Fewer women than men become executive managers. They earn less, hold more
junior positions, and attrit faster. We compiled a large panel data set on executives
and formed a career hierarchy to analyze promotion and compensation rates. Given
executive rank and background, women are paid more than men, experience less income
uncertainty, and are promoted as quickly. Amongst survivors, being female increases
the chance of becoming CEO. Hence the gender pay gap and job rank differences are
primarily attributable to female executives attriting at higher rates than males in an
occupation where survival is rewarded with promotion and higher compensation.
I wonder if there is any/what the correlation is between the attrition rate of these females and pregnancy - is becoming pregnant a significant blocker to their survivorship rate?
It is most implausible to suggest that giving birth and caring for young children is the predominant reason why female executive managers, who average 50 years old in our sample, quit. Other unobserved factors leading managers to attrit could include more un-pleasantness, indignities, and tougher unrewarding assignments at work, examples of factors that reduce the attraction of work without necessarily affecting productivity or human capital acquisition. Perhaps women are subject to this form of gender discrimination. Another hypothesis is that women acquire more nonmarket human capital than men throughout their lives, and hence find retirement a relatively attractive option.
Why shouldn't women quit at age 50 because of children? If they sacrificed family time for their career before, they might realize that suddenly there is not a lot of time left with their children before they will leave the house. Maybe at 50 they have secured enough money as well to be comfortable working less. Older men seem to be taking time off for family, too.
It's a shame that they have to discredit their paper by ending it with pure speculation ("could include...").
The speculation is clearly indicated, and is no discredit to the paper. In fact, it is to their credit that they admit ignorance of the causes of the effects that they observe.
At 50 years old, most people's children would be having children of their own, let alone be out of the house. Retiring to spend more time with your adult children wouldn't make much sense when those children are likely just ramping up their own careers.
My mother semi-retired in her fifties to care for her grandchildren (providing free childcare so that my sister could continue her career). Perhaps this is a factor.
Not necessary, just desirable because people like buying things.
Considering it 'necessary' is actually part of what makes this a problem. If people knew how to want instead of need, they might next learn how to delay gratifying those wants. Instead, desire becomes confused with necessity and suddenly you can't live without an HDTV right now.
The median income per household member in the US was $23,535 in 2004[1]. Unfortunately I can't find a more recent census value for that. In the case of a household with two partners and at least one child, such as we're discussing here, I would think that more than ~$24,000 would be necessary.
I'm 58 and my kid graduates high school this spring. And looking around at my workmates, I'm far from the exception, although I may be somewhat toward one end of the scale. Looking around, 50 seems entirely plausible, even if it's only a significant minority.
Data and people should probably not be divided into the majority and nothing else.
No, we are talking about career women here, so they are more likely to have children later in life. I don't think the typical female CEO candidate had her first child at 18 years old.
If you had your first child age 35 (I think the official limit before physicians consider you late for having children), at 50 your oldest child will be 15.
Sure, but a population of 'all women' is different than the comment you are replying to, which was specifically addressing female executives. Here's the data for that, which supports their conclusion - over 50% have their first child in their 30s.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/15/for-most-hig...
Maybe in barbaric parts of the world where people reproduce absurdly young in their 20s, but in most of the West reproduction is moving later in life in their 30s or 40s. If you start having children at 30 and have three kids at say 30, 34, and 38, at 50 your youngest would be in middle and high school and your oldest would be halfway through college (hopefully).
Yes, how dare those "barbaric" parts of the world give their children the best chance of being born healthy by reproducing at an optimal (physically speaking) point in their lifespan.
Us "civilized" countries will just sit back and act haughty while we try to deal with skyrocketing autism/developmental disorders/disabilities as our populations continue to give birth later and later in the fertile/viable part of their lifespan, thus significantly increasing the chances of developmental disabilities in our offspring.
Yup, that's a great idea. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
I didn't say countries, I said parts of the world. There are places even in America where misogyny is so entrenched that, like you, people treat women as nothing more than offspring incubators.
It's attitudes like yours that keep women out of the tech industry. At literally the same time that you're telling young men to take risks, do a startup, and try for the big win, you're telling women to do what? Stay at home and feel despondent while little Timmy says he doesn't have to for the 5000th time that day? That's an attitude for the 1950's, not modernity.
