Religion is a Mental Illness

The biggest study ever on the pay gap, I think it was done by Harvard, basically looked at Uber drivers in America. The big reason it's the biggest is because they had so much data. Uber obviously has so much data, and men and women both drive Ubers in America.

They looked at the paying and they were like, "well, women are getting paid less at Uber. How does that make sense? Because it's obviously all automated." What a great way of studying the male and female behavior to work out what is in this gap.

And there's three things in the gap.

The first was men drove at different times at night. Some men would do the graveyard shifts, early mornings where you get paid more. They would want to do that. Women less so.

Second was that men were more likely to stick with the platform for longer, so they had more experiences, and they benefit from that experience. Makes sense of any job.

And the third reason, which is 50% of the gap, was that men just drive faster.

Just drive a little faster, guys, then you'll close that gap.

That's so funny.

That shows that it wasn't discrimination that's causing the pay gap in Uber. It was just...

Heavy right foot.

Different types of behavior. And I guess we can have a discussion of what shapes that behavior, but we need to start that conversation with it's not discrimination, at least in Uber, it's different types of behavior.

For many, ground zero in gender equality advocacy is the #genderpaygap.

It’s perhaps the king of all tropes, from which discussion always seems to start, and inevitably returns too.

‘Yeah well, women are still paid less than men!’ You will hear, like some kind of broken record.

And this is true, they are – the average salary for women, is lower than the average salary for men.

But hold off the pitch forks, flaming torches, and cries of misogyny for a moment, as the picture changes if we ask, ‘are women paid less than men, for the same work?’

And to that, the answer is no.

For whilst it’s true that ‘all women’ are paid 16% less than ‘all men’, the gap quickly dissolves and almost disappears completely (to just 0.5%), when comparing women with men working the same job level, with the same function, and at the same company.

So, the better question is to surely ask ‘why are women not working in these higher paid jobs’?

Or even, ‘do such jobs pay less, because they employ mostly women?’

Or perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way round...

Maybe we should ask –

‘Do men choose more highly paid jobs, because society tells them to?’

Might society’s warped value system of men being ‘the breadwinner’ be what's really causing the gap?

What do you think?

The Tin Men: But this is a great example of how giving equal rights to men, benefits women.

The "pay gap" is not experienced by women versus men, it's mothers versus fathers. Mothers are not paid the same as fathers, because mothers are at home, and fathers are at work. And fathers often don't want to be at work, they want to be at home, and mothers often want to be at work.

So the graph is insane. It's salary over time. And it's men and women coming up, as the same, and suddenly the mum comes down, the father keeps going, and it's because they've had a child. And when you've had a child, the father takes two weeks off, but goes back to work; keeps getting promoted, keeps earning more money, and the mother stops working, and may never return to work. And if she does, it's often part time, and she's not paid the same as a father.

And she shouldn't be, because she's working part time, and he's gone back to work. So the best way of closing the pay gap, is giving equal parental leave to fathers.

Host: Just if it was me, I would just say, give it to the family, let them split it however they like.

The Tin Men: Well, yeah, but I also... it's such a difficult conversation, because I'm constantly making asterisks here and there. I agree. There should be a shared amount of time, and then it's "use it or lose it." So he has to use it.

But I also want to add another asterisk, and be like: childbirth is a traumatic experience for women, and she needs to have additional medical leave to recover from that. So both parents get six months, she gets and additional one month, or whatever it should be, seven months for her, six months to him, non-transferable, "use it or lose it."

Is the Difference in Work Hours the Real Reason for the Gender Wage Gap? [Interactive Infographic]

Every year, the Department of Labor issues a report on the pay gap between women and men.

Medium

Every year, the Department of Labor issues a report on the pay gap between women and men.

Women earn a median of $30,000[1] per year, while men earn $40,000 per year. In other words, working women earn 75% of what men earn.

But this gap doesn’t take into account the fact that on average, men work more hours than women. According to U.S. census data, men spend an average of 41.0 hours per week at their jobs, while women work an average of 36.3 hours per week.

Many argue that gender discrimination explains a large part of the difference in earnings. Others argue that parenthood and gender roles usually affect women’s earnings more than men.

