RE: Milo Yiannopoulos; the man twitter banned got a book deal. Currently #2 on Amazon.
January 7, 2017 at 3:05 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2017 at 3:08 pm by Aristocatt.)
(January 7, 2017 at 2:44 pm)CanOfMountainDew Wrote: It depends what you mean when you say 'wage gap' as to whether it's been proven false or not.
If you mean to say that women are paid less than men by virtue of sexism, that's literally non falsifiable. It's non falsifiable because sexism is a state of mind, and reading minds is impossible. There are instances in which a man and a woman, working the same position, are not paid the same salary. The person employing them would tell you the one making more is more efficient - or give off a myriad of other reasons as to why the higher-paid one is justified in receiving more. They'll tell you everything other than that it's because they're a sexist, and maybe they'd be lying in doing so. One can't know. However, just because we don't conclusively know, we don't get to just assert any explanation we want - that would be a 'god of the gaps fallacy.'
If you mean to say that if you add up all the money women make into a pile, and add up all the money men make into a pile, that the mens pile will be larger; yes, that is true, and nobody objects that this is true. This truism isn't synonymous with, "men make more money than women for the same work because of sexism", though.
This is a pretty interesting perspective. I'm not sure I agree with the statement that it's non-falsifiable. At least not in the same sense that god is non-falsifiable. Behavior and states of mind are always being correlated to one another in order to diagnose patients, e.g. psychopathy. How effective that is, might be questionable, but I don't know enough to comment on that either way.
In response to the god of the gaps fallacy part of the first paragraph, I think that is fair.
I also agree with the last paragraph as well. But I think when people talk about the wage gap, that is not what they are talking about.
As far as I can tell, when people talk about the wage gap, their are two issues that they are trying to address. The first issue and the more controversial issue, is to address if men are paid more than women for equal work solely because they are men. The second issue, as I understand it, is addressing why men make more money on the whole, and if these reasons can be defined as a difference in preferences between men and women, or as something else.
E.g. Did SAT format potentially hold women back from applying to STEM programs.
