The Gender Wage Gap
Differences in life choices vs patriarchal discrimination
The patriarchal system is paying women less for doing the same work as men, right? It is not that simple… When you only look at the average or median wage of men and women (which is simple to calculate) then you might find that women earn 82 cents on the dollar of what a man earns. These figures are not disputed since they are calculated straight from the census data.
However, when you control for the fact that men work longer hours (in particular more over time), they travel more for work, they are more likley to work in STEM fields, they are more likely choose their job based on earnings instead of passion, they are more likely to have dangerous/unpleasant jobs to only name some of the differences between men and women in the workplace.
Then you find that women often earn more than men for the same work after adjusting for these differences.
The difference in life time earnings over one’s life between men and women then comes down to a difference in life choices. Where women prioritize time with the family, women choose more flexible jobs, they choose more enjoyable jobs and women work less overtime. One way to look at it is that women want a balanced life and they want to do work that they enjoy.
In other words, the wage gap is not due to discrimination. It is a result of life choices. Where gender roles might come into play is that women do more unpaid work in the home than men. If men and women divided the work in the home more evenly, then women could work longer hours, more overtime, travel more for work and they could work worse hours. Thus women would not need to spend as much time in the home with the kids if men helped more. However, it is not clear that one’s quality of life would improve with worse working hours, more overtime in comparison to spending time at home with the family.
However, the conclusion is that the wage gap is not mainly a result of men conspiring against women. It is a result of differences in life choices. If women actually performed the same job, but were willing to accept lower pay. Then the greedy capitalists would compete to hire women at a discount for the same job which would drive up women wages. The truth seems to be that there is a difference in the choices men and women do in terms of their work life and that has an impact on life time earnings.
Video 1: Thomas Sowell on Gender Bias in Income
Thomas Sowell gives a short 5 min breakdown of how an intelligent look at the wage gap reveals that it is not a result of discrimination. How women who never marry out earn never married men. Thus he attributes the pay gap to how women work less, are not as available as men and how women prioritise their families.
Video 2: Warren Farrell on his book “Why Men Earn More”
Warren Farrell gives a more in depth account of the gender pay gap in this half an hour lecture on the topic. The lecture is based on his exhaustively researched 2005 book on the topic of the gender pay gap.
Farrell initially came to prominence in the 1970s as a supporter of second wave feminism. During this time he served on the New York City Board of the National Organization for Women. Farrell went into researching the pay gap in order to prove how women are not fairly treated in the workplace. However, instead he found that discrimination is not the reason for the pay gap.
On the other hand it might be one of the least important factors. He found 25 life choices which affect how much you are paid and found that women prioritise quality of life while men generally prioritise earnings potential.
Conclusion
In this article we see that the main difference in life time earnings between the sexes is clearly a result of the different life choices men and women make. We see that men prioritise money (generally in order to provide for his family) while women prioritise passion, balance and time with the family.
However, beyond choices we see that current gender roles result in a situation where women perform more unpaid work in the home and where women take on the most responsibilities in the home. A more balanced division of labour in the home would potentially reduce the pay gap, because then women can work more overtime, travel more for work and spend less time with the family only to mention some work sacrifices people make.
However, it is unclear if men and women would be happier overall if we made a strong effort to eliminate the unbalance in work time vs at home time. Furthermore, women are the ones who become pregnant, which creates time away from work and is a responsibility that cannot be undertaken by a man.
In the end, the most important take away is that we need to recognize that the world does not consist of men conspiring in order to keep the wages of women down. Women generally get the wages they deserve based on their choices due to the market forces created by greedy capitalists. There is no evidence that women are paid less for the same work as men when you account for differences in choices
Sincerely,
Bright Blue Dot
