-pay-gap-explained-
entirely-by-work-choices-of-men-and-women/), which points to this.

~~~
em-bee
why? that article provides a summary and is more interesting to read. not
everyone wants to read an 80 page paper. i'd understand if the article didn't
add any value at all, but i don't think that's the case here.

~~~
dang
That article is ideologically more tendentious, which would pretty well
guarantee a flamewar in the thread. That and the site guideline favoring
original sources
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))
made it seem a clear call.

------
warp_factor
The coverage on this subject is more and more made to follow a feminist/sexist
narrative that wants to prove that the world is patriarchal and against
womens.

the common saying "0.70$ for every 1.00$ of a man" is when you average all the
women salaries against all the man salaries. It doesn't take into account
specific individuals or interests.

I believe the main issue here is that womens are on average more interested in
having a better quality of life (as shown with overtime in this paper), and
are also less pushy during salary negotiations.

~~~
sigi45
Just imagine you work 40h per week and get money $ and it doesn't depend on
how hard you push at salary negotiations or what gender you have or if you can
make children or how willing you are to do overtime or work on skewed work
hours.

That doesn't only help woman, that helps everyone.

~~~
pluto9
> That doesn't only help woman, that helps everyone.

No, it doesn't help anyone. What if I have a financial emergency and am
willing to work overtime for the next month for some extra cash? How exactly
am I "helped" by not having the option to do that?

~~~
sigi45
That is not what i'm saying.

But your motivation to spend that extra time in the company should NOT
influence any salary negotiation.

Otherwise it brings pressure on all others while redefining what the 'social
avg norm' is.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
TLDR:

> Mechanically, the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact
> that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours
> per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and
> women face different choice sets in this job. Rather, it is that women have
> greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work
> hours than men.

~~~
b1gtuna
So the gap here is entirely due to choices made directly by the employees?

------
door5
Men take more overtime, women do more domestic work, men are paid for
overtime, women are not paid for domestic work. Is this not unjust?

~~~
nearbuy
If you're talking about singles, then no, not really. You do domestic work for
yourself. Men still have to do cleaning and maintenance at home, or pay
someone else to do it, or live with the fallout.

If you're talking about couples who share an account, it doesn't really make a
difference. The couple ends up with the same amount of money and domestic care
whether one spouse does more or if they share responsibilities equally, as
long as the total work hours at work and at home are the same.

If you're talking about a couple where the husband works and the wife stays
home and the husband fully controls all the finances, then yes, that's pretty
unfair.

~~~
rubidium
You snuck an assumption in that last point: “and the husband fully controls
all the finances”.

Why?

~~~
nearbuy
It's not an assumption, it's a hypothetical. If a couple did this, I'd
consider it unfair. I imagine that sort of arrangement was a lot more common
in the 50's than today.

~~~
stcredzero
In my experience, the traditional wife has a lot of say in the family's
finances. Audio enthusiasts have talked for many decades, sometimes with
dread, about "The Wife Acceptance Factor."

