im not trolling you i promise

weve had multipage threads before concerning the merits of paying burger flippers more for no real reason

why is paying women more for certain jobs out of the question?

are manly jobs deserving of more money just because women dont find them interesting / fulfilling ?

9/30/2014 2:48:02 PM

Quote :

"I'm not confident that paid leave for men and women has any impact on the "wage gap problem" illustrating the non-issue nature of the "problem" you're trying to solve."

i don't know if it does, GrumpyGOP and others made that claim that time off caused it, paid leave is the solution to that

[Edited on September 30, 2014 at 2:50 PM. Reason : it's needed regardless though]

9/30/2014 2:49:52 PM

Quote :

"that's why some systems involve both a minimum (that is sometimes even subsidized if you earn below a certain amount) and also a maximum benefit amount so that it's not too regressive."

Then don't you see the problem for your argument, given this fix? I'm not suggesting a specific fix. I'm saying that all fixes have problems. As we cap the high earning portion, this screws up the following things:

- Whatever gender skewing effect of parenthood still exists for the high earners
- You've made high earners more attractive to employers over low earners, which will put pressure on wage divergence
- Hiring discrimination could get even worse, particularly for low-wage workers
- The policy for low-wage earners even puts pressure on overall wage inequality divergence

It's not like the top stratum is irrelevant to feminism. A large amount of rhetoric is devoted to business leaders, which are only a handful of people out of millions within a large corporation. Male business leaders will continue to minimize the time taken off for children.

And the minimum benefit is a gigantic problem. If a woman takes in more income due to having a child than she would without the child, that exasperates the divergence of fertility rates (higher for low-income people, lower for high-income). Inheritance will continue to become a larger fraction of total capital given the indisputable global trends which lead to a higher capital-to-income ratio. Are you okay with returning to a landed elite? If this wasn't bad enough, it's more incentive to avoid hiring low-wage workers overall, increasing unemployment and worsening their plight.

What about single mothers? Since the corresponding fathers won't be eligible (because they're not contributing their time to the child), this makes low-wage men more attractive to hire. Particularly single men. Again, this makes the motherhood penalty worse - the problem you were seeking to solve.

What about the middle class? If men don't take the leave, it's still an incentive to not hire women. Even if the disparity lessens (as you hope), the total quantity of the subsidy is greater in your plan. So you might narrow the disparity and still reduce the professional options of women.

What about "complicated" have I failed to articulate? You can wave away the complexity. Fine. Now it's just counterproductive.

9/30/2014 3:17:58 PM

you provide a quota only available to men, this will end the gender disparity

[Edited on September 30, 2014 at 3:22 PM. Reason : another thing that is done]

9/30/2014 3:22:04 PM

y0willy0

Quote :

"im not trolling you i promise weve had multipage threads before concerning the merits of paying burger flippers more for no real reason why is paying women more for certain jobs out of the question? are manly jobs deserving of more money just because women dont find them interesting / fulfilling ?"

Paying women more than men for no reason other than the fact that they have vaginas would be bigoted and sexist. I can't believe I had to spell that out. Jobs that men gravitate toward aren't "manly." They are generally more demanding and dangerous. And I'm not certain that "gravitate toward" is the whole story. Women "gravitate away" from them as much as men "gravitate toward."

dtownral

Quote :

"this will end the gender disparity"

Something no one has yet responded to is why is this 'disparity' something we need to end? Why are we looking at a single variable of the equation and ignoring the rest? Women earn less in total, but work less, die on the job less, and have more spending power. Why in the hell do we need to "improve their situation?" Are they going to give up the spending power, give up the working more part time and less overtime, give up the dying far less on the job?

Something tells me no. As hard as feminist talk has been about gender equality and eliminating gender roles for the last 40 years, I haven't seen them give an inch on any of these issues. It's just about pushing the one flawed talking point and ignoring the rest of the context.

9/30/2014 10:59:21 PM

If you overlay years of experience vs pay scatterplots for men and women, they should be the same.

10/1/2014 1:02:54 AM

For the same job and if they average the same number of hours worked and controlling for all other variables, sure.