Not even going to touch the ableism in this comment. You're literally saying that people who are differently abled or neuroatypical are worthless.
Yes. We changed it back to that from "Gender gaps in promotion and pay due to female attrition". To cherry-pick one detail to highlight from the article is a form (actually the leading form) of editorializing, which is against HN's title rule.
Please don't. Your comment was factually wrong, but even if it weren't, provocative snark is something to avoid in HN threads. When commenting here, please make your point substantively.
Judging the results of the studies by the genders of the people who have done the study is pretty basic case of discrimination. And I am certain that you are that kind of people who think that you can not discriminate against men, white people, etc.
So if a woman can "survive" the business environment, she's more likely to become a CEO. To me that says: if she can survive through the bias/discrimination, she's probably much more qualified than her male counterparts.
That women are driven away by bias/discrimination is the true failing of our workplaces.
It is most implausible to suggest that giving birth and caring for young children is the predominant reason why female executive managers, who average 50 years old in our sample, quit. Other unobserved factors leading managers to attrit could include more un-pleasantness, indignities, and tougher unrewarding assignments at work, examples of factors that reduce the attraction of work without necessarily affecting productivity or human capital acquisition.
Although this does not support the "more qualified" argument, the study was specifically tailored to control for attrition from pregnancy, and the authors conclude that they are not entirely sure why older female executives quit at a higher rate than comparable male executives. It's not unreasonable to assume that it could be due to "discrimination" in the form of indignities and unfair assignment of tough/menial work, as the authors suggest.
To deny that women experience discrimination in the workplace would be pretty ignorant. This might not be true of every company, but it is a feature of many.
It seems logical that a woman who reaches the highest levels of a corporate structure are going to be, on average, more resilient, driven, and/or intelligent, then their average male competitors when it comes time to make a promotion decision. Many others will be lost to attrition.
You can't calculate an average across all industries. That does not make any sense to do. As an example, men choose to work more dangerous jobs than women in industries that tend to pay higher (miners, oil rigs, etc).
If you want to play fair, as this paper did, and consider a particular job type (highly paid executives), it would make sense to start calculating averages or percentages.
I don't think this washington post article really proves anything about the discrimination women experience within the workplace, after getting hired. We do know that the gender balance is unequal in the STEM workforce, and for various reasons, some employers feel compelled to try to balance that ratio by hiring more women. However, this does not mean women experience greater upward mobility after entering the organization.
You just dismissed real evidence that men are discriminated against as being completely justified, and then implied that discrimination against women exists once in the workplace without a shred of evidence.
Companies are clearly working hard to discriminate against men when hiring, and without evidence the default conclusion should be that they do the same thing within organizations when handling promotions.
Whereas men don't need to survive, they are carried along by a wave of applause and cheering? That must be the reason almost every man ends up being CEO eventually, and women are stuck doing all the work.
It's not too long ago that women wouldn't be promoted or considered for certain jobs, because they might get pregnant and leave. That was an all but accepted and admitted practice.
There are certainly current results from those legacies, since people tend to hire people like themselves. And there probably are more than a few surviving neanderthals that still believe those practices should be followed.
So yes, being a male, just like being white in the US, does give you certain current or legacy advantages.
You make many claims that are not really validated. And what does "like themselves" even mean. People can be different or similar in many aspects, gender being just one of many. Is a man who hates math and loves football more like me than a woman who likes maths and hates football (I hate football and like maths)?
Also, perhaps women getting pregnant was and is a real issue. There might be real risks and costs attached to companies.
And you make the same mistake as the parent I replied to, looking at thing out of context: presumably there are jobs where women were less likely to be promoted, but at the same time you neglect that there are jobs where men are less likely to be promoted (or being hired to begin with). Overall, men don't get a free pass in society, otherwise there wouldn't be so many books and articles on career advice. It's not like "hey, you are white and male? - hired!".
The context mistake is particularly easy to see in IT: because there are many more men than women in IT, for every woman who doesn't get promoted there are several men who don't get promoted. But only if a woman doesn't get promoted it makes headlines and she can sue for sexism.
Not to be too blunt, but you are supporting the parent's point about the existence of neanderthals who still believe that women are a bad idea, because they might get pregnant. You've just given legitimacy to that exact opinion!
