I don’t see it as spin, I see acknowledgment of complicated tradeoffs. Decisions about childcare are often sexist but even so, splitting time evenly might not be what the parents want. Yes, there...
I don’t see it as spin, I see acknowledgment of complicated tradeoffs. Decisions about childcare are often sexist but even so, splitting time evenly might not be what the parents want.
Yes, there is unpaid work, but it’s also work that allows them to spend time with their kids. Working more time for the MBTA often means less time with the kids (unless they would be in school), so yes it can be considered a sacrifice (that they are compensated for).
How you feel about this depends on the situation. I know people who are happy to have a break from their kids sometimes, but that doesn’t mean they don’t value the time spent with their kids.
Custody battles can be messy because the “unpaid labor” of childcare is something people value.
Yeah, "the sexism is only in gender roles (and also doesn't exist)" is also not the conclusion the paper came to; they seem to suggest that the job's systems could be changed to help reduce the...
Yeah, "the sexism is only in gender roles (and also doesn't exist)" is also not the conclusion the paper came to; they seem to suggest that the job's systems could be changed to help reduce the difference.
In an effort to reduce absenteeism and overtime expenditures, the MBTA implemented two policy changes: one that made it harder to take unpaid time off with FMLA and another that made it harder to be paid at the overtime rate. While the policy changes reduced the gender earnings gap from 11 percent to 6 percent, they also decreased both male and female operators’ well-being. Constraining work schedule controllability disproportionately reduced female operators’ well-being and productivity; reducing overtime hours disproportionately lowered male operators’ well-being while increasing their productivity. Because men and women face different personal life preferences and constraints, workplace policies, even if gender-neutral by construction, can affect male and female workers differently.
We suggest that workplaces — especially those that involve shift work or have seniority-apportioned amenities — can improve their employees’ satisfaction and reduce gender earnings gaps by increasing schedule predictability and controllability. Shift sharing and dynamic cover lists are some of the ways of achieving these improvements. Workplaces that provide defined benefit pension plans will also see the gender pension gap narrow. The changes should allow female workers to work more hours, reducing absenteeism and overtime pay, and improving the reliability of service provision.
Whether or not those changes would be good overall is maybe debatable, but the original poster and many comments seem to be ignoring it and just parroting the normal "it's what women want" line, rather than recognizing the way the job and overtime is structured might be disadvantaging people who have caretaking duties (regardless of gender).
We need to be careful here, because the paper chooses specific language that isn't lost to the post, but is definitely lost on the post that stretches it to an application towards the existence of...
We need to be careful here, because the paper chooses specific language that isn't lost to the post, but is definitely lost on the post that stretches it to an application towards the existence of a wage gap, and the comments tend to run with that stumble. That comments section is definitely not being careful.
The paper points to some interesting behaviors that are may contribute to this earnings gap (male gamification of work, women refusing to work schedules they don't like). It would be worth exploring to see if these behaviors occur in different industries in order to better understand all aspects of earnings disparity, but I personally don't see anything in the paper that can speak to other industries beyond this one point, especially private industries that are known to have pay differences.
EDIT: A little more info below
Female workers earn $0.89 for each male-worker dollar even in a unionized workplace where tasks,wages, and promotion schedules are identical for men and women by design. Using administrative time-card data on bus and train operators, we show that this earnings gap can be explained by female operators taking fewer hours of overtime and more hours of unpaid time-off than male operators .Female operators, especially those with dependents, pursue schedule conventionality, predictability,and controllability more than male operators. While reducing schedule controllability can limit the earnings gap, it can also hurt female workers and their productivity.
This is the paper summary, and its goal isn't even to disprove the wage gap (which the linked summary seems to try to claim), but to better understand what caused income disparity in this context, and consider possible solutions and their drawbacks.
It's a right wing blog with right wing commenters looking for justification for their indefensible beliefs and the post feeds directly into them by using careful language that their typical reader...
but is definitely lost on the post that stretches it to an application towards the existence of a wage gap, and the comments tend to run with that stumble. That comments section is definitely not being careful.
