RE: Women earn less than Men
May 27, 2016 at 4:53 am
(This post was last modified: May 27, 2016 at 4:55 am by Redbeard The Pink.)
(May 26, 2016 at 2:45 pm)Irrational Wrote:(May 26, 2016 at 8:13 am)Redbeard The Pink Wrote: OK...so if there's a wage gap, why aren't we seeing it in people's actual rates of pay? Why do we always have to do all this voodoo with the earnings gap to make the wage gap manifest? Why don't we simply look at the wages people are actually paid to find the disparity?
While I'm asking interesting questions, did you know that if you look at only the group of women who make identical business and lifestyle choices to the men in their field, they make the same money? Consistently. All women have to do if they want to make what men make is forsake childbearing, take a high-stakes job, then stress about it so much that it shortens their lives by several years.
Sooo...there's an unconscious bias that causes men to unconsciously pay women the same rates and then find covert ways to sneak money away from them so they'll earn less? How does an entire half of the population (or anyone, for that matter) unconsciously do something that pointed and insidious, and why has nobody figured out that they're doing it or how? You probably would have actually been better off trying to defend a conspiracy theory.
Also, that's a bit of an abuse of Occam's Razor. The Razor is not for parsing out which claim is true or even most likely true. Occam's Razor is actually for deciding which order to investigate answers in. When considering multiple possible solutions/explanations, Occam's Razor demands that we test and rule out simple claims before moving on to more complex ones, and the reason for this is time efficiency. If I am weighing two positions, and one would take an hour to test, and the other would only take minutes, It is markedly inefficient to tackle the hour-long test first.
What you CAN'T do with Occam's Razor is claim that the simplest solution is correct just because it's simple, especially in the absence of adequate evidence for that solution. Simplicity is not a measure of truth. Simpler claims are just generally faster and easier to investigate, meaning you can rule out more items in less time.
Something you conveniently ignored, and did not comment on, is the empirical evidence for gender discrimination is real in the workplace. Another thing to point out is that this isn't strictly committed by men. Women are guilty as well. The study I linked to is one example that illustrates this.
I am aware that conscious and unconscious bias exists against female workers in the workplace. What I don't believe is that this bias causes supervisors to actually pay those employees a worse wage than other employees doing the same job, and I don't believe that supervisors are able to get away with blatant wage discrimination on a systemic basis. The reason I don't believe those things is that I have yet to see convincing evidence that they're true.
Quote:As for your questions, there is a consistent unexplained gender pay gap,
Earnings gap.
Quote: that has been measured in hourly rates, weekly rates, yearly, etc,
Hourly earnings, weekly earnings, yearly, earnings,
You are still talking about an earnings gap and pretending it is a wage gap.
Quote: Gender discrimination is one factor that has been considered to at least partly contribute to that portion of the gap. Studies show subconscious discrimination is real, whether gender or race-based or sexuality-based. You may not like it, but that's the evidence.
I'm aware that unconscious bias is a real thing. I just don't think it causes or allows broad, systemic ignorance of our country's laws against wage discrimination. Isolated cases, perhaps, but not enough to cause a disparity the size of the earnings gap, or to significantly affect it.
Quote:No voodoo or conspiracy theory, this is statistics, psychology, controlled experiments, etc.
You can use psychology to demonstrate that unconscious bias exists, and you can use statistics to demonstrate the earnings gap, but you have yet to demonstrate a wage gap caused by discrimination. At best, experts speculate that it might be a contributor to the unexplained portion of the earnings gap, but only to the 6% or so that's left after you adjust for everything else. According to the European Commission, direct discrimination only accounts for a very small portion of the differences in pay between men and women. The rest is determined by college major, career choices, whether they had children, etc.
Wage discrimination is illegal, and there is a system in place for prosecuting it. If a woman believes she has a case for wage discrimination, she should go to the authorities and report it like any other crime. Aside from that, I really don't know what you expect to be done about the discrimination that still takes place. Making it illegal and punishing people who do it is about the best solution I can come up with, but we already do both of those things.
Verbatim from the mouth of Jesus (retranslated from a retranslation of a copy of a copy):
"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you too will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. How can you see your brother's head up his ass when your own vision is darkened by your head being even further up your ass? How can you say to your brother, 'Get your head out of your ass,' when all the time your head is up your own ass? You hypocrite! First take your head out of your own ass, and then you will see clearly who has his head up his ass and who doesn't." Matthew 7:1-5 (also Luke 6: 41-42)
Also, I has a website: www.RedbeardThePink.com
"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you too will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. How can you see your brother's head up his ass when your own vision is darkened by your head being even further up your ass? How can you say to your brother, 'Get your head out of your ass,' when all the time your head is up your own ass? You hypocrite! First take your head out of your own ass, and then you will see clearly who has his head up his ass and who doesn't." Matthew 7:1-5 (also Luke 6: 41-42)
Also, I has a website: www.RedbeardThePink.com