Real risk or not, it's the cost of doing business in America - it is illegal to discriminate against women on that basis.
It's a neanderthal idea that women get pregnant? Funny... Did you get your biology education in the bible belt?
Neanderthals are deemed to have been gentle and intelligent, btw, their reputation as brutes was misguided.
Men did not invent pregnancy. If you want businesses to hire women, it seems fair that you should compensate them for the added risk.
Suppose you have two equally qualified candidates, one male, one female. If an employee quits, it costs you months of productivity and thousands of dollars to recruit a new candidate. Obviously the male candidate is economically more viable because he is less likely to drop out because of children.
If you don't acknowledge that issue, you will never be able to help women (if they need help, which is not a given). I think the state should pay businesses for the loss, or perhaps even reward businesses if their employees become pregnant, if society wants more women to be hired.
Feminist stance is of course that men should be equally like to drop out and take on the "burden" of raising kids (that is what feminists think of family life - the only explanation why women put up with children is because the patriarchy forces them to do it). The reality is that being allowed to spend time with their kids is actually a privilege, not a burden. Women drop out to enjoy the time with their kids. They also tend to choose professions that don't allow them to provide for a family long before they even have kids.
Otherwise, why wouldn't they just continue to work and use their salary to pay a nanny?
It also doesn't seem like an overwhelmingly helpful survival trait for the species, given that the only thing left of Neanderthals are a few genes here and there. Similarly, the only thing left of modern social Neanderthals are a few scattered and aberrant practices.
One hamfisted solution would be to require both men and women to take the same time off if they were to have children. That way one gender isn't seen as having a greater possibility of taking longer parental leaves.
Mandate that both parents must take at least some baseline time off from work. Say mandate at least three months. There will be people who take longer, and some who opt out of work altogether but this would eliminate the thought pregnancies get in the way of productivity for one gender and not the other.
Have to make sure the family has still enough income, as women often choose lower paying jobs. Also take care of the desire for part-time work, sick children and issues like that.
Lastly, this would actually take away privileges from women (privilege to choose to be a stay-at-home mom), but if that's what feminists want, why not.
This is pretty much what happens in Scandinavian countries. E.g. in Sweden, parents each get three months of paternal leave. An additional part of the paternal leave can be divided between parents as they see fit. https://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden/
It's a neanderthal idea to determine whether or not you're going to hire/promote/review a candidate based on what plumbing is in their pants.
Acknowledging the 'issue' you described above isn't taking a brave stance against overreaching feminism. It is actually illegal. Not to say that people don't do it all the time. (Yay, at-will employment!)
This conversation is actually a perfect illustration of how one aspect of gender-based discrimination works.
And if we're going to talk about speaking statistically, according to the Disparate Impact clause, if whatever criteria you use for employment happens to statistically discriminate against a protected class, what you're doing is also illegal.
(And while we're here, black people are more likely to get arrested, and Russians are more likely to be alcoholics. I'll be sure to mention that the next time hiring is under debate.)
By making it illegal, governments simply weaseled out of the issue and put the burden on business owners. If they really would have wanted to solve the issue, they should have compensated business owners for the risks of hiring women instead.
It being illegal is pretty irrelevant for the discussion - in Nazi Germany it was illegal to be a Jew. Laws are being made by fallible people.
Is it really discrimination if arguably the man brings higher value to the company than an equally skilled woman? This is very different from discrimination against minorities, because there is an actual relevant difference between men and women.
It's not fair, but that is what nature has handed us. If societal consensus is to make up for the difference, society should do so via their governments, not shift the burden to random private people. It's not a business owner's fault if you get pregnant, especially since it's probably illegal by now to have sex with an employee.
Fewer women than men become executive managers. They earn less, hold more junior positions, and attrit faster. We compiled a large panel data set on executives and formed a career hierarchy to analyze promotion and compensation rates. Given executive rank and background, women are paid more than men, experience less income uncertainty, and are promoted as quickly. Amongst survivors, being female increases the chance of becoming CEO. Hence the gender pay gap and job rank differences are primarily attributable to female executives attriting at higher rates than males in an occupation where survival is rewarded with promotion and higher compensation.