It's a right wing blog with right wing commenters looking for justification for their indefensible beliefs and the post feeds directly into them by using careful language that their typical reader either ignores in order to equate earnings and wages or simply doesn't know there's a difference in the first place.
It doesn't use any of the phrases I would typically look for, and I was aiming to be somewhat charitable in my comment. Looking at the credentials of the site owners (really well-crafted to seem...
It doesn't use any of the phrases I would typically look for, and I was aiming to be somewhat charitable in my comment. Looking at the credentials of the site owners (really well-crafted to seem non-partisan), I guess that charity may not have been deserved.
Tyler Cowen is a libertarian and his entire department at George Mason is functionally bankrolled by the Koch Foundation, but I'd hesitate to characterize him or his blog as "Right wing." He...
Tyler Cowen is a libertarian and his entire department at George Mason is functionally bankrolled by the Koch Foundation, but I'd hesitate to characterize him or his blog as "Right wing." He doesn't really have the social/cultural politics you'd associate with that, just the generally blinkered view of human behavior as being defined entirely by market dynamics that most libertarians have.
This post is by Alex Tabarrok, who I find tends to be a bit more partisan than Cowen. Still, rereading it, I don't find his summary of this paper to be biased, except maybe in his choice of which...
This post is by Alex Tabarrok, who I find tends to be a bit more partisan than Cowen. Still, rereading it, I don't find his summary of this paper to be biased, except maybe in his choice of which paper to share.
I think you might take the first part of the paper's title to be excessively general. "Why do women earn less than men" is a very general question that isn't answered by the paper (except in the...
I think you might take the first part of the paper's title to be excessively general. "Why do women earn less than men" is a very general question that isn't answered by the paper (except in the particular situation they describe). I'm not sure any single study could answer that question, because the reasons tend to be job and culture-specific.
But that's a common convention of research paper titles, to lead with a very broad question of general interest and then say something very specific. I don't think the paper's authors or Tabarrok are confused about what the paper actually claims. (He does say a bit about what lessons we might learn from the paper, and that might be considered as an unreasonable generalization.)
Yes, the comments are terrible. I think that's a general problem with social media. I'm a bit miffed that even here on Tildes, people aren't responding to what's actually there in the summary, but what they think is being implied.
Although clickbait exists, I think it's partially our job to avoid responding to it. Instead it seems like it's the opposite? We expect and assume clickbait, see clickbait that's barely there, and then respond to the clickbait, and blame someone else for being distracting when we're the ones so easily distracted.
It seems like you have to write very defensively these days to keep people from being distracted, and often they will anyway because that's what they really want to discuss.
The paper's authors are not confused. Tabarrock might be, or he might be intentionally misleading. It's not being implied, it's perfectly clear what Tabarrok wants to convey and can be seen by...
I don't think the paper's authors or Tabarrok are confused about what the paper actually claims. (He does say a bit about what lessons we might learn from the paper, and that might be considered as an unreasonable generalization.)
Yes, the comments are terrible. I think that's a general problem with social media. I'm a bit miffed that even here on Tildes, people aren't responding to what's actually there in the summary, but what they think is being implied.
The paper's authors are not confused. Tabarrock might be, or he might be intentionally misleading. It's not being implied, it's perfectly clear what Tabarrok wants to convey and can be seen by simply highlighting the operative words used. There's zero coincidence that the study used earnings (the correct term) and Tabarrok used wages.
This looks like misleading word usage to you, but consider that maybe it's because you're expecting it to be misleading? "Wages" could be used to mean "hourly wage" or "total wages." But in...
This looks like misleading word usage to you, but consider that maybe it's because you're expecting it to be misleading? "Wages" could be used to mean "hourly wage" or "total wages." But in context, Tabarrok is using "earnings" and "wages" as synonyms. He's not saying that that the men in this study were earning a higher hourly wage. That's why it's an interesting study!
I vehemently disagree. He's a professor and a doctor of economics, has been "the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy...", he...
I vehemently disagree.
He's a professor and a doctor of economics, has been "the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy...", he should be extremely well qualified to know that earnings and wages are most certainly not synonyms in the context of this study.