If you can actually isolate it down so that the only difference is gender then I would agree with you, but just plotting years of experience, pay, and gender... no.

10/1/2014 2:26:38 AM

Quote :

"why is paying women more for certain jobs out of the question?"

Because it's basing pay on gender rather than work, at least how you've worded it here.

Quote :

"are manly jobs deserving of more money just because women dont find them interesting / fulfilling ?"

Of course not. But virtually all of the more dangerous jobs fall into the "manly" category. And there is naturally a tradeoff between the different benefits that a job offers. Preschool teachers work on relatively few days and they get the afternoon off. That, rather than high pay, is the benefit to being a preschool teacher. If there was a job where I only had to work a few hours in the morning on half the days out of the year and I got paid $150k a year, everybody in America would want that job.

Being CEO of General Electric, I'm guessing, requires you to be on call pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It requires a high level of dedication and the sacrifice of most family and leisure time. To compensate for that, they have to offer a giant pile of money, or nobody would want the job.

10/1/2014 4:46:22 AM

Quote :

"Being CEO of General Electric, I'm guessing, requires you to be on call pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It requires a high level of dedication and the sacrifice of most family and leisure time. To compensate for that, they have to offer a giant pile of money, or nobody would want the job."

There is an issue that you neglected - that only one member of a household can maintain such a job. You can't have a CEO married to a CEO. They would never see each other. Children would be hopeless. The only option would be to hire someone to raise their children for them.

This is why some people have argued outlawing (I mean this in the strongest form possible) working over a certain number of hours per week. Without this, one gender will sacrifice their professional development in order to advance the other gender. Since the top brass are so highly compensated, it makes more sense to support one spouse's career 100% and the other one's 0%. That's because the graph of compensation relative to effort is concave upward.

So as a policy solution, we would essentially have to demand that all business leaders are also family people. Otherwise, family people will not be business people. This isn't a hard concept to grasp. As long as a family involves more than one adult, gender inequality is a consequence of this.

But some people argue for programs without accepting the severity of the policies necessary to truly accomplish gender equality. Such self-delusion and attempts for an "easy" solution will result in bad policy and halfway measures which will likely make the problem worse. This is exactly what happened with the "motherhood penalty". Women are discriminated against more heavily in nations that offer more maternity leave benefits. This is obvious to advocates of the policies, but they refuse to acknowledge it.

Quote :

"Something no one has yet responded to is why is this 'disparity' something we need to end?"

Gender inequality isn't an existentialist problem, with the possible exception of developing nations. Africa and the Muslim world threaten their own survival with boneheaded dogma around reproductive culture. The US has limited sects which advocate the same things in a Christian flavor, but they're not large or effective enough to matter much. This is worlds-apart from the bickering over what we should correct for when we calculate the pay gap.

But disparities of other sorts can be "hellfire and brimstone". Much like climate scientists, economists have identified an empirically quantifiable trend of increasing inequality. Similar to global warming water vapor, more inequality sets off a positive feedback which exasperates the problem.

So why is the world still whole? Only because enough time has not passed. The World Wars were the thing that ended the previous social collapse at the turn of the century. Scholarly research determined that inequality was still increasing on the eve of WWI. This was in spite of an egalitarian effect of the American frontier (an effect which no longer exists). Our economy will self-destruct left to it's own devices. There was never any guarantee otherwise, and the experts are now moving to consensus that "yep, we're fucked".

Don't mistake me for making a humanitarian case. Sure, poverty is bad. The bigger problem is that our institutions can't survive. Without solving the problem of infinitely growing disparities, you have no protection of capital. You have no security of your own person. Our species may not survive the next big upheaval at all.

10/1/2014 9:10:55 AM

Quote :

"Women are discriminated against more heavily in nations that offer more maternity leave benefits"

because women are paid less, so they are the ones who take more time. look at countries that offer some time that only the man can take, the disparity is narrow. as long as women make less money, they will take off more time for children. providing time that only the man can take is how you stop longer leave from compounding the problem. it's also created social changes where implemented. your argument that paid leave is regressive ignores that unpaid leave, or not doing anything, is even more regressive (and a lot worse for reproductive rights reasons)

10/1/2014 10:40:49 AM

Do you truly think that women are paid less for the same work? Why would any business ever hire a man again?

