STUMP » Articles » Friday Trumpery: Rich Woman Complains Other Women Aren't Rich » 7 April 2017, 03:03

Yes, yes, I’m deliberately mis-interpreting Ivanka Trump’s tweet:

#EqualPayDay is a reminder that women deserve equal pay for equal work. We must work to close the gender pay gap! https://t.co/CcwsoBXWdF

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) April 4, 2017

Let’s check out the USA Today article she linked:

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a long road to pay equity.

Despite strides in the 1980s and 1990s, the pay gap between the sexes hasn’t budged in more than a decade. That’s even with growing research and outcry that’s prompted some companies to review — and vow to fix — broad discrepancies in their own workforces.

The numbers are glaring: Women make up half the U.S. college-educated workforce but those with full-time jobs were on average paid 80 cents for every dollar earned by men in nearly every occupation for which there was sufficient earnings data in 2015, according to the non-profit Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

The gap is especially pronounced when comparing median weekly earnings and far deeper for women of color.

Horrors! The inequality!

Also, why would anybody ever pay a man of any color to do a job a woman can do for 20% less?

You have to look hard to find a profession this gap isn’t the case. Median earnings for women are lower than men’s in 18 of the 20 most common jobs for women.

“It’s been stagnant the last 10 to 15 years even though women are better educated,” says Ariane Hegewisch, program director of employment and earnings at IWPR. She calculates that if the current trends continue, women on average will not receive equal pay until 2059.

For women of color, the rate of change is downright glacial — black women will wait until 2124 and Hispanic women will have to wait until 2248, Hegewisch says, compared to 2056 for white women.

Against that bleak backdrop comes the view from a growing number of companies that by failing to recruit, retain and advance women, they’re missing out.

Which professions are those, by the way? If it’s just “instructors”, then yeah, preschool teachers get paid less than high school teachers get paid less than full-time college instructors. But they’re all the same “profession”.

So the thing is, though, women may be “better educated”, but they tend to go for low-paying fields such as education, as opposed to higher-paying (and more difficult) fields as petroleum engineering.

To be sure, most men aren’t getting degrees related to petroleum engineering, either.

Eh, Ivanka is young and doesn’t know much. I have no idea how involved she is in running the businesses with her name on them. I don’t care, really.

But I am pretty sure this rich woman has done very little for her riches, other than having the right relations: Wealthy daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton is TOTALLY down with the struggle on #EqualPayDay. Go away, Chelsea. If anything, I think the Left is more tired of the Clintons than the Right. But again, I don’t really care.

COUNTERPOINT

Amanda Carpenter: Forget Everything You Know About The Wage Gap, Because It’s Actually Only 8 Cents

To hear some feminists tell it, there’s a nefarious, sexist patriarch looming at the top of every workplace, taking a chunk out of women’s paychecks to stop them from making as much money as men. If only women could band together and convince Congress to pass some unicorn legislation that mandated diversity, monitored paychecks, required paid leave, and provided free childcare, we could finally achieve wage equality! Or so the myth goes. But the equal pay movement has a problem. Its chief talking point — “equal work for equal pay” — is deceitful.

Let’s take a look at the statistic that’s always trotted out to convince women we aren’t rightfully valued at work. No doubt you’re familiar with the phrase “women only earn 77 cents for every dollar a man does.” (While that figure can vary a few pennies in either direction, the point remains the same.) That statistic is based on a flawed calculation, though: Equal pay activists usually divide the yearly difference between the median annual incomes of full-time male and female workers to calculate the so-called wage gap. That means income data for all working men and women in America is essentially thrown into a blender, mashed into a homogenous sludge, and poured out as if all those jobs were the same.

The reality is that it’s impossible to draw conclusions about “equal work for equal pay” when the data doesn’t even pretend to evaluate wages across similar professions. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s not even apples-to-oranges. It’s meaningless mush.

…..
Here’s the good news: Female earning power numbers are much rosier once adjustments are applied for prior work experience, education, industry, and occupation. After controlling for those factors, Cornell University Economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn estimated the wage gap is actually only 8%. Meaning: Women are earning 92 cents for the dollar every man earns. [when controlling for work experience, education, industry, and occupation]

….
Goldin concluded in her 2014 study that the real wage gap can be found in workplaces that disproportionately reward workers for working extremely long, continuous hours. She has also said that the gender gap, in terms of hourly compensation, would “vanish if firms did not have a financial incentive to pay employees working 80 hours a week more than twice what they would receive for 40-hour weeks.”