I posted the summary after thumbing through the paper because I felt it does a better job of trying to explain the paper than this unrelated four sentences. He pulls more from the paper than he...
I posted the summary after thumbing through the paper because I felt it does a better job of trying to explain the paper than this unrelated four sentences. He pulls more from the paper than he wrote about it, even. I'd bet if he was grading me, I'd fail for that ratio.
I think Tabarrok is confused, but the paper, and the research the authors did, is interesting. Wage is specifically a control in this analysis, there is no wage gap in this instance, and the point of the paper was to understand the difference in overall earnings and the behavioral causes for it. The study tried to control for any number of factors that can be seen to affect women's earnings (including wages) compared to men (page 4, paragraph 4):
In our context, prior work experience is not a differentiating factor. All employees obtain the same
training, regardless of their prior experience, and all who meet the basic qualifications and start work on
the same day receive the same wage.
There is some mention about a paper that determined women are more willing to take cuts, but this is in reference to other papers the authors found in relation to the topic.
Maybe I'm distracted by this Ph.D. economist's minor stumble, but I feel it's one no self-respecting Doctor of anything should make. It is definitely not the sort of thing that would stand in any of my undergrad courses.
Click to view Things I did not expect when opening that link: Commenter usernames that are nearly full sentences. Commenter usernames that are nearly as large as the headline text. Okay, that's a...
Click to view
Things I did not expect when opening that link:
Commenter usernames that are nearly full sentences.
Commenter usernames that are nearly as large as the headline text.
Comments filled with sexism and right wing nutjobbery. Okay, that's a lie, this one is always expected.
On the subject of the actual content being discussed, I'm not sure this is anything that was unknown... In a rigidly controlled environment, with identical and public wages, those that work the most hours earn the most money.
Great, you've proven that water is wet.
Now do it again in the real world where wage information is not freely available to each worker.
Oh, and while you're doing so, understand that careful wording by calling it an "earnings gap" does not disprove that there is a gender wage gap.
Never read the comments on Marginal Revolution. (I could have linked to the study directly, but I thought a summary would be more likely to be read, and the blog is what brought it to my...
Never read the comments on Marginal Revolution. (I could have linked to the study directly, but I thought a summary would be more likely to be read, and the blog is what brought it to my attention.)
This study does take place in the real world. It’s an interesting example that may or may not generalize. But you’re being uncharitable. It’s interesting to know who works the most hours and why.
I didn't intend to read the comments, but when they're larger than the article text it's a little difficult to not have your eye drawn to them. Imagine my surprise when I'm looking over the...
I didn't intend to read the comments, but when they're larger than the article text it's a little difficult to not have your eye drawn to them. Imagine my surprise when I'm looking over the right-wing-spin summary and see what looks like a subheading for the next section that reads
"Biden Has Obvious and Profound Dementia"
The study takes place in a rigidly controlled environment which is not the norm, hence the "real world" moniker. They effectively did a study on the control group to prove it's a control group, which is the only value here, as it can now be used as a reference to real world studies.
The study itself seems fine, sometimes you have to have a reference to prove the obvious for other research to be carried out without the need to waste resources on the obvious, but the blog itself is nothing but careful wording and spin.
While union jobs with strict rules aren't the norm these days, it's just wrong and disrepectful to say that it's not the real world. This isn't a laboratory situation! It's real people with real...
While union jobs with strict rules aren't the norm these days, it's just wrong and disrepectful to say that it's not the real world. This isn't a laboratory situation! It's real people with real jobs in a real American city.
It's also not a "control group." The study shows that in this situation, the gender gap in wages doesn't go away. It's interesting to find out what remains in a situation that's apparently without overt discrimination.
I wouldn't say the results of the study are surprising or counterintuitive, but in debates about the gender gap, people make all sorts of claims, so the results aren't "obvious" in the sense of being previously undisputed.
Emphasis mine. Incorrect, specifically because you're using the same language the blog post and it's commenters wants you to use. There is no gender wage gap in the study, it's a gender earnings...
