Quote:
Originally Posted by Seahawk
The Biggest Myth About the Gender Wage Gap - The Atlantic
I t might be the most famous statistic about female workers in the United States: Women earn "only 72 percent as much as their male counterparts."
It's also famously false.
A new survey from PayScale this morning finds that the wage gap nearly evaporates when you control for occupation and experience among the most common jobs, especially among less experienced workers. It is only as careers advance, they found, that men outpaced female earnings as they made their way toward the executive suite.
So, women aren't starting off behind their male counterparts, so much as they're choosing different jobs and losing ground later in their careers.
..."We're trying to compare men and women with the same education, same management responsibilities, similar employers, in companies with a similar number of employees." After controlling for these factors, "the gender wage gap disappears for most positions," she said.
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There is a Freakonomics podcast on this subject that I listened to recently. They had a guest (female) researcher/professor (Harvard I think) that is THE expert on wage inequality. From the podcast transcript:
The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap - Freakonomics Freakonomics
If you take women who don’t have caregiving obligations, they’re almost equal with men. It’s somewhere in the 95 percent range. But when women then have children, or again are caring for their own parents or other sick family members who need care, then they need to work differently. They need to work flexibly, and often go part-time. They often get less-good assignments because their bosses think that they’re not going to want work that allows them to travel, or they’re not going to be able to stay up all night, or whatever it is. And so then you start — if you’re working part-time, you don’t get the same raises. And if you’re working flexibly your boss very typically thinks that you’re not that committed to your career, so you don’t get promoted.