The gender pay gap

[pietillidie]

^It looks like a parody where they cut from a comedy studio to a real half of the interview!

Did I hear the host call them both ladies at the beginning? I was trying to work out if he was transgender after that! Perhaps I heard wrong.

Any danger of you ever summarising the key points of anything? It's even worse when it's a video with no references. It was just claim and counter-claim, so you have to both watch it, and then pause it to check the facts while remembering a claim uttered at the speed of light

[Wokko]

He's gay, not transgender. May have been a slip of the tongue. He's come pretty well prepared and appears to have sourced his information from studies while his opponent simply says "That's not true". At one point the host (I wouldn't say moderator because she's clearly biased) accuses him of using "male economists" as a source and he replies that he's sourced his information from Christina Hoff Somers (unsure of spelling, I only watched the video once and haven't followed up), apparently a feminist academic who also refutes the pay gap. The host replies "Good for her" and brushes it aside.

As far as I know Thomas Sowell debunked the pay gap back in the 70s, it's a myth that just wont die because too many professional victims rely on it. He also brings up the total flip where up to the age of 35 women now earn more, more go to university, more graduate with better marks and in some industries are employed at up to a 2:1 ratio.

Like you said, hard to confirm arguments in anything like this, but HIS points at least seem to reference something.

[pietillidie]

^You mentioned the interview was amazing, so when I heard (or thought I heard) both guests introduced as ladies, I thought you meant the fact a trans woman (I think that's the correct term) was arguing against the feminist position made the whole thing amazing in the sense of bamboozling!

Okay, fair enough; I haven't looked into the research for a long time.

[What'sinaname]

Very good article of gender pay gap in sport

https://www.news.com.au/sport/football/the-fifa-world-cup-pay-gap-exists-because-of-one-simple-factor/news-story/2987266b42485d1b00909e23336cccd0

[stui magpie]

^

There's all sorts of ideological arguments about the Gender Pay gap that simply don't stand up to proper scrutiny.

Sport is the most clear cut. Players in the WNBA get a fraction of what the NBA players get, and it's all about the revenue that the competition generates. The WNBA is a stand alone competition, so they don't get to coat tail on the NBA players. Maybe, in time, the AFLW players can reach the point where they play full seasons and the players can be fully professional and paid accordingly, but at the moment if they were a stand alone comp relying on their own revenue from gate receipts, memberships and media rights, they'd be bankrupt.

Equal pay for the same work is an ideological catch phrase that just isn't realistic.

[What'sinaname]

It's based on getting paid what you are worth, which doesn't discriminate between sex, colour or anything else. If two people are worth the same, they should get paid the same. Worth more - get paid more.

Wanna get paid more - be worth more.

[pietillidie]

^Don't be distracted by sport, which is not where the serious discussion resides, much like the transgender issue where sport is used to dismiss the genuine suffering of the very real, very grounded realities of gender dysphoria.

If you keep falling prey to those sleights of hand, and keep reacting to dumb extremists overstating the case, you'll miss the serious issues, fail to contribute to the discussion, and fail to benefit fully from good change. Remember, the same people using the same distraction tactics have a track record of being wrong about almost everything, and egregiously so, because they're merely reacting to social talk rather than trying to understand the full scope of the problem and implement win-win solutions.

I keep referring back to the same examples to remind people of just how costly and destructive seemingly random internet 'opinion' can be in reality: global warming denial, Iraq cheerleading and Brexit fantasy are three very telling case studies of such expensive nonsense.

The serious discussion on gender pay gap centres on corporate data clearly showing that women have routinely been paid less for the very same jobs even when producing the very same value and having the same abilities, despite their careers also taking a massive hit from childbirth and childcare responsibilities.

Sport is different because it's essentially entertainment, and entertainment is box-office dependent, much like acting. The argument with sport is more about biases unnaturally limiting that box office potential and investment in future value, and general social good. (It's also about financial fair play, competition quality, and the whitewashing of tyrannical regimes, but those are different issues).

In cases such as women's AFL, which has a very long way to go to have box-office potential, the argument is first more like the living wage argument or the bettering of rookie contracts in men's AFL, and second ensuring no unnatural barriers are limiting the sport, such as not enough being done at grass roots level to encourage and grow participation.

Growth requires investment and incentive, too, so it's misleading to make it all about present valuation, a mistake that no accountant or investor would ever make.

However you dice it, there is genuine, clear, sub-economic misvaluation happening through gender and other biases. Ethnicity, ageism and social class will be next in line for debiasing, while disability provisions are advancing at a pace. A lot of the legislation is about transparency first and foremost, which does most of the heavy lifting by exposing irrational bias.

In some cases, the bias is purely a stubborn refusal to adapt work to allow for people to be just as productive while catering for their unique life circumstances. E.g., women with children can often be just as productive working from home under flexible arrangements that also cater for their childcare responsibilities. Similarly, disabled people can be just as productive with certain adjustments and tools, and so on.

And we didn't need the pandemic to know this; working from home could've been widely implemented 10-15 years ago, and flexible arrangements more widely implemented decades earlier.