The study shows that in this situation, the gender gap in wages doesn't go away.
Emphasis mine.
Incorrect, specifically because you're using the same language the blog post and it's commenters wants you to use. There is no gender wage gap in the study, it's a gender earnings gap specifically because the women involved work less hours than their male counterparts. Actual wage difference between the genders is $0.06 and favors females.
It's a study outlining that in a controlled environment, where gender cannot be taken into account, the wages equal, but the earnings are not and they aren't because the female workers take less overtime and more unpaid leave to the tune of an 11% drop in earnings.
When 89.2% of jobs in the US are non-union, then the results of a study specific to a single union, in a single city, for a single type of job, are the exception to how the world works, not the rule. It's a control group.
It is and should be the case. The distinction is that wages is the amount you are compensated on a per unit basis (day, hour, bushel of apples, whatever). Earnings is the total wages earned. They...
It is and should be the case.
The distinction is that wages is the amount you are compensated on a per unit basis (day, hour, bushel of apples, whatever). Earnings is the total wages earned. They are two different and distinct things. The study is specifically about earnings as the wages of males and females within it are the same, the author is misleadingly using the term wages as if it and earnings are one in the same.
The study is perfectly fine in it's narrow scope. The author's purposeful interpretation is the issue.
Does the study get into why the women took less overtime? That seems critical to the understanding of the data. The implication I get from the article, as they make no inferences and consider this...
Does the study get into why the women took less overtime? That seems critical to the understanding of the data. The implication I get from the article, as they make no inferences and consider this case closed, is that this is due to something innate to women. Women take less overtime because women just don’t like overtime. But that’s not a very valuable conclusion.
One takeaway I feel is safe to make is that the gender wage gap is only partially the fault of employers. It may well be that society in general is more sexist than those that employ workers.
This is the summary at the beginning of the paper. It also goes into various other issues, from men understanding Uber better and doing better at gamificaiton of various systems from overtime in...
Female workers earn $0.89 for each male-worker dollar even in a unionized workplace where tasks,wages, and promotion schedules are identical for men and women by design. Using administrative time-card data on bus and train operators, we show that this earnings gap can be explained by female operators taking fewer hours of overtime and more hours of unpaid time-off than male operators .Female operators, especially those with dependents, pursue schedule conventionality, predictability,and controllability more than male operators. While reducing schedule controllability can limit the earnings gap, it can also hurt female workers and their productivity.
This is the summary at the beginning of the paper.
It also goes into various other issues, from men understanding Uber better and doing better at gamificaiton of various systems from overtime in public transit to Uber driving. I didn't read all 18 pages (the rest is data), but it covers suspected reasons fairly, and in depth, I think.
One takeaway I feel is safe to make is that the gender wage gap is only partially the fault of employers.
The paper isn't about the wage gap, it examines systems that specifically have wage as a consistent control. I'm only pointing this out because the paper is deliberate in analyzing systems with equal wages.
I don’t see it as spin, I see acknowledgment of complicated tradeoffs. Decisions about childcare are often sexist but even so, splitting time evenly might not be what the parents want.
Yes, there is unpaid work, but it’s also work that allows them to spend time with their kids. Working more time for the MBTA often means less time with the kids (unless they would be in school), so yes it can be considered a sacrifice (that they are compensated for).
How you feel about this depends on the situation. I know people who are happy to have a break from their kids sometimes, but that doesn’t mean they don’t value the time spent with their kids.
Custody battles can be messy because the “unpaid labor” of childcare is something people value.
Yeah, "the sexism is only in gender roles (and also doesn't exist)" is also not the conclusion the paper came to; they seem to suggest that the job's systems could be changed to help reduce the difference.
Whether or not those changes would be good overall is maybe debatable, but the original poster and many comments seem to be ignoring it and just parroting the normal "it's what women want" line, rather than recognizing the way the job and overtime is structured might be disadvantaging people who have caretaking duties (regardless of gender).
We need to be careful here, because the paper chooses specific language that isn't lost to the post, but is definitely lost on the post that stretches it to an application towards the existence of a wage gap, and the comments tend to run with that stumble. That comments section is definitely not being careful.