To better understand the pay gap, we classified the respondents according to their marital and parenthood status2. The gap is dramatically higher between married couples versus singles without children. For married parents, the gap is even greater.

But we also found that married fathers work even more than other men, while married mothers work less than married women without kids.

We analyzed the pay gap across hundreds of U.S. occupations. According to our research, in most occupations, the main source of the pay gap lies in the difference between the number of hours spent at work by women and men, and marital status and parenthood explain almost all this difference in working times.

The different behavior of women and men3 has an impact on the gender wage gap. As we will see below, the decision of who does most of the work outside versus who stays at home influences the pay gap in two ways: it modifies the nominal income, but it also influences how much women and men earn per each hour worked4.

Let’s take a look at the most common occupation in the US: Managers. This occupation is representative of the overall trend we see in the United States.

Single male managers without kids earn a median of $60,000 per year, while single female managers without kids earn $58,000 per year. On average, single male managers work 43.7 hours per week, while single female managers work 42.3 hours per week.

This means that men earn 3.4% more but work 3.5% more hours per week.

But when we look at the pay gap between married couples, we see a different picture. Both female and male married managers do have a higher salary. But men earn much more than women.

Male married managers without kids earn a median of $90,000, while female married managers without kids earn a median of $62,000. A pay gap of 31%. In other words, women earn $0.69 for each dollar earned by their male counterparts.

A large part of this gap is explained by the number of hours spent at work. Men tend to work more after they marry. The average weekly working hours of males increase 4.3%, while women keep working the same quantity of hours per week. This explains a part of the gap increase.

But the time spent at work does not explain all of the gender pay gap. Married men managers without kids also earn more for each hour at work: they earn $38.40 per hour while married women without kids earn only $28.70. That means that for each hour spent at their jobs, male married managers without kids earn about 34% more than women. As we will see in detail below, the different hourly rate is related to job market trends.

We can see the same pattern across occupations like school teachers, secretaries, nurses, customer service representatives, and a lot of other professions: a small pay gap for singles without kids and a larger pay gap for married people.

We have seen that, for the most common occupations, there is almost no absolute pay gap for singles without kids, and this gap could be explained by the difference in time spent at work. But there are some occupations that do show a gap for this group of people.

Notable examples are drivers, retail salespersons, supervisors and janitors. Interestingly, we can see the same general pattern in these occupations: the uncontrolled gap increases dramatically for married couples, even if they do not have kids.

The same general pattern repeats itself in occupations where single women without kids earn more than their male counterparts. Some of them are secretaries, customer service representatives, cooks, stock clerks, office clerks and receptionists.

In all of these occupations, the pay gap in favor of women reverts if they marry: married men still earn more than married women.

Now, let’s look closely at the different hourly wages paid to women and men. The data shows that there is a persistent difference in the hourly rate earned by women and men, specially for married women and men. But the data also shows that men work more than women.

After taking a closer look at the data, we found a relationship between the hourly wage and the time spent at work. The average hourly pay increases as the number of hours worked per week increases. This is true for both sexes.

In the following chart, we plotted the hourly pay for women and men. To isolate the effect of marriage and parenthood, we took into account only singles without kids.

In the next chart, we can see the average number of hours worked for each group:

For the relevant range of hours worked per week, the average hourly pay increases as the time spent at work increases.

Because men tend to work more hours than women, especially if they are married, and even more if they are married parents, this could explain a large portion of the pay gap.

Also, the previous chart shows that on average, single women without kids are getting paid more than men for every hour spent at work. This could mean that if women worked the same amount of hours as men do, and other conditions remained the same, there would be no pay gap for this group 5.

It is important to note that age and job experience are also relevant factors in the gender gap debate. To isolate the possible effects that age and job experience may have in the pay gap for each of the different groups, we plotted the weighted average of working hours per age for single women and men without kids.

For singles without kids, there is a very small gap at every age. But for married couples, there is a significant gap in working hours at every age.

If we take into account how the hourly wage varies as men and women get older, the hourly wage of men increases more than the hourly wage of women. The same pattern can be seen in all three groups.

The charts above demonstrate that job experience is correlated with the time spent at work through the years. As years pass, men accumulate more practice and training than women. The job market pays more if the worker has more experience. In other words, the gap widens as men acquire more experience than women.