10/1/2014 1:00:36 PM

Quote :

"because women are paid less"

what's this based on specifically? is there a significant statistical proof of a pay differential due strictly to sex where all other common factors are equal (hours, experience, training, production, leave/benefits)?

10/1/2014 5:02:17 PM

is it not a fact that women make less money on average? particularly, women who are having children that are the subject of that post? yes. the contributing factors don't matter in regards to the issue discussed in the quoted post post.

as long as that's true, mrfrog is probably right that increasing the amount of maternity leave would exacerbate the issue and increase any wage disparity because if women are the lower-earning partner it makes sense that they would be the one to take off time more often. the point i made was that when paid eave that is only available to men has been implemented, the disparity narrows and the social attitude towards taking time off even changed. i also made a point about the current existing regressive nature of reproduction that already exists without paying for time off.

i think you saw the first 5 words and just assumed i'm making a point that i'm not and ran with it

Quote :

"Do you truly think that women are paid less for the same work?"

who is this post to? if me, see above.

[Edited on October 1, 2014 at 5:40 PM. Reason : .]

10/1/2014 5:39:54 PM

^ Negotiating skill is probably more important than any of those.

10/1/2014 5:40:22 PM

Quote :

"is it not a fact that women make less money on average? "

Yes, but it's as misleading of a factoid as the 77 cents figure. And working your way backwards from it to conclude that "because women earn less, X" is just faulty logic.

10/1/2014 8:45:32 PM

Quote :

"i think you saw the first 5 words and just assumed i'm making a point that i'm not and ran with it"

i simply asked for legitimate evidence to support those very direct first 5 words.
also, "less money on average" is meaningless without an appropriate context, it's just an inciting headline.

10/1/2014 9:01:19 PM

both of you need to go read my comment again

10/1/2014 10:38:19 PM

Quote :

"Since the top brass are so highly compensated, it makes more sense to support one spouse's career 100% and the other one's 0%."

Yes. So? There's no reason the person with 100% has to end up the man. I don't see a law that inherently reduces productivity as a policy solution to anything, let alone gender disparity.

10/2/2014 4:45:50 AM

Fine, I'll ignore the two conclusions you made from the "fact" that women earn less and ask...

Quote :

" the point i made was that when paid eave that is only available to men has been implemented, the disparity narrows and the social attitude towards taking time off even changed."

Where was this ever implemented and in what way did you determine the "social attitude" changed?

Not a single country in this list

Every one but one (thanks Papua New Guinea).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave

has the Paid Maternity Leave column empty.

[Edited on October 2, 2014 at 9:21 AM. Reason : .]

10/2/2014 9:19:25 AM

it is a fact (it's not under debate), and because of that fact it makes sense that increased unpaid leave exacerbates the issue because the lesser funded partner will be the one who takes off more time

off the top of my head, paternity-only leave is utilized in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Quebec and some (many?) other parts of Canada

Regarding social changes:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2179070

Quote :

"I find strong evidence of reduced specialization in exposed households: exposed fathers experience a greater relative increase in non-market work than do exposed mothers. At the same time, exposed fathers reduce their time in paid work while exposed mothers spend considerably more time in paid work and are also more likely to be employed and full-time workers."

Quote :

"Every one but one (thanks Papua New Guinea). has the Paid Maternity Leave column empty."

did you mean to post another link? the paid maternity leave column has many entries . what point are you trying to make, i don't understand this part of your post.


[Edited on October 2, 2014 at 9:53 AM. Reason : .]

10/2/2014 9:43:47 AM

What do you mean by "paternity-only" leave?

All of your examples are shared leave and most have maternity leave on top of that.

My point is I'm unable to find a single location on the planet where paternity leave is available to fathers and maternity leave is not available to mothers. Maybe I'm just misinterpreting what you mean by "paternity-only".

I get it now; you mean when men get paternity leave at all.

[Edited on October 2, 2014 at 9:58 AM. Reason : .]

10/2/2014 9:53:39 AM

some part of the paid leave is only available to the father

i think you need to go back and read my posts again

10/2/2014 9:54:14 AM