The paper points to some interesting behaviors that are may contribute to this earnings gap (male gamification of work, women refusing to work schedules they don't like). It would be worth exploring to see if these behaviors occur in different industries in order to better understand all aspects of earnings disparity, but I personally don't see anything in the paper that can speak to other industries beyond this one point, especially private industries that are known to have pay differences.
EDIT: A little more info below
This is the paper summary, and its goal isn't even to disprove the wage gap (which the linked summary seems to try to claim), but to better understand what caused income disparity in this context, and consider possible solutions and their drawbacks.
It's a right wing blog with right wing commenters looking for justification for their indefensible beliefs and the post feeds directly into them by using careful language that their typical reader either ignores in order to equate earnings and wages or simply doesn't know there's a difference in the first place.
It doesn't use any of the phrases I would typically look for, and I was aiming to be somewhat charitable in my comment. Looking at the credentials of the site owners (really well-crafted to seem non-partisan), I guess that charity may not have been deserved.
Tyler Cowen is a libertarian and his entire department at George Mason is functionally bankrolled by the Koch Foundation, but I'd hesitate to characterize him or his blog as "Right wing." He doesn't really have the social/cultural politics you'd associate with that, just the generally blinkered view of human behavior as being defined entirely by market dynamics that most libertarians have.
This post is by Alex Tabarrok, who I find tends to be a bit more partisan than Cowen. Still, rereading it, I don't find his summary of this paper to be biased, except maybe in his choice of which paper to share.
I think you might take the first part of the paper's title to be excessively general. "Why do women earn less than men" is a very general question that isn't answered by the paper (except in the particular situation they describe). I'm not sure any single study could answer that question, because the reasons tend to be job and culture-specific.
But that's a common convention of research paper titles, to lead with a very broad question of general interest and then say something very specific. I don't think the paper's authors or Tabarrok are confused about what the paper actually claims. (He does say a bit about what lessons we might learn from the paper, and that might be considered as an unreasonable generalization.)
Yes, the comments are terrible. I think that's a general problem with social media. I'm a bit miffed that even here on Tildes, people aren't responding to what's actually there in the summary, but what they think is being implied.
Although clickbait exists, I think it's partially our job to avoid responding to it. Instead it seems like it's the opposite? We expect and assume clickbait, see clickbait that's barely there, and then respond to the clickbait, and blame someone else for being distracting when we're the ones so easily distracted.
It seems like you have to write very defensively these days to keep people from being distracted, and often they will anyway because that's what they really want to discuss.
The paper's authors are not confused. Tabarrock might be, or he might be intentionally misleading. It's not being implied, it's perfectly clear what Tabarrok wants to convey and can be seen by simply highlighting the operative words used. There's zero coincidence that the study used earnings (the correct term) and Tabarrok used wages.
This looks like misleading word usage to you, but consider that maybe it's because you're expecting it to be misleading? "Wages" could be used to mean "hourly wage" or "total wages." But in context, Tabarrok is using "earnings" and "wages" as synonyms. He's not saying that that the men in this study were earning a higher hourly wage. That's why it's an interesting study!
I vehemently disagree.
He's a professor and a doctor of economics, has been "the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy...", he should be extremely well qualified to know that earnings and wages are most certainly not synonyms in the context of this study.
It's extremely simple, he's either being purposefully misleading or he's unqualified to speak on the subject.
I posted the summary after thumbing through the paper because I felt it does a better job of trying to explain the paper than this unrelated four sentences. He pulls more from the paper than he wrote about it, even. I'd bet if he was grading me, I'd fail for that ratio.
I think Tabarrok is confused, but the paper, and the research the authors did, is interesting. Wage is specifically a control in this analysis, there is no wage gap in this instance, and the point of the paper was to understand the difference in overall earnings and the behavioral causes for it. The study tried to control for any number of factors that can be seen to affect women's earnings (including wages) compared to men (page 4, paragraph 4):
There is some mention about a paper that determined women are more willing to take cuts, but this is in reference to other papers the authors found in relation to the topic.