In this article, we found that one of the main sources of the gender pay gap is the fact that, on average, women and men devote a different number of hours to their jobs, specially after marriage and parenthood.

The literature on gender pay gap is very extensive. Different papers focus on diverse causes to explain it. Two of the most mentioned reasons are gender discrimination and motherhood and gender roles.

Gender discrimination against women occurs if a woman is paid less than a man for doing the same job.

If we consider that the quantity of hours devoted to a job determines whether we consider a job to be the same as another, the data doesn’t support the idea of gender discrimination at the aggregate level.

The hourly pay rate for married women is lower than for married men on average, but a probable explanation is because the job market pays less per hour if the number of hours worked decreases, and married women tend to work less. The same pattern can be seen in almost every occupation.

Also, men tend to devote more time to work, thus acquire more experience as years pass by, and the job market pays more if the worker has more experience.

This doesn’t mean that gender discrimination doesn’t exist. Our analysis just shows that, at the aggregate level, most of the gap is not explained by gender discrimination.

Regarding the second aspect of the pay gap, societal ideas of gender roles influence the behavior of women and men. Also, biological factors related to parenthood do play a role in the creation of differences in preferences. Namely, women get pregnant and women breastfeed. These differences between sexes could be a plausible explanation of why women tend to spend more time at home versus their couples, especially after marriage and parenthood6.

To conclude and to recap, we can say that, according to our analysis, job market forces and gender preferences in relation to marital status and parenthood could explain almost all of the pay gap. Most of the gap is not the result of gender discrimination.

[ See here. ]

The ‘Intersectionality’ Canard | National Review

Many studies that purport to find giant residual effects of race or sex are flawed from the outset.

National Review

Many studies that purport to find giant residual effects of race or sex are flawed from the outset.

‘Intersectionality” is just a badly done “woke” version of regression analysis.

The old feminist idea of intersectionality has been popping up across the mainstream media of late, as the latest round of the national debate over “DEI” (and CRT, ESG, SEL, NU-HR, and the rest of today’s insufferable corporate alphabet soup) rages on. Its resurgence seems like a worthwhile topic, while I am on a 3–4-week run of discussing academic issues for the gentle readers of National Review.

Per Merriam-Webster, which updated its definition of the term November 30, 2023 — the major dictionaries have been doing that kind of thing a lot lately — intersectionality is “the complex, cumulative way in which multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine . . . especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.” The United Nations’ Global Citizenship initiative has, also within the past year or two, adopted this concept as a primary analytical framework, and defines “intersectionality” as “how multiple identities interact to create unique patterns of oppression.”

“In the United States,” author and Global Citizen Sarah El Gharib declaims, “Women earn 83 cents for every dollar a man earns.” But, the situation is even worse for black women, who pull in “a mere 64 cents for every dollar a white man earns.” The reason for all of this? Obviously, oppression: The analysis almost invariably stops there.

The problem with all of this, which needs to be discussed if radical-feminist analysis — intersectionality as a concept was first outlined by UCLA’s Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s, and traces its roots back to “a Black lesbian social justice collective formed in Boston in 1974” — is now prevalent in the United Nations and around the Fortune 500, is fairly basic. The idea that multiple independent variables can influence a dependent variable like income is not exactly a new one. And, the actual range of potential “IVs” that can do so extends well beyond race and sex to include: age, the regions where people and groups live, test and IQ scores, patterns of study time, crime rates, desire to work at all (in the context of men vs. women), and so on down the line.

Simply put, racism or sexism can only be said to exist where we find that pretty much identical people, who differ only in terms of the characteristic of race or sex, are still being treated differently — after all of the other factors which might explain performance differences between them have been accounted for. This sort of real bigotry is, today, fairly rare. Many “intersectional” studies that purport to find giant residual effects of race or sex on some specific thing — individuals’ chances of going to prison, let’s say — literally just consist of unadjusted comparisons between citizens in two or more different groups.

