Posted on 12/12/2018 12:31:49 PM PST by Para-Ord.45
Not that it matters to the left, but a study from Harvard University titled Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? proves the gender wage gap is indeed a myth because of the obvious reasons: work choices between men and women.
Why do men make more than women? Their choice of jobs and working a lot of overtime.
In order to prove their point, authors Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel looked at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). It is unionized, which means men and women are treated the same and have to follow the same rules and receive the same benefits. So why do the men earn more?
From the study’s abstract (emphasis mine):
Even in a unionized environment where work tasks are similar, hourly wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions, female workers earn $0.89 on the male-worker dollar (weekly earnings). We use confidential administrative data on bus and train operators from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to show that the weekly earnings gap can be explained by the workplace choices that women and men make. Women value time away from work and flexibility more than men, taking more unpaid time off using the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and working fewer overtime hours than men. When overtime hours are scheduled three months in advance, men and women work a similar number of hours; but when those hours are offered at the last minute, men work nearly twice as many. When selecting work schedules, women try to avoid weekend, holiday, and split shifts more than men. To avoid unfavorable work times, women prioritize their schedules over route safety and select routes with a higher probability of accidents. Women are less likely than men to game the scheduling system by trading off work hours at regular wages for overtime hours at premium wages. These results suggest that some policies that increase workplace flexibility, like shift swapping and expanded cover lists, can reduce the gender earnings gap and disproportionately increase the well-being of female workers.
Overtime pays time-and-a-half. The authors found that men train and bus drivers accepted overtime more than their women counterparts by 83%. These males twice as likely took overtime than the females. Men accepted scheduled overtime scheduled three months in advance 7% more than the women.
As women moved up the food chain and had the opportunity to prioritize their schedules, the majority of them “moved away from working weekends, holidays, and split shifts more than men.”
Bolotnyy and Emanuel wrote that the evidence they discovered “so far on the earnings gap in our setting suggests that insufficient flexibility and high female values of time outside the workplace are its root causes.”
John Phelan, an economist at the Center of the American Experiment, provided an excellent analysis of the study. The gender wage gap came to light due to a dumb methodology that ignores basic observations (emphasis mine):
It ignores the fact that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2017, men worked an average of 8.05 hours in an average day compared to 7.24 hours for women.
True, women are more likely to be raising children, taking care of elderly family members, or doing housework, leaving them with fewer hours in the day for paid employment. But this does not alter the essential fact: that people working fewer hours, on average, can be expected to earn lower incomes, on average.
Let me repeat: When you work fewer hours, you will make less than what others make who work more hours.
This led Phelan to conclude that this “‘gender wage gap’ is as real as unicorns and has been killed more times than Michael Myers.”
A Goebbelsian myth as widespread as climate change.
Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph, if they wanted to study "work," they certainly picked the wrong place.
Duh...
Look, just because I want to flip burgers for the rest of my life, it’s not fair that Bill Gates has more money than me; I’m entitled to as much as he has. /s
That $.89/$1.00 female/male ratio looks like gross pay. For equal work, under equal conditions (same number of hours, same ratio of overtime/regular hours), the pay is identical.
At least, this is what the data shows for the Boston MBTA.
It makes me wonder and ask, “How many of these gender earnings studies confuse total annual take for pay rates?”
The “wage gap” myth has been perpetuated almost entirely by infantile people who have never met the demands of a private-sector managerial job.
> In order to prove their point, authors Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel looked at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) <
I’m guessing that these authors will soon be out of work. Or they could print a slobbering retraction. They could say that they forgot to “normalize” the data.
They don’t care about facts. At the end of the day they want to have the same W2 as a man who did not demand all that flexibility.
And, the way things are headed, they’ll eventually get it.
It’s seen as the man’s job to go out and earn a living to support his family.
The man wants to support his family, and willingly goes out to work. It’s part of being a man.
“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph, if they wanted to study “work,” they certainly picked the wrong place.”
Made me LMAO since it played out in my mind with a great Irish brogue...
If you could get the same work done for less money, you would do it. If women were really paid less for the same work, companies would only hire women.
“Let me repeat: When you work fewer hours, you will make less than what others make who work more hours.”
Put another way:
When people compare salaries based on equal “years of experience”, they’re _not_ comparing HOURS of experience. Someone who works a 2500 hour year will have 25% more experience than someone working a “normal” 2000 hour year ... and soon their pay will reflect that.
Have the paternalistic authors of the study been terminated yet?
You have a point. If you're too lazy to steal your partner's operating system, drop out of college to market it, and then use your dominance of the operating system market to develop knockoff products while driving your competitors out of business, then you deserve what you get.
And this gets to the heart of the whole “inequality is unfair” notion:
Someone working 60-80 hour weeks at skilled & insightful & high-demand work WILL earn significantly more than someone just clocking in a scant 40 hours at a job anyone can do ... and when their kids reflect their parents’ behavior, onward for generations, there WILL be a _substantial_ inequality of wealth.
That's exactly what I was going for!
Until government steps in and becomes “the great equalizer”.
Amazing that "obvious" commonsense comes from Harvard of all places. This have been a known fact for years. Yes, there was a time that a female executive salary was not equal to a male salary. That is no longer the case. Hourly wages vary, because women just don't work the same hours as men while taking care of their fatherless children. Exceptions excluded.
Butthurt for the Pink Pussy Hat radicals. They will go ballistic on this.
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