Maybe I'm distracted by this Ph.D. economist's minor stumble, but I feel it's one no self-respecting Doctor of anything should make. It is definitely not the sort of thing that would stand in any of my undergrad courses.
Click to view
Things I did not expect when opening that link:
Comments filled with sexism and right wing nutjobbery.Okay, that's a lie, this one is always expected.On the subject of the actual content being discussed, I'm not sure this is anything that was unknown...
In a rigidly controlled environment, with identical and public wages, those that work the most hours earn the most money.
Great, you've proven that water is wet.
Now do it again in the real world where wage information is not freely available to each worker.
Oh, and while you're doing so, understand that careful wording by calling it an "earnings gap" does not disprove that there is a gender wage gap.
Never read the comments on Marginal Revolution. (I could have linked to the study directly, but I thought a summary would be more likely to be read, and the blog is what brought it to my attention.)
This study does take place in the real world. It’s an interesting example that may or may not generalize. But you’re being uncharitable. It’s interesting to know who works the most hours and why.
I didn't intend to read the comments, but when they're larger than the article text it's a little difficult to not have your eye drawn to them. Imagine my surprise when I'm looking over the right-wing-spin summary and see what looks like a subheading for the next section that reads
"Biden Has Obvious and Profound Dementia"
The study takes place in a rigidly controlled environment which is not the norm, hence the "real world" moniker. They effectively did a study on the control group to prove it's a control group, which is the only value here, as it can now be used as a reference to real world studies.
The study itself seems fine, sometimes you have to have a reference to prove the obvious for other research to be carried out without the need to waste resources on the obvious, but the blog itself is nothing but careful wording and spin.
While union jobs with strict rules aren't the norm these days, it's just wrong and disrepectful to say that it's not the real world. This isn't a laboratory situation! It's real people with real jobs in a real American city.
It's also not a "control group." The study shows that in this situation, the gender gap in wages doesn't go away. It's interesting to find out what remains in a situation that's apparently without overt discrimination.
I wouldn't say the results of the study are surprising or counterintuitive, but in debates about the gender gap, people make all sorts of claims, so the results aren't "obvious" in the sense of being previously undisputed.
Emphasis mine.
Incorrect, specifically because you're using the same language the blog post and it's commenters wants you to use. There is no gender wage gap in the study, it's a gender earnings gap specifically because the women involved work less hours than their male counterparts. Actual wage difference between the genders is $0.06 and favors females.
It's a study outlining that in a controlled environment, where gender cannot be taken into account, the wages equal, but the earnings are not and they aren't because the female workers take less overtime and more unpaid leave to the tune of an 11% drop in earnings.
When 89.2% of jobs in the US are non-union, then the results of a study specific to a single union, in a single city, for a single type of job, are the exception to how the world works, not the rule. It's a control group.
It is and should be the case.
The distinction is that wages is the amount you are compensated on a per unit basis (day, hour, bushel of apples, whatever). Earnings is the total wages earned. They are two different and distinct things. The study is specifically about earnings as the wages of males and females within it are the same, the author is misleadingly using the term wages as if it and earnings are one in the same.
The study is perfectly fine in it's narrow scope. The author's purposeful interpretation is the issue.
Does the study get into why the women took less overtime? That seems critical to the understanding of the data. The implication I get from the article, as they make no inferences and consider this case closed, is that this is due to something innate to women. Women take less overtime because women just don’t like overtime. But that’s not a very valuable conclusion.
One takeaway I feel is safe to make is that the gender wage gap is only partially the fault of employers. It may well be that society in general is more sexist than those that employ workers.
This is the summary at the beginning of the paper.
It also goes into various other issues, from men understanding Uber better and doing better at gamificaiton of various systems from overtime in public transit to Uber driving. I didn't read all 18 pages (the rest is data), but it covers suspected reasons fairly, and in depth, I think.
The paper isn't about the wage gap, it examines systems that specifically have wage as a consistent control. I'm only pointing this out because the paper is deliberate in analyzing systems with equal wages.