This, however, is not how serious people conduct this sort of analysis. The pay gap between men and women, in fact, provides one of the best examples of an apparently giant gulf which vanishes almost as soon as anything but sex is competently adjusted for. As it turns out, one major reason that women make so little money relative to men — less than 70 cents per dollar, in some analyses — is that 39 percent of women “prefer a home-maker role” and about one-third are housewives . . . who often earn almost no money, but have access to all of the resources of what is usually a middle-class household.

Even if we focus only on working men and working women, it remains the case that males and females prefer to work different jobs, men work slightly longer hours, men took virtually no time off from work for pregnancy and child care until quite recently, and so forth. When the quantitative team at the PayScale business website took all of this into account and ran some models, they found that any actual gap in same-job wages which could be attributed to sexism would be on the order of –(1 percent). At some level, this is not even surprising: American corporate business is ruthless, and any trading floor or shark-tank start-up that could actually save 17–31 percent on labor costs by hiring only women would do so immediately.

Pay gaps between white and black guys, for that matter, do not survive serious analysis. As I have noted elsewhere, the labor economist June O’Neill attempted, back in the 1990s, to distinguish the impact of racism from that of plain human capital on the B/W wage gap. What she found was stunning, almost remarkable. An initial gap of 15–18 percent, which has been attributed to “racism” by almost everyone to write about it during the modern era, in fact shrunk to about 1 percent when adjustments were made for basic variables like the mean age of each racial population, region of residence, and IQ- or aptitude-test scores.

O’Neill and a co-author found almost exactly the same pattern to still hold more than a dozen years later, in 2005. As both she and I have pointed out, groups that are different as re very major traits such as race and religion also invariably vary in terms of other characteristics — and any effects of racism simply cannot be parsed out without adjusting for all of these important differences. Simply put, there is no reason to expect a 27-year-old black man living in Mississippi to earn anything like as much as a 58-year-old white dude with a residence in mid-town Manhattan.

What is true in the critical context of money is true almost everywhere else. For years, the “Black Lives Matter” movement argued that young African Americans are being “murdered” or “genocided” by police officers, because members of this group are more likely to be shot by law enforcement than members of the general public. Again, however, there is an elephant in the room. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has pointed out for decades now, the crime rate for black Americans — certainly before we adjust for age, or sex ratios, or living in mile-spire cities instead of Green Acres — is about two to 2.5 times that for whites. As an obvious result, we tend to encounter on-duty cops about that much more often.

Just adjusting for this one variable entirely removes the gap in rates-of-shooting. In the fairly representative year of 2015, which I select for analysis in my brilliant and best-selling book Taboo, there were 999 fatal police shootings nationwide — out of tens of millions of police/citizen encounters — of which 250 (25.1 percent) involved African Americans. That figure, which is 1.92 times the nation’s black population percentage, is almost exactly what any reasonably intelligent person would expect to see after taking a single glance at the crime statistics — if anything, a bit on the low side.

Entertainingly, the Reilly Rule about the impacts of the real, multi-variate version of “intersectionality” on day-to-day life applies even in the context of “white privilege.” As it happens, there exist several scales that attempt to measure personal privilege — such as this popular but quite empirical example, which several hundred thousand people have taken (a little bird tells me the average score is 43). When I have administered the 100-item ordinal survey, which includes Yes/No questions ranging from “I have never gone to bed hungry” to “I went to private school,” to sizable groups as a learning exercise, I do find that being white does have a small effect on ease-of-life: about two–three points, with all else adjusted for.

However, almost everything else has a bigger one. Other more influential variables recorded by myself and others to work with the test include female sex (yes, sure) — but also where people live (the suburbs as vs. the “hood or the “holler,” the North vs. the South), being gay rather than straight, and most notably plain social class. The largest chunk of “privilege” appears to be pure socio-economic status: crudely put, how much money a test taker and his or her family happen to make in a year. Across the aforementioned 100 questions, poor Appalachian or immigrant respondents often post “have not experienced” scores on the order of 17, while well-off ones “achieve” 69s and 73s.

At some level, none of this is particularly surprising, to the average human being with eyes. Of course, having wealthy parents, or not committing crimes, or not living on an isolated farm, or being a 6’4” blonde or black jock might sometimes help you along in life. However, this empirical point is a useful rebuttal to the much simpler standard idea of intersectionality — that what matters is race, or sex alone, or perhaps something like “being non-binary.”