Oh, so let’s banish overtime laws! Sounds great!

Okay, that’s not what that says.

But the thing is, the occupations where you can get paid a lot more than regular overtime rates for doing longer hours tend to be ones where the person working the longer hours is not a mere cookie-cutout person. It tends to be high skill (and high stress) professions like law and surgery.

Carrie Lukas: A New Date for Equal Pay Day — but the Same Old Misleading Data

The female–male wage gap is shrinking, and most of what remains is not due to sexism.
….
Accuracy about statistics has never been this movement’s strong suit. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014 the average full-time working woman earned 83 percent of what the average full-time working man earned. That’s up from about 80 percent in 2004. If you assume that the 2016 wage gap is roughly the same as 2015 and follow the Equal Pay Day math, then women would need to work about 44 more days in 2017. Allowing for weekends and holidays, that means Equal Pay Day should have taken place in the second week of March, not April.
…..
The Department of Labor ignores, for example, that the average man working full-time spends two hours more each week on the job than does the average full-time working woman. It shouldn’t be a surprise — or considered unfair — that someone who works longer hours also earns more money. They also don’t take into account differences in industry, years of experience, education, and specialty. Men suffer the overwhelming majority of workplace deaths and major injuries. To get people to take on dangerous and physically grueling jobs, businesses have to sweeten the pot with higher pay. Men even have longer commutes on average than women do. They often take on the extra commuting burden in order to take a job that pays more.

Finally, here’s a video from Christina Hoff Summers:

LET’S MAKE A DEAL

So here’s the deal: I work multiple jobs and have a superlong commute. (I average 107 miles per day — that includes weekends. It’s more like anywhere from 140 miles on a regular workday to 200 miles on days I teach at UConn, which is far fewer days.)

I am very highly paid (sure, I’d love more money… gimme gimme gimme).

You want to live my life? No? You’d like to work your less imposing job for a shorter commute, less responsibilities, and fewer hours? But be paid the same as me?

Ha, I’d come and take your job.

Do you understand how this works? I work for the money.

What I’m doing for free is this blog. (You’re welcome.)

SEXIST ELIZABETH WARREN

But here’s the main thing. Do you believe Elizabeth Warren is sexist?

Elizabeth Warren’s Female Staffers Made 71% of Male Staffers’ Salaries in 2016

Now, the Washington Free Beacon’s subtitle is: “Equal Pay Day Special: Warren demonstrates hypocrisy on gender pay gap”

Thing is, it isn’t hypocrisy. Nobody thinks Warren is deliberately underpaying women doing the same job as men. (I mean, she could be, but I doubt it.)

What it really exposes is the idiocy of comparing averages or medians for undifferentiated groups other than their sex.

Warren et. al. know the median pay argument is bullshit, and they don’t care. Whenever the leftists are called on this bullshit, then they give explanations similar to the reason for most of the pay gap — you don’t have men & women doing the same hours, same jobs, at same demand.

That’s not hypocrisy — it’s just plain lying.

They know what they’re doing is deceptive, and they will keep doing it as long as their tactic is successful (and perhaps even beyond that.)

This is hypocrisy: Facebook Demands That Its Outside Law Firms Meet 33% Diversity Target That Facebook Does Not Meet

Amusingly, Warren decided to remove herself from the cause this year: Elizabeth Warren Goes Silent on Equal Pay Day After Free Beacon Report. I suppose she needs to be choosy about how she leads the #Resistance to Trump. Unwelcome facts would be a distraction from the cause, which currently seems to be leaking info from the Federal Reserve? Um, okay then.

A REAL GAP

So I do follow this topic, but I don’t often blog about it, mainly because I care more about other stuff. But I have been following posts/material from the company Hired, and I thought this post had some good data.

I am going to ignore most of the text. Let’s look at the numbers.

They emphasize that 63% of the time, women are getting lower offers than men.

They didn’t indicate their sample size, but let’s pretend a real statistical test would show this statistically significant. I can believe that.

But that average gap is 4%.

4%

The gap may be “statistically significant” but ffs, 4% ain’t nothing.

