Equal Pay Day

[JoB]

http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/08/debunking-the-myth-of-a-mythical-gender-pay-gap/

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[wakeflood]

I’ll give you 73% of the credit for that post, JoB! ;-)

Change long past due…

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[skeeter]

I wonder if other countries have a pay gap and how they deal with it.

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[JTB]

skeeter, They probably deal with it without much consideration of American exceptionalism given that sets such an impossibly high standard to achieve.

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[JoB]

thanks wake..

but i still want to let you know that i know i earned more than 73% credit for that post…

even if i didn’t write a single original word ;-)

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[JoB]

skeeter..

ask and you shall receive …

all those years thumbing through card catalogs really helps when diving the google dumpster

http://www.oecd.org/gender/data/genderwagegap.htm

the short answer as to what most affects the gender wage gap is collective bargaining.. though this author has thrown plenty of other variable in as well.

i am sure you will find some place in this to hang your hat.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp8603.pdf

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[skeeter]

Thanks JoB. That’s good stuff. The second study you cited had a fascinating observation:

“The U.S. female-male wage ratio is now about 78%, but an intriguing pattern

emerges when examining this gender wage gap for different marital status groups. For

single men and women the wage gap is generally less than 10%, implying single

women on average earn over 90% of what men earn. But married women earn far less

than married men.”

Skeeter wonders what’s going on here. Are companies underpaying married women because they think/assume the married woman has a husband who brings home the bucks? Or does the performance of women drop off after marriage compared with the performance before marriage? Or does this have nothing to do with women – and it’s just that the performance of *men* increases after marriage because men have someone keeping them balanced at home? Or some other combination of factors causes this pattern?

Again thank you for the links.

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[JoB]

skeeter…

the single person’s numbers also hide an anomaly..

and that is that the number is not consistent through all age groups…

at first i was going to dismiss your questions with a flip comment.. then i was going to answer them with citations..

but after doing a bit of research i am going to lead you to one more reference …

https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/April-2003/Marriage-Motherhood-and-Money-How-Do-Womens-Life-Decisions-Influence-Their-Wages

let me know if your questions have changed after reading this..

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[skeeter]

Fantastic JoB. I loved this article.

Of course I have more questions now. But I’ll also share an opinion.

Regarding the “male marriage wage premium” the question is whether marriage is causing productivity or if more productive people are marrying.

In my observations it is more the latter – more productive people marry. As I think about my married male friends and unmarried male friends – I’m seeing that the more career-focused guys got married and the less career-focused guys were less likely to get married. So marriage didn’t cause greater productivity. Instead, the more productive guys were more likely to marry.

Of course, once married, the guys had an advantage over the unmarried guys. My guess is wives do far more than 50% of the household duties (cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc.) So the married guys, more productive to begin with, now have an additional advantage of being able to focus more on careers while wives take on more of the household duties.

What’s been your observation JoB? I’m curious to get your thoughts.

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[JoB]

the old chicken and egg question…

are more productive guys simply smart enough to create a homelife that allows them to concentrate on their worklife?

or are guys more productive simply because they don’t have to think substantially about anything but work

or…

is the whole married guys are more productive thing a myth predicated the notion that married guys are more productive and therefore they get preference in projects and promotions?

ah.. what a tangled web we weave when looking at cause and effect.

i do think that there is some competitive advantage to having someone else arrange your home life and make sure your laundry is done..

google has tried to fix that for the young engineers at their Mountain View campus by feeding them 3 meals and doing their laundry

;-)

personally i would love to have a wife…

not sure how i would go about getting one and don’t see how they would fit into our household structure… but … i can see where it would provide me with a competitive advantage :)

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