In reality, conservatives don’t make fun of that simplistic concept because we are too unsophisticated to understand it, some pack of rubes who believe that only hard work and lovin’ America predict life outcomes. Instead, we do so because we recognize that many, many factors predict those outcomes. And, in the end, if dozens or hundreds of things predict where each singular human being will end up in life, we should turn our focus back to that smallest and most vulnerable of minorities: the individual.

Thread by @wil_da_beast630 on Thread Reader App

@wil_da_beast630: I'll do a quick response here, since this is my article. Obviously, no one argues that "racism does not exist." The point

threadreaderapp.com

I'll do a quick response here, since this is my article.

Obviously, no one argues that "racism does not exist." The point is that you do not DETERMINE the existence of racism simply by pointing out "performance gaps" re something like income or police encounters - which is literally the level of a lot of 'woke' research....or by adjusting for sex as well as race (whee!).

As J. O'Neill pointed out 20+ years ago, most such gaps close or vanish after basic adjustments for things like age, region, any aptitude test score, etc.

(2) At some very basic level, it makes no sense to argue that, if a 27-year old Black Mississippian with a community college degree makes less money than a 58-year old white Bostonian who went to BU, the reason is "racism."

These are the sort of gaps political scientists often look at between large groups. More whites DO live in the US North (the boats landed further South). That IS the gap in at least modal average/most common ages between Blacks and whites...

The most common age among whites in U.S. is 58 – more than double that of racial and ethnic minorities

The most common age was 11 for Hispanics, 27 for blacks and 29 for Asians as of last July. Multiracial Americans were by far the youngest ra

Pew Research Center

(3) A common response from smart left-slanting stats folX, including Kareem, is that these other variables (age?!) could themselves just be measures of racism.

But, especially given that we can easily test for multi-collinearity and covariance, there is almost never any evidence presented of this. Aptitude test scores, for example, are higher for white kids from families making $40,000 per year than for Black kids from families making $200K per year.......and don't vary at all with reported racism. The obvious actual predictor here (attached) is study time.

The core point of my article () is quite simple - the "intersectional" idea that TWO or even THREE variables can affect a dependent variable is not very novel or original.

Of course both sex and race can influence your life outcomes - but so can social class (!!!), IQ, prey drive, attractiveness and fitness, age, level of education, being gay or lesbian, being from the country, hailing from the South, being white in the academic job market, just etc. Figuring all this out is the basic idea of multi-variate analysis.

We have to take some basic precautions as re how we model these things, but a researcher who finds that Black women earn 'just' 73 cents for every dollar white men do has not in fact "gotten to the bottom of the matter."

Unsurprisingly, I see a lot of conversation about the infamous ‘gender pay gap’.

A lot of opinions, and strongly held believes, and plenty of information that is not accurate, or at least… not anymore.

For the nature and shape of the pay gap has changed. And so out of the outrage, garbled conjecture, and political agendas; must come a new conversation that once again asks, ‘why are women paid less?’

Because the truth is, it’s not ‘women’ who are getting paid less, but rather ‘women with children’.

Mothers who are out of work, either full or part time, whose lower income drags the average down - they are a large piece of the conversation, too often missing.

No. Women are not paid less than men, and such slogans belong in the museum, not upon the placards of today.

Now it’s time to talk about parenthood.

To honestly discuss why mothers are paid less than fathers, and ask if this is a result of societal expectations… or women’s own free choices?

Do women want to be part time parents?

Do men? Who wants to work full time at a job they don’t even like anyway?

Do you?

We rightly talk about the price of motherhood on women; but what is the price of barely seeing your child at all?

What is the price of the late nights at work, or early morning shifts; or the second job, to make ends meet?

Also if mothers are to get equal pay, are they willing to share their parental leave with fathers in order to get it?

These are better questions.

And one’s I don’t see asked.

Instead I find the pay gap conversation to be a broken record; that redirects energy from logic and reason, into outrage and anger instead.

Yet another stick to hit ‘men’ with, another patriarchal poster child, and sermon preached from the pulpit.

It is a gap that is never closed, because it is never truly discussed.

So tell me, what’s in the gap?

Abstract Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

Abstract Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.