I like what economist Diedre McCloskey says about statistical significance:

Statistical significance is not the same thing as scientific importance or economic sense.

I will admit to you that there still is a gap, a statistically significant gap, after you control for other, easily measurable factors.

But the “statistically significant” gap is not a significant gap with respect to magnitude. I do not care about a 4% gap. That’s insignificant from a practical sense.

Hell, if public pensions were merely 4% underfunded, I’d be overjoyed. If people were saying “96% funded is enough”, I’d say: “yeah, they’r right, from a practical point of view.”

Makes me wonder how many of the “80% fundedness is healthy! Ideal!” people bitch about the 20% wage gap.

HMMMMM.

Related: The Age Pay Gap

LEAVE WOMEN ALONE

Look, it’s okay to tell people, and even women specifically, techniques to get higher pay and to have career advancement re: money & status.

But you do realize some women aren’t interested in that.

Neither are some men, of course.

It’s okay. Not everybody needs to desire the same thing.

And I don’t particularly care to rewrite Heather Wilhelm’s column: News Alert: Not Every Woman Wants to Run a Company

Why do so many feminists seem set on pushing women into high-pressure jobs they might not want?

Yesterday was Equal Pay Day, that glorious annual ritual in which women are told they are terribly oppressed at work and earn only 77 cents to every dollar that men earn, even though that’s not even remotely true. This year, just to up the ante, prominent feminists paired questionable math with equally questionable life suggestions. Women would be wise to ignore them.

…..
What also lacks a certain ring, at least to my ears, is a newer feminist refrain, also sung in chorus on Equal Pay Day: For true empowerment to exist, women must be literally equal to men, in everything, all the time. In a new profile in New York magazine, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, described as “a bit of a gender essentialist,” insists that Congress should ideally be split 50/50 along gender lines. Sandberg, meanwhile, feels similarly: “We know how important achieving equality is for all of us. A world where women ran half of our companies and countries and men ran half of our homes would be a better world.”
…..
And yet, strangely, many of today’s leading feminists seem quite fond of hectoring women into taking high-paying, high-pressure jobs whether they want to or not, promoting a weird vision of a corporate corner suite as heaven on earth. Studies have shown women’s happiness levels plummeting since the 1970s, the last time they were measured to be higher than those of men. Could it be because we’re getting a lot of really dodgy life advice?

Look, if you’re a woman, and you want to run a company or a country, good for you! Go for it. If you want to grow the ranks of females in the aforementioned senior-director-of-engineering field — according to USA Today, women hold only 9 percent of these jobs — bravo! If you want to have a flexible yet lower-paying job that allows you more family time, or if you want to stay at home with your children, that’s marvelous! In the end, I hope you find the life choice that works for you. That’s what modern feminism is all about, right?

It’s not just about women, but also men. I’m the breadwinner in my family, working multiple jobs. My husband has been a stay-at-home parent since our first child was born in 2003. We decided on this arrangement before we even got married.

I understand not many people make that choice, but that’s okay. And the thing is, even though I’m the breadwinner, that still doesn’t mean I’m gunning for CEO. But that’s okay, too — many men with stay-at-home spouses also weren’t reaching for CEO. We all have different goals.

If I could just stop people from parrotting the 80% fundedness myth, I’d be so much happier… and I’m not even get paid for that goal!

But more to the point: you know what? It’s okay if some people, some of who are women, decide they don’t want to have gung-ho careers and would take a lower-paying job so they could be home when their kids get home from school. It’s okay if some people opt out of the rat race altogether, and raise their family, while another adult of their household provides the $$. It’s not your business that they do that.

Quit trying to make people feel bad for making choices you don’t like. Mind your own damn business.

FINE A REAL TRUMP CONNECTION: Trump Pulls Back Obama-Era Protections For Women Workers…except it was not only for women workers, and not for all women workers, but just covering workers who were employed by federal contractors….and it was just to check that federal contractors were compliant with federal labor laws. You know, the labor laws that apply to all employers, whether they’re federal contractors or not. (Supposedly there was some embarrassment from some contractors having flagrant violations officially noted and they were awarded contracts).

Anyway, this was so important to the Obama admin, they didn’t get around to it til July 2014.

It seems like most of the complaints about Trump’s revocation surround lawyers who want to get their payday. Sad.