
There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap  - pavel
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704415104576250672504707048.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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scythe
I always figured you would assume the market is in equilibrium, unless you can
prove it isn't by e.g. evidence of intentional discrimination, that sort of
thing. In an efficient market -- a market in equilibrium (I took economics a
long time ago) -- everyone earns what their labor is worth. Any wage gap in
such a situation is by definition still fair: everyone is getting what they
earn.

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jellicle
An Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal isn't worth the electrons used to
produce it. The Wall Street Journal specifically disclaims the truthfulness
and factuality of anything in its Opinion section, and we ought to take them
at their word - this is a propaganda piece, not intended to inform but to
disinform.

This is just laughable:

<http://www.iwf.org/about/>

What that says, in disambiguated English, is that it's a propaganda house
funded primarily by the Scaife and Olin foundations.

~~~
jamesbritt
_this is a propaganda piece, not intended to inform but to disinform._

Can you dispute _anything_ in the opinion piece, or is your whole argument
"Look, it's in the WSJ"?

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cjoh
So because there are more unemployed single or married men who have less
education than single women with education the wage gap is closed? This is
nonsensical.

The most laughable part of this is when they just throw out that single women
make more than males. You might as well say "The cost of oranges and apples
are relatively different if you compare orange juice to apple seeds"

Why'd they go with single women? Because married women, specifically those
with kids, make a lot less money. I'd imagine if they only used black men
without a high school education, there'd be an even greater pro-male wage gap.

Here's some good data to illustrate how complicated the wage gap and
employment gap issues are and why overly simplistic stories like that are,
well, embarrassing:

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-
lines.html)

~~~
vehementi
He makes neither of the two assertions you attribute to him. He's saying the
wage gap is closed because for single males vs single females, women make the
same (or more). He doesn't compare single females to all males. The "wage gap"
claim is that men and women make different money for the same jobs. It doesn't
have anything to do with women with kids obviously making less money overall
due to that affecting their career.

Not saying I agree with the article or think it pulls in the whole picture,
but you are completely misrepresenting a lot of things.

~~~
cjoh
The way I read it, SHE (Ms. Lukas, a woman and the author of the post)
certainly is. See:

"Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in
fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are
disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more
insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries."
(comparing without demographic isolation)

"The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women
spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for
full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would
also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage
gap." (comparing with demographic isolation, with no mention of wage
differences between men with children and women with children)

Again, my point is that saying "men and women make X money for Y jobs" doesn't
make much sense, and doesn't illustrate whether or not the wage gap is closed
or not and more importantly, any subset of data can be compared with another
subset of data to illustrate that it is or is not closed. The author here uses
really simplistic arguments to make a case that isn't true.

The fact is, that if you leave out women with children and women who've only
negotiated their salary once, then the wage gap doesn't look so bad. But throw
in their first jobs and women with children, and it's significant.

~~~
vehementi
Sorry I even checked and still misread the "Ms."

But isn't "men and women make X money for Y jobs" the only legitimate way to
look at the wage gap? What other comparison makes sense at all? If not the
above, then what wage gap are people complaining about?

Why bring women with children up? Is it not expected (in the statistical
sense, not in the duty sense) that women with children will tend to have
sacrificed some amount of career? Are you saying that a woman software
developer makes more money for the same role as a woman software developer
with a child?

~~~
yummyfajitas
_What other comparison makes sense at all?_

I don't endorse it, but comparable worth is popular.

[http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/comparable.h...](http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/comparable.html)

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notaddicted
Between the title and "WSJ.com" you can almost predict the entire article. One
admits, however, mild surpirse that the author literally admits to only doing
"a cursory review of the data," such is suspected but rarely explicitly
confirmed.

~~~
earl
Not to mention stupidity like this: "hoice of occupation also plays an
important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced
into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at
work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable
conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility.
Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the
statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job
characteristics."

On one side, there's a long history of studies/research showing coercion of
women into certain job sectors. On the other hand, this author says, "most
women know something else is often at work". So yeah, about par for the wsj.

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michaelchisari
I'd love to see a comprehensive study of male/female wages within specific
industries, because I think that would be much more informative on the
relative biases specific to industries, but this link isn't it. Instead, this
is an opinion piece that does not take its sources seriously, and instead
uncritically hand-waves away what is quite possibly a legitimate concern.

~~~
billybob
I would have liked to see more citations and numbers, but what specifically
did you think was hand-wavy?

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jbooth
I lol'd.

Headline is stating something completely different from the study.

Even within the study.. how about a study of wage gaps by industry rather than
within the universe of "22-30 year old urban workers"? Maybe there are more
male fry cooks and more female advertising execs in that age group?

When feminist groups talk about a wage gap, they talk about different pay
levels for the same job, and as far as I'm aware that still exists.

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lkozma
A plausible explanation I read about the wage gap (if there is any, contrary
to this headline) blames it on the fact that wages are bounded from below
(minimum wage) but not from above. If you have two groups that would normally
have the same average but one is more dispersed, such a truncation on one side
will lead to the gap.

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ajoshi
There hasn't been a massive wage gap in the software engineering field since
at least 1995.

<http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib99352.htm>

If you combine the premise of this WSJ article with the above data from the
NSF, can we say that men now make less than women?