Childcare support is woefully inadequate at the same time, and reflects some of this irrational bias because good childcare delivers good national financial returns, while deficient support delivers very costly social dysfunctions.

Also, if one accepts the box office effect as legitimate valuation - it is just plain old economic demand after all, much like fashion preference or taste of any kind. If people prefer doing business with firms with better social and green credentials, and prefer to work for such firms, then that's a matter of popular economic demand, much like popular sport.

In many cases the various aspects of valuation entirely align, such as when workers rate firms that are trying to cut emissions or trying to weed out bias and emissions being costly because global warming is costly, and bias being costly because overlooking good workers is costly.

These legitimate forces have been given momentum by highly costly worker and skills shortages, which have a number of causes such as demographic ageing, long-term illness rates, and shortened technology cycles that make skills harder to keep up with. Overcoming that shortage by onboarding more people across society more fairly into the workplace is an entirely rational economic motive.

Many folks are intelligent enough to work these things out, but they keep getting sucked into parochial nonsense and cheap wins rather than using their god-given smarts to stand on their own intellectual feet and seek better outcomes for all.

It's astonishing how readily people fall into this reactive culture. One of the best case studies in such irrationality is Trump. The average person would never ever leave their daughters alone with him and never ever enter a business arrangement with him, lend him money, or entrust him with anything of value. Yet, some people are falling over themselves to hand him authority over extremely serious decisions of policy, governance, life and death. This is simply irresponsible madness.

[stui magpie]

^

Leave sport out of the equation, you'd be well aware that there are a lot of moving parts in determining remuneration. It's not as simple as saying "Same job, same pay" or David, as an Editor, would be paid the same as the Editor of the Age or Herald Sun.

Even in generic roles, like a Nurse in Public Health, they aren't all paid the same. There's a scale whereby salary increases on years of experience. They're called Increments. So a 5th year nurse earns more than a second year nurse, despite doing exactly the same job.

There's lots of variables and lots of questionable statistics running around.

[pietillidie]

^Fortunately, there are also a lot of statisticians and researchers running around Well, not a lot, but enough to crunch these numbers. You're right, though, it's not as simple as that, but the policy efforts were informed by aggregated data and major research papers.

We can say with a high degree of confidence at the aggregated level if a group is being disadvantaged. As you can guess, they compare groups across a bag of metrics (education, work history, training, CV quality etc.), adjust that for local constraints (demographics and worker availability in the catchment area), etc., run the confidence levels, publish papers, receive critique, conduct confirmatory qualitative studies, etc. Then, they request public submissions, put the policy through a gradual legislative process, etc.

At least in the UK and Ireland it seems to have been handled sensibly.

The basic economics/demographics is managed by national stats bodies, and is actually quite standard work. Like most of things, the devil is in ensuring the policy is sensible; i.e., it gets the balance between applying adequate pressure without creating undue duress right.

And I do think that has happened in the UK and Ireland, the two policy settings with which I'm most familiar. Note, the only penalties are penalties for failing to report, while the data is already captured by firms in their payroll systems.

The part I like most about the policy is that it makes companies (over 250 employees) recognise the gap and explain plans to narrow it, much like public companies do for financial metrics in annual reports.

The new Irish policy is being phased in across orgs of progressively smaller size down to some minimum, so firms have plenty of time in advance to start thinking about how to get it right. Meanwhile, the government is trying to support the shift overall through adjacent policies such as better childcare support, etc.

Not everything done by governments is irrational; we just hear about the dumb things they do in the media every other day. These are, at least on the face of it, good policies. I'm sure they won't be perfect, but are pretty good. They also seem widely backed in by business.

[Skids]

In mining, if you're a woman of equal or lesser ability, you will be paid more than a man to do exactly the same job. You will be twice as likely to be promoted, even if your ability is nowhere near that required.
If you hand in your intention to resign, you will be offered a ridiculous pay increase to entice you to reconsider.
Apprenticeships are being offered to females only by some mining companies. It is virtually impossible to be fired if you are a female in mining, you will not be disciplined in any way and can basically do as little work as you want, even sub-standard work is tolerated, if it's done by a female. If you can't do a task, a lesser paid, male employee will be allocated that task.

Ah yes, the great gender pay gap.

[David]

^ Do you have any evidence for any of the above claims, or is it all anecdotal?

[What'sinaname]

[David]

In that case, I expect a class action from male miners any moment now, given how entrenched gender discrimination is in their industry – if we are to believe Skids, anyway.

(Of course I can't possibly imagine this is all based on his perception of how one colleague has been treated in a single workplace, or merely something he's heard about.)

[stui magpie]

^

I dare say what's happening is a form of affirmative action, trying to increase female representation in a male dominated industry.

As an observation, with all the roadworks going on everywhere, I've noticed an increasing number of young women working in the traffic control crews. It used to me mostly old blokes who's bodies were busted up and couldn't do the physical work anymore and it takes no physical strength (and little brains) to hold a Stop/Slow sign, but it pays well.

If companies are tendering for Government jobs, there's all sorts of questions to answer about gender makeup, numbers of Indigenous employees, sourcing supplies from Indigenous organisations etc

[pietillidie]